Thread: TODAY, AMERICA’S FLAG DROPPED LOWER IN EAST TENNESSEE!!!

It looks as though tomatoe growers and furniture maufacturers dominate this county. This is a PDF file that is very enlightening on the motivation in Hamblen County. This is a long post, sorry.


http://cas.memphis.edu/isc/crow/race_na ... nflict.pdf
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Across Races and Nations:
Building New Communities in the U.S. South
Conflict and Community-Building in the Appalachian South
by
Susan Williams and Barbara Ellen Smith
2
CONFLICT AND COMMUNITY-BUILDING IN THE APPLACHIAN SOUTH
By Susan Williams and Barbara Ellen Smith
Hamblen County lies in the Tennessee River Valley of Appalachian east
Tennessee, nestled between the Cumberland Mountains to the northwest and the Great
Smokies to the south. Morristown, the county seat, is home to 43% of the county’s
58,000 people, and serves as a magnet for residents of adjacent Cocke, Grainger and
Jefferson Counties who commute to its industrial parks and other businesses to work. The
remainder of Hamblen County’s residents live in outlying areas, where many garden,
grow a small amount of tobacco, or cultivate other cash crops to supplement their
earnings from conventional but not always reliable jobs. Although its agricultural history
remains visible in farms and expanses of green countryside, Hamblen County’s
employment base lies above all in manufacturing, which began to develop in the first half
of the twentieth century. By 1927 there were eight locally owned woodworking mills,
and in 1937 Berkline Corporation opened a furniture factory that remains to this day one
of the county’s largest places of employment.1 Like many areas of the rural South,
Hamblen County’s initial industrialization was dependent on access to railroad
transportation and natural resource extraction—in this case, timber from the great forests
of the Appalachian Mountains.
However, unlike the company towns of the textile industry or the pattern of single
industry dominance found in much of the rural South, Hamblen County’s manufacturing
sector rapidly diversified. Beginning in 1949, companies making synthetic fibers,
apparel, hosiery, paper products, plastics, auto parts and other manufactured goods
increasingly built factories in the county. The lack of unions, low wages, and
overwhelmingly white population (95% as of the 1990 census) were consistent draws.
During the restive 1970s, boosters in the local Chamber of Commerce advertised the
county’s “very favorable labor situation,” as evidenced in the “loyalty, sense of
responsibility and dedication to the fundamental principles of justice and fair play [that]
set [Hamblen County’s work force] apart from the present day concept of a blue collar
worker.”2 Manufacturing employment quadrupled from 1950 to the present, though the
1% increase from 1990-2000 was far lower than that of previous decades. Today, the
largest private employers are Berkline Furniture, MAHLE, Inc. (which makes aluminum
pistons), Lear Corporation (automobile seat frames), Shelby Williams (contract seating),
and Koch Foods, a poultry processor.3
Diversification has not protected workers in Hamblen County from the
dislocations of economic restructuring that swept through the “Old Economy” industries
of the U.S. manufacturing sector over the past two decades. Deindustrialization and
capital flight to yet lower wage areas hit Morristown’s apparel and furniture workers in
particular; automation and ownership changes decreased job opportunities in the rayon
1 Chris Baker, “From Frontier Democracy to Development District: Popular Resistance and Discourse in
Hamblen County, Tennessee,” pp. 11, 13. Paper presented at the Appalachian Studies Association
conference, 1996.
2 Morristown Chamber of Commerce, “Morristown: You’ll Like it Here,” brochure, n.d.
3 Tennessee Department of Economic and Community Development, “Tennessee Community Data:
Morristown,” Nashville, TN 2001.
3
plants; and contingent employment practices meant that workers who lost their jobs had
to apply for new positions (in some cases even the same positions) through temporary
agencies rather than a personnel office. From January 2000 through August 2002, total
employment in the county dropped by almost five percent, and manufacturing jobs
declined even more steeply—by 14 percent.4
The capital mobility of globalization has come to Hamblen County not only
through the movement of factory jobs to Mexico, China, Singapore and elsewhere, but
also in the form of new investors, often in more capital-intensive production processes,
from Europe and Asia. The former mayor of Morristown sought to frame these recent
changes in positive terms, as evidence of economic vitality:
…We have seen major changes as portions of the furniture industry leave us….
