North Carolina Voices:Understanding Poverty; Seeds of Sustenance and a Harvest of Change: The Story of the North Carolina Fund

this is seeds of sustenance and a harvest of change a special documentary as part of north carolina voices understanding poverty i'm kevin wolf for five years in the nineteen sixties in north carolina pioneered an anti poverty program that became a model for the federal government's war on poverty the north carolina fund broke new ground in the self effacing the link between race and party head on and it created ways for poor people to help themselves we learn about the fund through the story and woodard enterprises the cooperatives farm run by african americans in a poor rural corner of north carolina hollerbach a result from really go home you're eating one you were young enough to be about common indian get within which you a call i remain among the names so we can meet it head table where the plan b red bottle of being recorded mfa most of all he taught the people

of that is you were together what can be a compass seeds of sustenance and a harvest of change the story of the north carolina fund the department reports jane gilman he's surrounded by piece and plenty friends and family gather in a big open kitchen suppers on the table dishes wrapped in foil but it wasn't always this way while you're right when jon balke was growing up in the nineteen thirties and forties most black families here in northeastern north

carolina were sharecroppers they didn't own land but they worked it for white landowners with their mules their backs and their hands each year the sharecroppers gave a portion of the harvest to the landowners rant it was the last vestige of the south's old plantation system good morning they'll capture a crop until the early nineteen sixties and like most of his neighbors he was still in the hole you paint but when i saw that people didn't have calmed in the house to come here with my name is margaret really i was more no one's enough talent in nineteen forty two kitty riddick grew up in the county seat of windsor she remembers the world black community of wondered where john bel live as one of the poorest places in the whole county indiana have bases people like is there were for that is that you know one day have well as a broken as fraser c had become a thing about him

like he's came out in this prayers for some or just a bad loan nose run and yet is say i'm holly in the early nineteen sixties more than a quarter of the families in bertie county lived on less than a thousand dollars a year but something was about to happen all the ending the book that you're an outbreak vacant land you worry about vital part of a home and a job the late terry sanford was north carolina's governor than a democrat he came up with the idea for the north carolina fund oh man sanford appointed a government professor from the university of north carolina to be the fund's executive director george answer is eighty three now but he'll never forget the day the fun began it was august nineteen sixty three and then introduced

silent ayers very dramatic for a durable years i guess because it was right at the height of the civil rights and we broke a lot of new ground when stanford's started the north carolina fund half the people in the state were living in poverty forty percent never made it past the eighth grade poverty and illiteracy were disproportionately higher among african americans it was a white man's world billy barnes was the north carolina fans public information officer he took hundreds of photographs including this one to billboard's to join and support the united klans of america help fight communism in integration work on christmas eve terry sanford was the first north carolina governor to publicly acknowledge the link between race and poverty he belonged to a generation of world war two veterans who wanted change it was as a fellow service member of the staff who have simply stayed beside a university of north carolina history professor jim lucas he says sanford realize that i'm an educated workforce

couldn't compete for any job worth having and then jim crow was holding the state that both economically and socially so all those things are coming together to convince people like terry sanford and those around him that there has to be some break with the past that north carolina has to find some way to address poverty and also to try different future for itself that sanford went to the ford foundation he condom into relaxing on earth for him to tell a story in the way he did it was he she had i did not coke you're looking for money i'm not lifting for granted i want your ideas what can we do in north carolina about party especially rural poverty billy barnes and being approached for what their thinking was instilled what their money was completely beguiled the ford foundation people and forwards or with their rescue him to take some of their money

apply to those in sanford walked away with seven and a half million dollars he got two million more from north carolina's tobacco foundations c smith reynolds and mary reynolds babcock all that money was equal to something like a hundred million dollars today big bucks for a big experiment with very little in the way of special programs for the poor duke university history professor bob course death or people were just something that always existed and people basically felt there was a certain kind of closing that was involved with it its founders wanted the fun to be different it was a very new thing you recall involvement of the poor billy barnes your head their involvement grapefruit people to fund created eleven community action agencies throughout the state and made sure that poor people especially people of color served on the boards the community action agencies decide for themselves what they needed to try to

