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South’s changing demography erodes attachment to the Lost Cause

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By RICH SHUMATE
Chickenfriedpolitics.com
(Note: This piece, which originally ran on Chickenfriedpolitics.com, was also accepted as an Op-Ed submission by both the Gainesville (Fla.) Sun and the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.)

The newfound drive to retire the Confederate battle flag from the public arena may have been fueled by the visceral emotional reaction to the racist massacre at a church in Charleston, the Confederacy’s very birthplace. But the seeming ease with which Confederate artifacts are being swept away across the South can also be explained by another factor — shifts in the region’s demography that are eroding the regional insularity underpinning romantic attachment to the Lost Cause.

In the last 30 years, there has been a sea change in the Southern electorate. The percentage of white people born in the South — the people most inclined to want to retain vestiges of their Confederate past — is shrinking, while the percentages of African-Americans and whites born outside the region are expanding.

So even though the South may be as politically conservative as it has ever been, the constituency for public maintenance of Confederate heritage is becoming less potent, which is giving Southern politicos more freedom to maneuver across these contentious waters.

For example, in 1960 — around the time that many Southern state governments began embracing Confederate symbols in a show of defiance against the Civil Rights movement — more than 90 percent of the population of eight of the 11 former Confederate states was Southern born, according to U.S. Census figures.

The only exceptions were Florida, Virginia and Texas, but even in the most Yankee-fied of those states — Florida — 60 percent of the population was still born in the South.

1960 was also at the tail end of the Great Migration, in which 6 million African-Americans left the South for cities in the North and West, which dramatically reduced the black populations across the region In 1900, 90 percent of African-Americans lived in the South; by 1970, that figure had fallen to just 53 percent.

Fast forward to 2010. Only two former Confederate states — Louisiana and Mississippi — still had 90 percent of their populations born inside the region. Alabama was at 86 percent. But across the rest of the South, more than 20 percent of the state populations weren’t born in the South. In Florida, only 45 percent of the population was Southern born.

And those figures don’t take into account two salient factors: First, African-Americans born in the South, who would not support display of Confederate symbols, are included. And second, people born in the South whose parents weren’t born in the South are also included — another group not likely to salute the Confederate battle flag.

South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, a conservative Republican who has been leading the charge to remove the Confederate battle flag from the statehouse in Columbia, is a case in point. She was born in South Carolina — but to Sikh parents from India with no ancestral attachment to the Confederacy.

And even in Mississippi, the only Southern state that still incorporates the Confederate battle emblem into its state flag, 9 percent of the population in 2010 was born outside the South and 37 percent was African-American — a potentially formidable coalition against public Confederate nostalgia.

In South Carolina, the non-Southern population is 25 percent, and the black population is 28 percent. Although those two groups overlap, those numbers indicate that the section of the electorate that has no attachment to Confederate heritage may be approaching a majority in the place where the Confederacy began.

At the same time as the non-Southern born population in the South was rising, so too was the African-American population. As segregation faded away and the South’s economy boomed, blacks began moving back to the region, in essence reversing the Great Migration.

For example, between 2000 and 2010, six of the seven U.S. metropolitan areas with the largest influx of African-Americans were in the South — Atlanta, Dallas, Houston, Miami, Charlotte and Orlando. The seventh, Washington, D.C., is partially in Virginia.

Topping that list was Atlanta, which is why it is not that surprising that after the Charleston massacre, Georgia’s Republican governor, Nathan Deal, ordered a redesign of a Sons of Confederate Veterans’ specialty license plate festooned with the battle emblem.

That was a far cry from the fight over removing that same emblem from the Georgia state flag, a controversy that raged for more than 10 years and led to the introduction of three state flags in two years before the current design was adopted in 2003.

Whether public exhibition of Confederate symbols is a display of heritage or a display of hate is, of course, a debate that will probably continue as long as people watch “Gone With The Wind” and drink mint juleps. But if demography is any guide, public use of those symbols is headed into the quaint mists of Southern memory.

Hillary Clinton faces steep generational climb on the road to the White House

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By RICH SHUMATE
Chickenfriedpolitics.com
(Note: This piece, which originally ran on Chickenfriedpolitics.com, was also accepted as an Op-Ed submission by both the Gainesville (Fla.) Sun and the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.)

If Hillary Clinton wins the White House in 2016, at age 69, she will be the second oldest person ever elected to the presidency, just behind Ronald Reagan and just ahead of the ill-fated William Henry Harrison, who perished after just a month in office back in 1841.

And if she wins, Clinton will have overcome a fundamental feature in modern American presidential politics — namely, that the younger presidential nominee is usually victorious.

In the thirteen presidential elections since 1960, the younger candidate has won seven times. However, in two other elections — Johnson vs. Goldwater in 1964 and George W. Bush vs. Al Gore in 2000 — the candidates were roughly the same age. (Johnson had just a year on Goldwater; Bush had two on Gore.)

So, in only four of the 13 elections did the candidate who was appreciably older pull off a victory. Two of those were won by Reagan, and, in all four, the age gap was substantially less than what Clinton may face in 2016. (The other two were George H.W. Bush in 1988 and Richard Nixon in 1972.)

Now 67, Clinton is more than 20 years older than four of the likely Republican prospects — U.S. Senators Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz and Governors Scott Walker and Bobby Jindal. Indeed, Rubio and Jindal are both 43 — a whopping 24 years younger than Clinton.

To put it another way, Clinton was already studying law at Yale when Rubio and Jindal were still in diapers.

Reagan was the oldest man ever elected to the presidency when he beat Jimmy Carter in 1980, but he was just 13 years older. In contrast, the average age of the 10 leading Republican prospects in 2016 is 52 — 15 years younger than Clinton.

In fact, only two of the likely candidates — former Texas Governor Rick Perry and former Florida Governor Jeb Bush – even share the same decade as Clinton. Perry is 65; Bush, 62.

So, if history is prologue here, Republicans might do themselves some good by nominating someone who can present a generational contrast with Clinton. Bush would seem to be the candidate least able to do this, given his age and pedigree as the son and brother of presidents. But Rubio and Walker are both well positioned to make such a generational case.

Of course, it should be noted that Democrats tried, and failed, to make Reagan’s age a salient issue in both the 1980 and 1984 campaigns. Clearly, history can be defied. But if Democrats decide to nominate the oldest candidate in the field, save for longshot Democrat Bernie Sanders, they will be taking a generational and historical gamble.

Southern Politics 2014: A much better year for Republicans than for reality stars revamped as politicos

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By RICH SHUMATE
Chickenfriedpolitics.com/January 2015
(Note: This piece, which originally ran on Chickenfriedpolitics.com, was also accepted as an Op-Ed submission by both the Gainesville (Fla.) Sun and the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.)

A congressman man caught kissing. Reality stars trying to remake themselves as politicians. A snowstorm that threatened to torpedo a sitting governor. A top U.S. House leader unceremoniously unseated in a primary. And a flap over a fan during a heated debate.

Those were just some of the strange and unlikely events in Southern politics in 2014, a year that ended with Republicans roaring through the region like Sherman in reverse. Here are some of the memorable moments:

Loose Lips Sink More Than Ships — Republican U.S. Rep. Vance McAllister, a married Christian conservative from northeast Louisiana, was caught on videotape passionately kissing a female staffer who was, ahem, not his wife. He refused to resign but decided not to run for re-election. Then, he changed his mind and ran again, with his wife’s vocal support. But his constituents were less forgiving than the missus, and he finished a distant fourth in the primary.

Snowmageddon — When a January snowstorm paralyzed metro Atlanta, Republican Governor Nathan Deal took the heat for a sluggish state response and his initial attempt to shift the blame elsewhere. But Democratic hopes that this snowy debacle might bury Deal had melted by November, when he was comfortably re-elected.

Taking Aim At Obamacare — Alabama Republican U.S. House candidate Will Brooke posted a YouTube video, entitled “Let’s Do Some Damage,” in which he fired bullets into a copy of the Obamacare bill. The gambit gained him a bit of attention, though, alas, not enough to win the primary in his Birmingham-area district.

Strange Bedfellows — Bill Clinton and Rudy Giuliani both waded into the Florida governor’s race this year, cutting ads for Democrat Charlie Crist and Republican Rick Scott, respectively. However, their shoes were on the other feet in 2006, when Crist was a Republican (before becoming an independent and then a Democrat.) Back then, it was Crist who enjoyed Giuliani’s support, while Clinton backed his Democratic opponent.

Overheated Debate — Speaking of the Florida governor’s race, a televised debate between Crist and Scott came to an abrupt halt when Crist insisted on putting a small fan at his feet under the podium, in apparent violation of the debate rules. Scott first refused to take the stage until the fan was removed, but he eventually relented — after seven awkward minutes of scrambling by the debate moderators. In the end, Scott won a narrow victory.

Real Mean Politics – Three reality TV stars — American Idol Clay Aiken, former Louisiana Governor Edwin Edwards and former South Carolina Treasurer Thomas Ravenel — all vied for political office this year. But political reality proved harsh, as all three lost badly. However, Aiken is turning his unsuccessful U.S. House campaign in North Carolina into — wait for it — a new reality show.

Biggest Upset — In an outcome that shocked the political world, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor of Virginia lost his Richmond-area seat to Dave Brat, a little known college professor who ran at Cantor as a Tea Party insurgent. Weep not for Cantor, though. He bounced back with a job on Wall Street.

Worst Campaign — Texas State Senator Wendy Davis tried to parlay her filibuster against a bill restricting abortions in the Lone Star State into the governor’s mansion. But a series of gaffes — including questions about the veracity of her rags-to-riches story as a single trailer-park mom made good — sunk her chances, and she lost by a staggering 20 points.

Weirdest Campaign Appearance — Matt Bevin, who was challenging Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell in a GOP primary in Kentucky, appeared at a rally hosted by a group that supports legalizing cockfighting. While insisting he didn’t condone cockfighting, Bevin didn’t help himself when he told a radio reporter that the Founder Fathers were “very actively involved” in the blood sport. Perhaps not surprisingly, McConnell won rather handily.