Now you end up with a lot of plants that hire in the 50 to 250 range, with a few
over 1,000 but not many. What used to be the chief output—say fiber at American
Enka or furniture—are…replaced by other things, a lot of which are automotive
in nature. We have eight of the Fortune 500 manufacturing companies operating
in this area, and those are all American owned, but they provide less of the jobs
than our international plants. We have about 13 international owned plants that fly
about eight different flags…. Recently one of our larger companies was purchased
by the Chinese who promptly closed it down and took the manufacturing back to
their home in China. There is a constant interplay.5
For workers with a history in Hamblen County’s factories, these changes in
product mix and corporate ownership mean spells of unemployment, diminished job
security, and in some instances lower wages and the loss of fringe benefits. Older
workers are particularly hard hit. Although certain of the new, relatively capital-intensive
manufacturers offer wage and benefit packages that are excellent by local standards, their
jobs tend to go to young people entering the labor market rather than to 45- or 50-yearold
laid-off furniture workers. One young African American woman commented:
Morristown has always been a factory town, and a lot of the factories have closed
or are closing, especially furniture factories. …[W]e were always known for
Berkline and Lea Industries. And Berkline has been sold and Lea Industries has
been shut down, Shelby Williams the last I heard was going to shut down or
move... As far as a problem in the work force, what I’ve seen has come as a result
of NAFTA, because everybody …thinks all the jobs have been sent to Mexico,
and a lot of them have.
This economic context of tumult and insecurity is fundamental to understanding local
reactions to the large influx of Latino immigrants, which began in the 1990s.
Immigrant Community Growth
4 Tennessee Department of Labor and Workforce Development, East Tennessee Development District.
5 All quotations, unless otherwise noted, are from interviews conducted for the “Across Races and Nations”
project.
4
By the time of the 2000 census, the Latino population of Hamblen County had
ballooned by 1,785%, outnumbering the small but longstanding black population and
becoming almost 6% of the county’s residents in the space of ten years. The new arrivals
were predominantly foreign-born (77%), and most originated from Mexico.6 Economic
crises in that country, resulting in part from passage of the North American Free Trade
Agreement in 1993 and the devaluation of the peso in 1994, forced many rural and urban
Mexicans to emigrate to the U.S. These economic factors, combined with the social
networks of migration through which information about opportunities in Hamblen
County circulated far and wide, help to explain the influx of Latino immigrants.
However, it is important to note that Latinos have been present in Hamblen
County well before 1990 and the recent population explosion. Migrant farm workers have
been traveling through east Tennessee for decades, working on tobacco, tomatoes and
other vegetable crops. The Migrant Head Start program in Cocke County, adjacent to
Hamblen County, has been providing pre-school education for children of migrant
workers since the early 1980’s. Indeed, there is evidence that some of the first permanent
Latino residents of Hamblen County settled out from the migrant stream to work in local
poultry processing. In more recent years, word of these and other jobs spread through the
networks of Latino migration, so that Mexicans working in Florida, Maryland, Michigan,
Texas and California reported hearing about employment opportunities in Morristown
and came there to work. Others from the Mexican state of Michoacan, approximately 800
miles south of the border, learned of the job prospects in Morristown and migrated north.7
Today, there are many cultural indicators of the sizeable Latino presence in
Hamblen County and east Tennessee more generally. Morristown now has three Mexican
grocery stores within several blocks of each other, as well as new Mexican restaurants
catering to Latinos. Spanish-speaking residents can now listen to a Spanish radio station
that covers the east Tennessee area from Knoxville to Johnson City (which includes
Hamblen County), and read a Spanish newspaper Mundo Hispano. “For Rent” signs on
apartment buildings now appear in Spanish, and ads for car dealers, video rental stores,
check cashing services and other businesses increasingly note a capacity to speak Spanish
as part of their marketing pitch. The number of Hispanic children in the Hamblen
County School System has climbed from 117 students in 1995-1996 to 659 in 2002-2003,
indicating more and more immigrant families settling in Morristown.8
Reactions to New Latino Neighbors
In this relatively small town, where any newcomers tend to be identifiable to the
local population, the high visibility of the Latino population contributes to some negative
reactions, particularly from whites. One of the most widespread complaints involves
language, and the perception that speaking Spanish in public is exclusionary and
6 U.S. Bureau of the Census, Census of Population, 1990, 2000.
7 Robert Moore, “Sheriff: Employers Should Educate Hispanics on Drunk-Driving Laws.” Morristown
Citizen-Tribune, October 22, 1995.