address the root causes of poverty the lack of educational opportunities and good wages the lack of transportation water and sewer lines and decent homes these guys are laying a water pipe for a community they never head it's our water supply before billy barnes with one of his photos it shows a couple of teenage boys from the mountains who were employed by the fund's neighborhood youth core people were literally warping with buckets a quarter mile the mountain to a spring to bring drinking water and hand washing water and whatever else can of course and they reviewed core kids were paid something approximating minimum wage can it was pumping money into mountain families you're putting money into the home of an economy one of barnes is pictures shows president lyndon johnson visiting a family of tenant farmers lbj used parts of the fund as a model for his federal war on poverty one barnes captured on local activists saw firsthand

how he'd invaded was in her twenties when the north carolina fund started she was a volunteer working on the local voter registration drive and that's how she got to know woodard the bertie county community where sharecropper john bel lived when it wanted to basically there was no fraud where was before and it made it just had a brand new baby they can hear chickens and it was a doll with the puppies in every battle was in this one little blue it has taken a vote and down her husband was this is machine i get involved and now he can tell her don't want to face ago facing home aides believe on this air to go and be registered at that day i think it was a turning point for a lot of us in bertie county because that we found out where the poverty was and how they was in this county so many cable with the idea that would hit in france i mean it came into a

wooded enterprises was a community gardens started by and for the people and woodard it was one of many projects the north carolina fund sponsored and it was spearheaded by one of the neighbors who had the good fortune to own land is voicing you i was born to bertie county can pocket called big nick cannon wouldn't rule on twitter a nineteen twenty three when you ask him days more to share eighty one years of memories he laughs not to worry these memories sharper than people half his age he's not a felon is a bundle of energy he plucks a cell phone into his pickup and schemes often woodard road to show me where the community garden was paul days

more turns onto woodard rodin on to cedar landing road then onto a dirt road leading to a soybean fields in the head of the human beings like everyone else today's moore's father was a sharecropper but somehow he managed to buy a piece of land were standing on and leave it to his children when woodard enterprises got going here in nineteen sixty six it seemed like he'd left the land to the whole neighborhood at the time the sharecroppers were losing their livelihood detractors com minds and harvesters some unknown boom have gotten sights on this you have no no hamlet in defeat you and having him do his work rewarded him to go into some of the hidden stuff the surveys were offered his family's land for the community farm raised owned a

budget again raises all we want more you it is more says his four acres did a lot to stave off hunger and the pin in the fear but i think it was in order went much chicken give it up the hole and everything was hit it was the north carolina fund that made woodard enterprises possible the fund paid a few thousand dollars for feed and seed each family paid one dollar to join the men did most of the farm work and the women harvest the produce name it we had a kiddy riddick we had duck peas or a canopy black happy crowd a pea green peas make peace we call it's a tight senate finance bigger turnout rate k l y to say this week that state is and what we did here but that it was able to go out and purchase at its height woodard enterprises had two hundred families and it's bold and four or five gardens going maybe was to teach people to have to say as

to me that was my thing while we know that people are there could not cool what did know anything about kaine and freeze and ended so i to me it was a joy to see them get involved the whole thing man and volunteer labor there was a core group of committed members you didn't have any set amount of hours to work but we head alice say that the fed maybe thirty people you hear the word that if you call those people you need a son they were being today's moore's oldest son tim jr was a teenager then sometimes he recalls people would complain they wanted to know why they got ten chickens instead of fifty or why the project couldn't hire somebody to chop the beans but on the whole he says people were reasonably satisfied may like much because they didn't have to take all the money to buy food they could you know raise some from the us government used to back home in our transportation underneath so i really really really really but the most important way woodard enterprises

help says kitty riddick was to give people the vision of a better future because it tested having fame milestone one that all farms so do the kids were brought up to go to islam and is like the peanuts or work for somebody else method of sales and that says george answer is why the north carolina fund that would hurt our crisis we felt that it was important that people take the leadership in doing things to support themselves and that we would provide some help to those efforts because we admired that kind of thinking that kind of action but making progress on the problems of race and poverty also making waves torture so we ended up with a higher proportion of black and in the native american staff than any organization in north carolina it was the only organization where blacks and whites were sad that said in certain cases their wages working on very risky barry bonds that's