Best Don Quixote Impression — Mississippi State Senator Chris McDaniel — peeved that he was defeated in a GOP U.S. Senate runoff by crossover votes from Democrats and independents — launched a three-month court fight to overturn the result. Alas, his windmill tilting came to naught, and U.S. Senator Thad Cochran kept the seat.

Best Houdini Impression — Republican U.S. Rep. Scott DesJarlais of Tennessee faced voters for the first time since lurid details emerged from his bitter 2001 divorce during which he admitted a string of extra-marital affairs and — perhaps even more damaging for an avowed right-to-life lawmaker — encouraging his first wife to have two abortions. However, GOP voters in his district proved surprisingly forgiving, handing DesJarlais a narrow primary victory. He went on to win re-election in November.

If You Can’t Override, Indict — Texas Governor Rick Perry was indicted on charges of abuse of power and coercion over his veto of a funding bill for an Austin prosecutor who refused his demand that she resign after being arrested for driving with a blood alcohol level nearly three times the legal limit. A defiant Perry vowed to fight the charges, noting that in America, “we settle our political differences at the ballot box,” rather than in criminal court.

Double Dipper — Kentucky U.S. Senator Rand Paul announced he would run for re-election in 2016, even as he is also considering a White House bid. One pesky little problem, though: Kentucky law doesn’t allow somebody to be on the ballot for two offices at once. Paul’s supporters are trying to find a way to work around that technicality.

Democrat Dam Breaks in Upper South — While the general election was grim for Democrats across the South, the news was especially depressing in Arkansas and West Virginia, which had been places where the party of Jackson was still competitive. In Arkansas, Republicans took all seven statewide constitutional offices and every congressional seat for the first time since Reconstruction. In West Virginia, the GOP took all three U.S. House seats and captured control of the state legislature for the first time since 1931.

“D” Is The New Scarlet Letter — Three sitting Southern Democratic U.S. senators — Mark Pryor of Arkansas, Kay Hagan of North Carolina and Mary Landrieu of Louisiana — all went down to defeat, paving the way for Republicans to take control of the Senate. Republicans also took away an open seat in West Virginia that they hadn’t won since 1942.

Midterms were a show of woe for Southern Democrats

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By RICH SHUMATE
Chickenfriedpolitics.com editor
(Note: This piece, which originally ran on Chickenfriedpolitics.com, was also accepted as an Op-Ed submission by both the Gainesville (Fla.) Sun and the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.)

One look at a color-coded map of midterm election results in any Southern state tells the story – there’s a tsunami of red and a shrinking pool of blue.

Take Texas, for example, with its 254 counties. Republican U.S. Senator John Cornyn carried 236 of them; the Republican candidate for governor, Attorney General Greg Abbott, carried 235. The only blue is found in Dallas, El Paso, Austin and along the Mexican border.

But that’s still more blue than in Oklahoma, where both Republican U.S. Senate candidates swept all 77 counties, and in West Virginia, where GOP Senate candidate Shelley Moore Capito swept all 55, despite the fact that Democrats have a 350,000-person lead in voter registration.

A deeper look at the numbers from the midterm elections shows just how far Democrats have fallen from the halcyon days when they had an iron grip on the solid South. They’re not just losing; lately, they’re not even competitive.

And perhaps even more troubling for Democrats is the fact that the dam seems to have burst in states in the upper South, where the party had been holding its own at the state level.

This year, 13 of 14 Southern states — all but Florida — had a U.S. Senate election, and two states — Oklahoma and South Carolina — had two. Setting aside Louisiana, which is headed to a runoff, and Alabama, which Democrats didn’t even bother to contest, GOP candidates won by an average of nearly 21 points.

Democrats couldn’t crack 30 percent in either Oklahoma race. They failed to crack 40 percent in six others. In fact, Republicans won by double digits in 10 races. Only Virginia, Georgia and North Carolina were close, with the GOP taking the latter two.

Things were just about as bad in races for governor, where the GOP margin of victory was about 18 percent. Republicans won by double digits in six of the eight governor’s races. Only Florida and Georgia were even remotely close.

The news was particularly bad for Democrats in three upper South states that were politically competitive a decade ago – West Virginia, Arkansas and Tennessee.

In West Virginia, Democrats not only lost the U.S. Senate race, but they lost all three U.S. House seats, and Republicans took control of both houses of the state legislature for the first time since 1931.

With Democratic U.S. Senator Mark Pryor’s loss, Arkansas will have an all-Republican congressional delegation for the first time since Reconstruction. Heading into the election, Democrats held five out of the seven statewide constitutional officers. In the midterm, they lost all seven.

Tennessee used to be split between Republicans in the east and Democrats in the west. Now, the GOP is winning everywhere, holding seven of the state’s nine U.S. House seats. Both Alexander and Governor Bill Haslam, re-elected with 71 percent of the vote, carried Shelby County, which includes the Democratic bastion of Memphis.

Increasingly, Democrats seem to be doing better in the deep South, where they can rely on the support of black voters, than in the upper South, where black populations are smaller.

For example, Republican U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, despite being a long-time incumbent in a very red state, won by a smaller margin than did Republican Tom Cotton, who beat Pryor like a rug in Arkansas.

Some might attribute Graham’s narrower margin to his Tea Party problems. But Alexander — who faced a similar Tea Party dynamic — managed to win by 30 points in Tennessee.

What is clear from the midterms is that despite recent gains at the presidential level in states such as North Carolina and Virginia, Democrats are becoming less competitive across the region, and the South is becoming more monolithically red.

Indeed, the midterm results support the argument that in most of the South, the two-party system is becoming a relic of the past.

Florida Democrats have put all their eggs in Charlie Crist’s (flawed) basket

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By RICH SHUMATE
Chickenfriedpolitics.com/September 2014
(Note: This piece, which originally ran on Chickenfriedpolitics.com, was also accepted as an Op-Ed submission by both the Gainesville (Fla.) Sun and the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.)

More than 4.6 million registered Democrats call Florida home. Surely, in a pool of people that enormous, the party could have found somebody — anybody — to nominate for governor who is not as inherently flawed as Charlie Crist.

But what’s done is done. Democrats have given one of their prized political possessions to a man who has pulled off the hat trick of being a Republican, an independent and a Democrat in just four short years. Look in the dictionary under “political opportunist,” and you will find his uber-tanned countenance, smiling sweetly back at you.

Now, Democrats must hold their breath until November, hoping that Crist won’t do something foolish or shameless in the next three months that will ensure Governor Rick Scott’s re-election. Good luck with that.

Given Scott’s frequently turbulent tenure in Tallahassee, the governor should be in a lot more trouble than he is. Surely this should have been a race into which politically ambitious Democrats were anxious to plunge. But none of them were, and, as a result, this contest is, essentially, a dead heat, even though the Democrat should be well ahead.

Democrats may still believe that the divisive flavor of Scott’s first term will be enough to push Crist to victory, and the results in November may still prove them right. But an argument can also be made that they would be in better shape right now had they not nominated a man who has enough political baggage to fill all his overhead bins.

That was essentially the argument that Nan Rich made in the Democratic primary. Nobody listened to her. Her decades of service to the Democratic Party went unrewarded. Crist, who in comparison to Rich has been a Democrat for about 15 minutes, took the prize instead.

So what made Crist’s resurrection possible? In a word, money. He has the ability to raise a ton of it. Not as much as Scott, of course, who can also just get out his hefty personal checkbook if need be. But Crist’s argument that he was person best equipped to defeat Scott apparently resonated with Democrats.

Or maybe that was just wishful thinking.

In any case, no other up-and-coming Democrats were willing to endure the prospect of facing big-spending Crist in the primary and, then, if successful, facing the bigger-spending Scott in the general election. The result? Crist is heading into the general election without having fought for the Democratic nomination, a fight that might have demonstrated whether he still has the political chops to go the distance.

If Crist loses in November, Florida Democrats — particularly those who view Scott as nothing short of diabolical — will be kicking themselves for the next four years. And Charlie Crist? Well, there’s a Senate race in 2016, and he hasn’t been a Libertarian yet.

Jubilant Iraqis celebrate fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime

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By RICH SHUMATE
The CNN Wire/April 2003

BAGHDAD (CNN) — Nearly a quarter century of iron-fisted rule by Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein crumbled dramatically Wednesday, sending jubilant Iraqis into the streets of Baghdad just three weeks after the U.S.-led coalition launched Operation Iraqi Freedom.

However, the security vacuum also led to widespread looting, particularly of government offices. The streets had reportedly quieted down by nightfall, as fearful residents ducked back into their homes. U.S. Marines were patrolling darkened streets in the capital, where the electricity was still off in many areas.

Meanwhile, along the burgeoning northern front, coalition aircraft launched their heaviest wave of bombing yet early Thursday morning, reported CNN Correspondent Brent Sadler, located about 18 miles from the front lines near Kalar.

The bombing runs are designed to soften up Iraqi lines, and local Kurdish commanders told Sadler they expect to gain significant ground later in the day as the result of the strikes.

Kurdish Peshmerga fighters are working alongside U.S. Special Forces in the area, which is about 100 miles east of Saddam Hussein’s hometown of Tikrit near the Iranian border.

In Baghdad, the moment of highest drama Wednesday came when U.S. Marines helped Iraqi civilians topple a massive statute of Saddam Hussein in Firdos Square, in the heart of the Iraqi capital. The Iraqis then danced on the dethroned image and dismembered it.

As the head of the statute was dragged through the streets, people spat on it and beat it with their shoes — considered a grave insult in the Arab world. Civilians chatted amiably with Marines and climbed on board the tank towing vehicle used to pull the symbolic Saddam Hussein from his pedestal.

While tying a rope and chain to the statute to bring it down, one of the Marines briefly covered Saddam Husseins face with the Stars and Stripes, then replaced the U.S. flag with an Iraqi flag.

“The game is over,” conceded Mohammed Aldouri, the Iraqi regime’s ambassador to the United Nations in New York. “I hope that peace will prevail.”

Other senior Iraqi officials were nowhere to be seen. Journalists in the city reported that they didn’t show up for work Wednesday, and reporters were free to move about Baghdad without the “minders” from the Information Ministry who normally shadowed their every move.

Among those officials not seen Wednesday was Information Minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf, who had been confidently predicting a coalition defeat in recent days, even as U.S. troops were moving through the city.