8 Robert Moore, “Hamblen County Classrooms Seeing Changes with Rise in Latino Students, Morristown
Citizen-Tribune, October 2, 2001, p. 1.
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disrespectful. As in Siler City, North Carolina and other small southern towns with large
Latino population growth, some local residents react with a feeling of being “invaded” by
those who are ethnically different. The director of a local Hispanic ministry commented:
“Minorities at first are so rare that they are interesting. They become a threat later on
when the numbers increase and they start taking over neighborhoods.”9
Already bitter about the movement of local jobs to other countries, including
Mexico, many white working-class residents viewed the entry of Latinos into local labor
markets as an aggressive threat that added insult to injury. Anonymous postings to the
website of the Morristown paper decried the Latino presence in venomous tones. One
Latina commented, speaking of her white co-workers: “They view me badly, they don’t
want me, they hate me.” In another interview, a white woman recounted:
I just experienced this on the weekend: someone decided to come up and start
telling me—and she didn’t even know me, that was the first time I had met her—
that she had just lost her job because of the immigrants. I said, “How do you
know that?” She couldn’t give me an answer, but I think what it went back to is
that the job she had before this, …that plant had shut down to relocate to Mexico.
Then the place where she lost her job just last week had a few immigrants
employed there, and when she lost her job she just naturally assumed that was
why.
Within the locally defined hierarchy of manufacturing industries in Hamblen
County, the jobs that many of these new arrivals secure in poultry processing and farm
work are among the least desirable—but for local workers, both black and white, still
sometimes necessary—in the county. Koch Foods, the poultry processor, “where they
actually kill the chicken, clean the chicken, cut the chicken up, package it, freeze it, and
ship it out” is at the bottom of the hierarchy, along with farm work. One white woman
described local attitudes toward jobs in poultry processing:
We’ve always called it the “chicken house,” and it was like—if you hit rock
bottom, it was even a joke, if you lost your job or got laid off or whatever it was,
like I would do anything before I have to go work in the chicken house. That’s
something that was always said, and there were horror stories about the working
conditions and what you were exposed to and the way the employers treated their
employees….
In one sense, then, these immigrant workers “took jobs that no one else wanted,”
but our Latino interviewees had also found work in more desirable manufacturing
sectors, including furniture, fan assembly, plastic fence production and even auto parts.
Moreover, within the repertoire of survival strategies among white and black workers in
Hamblen County, even stigmatized jobs in poultry processing represented fall-back
positions in hard times. These and other dynamics in the local labor market are essential
to any understanding of the hostile reactions of some residents to Latino immigrants. The
presence of this new racial/ethnic group also unsettled the dualistic hierarchy of black
9 “1492 in East Tennessee.” Knoxville News Sentinel, June 11, 1995.
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and white in Hamblen County, generating complicated cross-currents of both solidarity
and tension across racial/ethnic lines.
Racial and Ethnic Dynamics in Hamblen County
Contrary to stereotypes of rural Appalachia as exclusively white, racial/ethnic
diversity has characterized Hamblen County since its founding in 1870. Although
European settlers displaced the original Cherokee inhabitants, African Americans lived in
east Tennessee, primarily as slaves, since the late 18th century. In 1868, soon after the
Civil War, a school for freedmen, the Morristown Normal and Industrial College, was
founded in Hamblen County. Investment by the Methodist Conference allowed the
college to grow and become an important resource for educating black teachers and
ministers. The influence of Morristown College, as it became known, accounts for the
relative prosperity and higher educational levels of Hamblen County’s black community
as compared with many other areas of the rural South.10
This is by no means to suggest that African Americans were treated as equals by
the dominant white population. Jim Crow segregation, racist attacks on Morristown
College and other features of white supremacy are part of the county’s history. A book
published in 1996 by the county’s black Progressive Business Association stated:
We decided to take personal responsibility for giving the larger community a
history of people who have survived four hundred years of slavery, one hundred
years of Jim Crow, additional years of unfunded expectations and economic
disparity in the workplace but who still find a people striving, achieving and
contributing to society.11
Today, Hamblen County’s black population, though not as well off on average as whites,
fares better than Latinos according to such measures as the poverty rate and median
income. (See below.) Indeed, unlike Memphis, Tennessee, Latinos are on the bottom of
the economic and racial hierarchy in this rural Appalachian context.