why we have political prominence during the nineteen sixty six they're given power to poorer people you know it was very threatening to coach during the so much power in a comedian tv star kuttner big chocolate pie and good for people and people of color than the ocean that much less pie for people who have to borrow george as her vividly remembers one meeting to fund held as us the porch of the restroom oh my aunt whom i had known for ten years and those schools superintendent eastern north carolina county hidden representative of the general assembly came up to me and shook his fist and chimneys and you're destroying the same way every one of these tensions were nail in bertie county whites who supported jim crow had branded ten days more a troublemaker years before he got involved with woodard enterprises and the north carolina fund is more have led the push for school integration

three june to high school it was nineteen sixty four king jr was in sixth grade and you remembers how his new school was different from his old one with planning tile floors water fountains and the books we go the source that had never been used a private that every skier we head had a list of names is key is that it would have been assigned to all the way down and i didn't realize that there was a double standard to meet soon afterward the lumber companies stopped buying the pope would ten days were hauled the local bank called and alone on the farmland he was renting come in by june one and that you know that we could not only you know what you don't know the protocol if they make an example of the year because it didn't happen instead the north carolina fund came to his aid people at the fund had read about ten days more in the papers and offered him a job as a

community organizer he worked on the funds mobility project a program that trained displaced farm workers and rural eastern north carolina for factory jobs in the industrial piedmont is more recruited the workers and bertie county and he discovered that now there was no more retaliation against him even when he dared to drop in on a klan cross burning political are homebound was a wall right under the new law the new well it you know the work of a federalism and i'm no data hacked out though that was just put on the radio some critics of the north carolina fund were so set against it they wanted to shut it down but in the end they didn't have to because the fun shut itself down from the outset it was supposed to last for only five years the idea says billy barnes was that an experimental organization like this one couldn't stay that way forever and activated begins to get corporate hardening of the arteries he gets more and more like

a government bureaucracy more more like an old company that's just really in the business of getting grants and spending them there was more to it than that though the ford foundation was willing to keep financing to fund the issue wasn't money but politics in the late nineteen sixties there were the protests against the vietnam war the killing of robert kennedy and martin luther king the riots in chicago and washington and watts north carolina wasn't as volatile as some places but it had its share of civil rights demonstrations especially in urban centers like durham and some of those demonstrations involved the funds on community organizers walked off on is now a political organization meddling in local communities throughout the state of law that's jim gardner a republican congressman from rocky mount speaking at a press conference in nineteen sixty seven gardner accused the fund of using outside agitators to incite violence by local blacks just like other anti

poverty groups were doing elsewhere in the nation these people at all how to go through normal channels in protest and newark new jersey they were taught how to make money out of cocktails that little white supremacy to happen to be in power they are being told it the whole way that thing about other prose in poverty conditions is to tear down the autumn our society and government and their local communities to work as a gardeners outrage resonated with a lot of white north carolinians including a working class whites and the north carolina fund says jim lucas failed to persuade them that they share common interests with working class blacks because it was destroyed the political lesson for whites it always been that politics economics is a zero sum game to the extent that african americans one way with loans and i think one could argue that that's out to this day is one of the great political challenges of fighting poverty

nineteen sixty four the year lyndon johnson was elected was the last time that working class blacks and whites voted as a bloc in a presidential election in nineteen sixty eight richard nixon used his southern strategy to pull disaffected white voters into the gop congress passed a law forbidding community action agencies to get involved in politics and in nineteen sixty nine the north carolina fund closed its doors we had used up there and i used the poem and then george and i guess also lovers tire those were very very the end of the wooded enterprises came in a different way food stamps arrived in bertie county in the early nineteen seventies and for many folks have no guaranteed a year round supply of groceries looked better than hauling and butchering tim days more went on to lead a number of other self help ventures including a worker's own so uncooperative but he says of all the projects he worked on woodard