Marines also entered the home of Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz, finding evidence that he had left only recently — with blankets draped over the furniture, as if he planned to return. Aziz, one of the Iraqi leader’s longest-serving and most loyal aides, has been the primary face of the regime on the international stage.

As for Saddam Hussein himself, coalition officials said it was still unclear whether he was dead or alive. On Monday, acting on a tip, a U.S. bomber destroyed a building where he was believed to have been, but whether he died in that attack is unknown.

Ahmad Chalabi, leader of the Iraqi National Congress, an opposition group, said he had received unconfirmed reports that Saddam Hussein and at least one of his sons had escaped to Baquba, a town northeast of the capital.

The Day Atlanta Died

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How the 1962 Orly plane crash, which claimed 115 Georgians, forever altered the city’s destiny

By RICH SHUMATE
Atlanta Magazine/June 1992

atlanta magazineThe jet that crashed was six time zones and 4,000 miles from Atlanta, in France. But it was this city, not Paris, whose destiny was altered forever in an instant in 1962 — more than 100 of Atlanta’s best and brightest violently consumed by flame, the quiet of a Sunday June morning punctured by news so unexpected, so immense that it was beyond understanding.

A city was thrown into a summer of grief, of funerals, of learning to cope without people who were so much a part of the fabric of leadership, of life.

“Everyone I came into contact with that morning couldn’t believe that it happened,” says Ivan Allen Jr., who was Atlanta’s mayor in 1962 and who knew most of the dead. “People were just not willing to accept it.”

A plane crash is always tragic because of the suddenness with which a group of healthy, happy people, usually thrown together by chance, engaging the benign exercise of air travel, perish in one horrible, gruesome instant. But the crash at Orly Airport in Paris on June 3, 1962, was unique in that its victims were not strangers hailing from distant points.

On board were 115 Georgians, 106 from metro Atlanta.

None survived.

At the time, former Mayor William Hartsfield called the disaster the biggest blow to Atlanta since the Civil War.

The roster of the dead was made up disproportionately of members of the city’s powerful gentry. They were a Who’s Who of Atlanta: businessmen, members of prominent families, the ladies in charge of good words. They were a close-knit bunch, had grown up together, lived near each other in upscale neighborhoods on the northside like Buckhead and Ansley Park. They worshiped together in churches like Second-Ponce De Leon Baptist, First Presbyterian, St. Philip’s and Christ the King cathedrals. The lunched together at the Piedmont Driving Club, the Capital City Club. They were people who had the time and money to travel through Europe for a month. On board the plane were 27 married couples, 11 major corporate executives, 13 women active in the Junior League.

And arts patrons. Especially arts patrons.

For the common threat that brought these Atlantans together was the Atlanta Art Association. Only members of the association, which promoted arts programs and ran an art school and museum, were eligible for the trip, designed to promote the group and expose its members to the treasures in the museums of Europe.

Many on the tour were longtime members who had worked hard to promote the arts in the city, but perhaps a third of the people on the plane joined the association just to go on the European trip.

Only about 45 people had taken the full, month-long tour organized by Air France and American Express, considered a bargain at $895. Over the course of a month, those travelers had gone sight-seeing and museum hopping in London, Amsterdam, Lucerne, Venice, Florence and Rome, before ending their tour in Paris. The rest of the group went to Europe on a charter, traveled on their own and then returned to Paris for the trip back home.

Atlanta Constitution columnist Doris Lockerman described those who perished on the plane as “couples rewarding themselves with the adventure of a lifetime; the bon vivants who took these European jaunts as regularly as opportunity presented itself, stepping upon a transoceanic airplane as casually as if they were boarding a Peachtree bus; the wives whose husbands had no taste for sight-seeing, or no time to take from their work, and had urged them to go on this holiday with their friends; the parents awakening the sensibilities of their children to the world around them; the widows, radiant, gallantly self-reliant, filling unaccustomed spaces of time with new interests.”

The list of the dead was a list of men and women of achievement:

Roby Robinson, partner in the Robinson-Humphrey investment firm, and his wife, Louise, who lived for many years in the landmark Pint Castle on West Paces Ferry Road.

Frances Longino, a member of the city’s library board and daughter of the co-founder of Davidson’s department store.

Katherine Bleckley, clerk of the Georgia Supreme Court and a descendent of one of Georgia’s most prominent families.

Morris Brandon Jr., owner of Superior Syringe Co. (Morris Brandon elementary school in the city was named for his father.)

Raiford Ragsdale, who the year before had completed a two-year tenure as the only woman on the Atlanta school board.

Charles Shaw Sr., a Sears executive and superintendent of the Sunday school at Druid Hills Baptist Church.

Ruth McMillan, Atlanta’s Woman of the Year in 1955, who campaigned to allow women to serve on juries and enroll at Georgia Tech.

Sidney Wien, a retired businessman whose passion was buying artwork and donating it to museums.

Rosalind Williams, a vice president at Tucker Wayne and Co. advertising agency.

Dr. Christopher McLoughlin, a well-known physician on the staff at Piedmont Hospital.

William Cartledge, owner of the El Morocco supper club. His wife, Helen, president of the Theatre Atlanta Women’s Guild.

Redfern Hollins, a transplant from England who was director of research at W.R.C. Smith Publishing Co.

C. Baxter Jones Jr., a lawyer who ran unsuccessfully for Congress in 1952. His wife, Julia, was a past president of the Junior League.

Del Paige, who headed the Atlanta office of the national accounting firm Ernst & Ernst and was president of the Atlanta Art Association.

Of course, not everyone on the tour was rich or prominent. But each one had a story that ended that day at Orly.

Helen Seydel was an artist who told a friend that she saw this trip to Europe as a “spiritual resurrection.” Her marriage had ended suddenly, unexpectedly, upending her life. Now, at age 46, refreshed by a pilgrimage to Florence, Seydel believed the was ready to return to Atlanta and begin again.

After the crash, Life magazine printed a picture of the room where she painted at her home on Lakeland Drive. Her artist’s tools were as she left them, in strict order. The tubes of paint were lined up neatly, the brushes reposed on the left edge of the table. On the wall above the easel was a self-portrait of a middle-aged women with auburn hair and green eyes.

Paul Doassans, 42, was the district manager for Air France in Atlanta who helped organize the trip. He had not actually taken part in the tour, but he decided to fly to Paris and make the return trip with the group. He was coming home to a new bride, a stewardess for Delta Airlines he had married just five months earlier.

Douglas Davis Jr., 33, had not been on the tour, either — he lived in Paris — but he was among home folks. He was the son of pioneer Atlanta aviator Douglas Davis Sr., who died in a plane crash in 1934. The younger Davis left the city in 1958, embarking on a career as an artist. In Paris, he had met up with an old friend on the tour, Tito Italgo, with whom he had studied art in Atlanta. Italgo wanted to stay in Europe, so Davis took his seat on the plane to come home to help his mother move into a new home.

Betsy Bevington got on the plane with her mother after she bid her husband, Milton, goodbye in the terminal at Orly Airport. He didn’t take part in the tour, but he had surprised his wife by meeting her in Paris for a short vacation.

“We just did the normal ‘touristy’ things,” he says — seeing the Louvre, Saint-Chapelle, taking the Michelin guide and walking the city.

But the Bevingtons would not be together on the flight that afternoon. He was booked on a later plane because she didn’t like them to fly together. Her caution would, in hindsight, seem like a premonition.

“She was somewhat apprehensive of airplanes in general. Our sons at that time were 7, 8 and 9. She thought it would be unfortunate if we had an accident and both parents were taken out,” Bevington says.

“I kind of pooh-poohed the idea.”

The skies were clear and sunny. It was nearly half past noon, Paris time. The plane was a half-hour late because the Atlanta travelers had dawdled in the airport’s duty-free shops, making last-minute purchases.

Captain Roland-Paul Hoche moved the Air France Boeing 707, named Chateau de Sully, away from the terminal toward runway No. 26.

Happy, full of the experience of Europe, the travelers were on their way back home.

The takeoff proceeded normally. Then, after the plane got just a few feet off the ground, the wheels touched back down. The plane veered off the runway.

“At that point, you could see black smoke, and you got a pretty good idea that something was wrong,” says Bevington.

He had been watching his wife’s plane take off through a terminal window.

_______________
R.P. Turner Jr. first heard the news over his clock radio when he woke up that Sunday morning in his Atlanta apartment.

He was 19, a student at Georgia Tech. He had grown up in Marshallville, a small town between Macon and Americus famous for its devotion to colorful camellias.

Turner’s mother, Louise Turner, painted watercolors of camellias in exacting, botanically correct detail. She had give up a career as a fashion illustrator in New York to return to Georgia with her husband, and she had developed a renown for capturing camellias as no one else could. But Mrs. Turner didn’t limit her repertoire. She plucked people off the street to pose for her and made her two sons sit and pose when what they really wanted to do was go play baseball. She worked in the light of sun porches on either side of the Turners’ brick home on East Main Street, and she would move from one porch to the other as the sun moved through its day.

That afternoon, R.P. Turner was to meet his parents at the Atlanta airport. His mother liked to travel and expose herself to a wider world of art, and her husband would accompany her on forays. Even though she didn’t live in the city, she was a member of the Atlanta Art Association.

The Turners had gone with their friends to Europe. They were to return home in time to see their youngest son, Tom, graduate from high school the following Tuesday.

When he woke up, R.P. heard the news. A plane had crashed in Paris. Early reports were sketchy and only hinted at the magnitude of news to come.

“The first thing I started doing was figuring flight times,” he says. “Thinks started clicking in.”

The first wire service report of the tragedy, from United Press International, reached Atlanta at 7:27 a.m.: Paris, June 3 — An Air France Boeing airliner crashed today at Orly Airport with more than 100 persons aboard, airport authorities said. The French news agency France Press said, “Few of them escaped death.”

There was no mention yet of the plane’s destination; that would come 15 minutes later, from the Associated Press: The plane was bound for New York, Atlanta and Houston.

Newsman King Elliott was on duty at WSB Radio that morning when the first rudimentary reports arrived, saying that an undetermined number of Atlantans had perished in a plane crash in France. There was no mention yet that this was the art association’s plane. Elliott decided to alert Mayor Ivan Allen Jr. and called his home.