Earnings, Income and Poverty, 1999
Hamblen County, Tennessee
Hispanic
Black
White
Median Earnings of
Full-Time, Year-
Round Workers
$12,280
$23,682
$26,512
Median Family
Income
$23,850
$32,763
$40,253
Poverty Rate
34.2%
16.2%
13.0%
Source: U.S. Bureau of the Census, Census of Population, 2000.
10 Jovita Wells, ed. A School for Freedom: Morristown College and Five Generations of Education for
Blacks. (Knoxville, TN: East Tennessee Historical Society, 1986).
11 Willie and Clare Osborne and Luie Hargraves, eds. Contributions of Blacks to Hamblen County, 1796-
1996. (Morristown, TN: Progressive Business Association and MCF Discover, 1996), p. i..
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Most of our interviewees—white, black and Latino—agreed on the intense
hostility that some whites in particular expressed toward new immigrants, and both black
and white residents observed that Latinos had replaced African Americans as the chief
target of white racism. This served to engender sympathy, rather than competition,
between African Americans and Latinos. Two comments by different African American
women in Hamblen County illustrate this dynamic:
I think that the Hispanic community and the African American community get
along a lot better than the Caucasian community in certain areas because of us
both being minorities…. I noticed how the Caucasian community tends to lean
more toward the Hispanic community now as far as the hassling and giving them
a hard time and the racial comments and that sort of thing.
I think [the racial tension] is more between the Latinos and the Caucasians than it
is the blacks…. [Latinos] are different and new, and then too they are moving in
and probably taking over what [whites] consider their territory….For years the
white man has gotten used to the blacks and now another group comes in and it’s
just changed.
Although it would be premature to celebrate racial/ethnic solidarity between blacks and
Latinos in Hamblen County, these comments seem to suggest that potential. Working
against that possibility are the actions of certain federal agencies, which have served to
foment division along racial and ethnic lines.
Federal Targeting of Immigrants
Since September 11, 2001, changes in federal immigration policy have clearly
targeted certain groups of immigrants, evoking in response both popular endorsement as
necessary domestic security precautions and condemnation as violations of civil liberties.
In view of these ominous national trends, it is important to note that the two episodes
documented below occurred prior to September 11. They nonetheless served to
marginalize and, particularly in the case of the highly publicized Immigration and
Naturalization Service’s action, foment antagonism toward Latinos.
In 1995 and 2000, two federal agencies, the Immigration and Naturalization
Service (INS) and the Social Security Administration, targeted immigrants in east
Tennessee for highly publicized “raids” and for document verification that was in some
instances unwarranted. Although their focus was on the immigration status of
newcomers, the local association between Latino ethnicity and foreign birth, lack of
English proficiency, lower class position and undocumented immigration status rendered
the meaning and impact of the agencies’ actions profoundly stigmatizing. They served to
separate Latinos even further from other residents, and to construct them as a distinct
“race.”
In 1995, just as immigration to Hamblen County and east Tennessee more
generally escalated sharply, the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service announced
Operation South P.A.W. (for “Protecting American Workers”), a brief and largely
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symbolic series of raids to enforce immigration laws in the interior South. The Knoxville
newspaper, in an article titled “Residents Laud Aliens’ Roundup,” reported that “legal
residents of the region, angry over losing jobs to illegal aliens, stood in the streets and
cheered the [INS] agents on.” Ron Kidd, an INS supervisor from the regional office in
Memphis, was quoted: “Seldom have we been welcomed with such open arms by the
public. To have people stopping us on the street, shaking our hands and applauding is an
eye-opener to the most seasoned INS veteran.”12 This action clearly reinforced existing
perceptions of Latino immigrants as economic threats, while doing nothing effective to
“protect American workers” and their jobs.