enterprises was the best because for so little money to do so and also rose cuban community here but they wanted to have any surprise given since the nineteen sixties poverty the state has decreased dramatically liberty county is still struggling this is north king street it's the main street in windsor and its middle of a saturday afternoon and there are really very many people hear i'm just like a lot of small towns across north carolina there are a lot of two story turn of the twentieth century brick buildings a couple of gift shops a flower shop a chinese restaurant but it does seem a little bit on the empty side ten days more says since the days of the north carolina fund everything has changed and nothing has

changed part in now will be going to public they threw their very lowest income now leo better than to rich a publicity of an outcome known as a bow but we do have suffering not necessarily suffering from congo who suffer from dormant are not having everyone a major party but i do spend a living we get just by most power to shape it us census numbers bear that out in nineteen sixty nine the year the fund ended pretty county's poverty rate was twice as high as the states forty four percent compared to twenty percent it's still the same ratio today the statistics don't surprise david dodson he's president of them dc a nonprofit research group in chapel hill that was created as a spinoff of the north carolina fund not a place where this industrial high technology post modern miracle has taken hold

because of infrastructure location that's because of this legacy of under investment an under education you have to ask what in the future of such places be well the greatest exportable bertie county as the reviewers high school graduating class young people to sleep teenage union announced that and fifty he's doing well as the owner of a medical transport business but his son who's at a and t university in greensboro has no reason to come home to a junior says that with a few exceptions the people end up staying are the ones who are lacking ambition and so with that vision here in bertie county the industry here think there's a chicken processing factory does a land feel and the space click funnels to triage with c his elders also worry about the future especially the lack of community resolve to make things better eighty one year old ten days more

compares notes with eighty five year old alice balance another local civil right activist they say the power structure in bertie county hasn't changed it's still controlled by whites and compliant blacks the two sit side by side and bays moore's dining room table old combat veterans and say the poverty dc now is a poverty of spirit there's no authorization says we haven't all know why didn't have taken out ways less so did their leadership has been built to mystic best that's the reason people don't realize that the nightly vigils and the inanimate mr dilts yeah someone else from their generation also sees it that way things have come a long way for john nelson says sharecropper days he still lives in the woodard community but he's treated at the cricket captain who grew up in for a solid brick ranch his old neighbor ten days more stop by for a visit

but despite the changes bill can't forget being poor it's still his frame of reference my grades were there's nowhere to go so what do you say when you say is that ear candy rank and whenever they live in when they levied little do what we've been through one of bell's grandkids is here and she is laughing good naturedly a song that i think about well if it wanted to play look we did jones is studying business administration at elizabeth city state university like him junior son she has dreams that could take her far away from bertie county but things

aren't so promising for kerry bond she's one of the many people who stuck in the relative poverty the ten days more talks about our work and our culture plays out to get better bond is a neighbor but to the bill she's like a daughter and forties she's just young enough to remember the bad times these days she makes at eighteen hour inspecting chicken breasts with eleven year old tiffany on her lap but says it's not de destitution of her girlhood but still it's not easy she's too rich for food stamps and too poor to be comfortable they'll work in and wang and enjoy what were five bia funny enough for it or we get me and they go away when a gallon and thomsen man yes that's how more recall pat is better our great man with my slave return because it really not making them my name britain can they know sandbagging and a day fall back a month they'd only applies to be a

long haul after we leave john belles house tim days more pauses in the driveway the soft evening drizzle in sync with his mood he's thinking about kerry bond and so many others like her in the community people who are barely getting by but stay where they are because they can't see a way out he wishes he could start up a project like woodard enterprises all over again and only of yours but he's not younger and he doesn't wanna start something he might not finish and now for the first time kim basinger looks old seeds of sustenance and a harvest of change was produced by leda hartman and edited by deborah george for production assistance from anthony hayes and sally council north carolina voices understanding poverty is a

production of north carolina public radio w unc executive producer of north carolina voices is emily hanford support for this series comes from the ag fletcher foundation the center for documentary studies at duke university and peggy abrams julian price family foundation bob and taylor ph the michael moore greater iraq a foundation and the north carolina humanities council more information about north carolina voices is a w and c dot org you