Allen was out of town, at his family’s farm in Heard County, about an hour west of the city near the Alabama line. He had been mayor for less than six months, after winning a hard-fought campaign against segregationist Lester Maddox. It had been a rocky few months. Voters torpedoed a bond issue proposed by Allen, which included money for an arts center in Piedmont Park. And he had taken some hard hits after ordering erection of a barricade on a street running between white and black neighborhoods where racial tension had risen.

He hadn’t fared well in his first tests as mayor, and now he was to face one that was unprecedented.

The mayor’s wife, Louise, called him at the farm and passed along the few details Elliott had given her. He told her to call back if she heard more information and started out the door. Then, Allen says it dawned on him that it had been a month since he had gone to the airport and bid farewell to the art association tour. He knew they were scheduled to return after a month, and he began to fear the worst.

He called his secretary, Ann Moses, and asked her to open City Hall. Still in the work clothes he was wearing on the farm, he tuned his car radio to WSB and drove back to the city.

“(The news) was very fragmentary at that point,” Allen says. As he was driving back, he heard an announcer say that Jack Glenn, a friend of Allen’s, and his wife were among the victims.

“I knew that wasn’t the case. I knew they were in Atlanta,” Allen says.

But he was also hearing names of people he knew were on the tour.

King Elliott had made another call that morning, to Aubrey Morris, then news director at WSB. Morris wasn’t home, either, and Elliott passed on the information to his wife.

Morris, too, knew many of the people on the tour and had seen them off at the airport. In his years covering news in the city, he frequently came into contact with them. He was at an early church service in Sandy Springs that Sunday when an usher tapped him on the shoulder and told him that his wife had call the church and wanted to take to him about a plane crash in Paris, France.

“I knew immediately what it was,” he says.

The crash happened at 6:29 a.m. Atlanta time, as the city was just beginning to awaken. News did not have the immediacy in 1962 that it has today. It was almost an hour after the crash before reports started reaching Atlanta, and the details were sketchy and incomplete. Some early reports said that only 18 Atlantans had died in the crash, that most of the people on the art association tour were still in Europe.

By 10 a.m., that hope would be gone forever.

As Atlantans got in their cars and went to church, they began hearing the full story. Of the 132 people on the plane, 130 had perished. Only two French stewardesses, who had been thrown from the plane as it broke apart, survived.

Back in Paris, Milton Bevington encountered the stewardesses when he went to an Air France office in the terminal, knowing that the plane had crashed but still clinging to hope that his wife might have survived.

“They were sitting in the office. When I saw them, I guess I thought I might see some other people …” he says, his voice trailing off. But he learned there were only two survivors, and neither one of them was his wife.

Betsy Bevington was 33. When she graduated from college, her parents had promised her a trip to Europe, but she didn’t go at the time, choosing to marry instead. One decade and three children later, her father decided to make good on the promise. He was supposed to accompany her on the trip but died the January before. Her mother came from Florida to take the tour instead.

Once he knew his wife had died, Milton Bevington put in a call to some friends in Atlanta, asking them to take his sons to a cabin on Lake Rabun so that the wouldn’t hear the news on the radio or television. He wanted to tell them himself.

“The next day, when I came back, I went up to the cabin and broke the news,” Bevington says.

At the time Betsy Bevington and the rest of the passengers died in 1962, the Orly crash was the worst single-plane disaster in the history of aviation. The only local disasters that Atlantas of 1962 could remember through their own experience to rival the crash were the Dec. 7, 1946 fire at the city’s supposedly fireproof Winecoff Hotel that killed 119; and a tornado that hit Gainesville in 1936, killing more than 200.

But neither of those tragedies had taken so many of their personal friends.

In 1962, WSB Radio broadcast Sunday services from the First Presbyterian Church. The day of the crash, the broadcast was interrupted to that Morris, at the Air France office on Forsyth Street, could begin reading names of the dead. Assisted by a businessman who had come to the office and knew many of the victims, Morris began giving short biographies, trying to be a reporter, and keep his emotions from creeping into his voice.

Then he got to the name of Ruth McMillan. He knew her and her sister, May, very well.

“It was in their house that I had my first room when I came to work at the Atlanta Journal after coming from the University of Georgia,” he says.

When Morris got off the air, he put in a call to May.

That afternoon, families and friends of the travelers crowded into the Air France office to receive confirmation of what they deep down already knew. A woman on the airline’s staff, Collette Lautzenhiser, checked a passenger list for the anxious, repeating over and over in her light French accent, “I’m sorry … I’m so sorry.”

In the archives of the Atlanta History Center is a passenger list of the ill-fated flight, with names in green-tinted teletype ink. Beside some names are check marks, beside others question marks. In the margin of several pages, in a delicate hand, the word “notify” is written, followed by names and addresses.

By late afternoon, a traffic jam had developed downtown along Forsyth Street. Word had spread that the Journal was planning a special edition, the first since Margaret Mitchell was hit by a car and killed in 1949, and a crowd had gathered in front of the newspaper offices. The extra carried a straightforward banner headline: 119 Georgians Killed In Fiery Paris Jet Crash

A Paris newspaper was more dramatic: Catastrophe a Orly. Un Boeing S’Ecrase: 130 Morts

Ivan Allen wasn’t sure what a mayor should do to respond to a disaster of this magnitude — there was no precedent. By that afternoon, he had decided that his place was in Paris.

“I thought it was the right thing to do. It was purely to be a help to the families (of the victims),” Allen says. “I had no position of authority outside of Atlanta.”

He also had no experience in international diplomacy. Atlanta mayors then were not the worldwide travelers they are today, so he would have to rely on his education and instincts. Reflecting on that afternoon years later in his book, Mayor: Notes on the Sixties (written with Paul Hemphill), Allen wrote that one thought that crossed his mind was how fortunate it was that he, and not Lester Maddox, was representing Atlanta.

At 5:55 p.m., Allen, accompanied by Assistant City Attorney Ed Sterne, left on a flight to New York. They would catch a connecting Air France flight to Paris on a Boeing 707, the same kind of plane that had crashed.

Morris traveled with Allen and Sterne. When he had heard that the mayor was going to Paris, he went to his boss at WSB, Elmo Ellis, and told him that he thought the place to cover the story was in Paris. To his surprise, station management let him go. He would be the only Atlanta journalist on the scene for two days. Mayor Allen, not used to the crush of media in New York, asked Morris to also act as his unofficial press aide. He agreed.

When the Atlanta entourage arrived at Orly, they flew over the crash site. They saw the skid marks on the runway, evidence of Captain Hoche’s ill-fated attempt to stop the plane. They saw the wreckage, off the end of a runway next to a cherry orchard near a small French village.

When the mayor’s party toured the crash site a short time later, the debris was still smoking, and many of the victims’ personal belongings, thrown from the plane as it was breaking apart before the explosion, were strewn all over the runway. They found unbroken bottles of champagne, and the mayor picked up a banner from the West Point Rotary Club, which belonged to a friend on the trip, Morgan Ganty. He saw a dress that, because of the color and style, he recognized as belonging to Nancy Frederick.

“She was the first date I had as a young man,” Allen says. “I remember going over to her house on my red bicycle on a Sunday to pay a call.”

At the time of the crash, Allen described the victims as “my generation. We were boys and girls together.” Thirty years later, Allen, now 81, points at a scrapbook of newspaper clippings from those dark days ans says, “There’s a list of my friends.

“It’s still emotional.”

_______________
Roland-Paul Hoche was 40 and had been a pilot with Air France for 16 years. Eighteen months before the crash of the Chateau de Sully, he had tried to qualify to flying the Boeing 70 and failed. Four months later, on his second try, he passed.

Some early reports speculated that the plane was perhaps too overloaded to get airborne. The absolute maximum capacity of a 707 was 312,000 pounds, and, on June 3, the Chateau de Sully was carrying 303,000 pounds.

Yet, the official investigation found that the plane should have been able to take off with the weight it was carrying. It was a series of human errors that prevented the plane from getting off the ground.

The first mistake was made when the flight crew incorrectly set the angle of the horizontal stabilizers (the small wings on the back of the jet). When Captain Hoche put the engines in full thrust down the runway and tried to pull up on the controls to get airborne, the plane rose only a few feet, then returned to the runway.

What Hoche should have done at that point, according to investigators, was pull up forcefully on the controls. Instead, he threw the engines into reverse thrust, put on the brakes and tried to stop the plane. It was his last, fatal error.

When a jet is hurtling down a runway, it reaches a point of no return, after which a pilot is committed to taking off. Under procedures used at the time of the crash, the co-pilot called out the point of no return to the pilot.

Calculations made by investigators show that Hoche was past that point when he tried to stop the plane. The question, however, is whether he knew that he was, whether the co-pilot called out the proper warning. In 1962, there were no voice recorders in the cockpits of planes as there are now. (In fact, after the Orly crash, aviation officials in the United States started looking at requiring cockpit voice recorders in all planes. They are now standard.) So what was said, and by whom, died with the flight crew.

As Hoche tried to stop the plane, it began careening down the runway and crashed through some runway lights. The left wing hit the ground, and the tail section of the plane broke away, throwing the two stewardesses who survived, as well as a steward who later died from his injuries, free from the plane.

The front of the jet then crashed through a fence and leveled an unoccupied house in the village of Villeneuve le Roi. The fuel then caught on fire and exploded.

The passengers burned to death.

“We just only hope it was instant,” says R.P. Turner. “They told us it was.”

The plane crash occurred three days before the anniversary of the D-Day invasion, and the villagers of Villeneuve le Roi were holding a ceremony commemorating the liberation of prisoners of war. Firemen and policemen in dress uniform rushed to the scene to put out the fire.

It took two hours of fire fighting before the bodies could be removed. They were laid in the cherry orchard and later taken to five morgues in and around Paris. Allen and his party would later visit all five morgues to see if they could visually identify any of the bodies.

They could not. It would take several weeks before all of the bodies were identified through finger prints, dental records and personal effects.