A second episode also involved intimidation of immigrants, but without the
intentional, visible appeal to anti-immigrant sentiment among other residents. In 2000,
Highlander staff learned that the Morristown-Hamblen Hospital was not filing for EAB
(Enumeration at Birth) if at least one parent of a baby born at the hospital couldn’t
provide a social security number. EAB is the process for newborns in the United States,
who are automatically citizens regardless of their parents’ status, to receive social
security numbers. Parents of children born in the Morristown hospital were asked to
provide their own social security numbers to hospital staff and, if neither parent could
produce one, were told to go to the Social Security Administration office. This policy
apparently originated from the Social Security Administration, and was shared through a
memo from Paula Taylor, State Registrar, dated January 10, 2000. As noted in a memo
from Chris Griffin of the Tennessee Justice Center: “All of this had a horrible impact on
mixed status households. If both parents were undocumented, they were told that their
child could not get a social security number, even when the child was born in the U.S.
and was, therefore, a citizen.”
Fortunately, this situation was favorably resolved, but only after considerable
effort by the staff of several non-profit organizations. Phone calls and other interventions
by the Tennessee Justice Center and the National Immigration Law Center eventually
persuaded the Social Security Administration and Tennessee state registrar to distribute
clarifying memos, which instructed hospital staff to encourage parents to participate in
the EAB program, regardless of the parents’ possession of social security numbers.
It is probably not accidental that this episode involved immigrant babies’ status as
U.S. citizens, for that birthright represents the potential establishment of a permanent,
unequivocally legitimate immigrant presence in the local community. That prospect was
precisely what the actions of both the INS and the Social Security Administration seemed
designed to prevent. The implicit message of these and other actions by official
government agencies was that immigrants are an undesirable presence in east Tennessee,
undeserving of the rights that they as parents and their children in fact possess. Coupled
with the larger economic context, this attitude fed into the episodes of anti-immigrant
mobilization by individuals and organizations that occurred in east Tennessee during this
same period.
12 “Residents Laud Aliens’ Roundup.” Knoxville News Sentinel, June 24, 1995.
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The Controversy over Migrant Head Start
In 1999, the staff of the Migrant Head Start program in Cocke County, a
predominantly agricultural area adjacent to Hamblen County, sought to lease land in the
small town of Bybee, where they planned to build a new center. Migrant Head Start had
been operating for twenty years in Cocke County, providing pre-school enrichment
activities for three months during the summer for children from Hamblen, Cocke and
Greene Counties whose parents qualified as seasonal migrant workers. The program’s
longstanding existence indicates the well-established migrant stream through this area.
Although transitory and largely segregated in migrant housing on larger farms, Latino
workers and their children had been a familiar and essential part of the local agricultural
economy for many years.
Nevertheless, the proposal to lease land in Bybee unleashed hostile reactions from
residents. A petition against the new facility began circulating, and more than 100 people
turned out for a protest against its opening. Those in attendance disparaged migrant
workers, calling them “illegal aliens,” and asserting that they were prone to criminal
behavior and violence. Signs around Bybee soon declared “No way, Jose” and “Help
keep our community safe and clean.” A barn owned by the farmer who planned to lease
his land for the Head Start program was burned to the ground, and the FBI began
investigating the arson as a hate crime.
Seeking to dispel the hostility, the Telamon Corporation, which operated the Head
Start program under contract with the federal government, scheduled a public meeting in
July 1999 in Newport, the county seat of Cocke County. Both supporters, who included
Latino workers, Head Start staff members and progressive activists, and opponents,
primarily white working-class residents of the county, turned out to voice their
perspectives. One of the most common arguments against the new location involved the
“NIMBY” (Not In My Backyard) phenomenon; critics asserted that there were few
migrant farm workers in the Bybee area and that busing their children from elsewhere
would be expensive and dangerous, due to the increased traffic. Infusing this perspective
may have been class resentment against wealthier farmers in the area, who were more
prone to hire migrant labor. An opponent argued, referring to one of the largest farmers in
the county, “Harloff’s farm is where they [Latino migrants] pick their tomatoes. Why not
let them build it over there?”13 Others who opposed the new location questioned the
legality (i.e., immigration status) of migrant farmworkers, their contribution to the tax
base, and the wisdom of spending government money on such a program in the first
place.
