This is the first in a series on Southern blacks. The author spent the summer as a reporter for the Southern Courier, a civil rights newspaper founded in 1965 by Harvard graduates.

Of all the places where it is unpleasant to be black in America, you have to look hard to find many worse than Alabama. Proximity to white suburbs and the glittering promises of Real American Life may make the Northern ghettos seem more frustrating, but few Harlemites are frustrated enough to consider returning to the South.

In the Deep South itself, Mississippi--with its title of "Poorest State In The Nation" and its legendary smalltown sheriffs--may be more glamorous than Alabama; but Mississippi's notoriety has made it the target of many more civil rights projects than have ever come to Alabama. It's possible to make a good case for Southwest Georgia as the most segregated area in the country, but Georgia also contains semi-progressive Atlanta and black legislators like Julian Bond. South Carolina has Storm Thurmond, Louisiana has Leander Perez, and Arkansas and Tennessee have their residual rednecks. But for over-all misery--that combination of systematic oppression and debilitating poverty that makes black lives bleak--Alabama wins in a walk.

Poverty, of course, is the heart of the problem. Alabama's economy has been shaky since Reconstruction days, and the euphemistic talk of the "New South" has little evident effect outside of the few industrial centers like Birmingham or Huntsville. To some extent, this general economic depression is to blame for the black poverty, and liberal-but-loyal white southerners concernedly tell visitors that "these poor folks--black ones and white ones--are a real problem."

But the "white ones" seem to be more a figure of speech than a reality. In Appalachia there might be a large scale white-poverty problem, but not in Alabama. It is no coincidence that in the state where less than 40 per cent of the population is black, nearly 97 per cent of the people who are poor are black.

Survival Level

"Poor" also has a new meaning in Alabama. The $3,000-per-family-of-four poverty line figure used in the rest of the country is awkward to use in counties where the average family income hovers around $800. Much handier is the government's survival level" figure of about $1500 per family.

Using the "survival level" (by government definition, the income necessary to keep a family going for a year) to define poverty, things start to look a little brighter. In the central Alabama Black Belt region, it means that the white families (with an average annual income of about $2500) get above the poverty line. But in the ten Black Belt counties where the average income for a black family is less than $600 less than half the "survival level"--a disturbing conclusion is obvious. Either there is something grotesquely wrong with the statistics, or else thousands of American families have missed their share of American plenty.

A quick drive through the Black Belt soon reveals what the answer is. Thousands of families have missed out; thousands of black people are getting by on less than what the country has decided it takes for people to stay alive. A first-hand look at their lives makes the abstractions of "poverty line" and "survival level" painfully concrete.

Central Alabama is remarkably beautiful. There are gentle green hills, green with meadows and trees, green from the frequent afternoon rains. There are small cotton fields along the roads, and in September the open cotton bolls make the Black Belt look like a huge snowbank. In the open meadows there are fat black cattle grazing under "Eat More Beef" signs. A traveller on the main highways, looking just at the green hills and the cotton and the cattle, might think he had found the legendary pastoral American paradise.

That's because a traveller on the main roads wouldn't see many of the people that live behind the hills. It takes some arduous tracking on the red dirt roads and the mule paths to find the hard-core poor. Alabama's poor are slightly more visible than those lost in the urban ghettos, but it's still easy to forget they are there until a trip up the dirt road shows them too clearly.

The houses are probably the most shocking part. In the 1930's, in the depths of the depression, James Agee and Walker Evans went to Alabama to photograph and write about Southern rural poverty. Several of the buildings in the picture section of their book, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, still exist. Thirty years of occupancy have not improved the buildings. And where the buildings are different from the ones Agee and Evans saw, they are not much better.

A Southern "black shack" is made out of wood, that has become gray from several years of exposure. There is no glass in the windows, or plumbing or electricity in the house. The shaded front porch is where most of the people spend their time, mainly out of necessity, since there is not enough room in the house. Behind the house there is a small wooden outhouse underneath the house there are chickens, rats, and black children.

New Jerusalem

The New Jerusalem community in Hale County is a fairly typical black town. New Jerusalem is not on any of the road maps, and it is a distinct mistake to ask local gas station owners how to get there ("Why you wonna go see them niggers boy?"). Most white visitors who find themselves in New Jerusalem are there by accident, having strayed off Country Road 21 on the way to Greensboro from Akron. The only white faces that appear regularly in the town are those of county sheriffs, looking for moonshine liquor.