alabama possible from the alabama poverty project

Peggy Sanford

The Birmingham News

October 15, 1998

Sixty years ago, as problems, a region-wide assembly in Birmingham explored the basic human needs of Southerners.

Drawing on that experience, a three-day conference called “Unfinished Business: Overcoming Racism, Poverty and Inequality in the South” has been scheduled next month in Birmingham.

Planners of the Nov. 14-16 conference at the Sheraton Hotel and Civic Center and the Civil Rights Institute are asking scholars, students, religious and political leaders, business and labor officials, activists, and community organizers to ad- dress the root causes of racial inequality and poverty “in search of concrete ways to shape a more equitable future.”

Conference officials predict the event will draw several hundred people “of different races, ages, occupations and philosophies to discuss the South’s troubled past, its more upbeat present and its unknown future with respect to racial and economic issues.” The goal, officials said, “is to develop a public agenda around these issues for the start of the new millennium.”

Unfinished Business is the climax of a series of more than 20 public forums held throughout the South in the past year. The Center for the Study of the American South at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill launched the project in fall 1996.

It is funded by the Jessie Ball DuPont Fund of Jacksonville and other community foundations. The Birmingham Civil Rights Institute has helped plan the Unfinished Business initiative.

The Southern Conference for Human Welfare in Birmingham in 1938, shortly after the Depression-crippled South reeled in economic and social President Franklin D. Roosevelt described the oppressed region as “the nation’s No. 1 economic problem,” drew about 1,500 reform-minded Southerners.

The primary focus of November’s conference is to inform and energize the region’s young people, said Nashville historian and author John Egerton.

“There’s an entire generation of Southerners, white and black, that has no clear understanding of what happened here in the two decades after World War II,” Eger- ton said. “The civil rights movement not only liberated black Southerners from the legal bonds of segregation and white supremacy; it also freed whites from an indefensible system of unearned privilege,” he said.

Speakers for the Birmingham conference include Sherry Magill, executive director, Jessie Ball duPont fund; Birmingham Mayor Richard Arrington; Raymond Winbush, director, Fisk University’s Race Relations Institute; U.S. Rep. John Lewis, Atlanta civil rights activist; Alpha A. Robertson, mother of Carole Robertson, one of the four girls slain in the 1963 Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing; Hodding Carter III, president, Knight Foundation; and Bill Lann Lee, acting assistant at- torney general, Civil Rights Division, U.S. Department of Justice.

For information on how to register for the conference, call Angela Hall at the Civil Rights Institute, 328-9696, or the Center for the Study of the American South by fax at 1-919-962-4433, or e-mail at csas@email.unc.edu.

Alabama sponsors of the Birmingham assembly include Alabama Poverty Project, Alabama Power Foundation, BellSouth Foundation, Biracial Study Group of Dothan, Civic Entrepreneurs of Greensboro, Community Foundation of Greater Birmingham and Innerchange Project of Montgomery.