Civil Rights Movement.
The Civil Rights Movement in a literal sense only indirectly affected economic development, but the Movement was to demonstrate the close tie in between social and population movements and the theory and practice of economic development. The Movement’s effects would be felt in both wings of the profession over the next several decades.
First, the movement itself has been credited with several starting dates (Brown vs. Topeka Board of Education 1954), but perhaps the most helpful to our analysis is an inception which began in 1955-56 with the Montgomery Bus Boycott (Rosa Parks) and the 1957 integration of Little Rock Central High School. Under the leadership of many, notably Martin Luther King, the Movement gathered momentum through the 1950’s. In 1960 the Greensboro Sit In, followed by the 1961 Freedom Riders, the 1962 integration of University of Mississippi (a national crisis with JFK/RFK deeply involved), the 1963 March on Washington (King’s “I Have a Dream”) and culminating in the Selma to Montgomery March in 1965, the Civil Rights Movement became a full-fledged national crisis despite the reality that most of the Movement’s events occurred in the South and Southeast.
This all changed with the Chicago Freedom Movement (1965-67) which represented the first sustained Northern demonstration. The North, however, was a tinderbox (we will discuss the race riots at a later point) and the pent-up frustration of blacks, many of whom were relatively new to northern central cities (the Second Great Migration was in full force at this time and had been since World War II) caused by injustice, discrimination and poverty are too well known, documented and acknowledged to need extensive description in this monograph of the economic development profession. It also should be recognized that during and after the Civil Rights Movement other civil rights and liberties movements also occurred. Second Wave Feminism probably commenced in the early sixties (1962), the Black Power Movement in 1965, the Chicano Movement of the late sixties and seventies, the Stonewall riots of 1969, and Wounded Knee Incident occurred in 1973.
All of us recognize these movements were multi-faceted, but for our purposes they were major page-turners in the evolution of American politics. These are the forerunners of today’s Identity Politics which is testimony to the durability of the movements on our political, social, ideological landscape. In these tumultuous years, several assassinations (JFK-1963, King and RFK in 1968, and George Wallace (who survived) in 1972 highlighted the deaths of those who had been killed throughout the Civil Rights and other movements.
To those of us who lived through these days, the pain and horror of the latter events are still very real and were incredibly transformative for many individuals. We dwell on these emotional aspects to convey to the reader the psychological impacts etched on virtually everybody in the nation. We also remind the reader that as all this played out, we were at war in Vietnam. Almost every public policy issue at that time, and for some years following, carried with it overtones of racism, poverty, crime, discrimination, draft resistance, and injustice. Economic development could not be expected to escape from the emotional and public policy effects of these events and this period–and it didn’t. But the effects on the conventional wings of economic development, page-turning as they were, were indirect. If anything, the priority afforded to economic development in the middle and late sixties, was lowered and submerged into the higher priorities of eliminating poverty, injustice, crime and racism. Economic development was in the process of being redefined!
The Civil Rights Movement obviously provided some awesomely bad publicity for southern cities and the South as a whole. Virtually every negative northern stereotype of the South was reinforced. In no way did any of this unfavorable pr help southern economic developers with their attraction-based strategies. As early as 1956, Cobb reports that the Fantas Factory Relocating Service had uncovered “at least twenty major factory moving projects were being seriously reconsidered in light of the situation in the South”[1].
The reaction of Dallas (as well as other similar Southern cities), however, is not the entire story. Triggered by each new civil rights confrontation was a fear of jeopardizing ongoing economic development attraction efforts–a cornerstone of southern growth and economic development. Obviously, in the short term these economic development concerns were not sufficient to forestall the numerous future civil rights episodes that never seemed to end in the fifties and sixties. But as events wreaked their havoc some communities began to foster initiatives to end the pattern of a two-tiered racially-based social-economic system. Atlanta, arguably, was the first.