The discussion thus turned quickly toward larger questions of immigration policy,
the necessity of migrant labor, the value of education and the appropriate priorities of
government. Although Telamon staff fielded the majority of specific questions (e.g.,
regarding the decision to locate in Bybee), other supporters spoke to the attitudinal
differences underlying the controversy. One Latina eloquently defended migrant
workers:
13 These and other quotations from the meeting are from a videotape filmed by the Cocke County Contact
Council youth group and transcribed by Highlander staff.
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I’m a migrant, OK? I come from Florida, ….a beautiful state. We come here to
harvest your crops, we come here to cut your tobacco, we come here to pick your
tomatoes…. We work here so you don’t have to pay $5.00 a pound for tomatoes,
we come here so you don’t have to pay $20.00 for a pack of cigarettes. We do the
labor, and I’m not afraid to say it. I am very proud of what I am: …a migrant is a
person who moves from one state to another to harvest everyone else’s crops but
our own.
A young, white working-class man in the audience also spoke in support of the
center by using his own experience to repudiate arguments about the purported
relationship between Latinos and crime:
You worry about the crime rate going up because a school is being built. That’s
stupid, the crime rate is going to go up if you don’t have a school. I’ve lived the
hard life, I’ve lived in the projects all my life, in Knoxville, all over here… I
didn’t have schooling, I didn’t have very good schooling, and that’s what
introduced me to crime.
Although this meeting was an important opportunity for public dialogue about the
controversy, the barn-burning ironically seemed to do more to quell overt opposition.
Critics of the new center sought to distance themselves from this act of property
destruction, especially when FBI agents began questioning local residents about the
arson. The Telamon Corporation eventually proceeded with plans to build the new
Migrant Head Start center in Bybee, and it is now operating without incident. However,
opposition to the Latino immigrant presence in east Tennessee has persisted and, in the
wake of the events of September 11, 2001, re-emerged in the odious form of overt white
supremacy.
The Klan Resurfaces
In January 2002, the Tennessee White Knights of Yahweh, the Morristown-based
chapter of the Ku Klux Klan, announced plans for a January 19 rally at the courthouse in
neighboring Cocke County to celebrate the birthday of Confederate General Robert E.
Lee and to protest the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. holiday. An additional purpose of the
rally was to condemn “the growing non-white flood of illegals into our communities.” A
pamphlet promoting the event called for closing the nation’s borders “before the hordes
of American hating foreigners pollute and destroy your community. We must secure the
existence of our people and a future for white children.”14 According to newspaper
reports this would be the most public demonstration by the Klan in the east Tennessee
area since 1978.
It was not clear why Cocke County and its county seat of Newport were chosen,
although the mayor of Newport, Roland Dykes, is African American, elected by a largely
white community. In the week before the event, a cross-burning in the front yard of
Mayor Dykes’ home led to an FBI investigation and to protestations by the Klan that this
was not the work of their group. In response, a number of local groups in Cocke County,
14Ray Snyder, “FBI Probes Cross Burning,” Morristown Citizen-Tribune. January 17, 2003, p. A6.
11
supported by the mayor and district attorney, planned a diversity event at the high school
to counter the Klan’s message of hate and fear. Others felt it was important to protest
directly and visibly at the Klan rally, and to mobilize a large crowd to come to the
courthouse. These included Earth First, the NAACP, American Indian organizations,
and Jewish anti-defamation groups.
On the day of the rally, the clouds poured buckets of rain, to the great delight of
anti-Klan forces. Despite the deluge, a large crowd gathered in front of the courthouse:
about 50 Klansmen, outnumbered by over 150 state troopers and police, faced off against
a far larger group of some 800-1,000 anti-Klan protestors. The latter group drummed and
chanted, making it impossible for the Klan’s message to be heard, although their
speeches went on for two hours. Above the crowd, a banner with Dr. King’s likeness was
hung on a brick building. It read: “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do
that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.” Onlookers were divided in their
sympathies. A local woman who worked in a shirt factory said that she found the Klan’s
message decrying Latino immigration appealing. “These people come in here and are
taking our jobs,” she told a reporter, refusing to give her name.15 A skinhead waving a
Nazi flag also drew press attention. Meanwhile, others attended the diversity celebration
at the high school, where there were displays, performances, music, food and speeches.