Damage claims were filed against Air France on behalf of 122 victims. However, international flights are governed by a treaty known as the Warsaw Convention, which limited the amount of damages that the airline would have to pay to $8,300 per victim. Lawyers for the Orly families argued that since the flight was a charter, not a commercial flight, it was not governed by the treaty. They took that argument to the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals but lost.

In February 1969, the final claims against Air France were settled. The average payment was $84,000 per victim.

Three days after the crash, the people of France participated in an interdenominational memorial service at the American Cathedral in Paris. During the service, a choir sang the standard hymn, “God Be in My Head.”

“Every time I hear that song, I’m reminded of that occasion,” says Aubrey Morris. For him, the service in Paris is his most vivid, emotional memory from those days 30 years ago.

After the service, Ivan Allen’s party returned to Atlanta, arriving in the city at 7:40 p.m. Wednesday evening, June 6. Morris recalls that the crowd at the airport, which included families of the dead, applauded as the mayor came into the terminal. “God bless you, Ivan,” one man said to Allen.

Over the next seven and a half years in office, the city would see grace under pressure from Allen in other troubled times — during the Summerhill riots in 1966, while testifying for the 1964 Civil Rights Bill and after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968. But his handling of the plane crash established Ivan Allen as a leader and a legend.

Members of the mayor’s party had virtually no sleep over the course of three days in France. For Allen, it had been an emotional time, seeing his burned friends in morgues, seeing their belongings on the runway. After reporters at the Atlanta airport had asked their questions, the mayor’s wife, Louise, took him by the arm and said, “Will you please excuse him?” then led Allen away.

The day before the service in Paris, two Atlanta churches hard hit by the crash, the Catholic Cathedral of Christ the King and St. Philip’s Episcopal Cathedral, held memorial services. Each had lost 20 members in the crash.

Christ the King was crowded past capacity, the largest Mass in the church’s history. Life magazine ran a photograph of a woman who could not get a seat inside, kneeling in worship on the cathedral’s steps.

The first three bodies came home on June 15. Over the next month, as the dead came back home, there were as many as five funerals a day.

_______________
On June 3, 1966, four years to the day after Atlanta’s European voyagers perished at Orly, their next-of-kin gathered at 15th and Peachtree streets, next to the old High Museum, to break ground on the Atlanta Memorial Arts Center.

Not long after the crash, Atlantans had begun talking about what they might do to commemorate those who died. What they decided is quintessential Atlanta: They decided to build something.

In this case, it was a $13 million arts center, built with private funds raised in the names of the victims. Today, the memorial center, now a part of the Robert W. Woodruff Arts Center, is home to the Atlanta Symphony, the Alliance Theater and the Atlanta College of Art. The current High Museum was added in 1983.

The citizenry had rejected an arts center before the crash. Afterward, it embraced the idea.

There were predictions at the time of the crash that it might take 25 or 30 years for the city to recover from the vacuum in leadership caused by the crash; that turned out not to be so.

On the occasion of the opening of the arts center, the French government gave the city a bronze cast of Rodin’s The Shade, which still sites in the main stairwell of the building.

_______________
After hearing news of the plane crash on the radio, R.P. Turner got a friend to drive him back to Marshallville. When he arrived, the yard of his parents’ house was filled with people. Both the Methodist and Baptist churches had canceled services, and mourners came to pay their respects.

“It was a true outpouring,” he says. “Mom and Dad had so many friends.”

R.P. Turner did not return to Georgia Tech. He and his brother, Tom, took over the family’s farm, which they still operate today. They took all of their mother’s artwork and put it up in the attic of his parents’ house, where R.P. and his family now live.

About a year ago, R.P.’s wife, Susan, brought out Louise Turner’s extraordinary collection, which includes 250 works. Among them is a self-portrait, which she painted while looking in a mirror.

The family decided that her legacy shouldn’t sit in a musty old attic. They are now selling prints of two of the camellia watercolors and working with an Atlanta curator to set up an exhibition of Louise Turner’s work.

When their mother was making them pose instead of letting them play baseball, the sons resisted. Now, they feel blessed that they have these pieces of their past and their mother.

She is back home, in her own house. But for her son R.P., the memory of the news on the radio that morning in Atlanta doesn’t go away, not even after 30 years.

“There’s not a day that goes by that I don’t think about it.”

For Milton Bevington, who remarried three years after the crash, what he witnessed that day in Paris is still hard to talk about, even after three decades. But he says what usually comes back to his mind is not the smoke but the faces of the travelers in the terminal, a vivid picture of both his wife and her mother.

“It’s always in your mind. I won’t say it’s on your mind, but in your mind,” he says. And as for getting over witnessing such a disaster, “you kind of decide you don’t have much option but to go on.”

“You just decided you’ve got to do it, and you do it.”

And that’s what Atlanta did.

Stars, Bars and Homophobia

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How the battle to preserve Confederate heritage is fueling a anti-gay political movement

By RICH SHUMATE
Southern Voice/March 31, 1994

sovo logoThroughout the South, the battle lines have been drawn again. But this time, the fight is not over land nor state’s rights nor political hegemony. It is instead over songs and flags and symbols.

Many native white Southerners — gays and lesbians among them — believe these Confederate symbols represent a noble chapter of valor and sacrifice that ought to be cherished and remembered. They bristle against the forces of political correctness that, as they see it, are trying to eradicate Southern heritage and the region’s particular identity. They reject the idea that the Confederate battle flag and “Dixie” are racist statements. They no doubt cheer the efforts of groups fighting to preserve the Georgia state flag and the Virginia state song.

But what they may not realize is that some of the people who are leading the charge to preserve Confederate heritage, known collectively as the neo-Confederate movement, are often openly, and passionately, homophobic.

The movement, a coalition which includes such innocuous sounding groups as the Sons of Confederate Veterans, the Heritage Preservation Association and the Confederate Society of America, has ties to a number of strongly anti-gay and Christian supremacist political leaders, including Pat Buchanan, Jesse Helms and Pat Robertson. And the political clout the movement has gained from the controversy over the public use of Confederate symbols — in Georgia in particular — is being used to rally support for political candidates strongly opposed to lesbian and gay rights.

Last year, two Republican state senators elected in special elections with neo-Confederate backing became part of a fundamentalist clique in the Georgia Senate that has pushed that body sharply to the right. This year, the neo-Confederates plan to go after their public enemy number one — Gov. Zell Miller, who drew their ire when he pushed, unsuccessfully, for the elimination of the Confederate battle ensign from the state flag.

In essence, what is being billed as an effort to preserve heritage, for which there is a great deal of sentiment in the South, is instead turning into a political movement that is very unfriendly to gays Lesbians, couched in a conservative brand of Christianity.

“I would say that what we’re now starting to see is the development of a strategy to promote key parts of an ideology,” says Walter Reeves of the Neighbors Network, an Atlanta based human rights group that monitors neo-Confederate activity. “I think they find this is an excellent way to mobilize a segment of white Southerners.”

In the context used here, the term “neo-Confederate” is not meant to refer to white supremacist groups, such as the Ku Klux Klan or the Southern White Knights or the Nazi Party. In fact, the leaders of the Sons of Confederate Veterans and similar groups go out of their way to distance themselves from overt racism and hardline racists, dismissing Klansmen and their ilk as Southern white trash.

Instead, these are the gentlemen and ladies, reared on reverence for Southern heritage, fighting to keep alive the beliefs and traditions of centuries past. They insist that they abhor the misuse of the Confederate flag by white supremacists and argue that just because these symbols have been misappropriated doesn’t mean they should be discarded.

But while neo-Confederates leaders labor long and hard to veil any racist sentiments among their members (though in many cases, the veil wears pretty thin), disdain for gays and lesbians is, in contrast, often expressed openly and boldly. For proof of. that, one need look no further than neo-Confederate literature.

Take, for example, Southern Partisan, a magazine based in Columbia, S.C. that is one of the largest and most important organs of the neo-Confederate movement. On the masthead, as a “senior advisor,” is Buchanan, the TV commentator and unsuccessful candidate for the Republican presidential nomination in 1992 who excoriated gays from the stage of the GOP convention. Buchanan is a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, one of the oldest and largest of the neo-Confederate groups. Though Southern Partisan is not an official publication of the Sons, the group is frequently mentioned in its pages.

In one of Southern Partisan’s 1993 issues, Buchanan provided a column slamming Bill Clinton, accusing him of supporting gay rights. His comments were mild compared with another writer named P .J.. Byrnes who provided a review of the 1993 March on Washington for gay and lesbian rights entitled “Armageddon — An Update.” Brynes, saying the news media sugarcoated its coverage of the largest human rights march in history, characterized the event instead as “the most obscene desecration of public property in the history of the nation.”

He decried topless lesbians, intimated that female marchers expressed an interest in molesting Chelsea Clinton and said that on the Mall, “genitalia were almost as prominently displayed as midriffs.” The March on Washington was, according to Byrnes, “the deliberate, in the face posturing of an obsessed mob, sick with confused lust, determined to infect the rest of the nation.”

In this same issue, on the very next page, President Clinton was taken to task for his “don’t ask, don’t tell” compromise on the military ban. Though Clinton’s proposal offered little difference from the ban already in place, SP’s editors decried it as a radical departure that would allow people in the military who are “perverse and unnatural,” “Of course, this is not to say that Americans are predisposed to persecute homosexuals,” the editors went on to say. “The threshold to this problem is the door to what once was metaphorically called ‘the closet.’ In a world where moral standards are publicly upheld, the closet is a useful place indeed. Many sins reside there in peace, for no one is without fault. But today’s militant homosexuals are no longer restrained by the unspoken rules of civility.’

Also in this same issue was an article praising U.S. Sen.. Jesse Helms of North Carolina for his characterization of Roberta Achtenberg as a “damn lesbian,” during hearings to confirm her as assistant secretary of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, and a piece taking the University of South Carolina to task for offering a course last summer by a gay professor on the challenge to public education posed by the fundamentalist agenda.

The magazine also published an attack on hate crimes laws in general and a U.S. Supreme Court decision upholding them in particular, and it reprinted part of Virginia’s 18th Century criminal code that outlined the punishment for sodomy as castration for a man and, for a woman, having a half inch hole bored through her nose.

All in all, in that one issue of Southern Partisan, there were nine articles that were primarily antigay/lesbian in nature. Gays took more hits in that issue than did Abraham Lincoln.