In 1960 twenty-five prominent Atlanta businessmen, including Chamber of Commerce President Ivan Allen, Jr., petitioned against closing the schools (to resist desegregation) warning politicians that ‘next to our children, the Georgia business community has the most at stake in the present school crisis’….Atlanta’s newspapers, the Journal and especially the Constitution …gave prominent coverage to theorists who predicted that racial turmoil would slow industrial growth….Atlanta’s reputation as a citadel of moderation … (however) grew rapidly after the city made its transition to token desegregation in 1961.[2]
Charlotte followed Atlanta’s example in 1962 and as in Atlanta the Chamber of Commerce played a lead role and observed the terrible effects resisting desegregation would have on industrial development. This positive tendency was further reinforced when Eastern Airlines choose the city as a site for a new computer center (yes they had computers back then!) and announced they had done so because of the positive ways Charlotte was handling the racial crisis.[3] Dallas and Augusta Georgia (Masters Golf Tournament) also responded with more responsible and moderate reactions to desegregation and civil rights. New Orleans much less so and their tourist industry dropped precipitously
Neither did the prospect of weakened industrial recruitment stop a normally very pro-business recruitment George Wallace in the 1962 refusal to integrate the University of Alabama. Chambers and businessmen in Alabama did support him so to “stop these Yankee corporations from putting pressure on these third-rate Babbits in these Chambers of Commerce to surrender to these Negroes”[4]. Still, Alabama lost a number of serious prospects, but seemed vindicated when in 1965 Hammermill Paper Company relocated to Selma–prompting a national reaction because on the day before the announcement Martin Luther King and 270 demonstrators had been jailed in Selma. On the day of the announcement, Selma jailed 500 more. On hindsight the incentive package made to Hammermill by the Selma Industrial Development Board and the state of Alabama was so attractive that the company decided to ride the whirlwind of shame.[5]
The New South
Overall Cobb makes a case that the Civil Rights Movement did seriously and negatively affect the perception of the South by the rest of the nation, its overall impact on southern attraction and economic development was not serious. Site selector surveys suggested firms were not dissuaded from relocating to the South during this period, although interviews with specific firms suggested otherwise. Cobb strongly suggests these firms talked “with forked tongue” (our words) in their politically correct public interviews. Also, most southern business leaders continued their support for segregation throughout the period.[6] While a few major cities did exhibit a more moderate reaction to desegregation, most of the South found it very difficult to accept–whatever the consequences.
Instead of accepting desegregation more willingly, states and municipalities in the South began efforts to do their own brand of modernization. Streets, highways and even school systems as in improved vocation-technical schools. The last modernization was important to economic development as state after state invested in a system of vocation-technical schools, as well as community colleges, four year college and specific or customized vocational training programs. Cobb cites South Carolina and it’s Governor Hollings (1960) as a leader in this respect.[7]
Just as the institutionalization of subsidy programs brought the promise of order and stability to the crusade for new industry, the development of state-administered training programs for new industries aimed at providing high quality workers who would be rewarded rather than exploited. More importantly, perhaps, such training efforts would eliminate the costs of on-the-job instruction for new workers, costs that would otherwise be borne by the relocating plant. The ultimate goal of expanded vocational training programs was to make it as painless and inexpensive for a higher wage industry to move south as it already was for a lower-paying labor-intensive one.[8]
In effect, Cobb seems to suggest that the Civil Rights Movement did prompt a response from southern states to retain the attractiveness of its business recruitment program. Essentially, by tossing vocational training into the incentive mix, and sharpening and modernizing its community colleges and higher education sectors the South was continuing its now traditional business recruitment, cost-reduction, incentive-based economic development strategy. But a clear difference had evolved. The state now was not only the partner of municipal efforts, the state had been a leader. Southern economic development was very much a state-local partnership. This is most evident in North Carolina’s Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill research triangle.
Home to three major universities, the Research Triangle was seized upon by Businessman-now Governor of North Carolina Luther Hodges “as a selling point for new industry”. Setting up a three college coordinating committee (the Triangle committee, 1955-1960), acquiring acreage with transportation access near the Raleigh-Durham Airport, and culminated in 1958 with creation of Research Triangle Institute. The whole package was wrapped up and then transferred to a not-for-profit corporation (with private funds) and the core of the now-famous Research Triangle was in place. Included was a “sales crew” which by the end of 1958 had made approximately 150 contacts–leaving us no doubt that business attraction was the core purpose for establishing the research center. By 1977 there were twenty-two research facilities in the park.[9] If ever there were an instruction manual in how to set up a successful public-private partnership, the Research Triangle would be it.
Still as we entered 1964, the South as a region had endured (and created) a nearly ten year crisis involving nothing less than its social-economic-societal structure. With a few important exceptions, southern states and communities fought grudgingly and often cruelly to retain a morally disgraceful way of life which if nothing else was arguably the chief reason it was the poorest region in the nation. As part of that mean-spirited struggle, southern states had uniformly attempted to preserve its traditional business attraction, cost reduction, industrial recruitment strategy by pioneering yet another economic development innovation–the establishment and enhancement of vocational and higher education-worker training complete with the establishment of a public-private premier research institute. The irony is that if the same actions were to occur in 2013, it would be viewed as a regional, cluster-based, high-growth, innovation and knowledge-based initiative.
[1] Cobb, op. cit., p. 123.
[2] Cobb, op. cit. p. 128
[3] IBID., p. 131
[4] IBID., p. 138
[5] IBID., pp. 139-140
[6] IBID., pp. 142-150
[7] IBID., p. 166
[8] IBID. p. 165
[9] IBID., pp. 174-176
Ron W. Coan 