Two days later on Monday, the actual King holiday, a local group called Citizens
for Justice, Equality and Fairness (CJEF) sponsored an event in adjacent Jefferson
County with the theme “Together We Rise.” As the group marched toward the
courthouse, a small number of black-jacketed Klan members, including one woman,
began taking turns using a sound system to speak hateful messages about immigrants,
Jews, gays, communists and African Americans. One of the protestors made reference to
the failure of the Ku Klux Klan rally in Newport, and explained that he and his friends
had come to Jefferson County to “return the favor.”16 They carried signs reading
“Abolish King Holiday in America now” and “NAACP is the real terrorist organization.”
The appearance of the Klan enlivened the CJEF crowd, which proceeded to sing more
loudly, speak more fervently and raise the importance of the messages that the civil rights
movement shared with the country.
The Meaning of Anti-Immigrant Sentiment in East Tennessee
It is instructive to examine seriously the negative attitudes expressed toward
Latino immigrants in Hamblen County, for they extend beyond the specific question of
local job competition and reveal larger political and economic themes that social justice
organizations are challenged to counter. Although factors specific to the context of
Hamblen County evoked white hostility, local expressions of anti-immigrant sentiment
drew their ideological strength and framework from decidedly national themes in
conservative thought. These include the pairing of whiteness with American identity, a
class resentment that defines the “real” Americans as “working people,” and a militant
15“No Major Incidents at Klan Rally—Protestors Drown Out Speeches by KKK,” Morristown Citizen-
Tribune, January 19, 2003, p. A8.
16 Steve Marion, “Marchers Drown Out Protests,” [Jefferson County] Standard Banner. January 22, 2002,
p. 3A.
12
nationalism that is combined with disdain for the established government.17 It is
important to underscore that these are not neo-Confederate or peculiarly southern
sentiments. Although anti-immigrant activism in east Tennessee has featured some
symbolic trappings of the region, such as Confederate flags, the ideology that frames the
protest is more akin to that of national militias and hate groups.
Within this ultra-nationalist perspective, fueled by the events of September 11,
foreigners threaten white supremacy and the already precarious status of working
people—both of which are symbolically represented by an endangered America—while
elected officials do nothing effective to protect the citizenry. This combination of
economic insecurity and perceived political powerlessness—a consequence of
politicians’ neglect of working class economic interests and the absence of effective
levers of influence in the political process—is exceedingly dangerous. The chilling
implication is that it will be necessary for “people” to take matters into their own hands.
A local labor leader expressed this complicated and ominous perspective in a
statement that is worth quoting at length:
I don’t think [residents of Hamblen County] are actually against the people
because they are Mexicans. I think it is sort of a complex deal where they are mad
at the government for opening the doors. They know they are losing their jobs to
foreign competition, and [the Mexicans] don’t really care about the jobs that
much; …they are just over here on a free ride. They don’t …really care about
America…
I’ll tell you what I hear through the grapevine: we are going to have a real
problem here in America. It will probably wind up being racial. I’m not saying
anything against the Latino, but I hear there are groups here in the South and the
Midwest that is just ready to roll if things don’t change. I’m not a fanatic, and
I’m not reading this out of any kind of lunatic magazine, but I’m thinking people
are really getting down on the politicians more and more…[T]here is not going to
be any kind of move made…to change anything to benefit the working people.
And I think the NAFTA thing and losing the jobs—if this economy drops down, I
believe [America] is going to be a violent place.
White antipathy toward Latino immigrants in Hamblen County is neither
exclusively racist nor distinctively southern. Rather, it derives from a larger ideology that
is all the more powerful because of its acceptable appeal to a nationalism that disguises
white supremacy within imagery of an embattled America. It is this complex ensemble of
mutually reinforcing beliefs—rather than a more narrow ideology of racial exclusion—
that social justice organizations are challenged to address.
17 Juan Perea, ed., Immigrants Out! The New Nativism and the Anti-Immigrant Impulse in the United States.
(New York: New York University Press, 1997). Abby Ferber, White Man Falling: Race, Gender, and
White Supremacy. (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 199.
13
Signs of Community-Building in Hamblen County
Episodes of suspicion and hate, exemplified by opposition to the migrant Head
Start center in Bybee and the mobilization of the Klan, receive major local and even
national media attention. Less visible and often unreported in the press is the on-going,
steady work of building bridges between longstanding residents and new Latino
immigrants.