Another neo-Confederate publication, called Southern Heritage, is equally hostile to gays and lesbians. Though it is independent and not officially affiliated with any group, almost 60 percent of its readers are members of either the Sons of Confederate Veterans or the United Daughters of the Confederacy, according to a survey of its readers published in one of its issues.

Based in Merrifield, Va., the publication lists on its masthead as a contributor Charles Lunsford, an Inman Park resident who is the spokesman for the Sons of Confederate Veterans’ Georgia branch. Lunsford has been at the forefront of the fight to preserve the Confederate emblem on the state flag.

In one issue of Southern Heritage, a writer named Kay Moxley Black wrote an entire column decrying the use of the term “gay” to mean homosexual, asking rhetorically how “did a beautiful word like ‘gay’ become so debauched?” “Look how many of those words were good, pure, beautiful words before ‘they’ decided to change our culture,” Moxley said.

John F. Cummings III, the editor-in-chief of Southern Heritage, writes a column in each issue that he routinely uses to blast gays and lesbians, referring to the United States as the “land of Rodham and Gomorrah” and decrying the fact that “flagrant homosexual expression is heralded as acceptable.”

Then there are the letters to the editor expressions of the sentiments of the readers of these magazines that are often stridently anti-gay. One letter writer even advocated that Atlanta be burned a second time because “elements alien to the traditional values of the South (i.e. feminists, homosexuals, Northern liberals) have descended on the city in force.”

Advertisers in these publications include a number of mail-order merchandise firms that peddle anti-gay T-shirts and bumper stickers. One such sticker reads, “Roosevelt: A Chicken In Every Pot. Clinton: A Fag in Every Pup Tent.” (Their history is a bit faulty here- — t was Herbert Hoover, not FDR, who promised a chicken in every pot).

Of course, many people who feel a reverence for Confederate symbols are not members of these groups and do not subscribe to their narrow ideology. And not all of the people who belong to  these groups necessarily share these anti-gay/lesbian viewpoints.

So these homophobic ramblings might just be dismissed as the expected rhetoric of a fringe group, except for two things. First, homophobia seems to be a strong, consistent central theme, not an isolated occurrence. And second, these groups have been able to tap into public sentiment in favor of retaining Confederate symbols to bolster their political power.

After Gov.. Miller proposed dropping the Confederate battle ensign from the state flag, polls showed that a majority of Georgians opposed the idea. Amidst the controversy, the Georgia division of Sons of Confederate Veterans — whose Atlanta branch, ironically, holds its meetings in Midtown, a gay friendly neighborhood — began receiving applications from as many as 500 new members a month, according to a recent investigation into Confederate preservation groups by Atlanta Magazine writer R. Robin McDonald.

The Georgia Sons have more than 20,000 members, including a number of prominent political leaders. While many of those people do not publicly disclose their affiliation, Atlanta Magazine identified among their number Georgia state representatives J. Max Davis of Dunwoody and Keith Breedlove of Buford; former Waycross mayor John Knox, who is running against Miller for governor, and U.S. Rep. John Linder, a Republican who represents DeKalb and Gwinnett counties in Congress.

During the recent legislative session, Davis was one of the cosponsors of a bill that would have repealed two Atlanta city ordinances setting up a domestic partnership registry and providing benefits to the partners of city employees. “He has been a longtime opponent of progressive legislation,” said Larry Pellegrini, the Capitol lobbyist for GAPAC, Georgia’s gay/lesbian political action committee.

Knox made headlines in January when he called a press conference at the Capitol to ask Miller for force Georgia Public Television to pull Armistead Maupin’s “Tales of, the City” from the airwaves. Though he hadn’t seen the program, which chronicled life in 1970s San Francisco, Knox termed it “X-rated” television.

Last year, Perry McGuire and Bob Guhl, both Republicans, were elected to the Georgia Senate from suburban Atlanta districts, replacing moderate Democrats. Neo-Confederate groups were involved in those campaigns, according to Atlanta Magazine’s report. While there is no way to tell what difference that support made in the election’s outcome, both were hotly contested elections where the neo-Confederates may have made a difference.

“Both [McGuire and Guhl] allied themselves with the right wing ,” said Pellegrini. “Both of them were beholden to the right wing in the election, and they acted like that once they got down [to the Capitol].”

The Senate had been closely divided among moderates and conservatives. This past session, right¬wing Republican conservatives were able to bring along enough conservative Democrats to swing the Senate to the right on abortion funding and some other issues.

Perhaps the most curious thing about the political involvement of the neo-Confederates — and evidence that they may be promoting ideology instead of preserving history — is their consistent support for Republican politicians. During the War Between The States, of course, Republicans were the enemy.

The big test of the power of the neo-Confederate groups will come in November, when Miller faces re-election. Were it not for the flag contretemps, he would probably be a shoo-in for a second term. Now, according to Pellegrini and other political observers, “that’s one flank on which he might be vulnerable.”

And while Miller has been no champion of gay and lesbian issues, he has not been hostile to them in the way other candidates, particularly Knox, have been. Neighbors Network has sent servers to “save-the-flag” rallies, and they have talked to people in the crowd to get an idea of why they were there.

According to Reeves, most don’t express racist or homophobic sentiments. Many say they are Civil War re-enactors, people who, as a hobby, put on costumes and participate in authentic reenactments of famous battles.

But these people have been drawn into the flag fight because they have bought into a post-Reconstruction view of the Confederacy as some romantic “Gone With The Wind” fantasy and can’t understand why Confederate symbols need to be removed, according to Reeves. He says he has come across well educated, thoughtful people who have told him that they believe the Ku Klux Klan was formed to protect Southern rights during Reconstruction and only later became a terrorist group, when in fact evidence is overwhelming that the Klan was a terrorist group from its very inception.

“I find this prostitution of our history to serve this revisionist political agenda to be thoroughly disgusting,” said Reeves, a native Georgian whose ancestors fought for the Confederacy.

Gay and lesbian groups have been involved in the effort to change the state flag- — most recently during a demonstration at the Georgia Dome during the Super Bowl — but those who have been doing so have, in large part, been motivated by their dislike of racist baggage attached to Confederate symbols.

There are other gays and lesbians, however, who don’t share that same dislike. One can occasionally see patrons in gay bars festooned in Confederate attire or a vehicle with a Stars and Bars sticker juxtaposed with a Rainbow Flag.

However, those lesbian and gay people who revere and display Confederate symbols face a different paradox, and they may not even be aware of it.

Though their motivation may be Southern pride, they are casting their lot with the neo-Confederate movement. And the vocal activists in that movement, if they had their druthers, would render all gays and lesbians second-class citizens — whether or not they revere the Cause.

Is It Possible to Be Both Christian and Gay?

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Chris Glaser’s 30-year struggle to answer that question — for himself and for the church

By RICH SHUMATE
Atlanta Magazine/November 1995
(Note: This story won the first place award for feature writing at the 1996 SPJ Green Eyeshade Awards, saluting excellence in journalism in the southeastern United States.)

atlanta magazineIt was Sunday morning, and from the earliest days of his childhood, Sunday morning was a time set aside for Chris Glaser to stop, separate himself from the day-to-day and trivial concerns of life and give himself over to the message and grace of Jesus Christ. To spend Sundays this way was as much a part of his natural order as eating or breathing, and almost as necessary. And though this morning he was in the middle of a celebratory secular parade and not sitting on the sacred surface of a church pew, he was still about to see the message of Christ become physically manifest.

Or rather, wildly different interpretations of the message of Christ.

As Glaser and the other Gay Pride marches cross Third Street at Peachtree, parishioners at The Lutheran Church of the Redeemer stand behind a folding table set up on the sidewalk on the right side of the street. They hand cups of water to the overheated marchers who have already been out in the midday sun for 45 minutes but are, as of yet, only halfway to Piedmont Park, their destination. In the next block, volunteers from St. Mark United Methodist Church, including the senior minister and his family, carry small cups of water on trays and walk into the fringes of the marching line of gay activists. “Everyone is Welcome at St. Mark” reads the banner draped above the door of the church’s sanctuary.

Directly across from St. Mark, at the church on the left side of the street, there are no welcoming parishioners, not a drop of water. A uniformed guard sits watch, perched inside a white truck with the words “First Baptist Security” stenciled on the side. This year, two other guards and a handful of church elders watch impassively as one of the marchers takes blue chalk, writes “Bigot” on the sidewalk and adds an arrow pointing straight at the towering steeple of the First Baptist Church of Atlanta.

Friends of Glaser who had warned him about the dichotomy of the welcomes he would and wouldn’t receive know that he applies to himself, quite comfortably, both the adjectives “gay” and “Christian.” Indeed, both labels have become so integral to how he reacts to his world and enjoys and lives his life that they have taken on a significance stronger than adjectives, a power more vibrant than a mere label.

So as Glaser stood giving witness as a gay man while watching the Methodists and Lutherans give witness as Christians, what came into his mind is a familiar passage of Scripture: For truly I tell you, whosoever gives you a cup of water to drink because you bear the name of Christ will be no means lose the reward.

“We may not have known we bore any resemblance to Christ,” Glaser would later write, reflecting on the experience. “But these Christians saw Christ in us. Their reward was that we saw Christ in them.”

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In the Old Testament, an ancient psalmist facing uncertain exile cries, “How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?” For people with a Christian spiritual imprint who come to accept their sexual identity as gay, the psalmist’s cry is all too familiar.

To live openly as a gay man or a lesbian is to contradict 2,000 years of church tradition. To live openly as a Christian — a word that gays and lesbians who have felt more preyed upon than prayed upon use as a synonym for oppressor — is to be politically incorrect in a community that values political conformity.

Why cling to an institution that at best doesn’t fully include you and at worst persecutes you? Why push the church to change its time-honored conventions and moral standards to accommodate your reality? Why not find a way to fulfill your spiritual needs that doesn’t conflict with you sexual identity? Why not find a way to fulfill your sexual needs that doesn’t conflict with your spiritual identity?

