Overheated by Kate Aronoff

Author:Kate Aronoff [Aronoff, Kate]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-04-20T00:00:00+00:00

THE NEW DEAL’S public power programs were a microcosm of its larger contradictions. Black households enjoyed relatively few gains from rural electrification compared to their white counterparts. Landlords who rented to African Americans often chose not to pass power bill savings down to their tenants. The interests of Black tenant farmers in rural development programs were subsumed to those of white landowners, and African Americans were barred from the best-paid positions within the TVA and consigned to its most menial jobs. John Rankin, a Mississippi House member who pushed hard for the TVA and one of the country’s most dogged advocates for public power, fought for rural electrification as doggedly as he fought against antilynching bills. Southern Democrats broadly supported the TVA for the benefits and job creation it would bring to a region long neglected by the utility giants. For all its transformation of life in the South and its built environment, the REA and TVA—like much of the New Deal—self-consciously did nothing to disturb Jim Crow.

Their foundations in segregation extend well into the present. Many co-ops are still unrepresentative of the areas they serve. In southern states, many that serve majority Black service areas have for years maintained all-white co-op boards and employed majority white staffers and contractors; some co-ops haven’t had proper elections in several decades. In the Black Belt, where the civil rights movement swept majority Black local governments into power, RECs continue to lag behind, often featuring little to no minority representation.

Nsombi Lambright is the executive of One Voice, an affiliate of Mississippi’s NAACP, which trains up African American co-op member-owners to run for boards on nine of the state’s twelve co-ops, many of which serve majority African American counties. Lambright knew of only three Black board members in the co-ops they’ve been targeting. While Mississippi is 37 percent Black and nearly half its residents get their power from co-ops, its co-op boards are 91 percent white and 96 percent male. Rates can be well above what’s offered in adjacent IOUs, with some co-op members—many of them living in persistent poverty counties—paying as much as 40 percent of their income on monthly bills. “The only thing that has pretty much been common among the co-ops is that the members of the board tend to be the existing power structure in the community,” Lambright told me.

“What we’re dealing with here is that racism is still alive in America. These RECs were started in the 1930s and ’40s. In Alabama at that time, there was no justice, no equal rights,” John Zippert, of Epes, Alabama, told me. With the Federation of Southern Cooperatives Land Assistance Fund (FSC)—a group supporting Black cooperative development in the rural South, founded in 1967—Zippert, a civil rights movement veteran, has worked with member-owners of the Black Warrior Electric Membership Corporation to make it more democratic. While Zippert estimates that as much as 60 percent of Black Warrior’s 26,000-plus membership is Black, “up to this point,” he said, “they have not had a Black board member.

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