To be both gay and Christian is, in the eye of ideologies at either end of the debate, to be fully neither. To be both requires gay and lesbian Christians to redefine, or even reinvent, their spirituality. The journey can be painful and scary and last a lifetime. It can also be joyous, a time of spiritual growth and discovery. If you ask a dozen gay and lesbian Christians why they persist on the journey — what sustains them — their replies almost always focus on the joy.

Their belief in Christ and his message may have been challenged, even shaken, but, they say, it still gives them a peace that passes all understanding. They are also comforted by the rituals and fellowship so woven into the fabric of Sunday mornings in the South. They want to live out Christ’s social call by contributing to institutions that feed the homeless and minister to the sick. They need the camaraderie that comes with raising voices in unison with other believers in praise of their almighty God.

“We are all confronted with not knowing,” says Eugene Schoenfeld, a professor emeritus of sociology at Georgia State University, who is currently studying how faith impacts Atlanta’s gay and lesbian Christians. “The church has always provided reassurance of the meaningfulness of that existence and the continuation of that existence. That isn’t any different for gays and lesbians.”

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As he was growing up a devout Baptist in the suburbs of Los Angeles, Chris Glaser, now 45 and a Yale-educated writer and theologian, couldn’t always see Christ in himself or believe others would see Christ in him. In his early teens, he felt a growing attraction to men — and with it a growing terror. Homosexuality contradicted everything he had been told about who God was and what he would accept.

“At first, I believed it was a sin or a sickness. And I would pray to God to change. I would repent, confess my sins. Sometimes I would pray several times a day. I prayed to God that I would grow out of it. But I didn’t.”

It was during this time that the volunteer youth minister in Glaser’s church was forced to resign. Glaser and his family had been friends with the man, had invited him into their home. But when the church’s leadership found out the youth minister was gay, he was asked to leave. It didn’t matter that the man vowed he was celibate and fully agreed with the church’s teaching that homosexuality was a sin.

The rumors that were swirling through the church coincided with a scheduled field trip to Disneyland. Despite her friendship with the minister, Glaser’s mother pulled him aside and admonished him that while at Disneyland, he was not to go into the restroom with the older man.

As Glaser had begun to feel his true sexual identity emerge, he had also begun to experience a call from God to the ministry. So as he watched the life of his friend, the only gay minister he knew, being destroyed, Glaser grew more and more frightened.

“I felt like the fearful reaction that the people in the church were demonstrating toward this man was the same reaction they would have toward me, if they knew who I really was.”

_______________
If the church of Glaser’s youth helped accentuate his terror, his overriding belief in God’s wisdom and mercy delivered him from it.

“As a child, I had been taught that I could talk to God about anything and everything. And so even those things I couldn’t talk about with my parents or a minister or a psychiatrist, I could speak about with God. And it really was the beginning of my prayer life because I spent a lot of time talking to God about my feelings and about my doubts and my loves.”

As he read the Bible, Glaser began to identify with its outcasts, those characters who were treated badly and persecuted not because they were sinful or evil but because they were different or sought God differently. Jesus himself fit into that category. And the discovery that he could see himself in the Bible’s mirror convinced Glaser that no matter what he was, he was known by God.

It was that sense of acceptance that was his security blanket even during those times when he was having trouble accepting himself.

When Glaser got to college, he left the Baptist Church and became a Presbyterian. Its traditions, he felt, were less dogmatic, more receptive to the value of personal introspection and possibility of debate and dissent.

College was also when he first fell in love with a man. He was Glaser’s best friend, completely heterosexual, and no romantic or physical relationship developed from it. Glaser never even told him how he felt. But the experience was transforming and profound, especially on a spiritual plane.

“I suddenly realized that my sexual orientation was an ability to love. And since I believe all ability to love ultimately comes from God, I came to believe this was a gift from God. I recognized that my feelings for him were really sacred.”

After finishing college, Glaser entered the Yale University Divinity School in 1973. Though at the time the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) didn’t explicitly ban the ordination of gays and lesbians, Glaser knew that under church rules a congregation would have to hire him before he could be ordained. Unless he covered up his sexual identity, chances were slim that any congregation would want him. But this obstacle didn’t diminish the call he felt from God. Because he had suffered and struggled with his own identity, he was convinced he could empathize with the suffering of others and minister to them, especially other gay men and lesbians.

So Glaser decided to go to New Haven anyway, telling himself that it was purely for theological study, not necessarily in pursuit of a pulpit. But he didn’t disclose his sexual identity to members of a committee set up by his home presbytery in California to monitor his work at Yale.

_______________
Homosexuality has traditionally be such a taboo subject that gay and lesbian Christians, even those who grew up in conservative churches in the Bible Belt, don’t remember many fire-and-brimstone sermons on the subject. That’s not to say that they didn’t know the church disapproved mightily. Rather, the notion that homosexuality was an abomination was so unchallenged that preachers says little need for reinforcement.

But in June 1969, four years before Glaser started at Yale, an event occurred that began to subtly alter the position of gay people in society. Patrons at the Stonewall In, a gay bay in New York City, rioted after a police raid. The uprising was the seminal event of the modern gay rights movement, and it is commemorated every June in parades in Atlanta and around the country.

The dialogue touched off by Stonewall about the place of gays and lesbians in American life began to seep into churches and seminaries. The Rev. Elder Troy Perry, who a year before the riots had started an outreach ministry to gays called the Universal Fellowship of Metropolitan Community Churches, came to the Yale University Divinity School to give a lecture that Glaser helped arrange.

As part of his work at the seminary, Glaser had been involved in a ministry directed toward the gay and lesbian community. What he was doing had begun to draw attention, and bringing in Troy Perry would no doubt draw even more.

When he returned to California after his first year at Yale, the committee charged with overseeing his education called Glaser in for a visit. They asked a series of questions about his ministry. Then one of them finally asked the question. Glaser told them the truth. He had decided he wouldn’t pursue ordination at the expense of honesty.

Even though the possibility of Glaser becoming a minister was now remote, and the committee members’ reaction to his admission was mostly negative, they nonetheless decided to let Glaser complete his studies at Yale. He was thus one of a handful of openly gay people who became eligible for ordination in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) in the mid-1970s, touching off a fierce debate about what the church should do with them. In 1978, the General Assembly, the Presbyterians’ governing body, voted to formally bar gays and lesbians from ordination as either ministers or elders. But far from settling the issue, the vote hasn’t even slowed down the arguing.

Today, the debate goes beyond ordination, addressing the broader issue of how far the church should go in including gays and lesbians equally in every aspect of church life. And no item in this discussion about equality generates more raw emotion than the argument over whether the church should recognize committed relationships between two people of the same gender.

_______________
On a sunny Sunday afternoon last October, family and friends filled the pews in the Ormewood Park Presbyterian Church, a small, gray stone structure in southeast Atlanta, where Chris Glaser and Mark King, 34, were to formalize their longtime commitment to each other. Glaser had met King, an AIDS educator and activist who grew up in Louisiana, while both were living in Los Angeles.

In the Presbyterian tradition, marriage is an occasion not only to join two lives but also to worship God. Glaser and King wanted a church setting to lend full reverence and ceremony to their worship.

Facing them as they came up the aisle were two Presbyterian ministers: the Rev. Howard Warren, from Indianapolis, who is gay, having stated his sexual identity after decades in the pulpit, and the Rev. Peter Denlea, then the church’s pastor, who is heterosexual. As Denlea stood there waiting to preside at the covenant ceremony he had helped design, he was well aware that he had climbed way out on a limb.

Since his arrival at Ormewood Park in 1989, Denlea’s watchwords had been full fellowship. This was to be a community of believers where all could come together and participate equally and fully in all the parish had to offer. That included black people, homeless people and gay people. It was a message that made some longtime members angry enough to launch a campaign to get rid of him. An imposing former Navy commander and father of five who grew up on the streets of Brooklyn, Denlea, 61, had survived 50 air combat missions in Vietnam. His message to his critics was succinct: Don’t you dare get between me and the people to whom I need to preach the Gospel.

But when Glaser called and asked Denlea if he could use the sanctuary to formally join his life with King’s, Denlea flinched. He swallowed hard. The church’s elders had previously agreed to let him bless same-sex unions performed outside the church. But to do it right there in the sanctuary? The space where one whispers out of respect for its sacredness?

“Damn it, it was either full fellowship or it wasn’t,” says Denlea. The elders agreed, unanimously.

Glaser and King later put an announcement about their ceremony in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, a notice which included both the location of the service and the fact that Denlea presided.

The elders at Midway Presbyterian Church in DeKalb County read the item and decided that this just went too far. They formally petitioned the Presbyterian Church’s regional governing body, the Presbytery of Greater Atlanta, asking that Denlea be disciplined and Ormewood Park’s elders be counseled “regarding their mission as spiritual leaders.”

_______________
When the elders at Midway looked at the totality of the Bible’s teachings, they were — and are — convinced that King and Glaser, with Denlea’s help, were acting contrary to Scripture.

“We have to have something to turn to and find out what we believe. We have to have a home base,” says the Rev. Ronald Hieber, the pastor of Midway Presbyterian, which, though inside the Perimeter and just east of Decatur, sits in an isolated enclave with an almost rural feel.

At Midway, home base is the Bible. Sitting around a table in an office just off the parish hall, Hieber and a group of elders say they are not hateful people, not spiteful or intolerant. They are not archconservatives, ascribing inerrancy to the Bible’s every word. But they firmly believe that the ceremony Denlea performed went against the Bible’s total teaching.

“And we don’t see ourselves jousting at windmills,” says Ralph Murchison, one of the elders who drafted the overture to the presbytery (which, after an emotional debate, was defeated). “We don’t see ourselves as alone.”

And they are not. In a world of astonishing change, in an era when sexual roles and the definition of family have blurred nearly beyond recognition, the church has stood for many as a bastion of comfort and continuity. And though in the last 30 years churches have been faced with issues such as civil rights, women’s rights, abortion, homelessness, drug abuse, contraception, violence, the morality of the nuclear arms race and the explosions of divorce and illegitimacy, fully including gays and lesbians is a Rubicon that seems especially wide and tumultuous.

This is a frontier many in the pews would just as soon not explore. But the Chris Glasers of the world prod them on — not because they want to be revolutionaries but because they want to be Christians.

For Glaser, with each year that goes by, the realization grows that he may never be ordained. He has written four books about the gay Christian experience, including The Word Is Out: The Bible Reclaimed for Lesbians and Gay Men, and he travels the country lecturing and preaching. His ministry without ordination brings him more notice than he would receive laboring as a minister in a local parish, typing the church bulletin and baptizing babies. But he still wants the authority and respect that comes with being ordained. He wants to be part of a church where the level of one’s participation is shaped only by talent and desire and God’s call.

And in the face of everything he’s gone through in the last 30 years, Glaser has gotten philosophical about the struggle. He simply paraphrases theologian Reinhold Niebuhr: “Anything worth committing your life to requires more than a lifetime to achieve.”

“I Will Not Accept Any More Cases”

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How Atlanta public defender Lynne Borsuk rebelled after being overwhelmed by hundreds of cases a year

By RICH SHUMATE
ABA Barrister Magazine/Winter 1991-1992

aba logoOne day each week, buses pull up in front of the Fulton County Courthouse in downtown Atlanta, disgorging a routine cargo of accused felons. They are herded upstairs to the courtroom of Superior Court Judge Joel J. Fryer to formally hear the accusations being made against them and go through a question-and-answer session as to whether they understand their rights.

Lynne Borsuk stood in Fryer’s courtroom through dozens of these weekly cattle calls. By the fall of 1990, after nearly four years as an assistant public defender, Borsuk had worked her way up to one of the top jobs in the PD’s office — trial attorney in the criminal division. As the only public defender assigned to Fryer’s courtroom, she was appointed to represent virtually all of the indigent defendants making their way through this branch of the judicial system.

But these were not easy times in the Fulton County courts, particularly for those charged with defending the poor. Resources were stretched beyond their limits by an exploding caseload. Trial-level attorneys had been grousing for months about a workload so overwhelming that it was turning courtrooms into “plea mills,” where justice and fairness took a back seat to keeping the system afloat.

Borsuk, 30, says she became increasingly uncomfortable about her role as a cog in this judicial machine, uneasy about what her participation in a process collapsing under its own weight was doing to her clients. While the problems had been festering for months, they came to a climax during one exceptionally chaotic arraignment session in September 1990.

“I was assigned 45 cases for one arraignment calendar,” she says. “When I figured it out, it wound up being 10 minutes per defendant. I had 10 minutes to devote to each one.”

“I guess sometimes in life, that’s how you realize things — when they just get so bad that you think ‘I just can’t do it anymore.’ And that’s what happened.”

Borsuk began talking to her fellow defenders, as well as outside experts in the criminal justice field, to try to come up with some way, any way, to spark reform.

“I recognized that I was no longer doing my clients a service by keeping quiet. It was a sham. We were pretending that we were providing adequate representation. We weren’t. You can’t provide adequate representation for somebody charged with a felony when you devote 10 minutes to their case. That’s a lie. It’s not honest, and it’s not ethical.”

“The judge would ask the defendant, ‘Do you have a lawyer?’ The defendant would say ‘no.’ Then it would come out during the conversation, ‘No, but I’ve got a public defender.’ If I were ever, God forbid, charged with a felony, and my attorney presumed to spend 10 minutes on my case, I wouldn’t think I had a real lawyer, either.”

By October 2, Borsuk had settled on a risky plan of action. Assisted by two attorneys from the Georgia Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, she marched into Fryer’s courtroom prepared to use the legal system itself — and its constitutional guarantees — to turn the spotlight on the deficiencies in Fulton’s system of public defense.

After receiving her sixth court appointment of the day, Borsuk turned and faced the judge.

“I would ask your honor not to appoint me to any more cases at this time,” she said. Then she handed the clerk a written motion which stated that her caseload was so overwhelming that is violated her clients’ rights to effective assistance of counsel, due process, and a speedy trial. She also pointed out that the canons of ethics of the State Bar of Georgia prohibit her from taking on more cases than she can handle.

“Filing the motion seemed to be a sound, legal way of achieving change,” she says. At the same time she filed it, Borsuk had 121 active cases pending. While the National Advisory Commission on Criminal Justice Standards recommends that a public defender close no more than 150 cases a year, she had already closed 476 in the first 10 months of 1990. She asked Fryer to give her no more than six new cases a week.

“I didn’t know what was going to happen. I just knew it couldn’t go on,” Borsuk says.

“With that many cases, at some point you’ve got to start choosing who’s more important, who’s got more to lose, whatever. So that while I’m devoting hours and hours to a particular person charged with murder or rape or a series of armed robberies or something, there’s somebody over here who is not getting the attention that they deserve. That’s a conflict of interest. No client should be sacrificed.

“Even a little case in Superior Court is a significant case. You’re talking about a year in jail for that person. You’ve got to pity the person whose case is the little one because you figure they’re going to get smushed through the most quickly.”

Borsuk’s motion made an immediate splash, and the size of the waves it created surprises her even now. News of her action spread from the legal community into the mainstream press, throwing the spotlight on the problems with the indigent defense system in Atlanta and making Borsuk something of a local celebrity. The problems were an open secret among practitioners in Atlanta’s criminal courts, but the politicians and the public had little idea of what was going on. The publicity her motion generated changed all that.

It was also the beginning of the end of her career as an assistant public defender in Fulton County.

While Borsuk met with Fryer prior to the arraignment session to tell him what she was about to do, she did not inform her boss, Chief Public Defender Vernon Pitts. He found out about Borsuk’s motion when questioned by a reporter, and his response was that he was considering firing her.

Pitts says he and his staff had discussed refusing to take on more cases as an office, which he maintains would have been more effective that what Borsuk tried alone. He also says prior to Borsuk’s motion, he sent another lawyer to help her, but she refused to relinquish her existing caseload while insisting on taking on no more than six new cases per arraignment.

At the next arraignment session, Pitts told Fryer that he didn’t support her motion. Two weeks later, he transferred Borsuk, one of the most experienced lawyers in the public defender’s office, to juvenile court, which is normally the domain of green, newly hired attorneys — the place Borsuk herself started out in 1987.

“I didn’t enjoy being punished, and I don’t think it was proper to punish me for what I was ethically bound to do because the punishment for not doing what the ethical rules tell you is disbarment,” says Borsuk, who vowed after her transfer to juvenile court that she would not resign — or shut up.

“I thought I owned a duty to my clients to try to and see that they receive adequate representation. And resigning would have shirked that responsibility.”

For Lynne Borsuk, life as a public defender wasn’t always so contentious. After graduating from the University of Florida College of Law, she was hired by Fulton County just a week after passing the Georgia bar. I was not a career path she intended — Borsuk says she went to law school solely to learn legal theory and never intended to become a practicing attorney.

“In so many ways, it’s really a great job. You have a tremendous opportunity to help people. You learn so much and have the ability to have hands-on experience. You actually get to try cases for people.”

After she was hired, Borsuk was thrown into juvenile court with virtually no training. She would have to sink of swim on her own.

“I actually was neurotic about it. I would stay up until 11 o’clock every night thinking, ‘Oh my God, what am I going to do?’ My boyfriend was a lawyer, and I would ask him, ‘How do I do this, how do I do that?’ at night so that I could figure out how to do things during the day.”

As her career progressed, Borsuk became a fervent believer in the importance of public defense and her role in it.

“Part of the problem with this is that indigent defense is not popular. It’s never going to be politically popular. People charged with crimes are not viewed fondly by the voters. But the rights that accrue to those charged accrue to all of us, including the voters. And if we want to protect those rights for all of us, we need to ensure that we’re protecting them for the poor.”

When she was promoted to handling felony cases in Superior Court, the number of people indicted on felony charges in Fulton County had begun an astronomical rise, doubling in just five years. An increased emphasis on drug arrests was the main reason. Prosecutors also stepped up the pace of indictments to help relieve severe jail overcrowding, cutting down the time indigent defendants would sit in a cell between arrest and indictment.

The 25 attorneys in the public defender’s office shared one computer. They had no paralegals and only three investigators. In addition to handling their courtroom work, defenders would at times have to play Matlock or Rosie O’Neill, investigating their own cases and even serving subpoenas.

Grand juries were churning out an indictment as often as once every three minutes. On one day that his courtroom calendar contained 98 arraignments, Fryer quipped to Borsuk, “We’re going to be drowned.”

“We’re already drowning,” she replied.

“We’re drowning, and we’re going to get drowner,” he answered.

Yet Fryer’s reaction to Borsuk’s motion was not sympathetic. During the next arraignment session after the October 2 episode, he repeatedly asked her why her caseload moved more slowly than that of other defenders. “We’re here together,” he said. “If you’re busy, so am I.”

He began assigning cases to the public defender’s office, rather than to Borsuk personally, so that her caseload never technically reached the six-cases-a-week maximum she requested. Then she departed for juvenile court, and the judge never formally ruled on her motion.

Today, Lynne Borsuk is no long doing penance in juvenile court. She resigned in frustration from the public defender’s office in February 1991 — four months after vowing that she would not leave.

“In all honesty, I just have to say it was common sense at that point. I left. I tried very hard to effectuate some change and worked as hard as I could the whole time I was there. I did what I could.”

She still practices criminal law, albeit in a different setting from the drab confines of the downtown courthouse. She has launched her own defense practice from a sunny office in the heart of Atlanta’s fashionable Buckhead neighborhood, although she does continue to occasionally accept appointments to represent indigent defendants.

She says she’s frustrated by the lack of change in the public defender’s office, despite her very public protest. Yet there is some encouraging evidence that Borsuk’s actions weren’t for naught.

Even though funding for indigent defense is not politically popular, media reports of deficiencies in Fulton County’s system led the county commission to appropriate an additional $470,000 for new lawyers, investigators and clerical help. To investigate indigent defense, the Atlanta Bar Association appointed a blue-ribbon panel, make up of some of the most high-powered lawyers in the city. That panel is considering recommending fundamental changes in the organizational structure of the office.

If she had it to do all over again, Borsuk says she would still blow the whistle on the deficiencies within Fulton County’s system of public defense, despite what it did to her career. In fact, she firmly believes that what she did will be good experience as she moves out into her own practice.

“I love criminal defense. And as a criminal defense lawyer, your aim is to advocate for your clients. And that’s what I have done.”