In Hamblen County, many non-profit organizations, service agencies, churches,
businesses and individuals have sought to respond favorably and helpfully to the
community changes associated with their new Spanish-speaking neighbors. The East
Tennessee Catholic Diocese, with a growing Latino membership, was one of the first to
support and reach out to Latinos through a Hispanic Ministry, Spanish language masses
and other initiatives. This work continues through diocesan-supported meetings with
Tennessee government officials and visits of the Mexican Consulate to provide Mexican
identification cards. Some Protestant churches have also begun providing English and
Spanish classes and other community ministries.
Service organizations have been providing an array of programs to the Latino
immigrant community. Reach-Out has been delivering pre-natal care to pregnant women,
and Stepping Out Ministries has begun offering its training support to Latino women. In
1996, local service providers and non-profit organizations came together under the
umbrella of the Alianza Hispana, or Hispanic Alliance. This group continues to meet
monthly to share information on challenges facing the immigrant community and
different programs to address them; on some occasions, the alliance has provided support
to immigrants in controversial situations, such as the migrant Head Start episode.
Individuals associated with the alliance have also worked to influence Tennessee
legislators to support a law allowing immigrants without social security numbers to
obtain driver’s licenses.
Businesses are responding to the potential Latino market by posting signs in
Spanish and hiring employees who are bilingual. Suntrust Bank led the way in offering
bank accounts to immigrants without social security numbers. This made good business
sense, but it also helped reduce the risk to immigrants who were carrying large amounts
of cash from their wages around with them or hiding it in their homes. Bank accounts
have also helped immigrants transfer money more economically back to their families in
Mexico and other countries.
Local government agencies have also sought to ease Latino integration into the
community. English language classes and a special migrant student program serve Latino
students in the public schools. The police department has been working to build bridges
to the Latino community, whose members seldom contact police when they are
victimized by crime.
Non-profit organizations have expanded their constituencies and programming to
encompass Latinos. The Southern Empowerment Project of Maryville, Tennessee, which
14
trains community organizers, initiated the formation of Latinos Unidos, in which Latinos
are organizing themselves to address their needs and advance their rights. The Tennessee
Industrial Renewal Network has been sponsoring worker-to-worker exchanges between
the U.S. and Mexico. The Rose Center, a culturally-focused community center, has
organized International Festivals, where people from all over the world who now live in
Morristown share food, music and information from their homelands. (See the section on
case studies of collaboration.)
Efforts such as these reflect the diversity of responses to Latino immigrants in
east Tennessee. Individuals and organizations are building cultural bridges, providing
bilingual services, and defending the rights of Latino immigrants. Much work remains to
be done, however, as the potential for tension and conflict persists just under the surface.

I really hate to say this folks, but you know I TRULY believe that our whole country has gone to Hell in a Hatrack.
I'm going to the rally in Raleigh, NC this weekend and I'm going to fly my flag. If the law, the government or the President himself don't like it.....well that's just tough. I could really care less what they say about it.

How low can our government officials get as to arrest a disabled vet for carrying his flag? That's pretty low in anyone's book.

Ruthiela's quote

I'm going to the rally in Raleigh, NC this weekend and I'm going to fly my flag. If the law, the government or the President himself don't like it.....well that's just tough. I could really care less what they say about it.

I don't think they'll mind Ruthiela. Just be sure you don't sharpen it before you leave home.

I'll do my best not to
But you will all have to admit it is pretty bad when the Illegal Aliens break OUR laws by coming across the border to start with, then they have gall enough to march and protest on OUR STREETS, not to mention flying THEIR COUNTRY'S FLAGS IN OUR COUNTRY, changing OUR anthem and DEMANDING their rights in OUR COUNTRY...............and OUR law doesn't do anything about it..........
and then they harrass and arrest one of our disabled vets for carrying THE US FLAG.........WHERE IS THE LOGIC IN THAT?

The PC crap is what is keeping us down! It is time to scream at the top of our lungs that it is our CONSTITUTIONAL right to defend this Country! All of those that are trying to destroy this Country realize that the baby boomers, the ones that demonstrated before are dying out! Well by GOD, not all of us!

There are still a lot of us out there and we see the PC crap for what it is! The destruction of America!

Nobody will ever tell me where I can or cannot fly our flag!
I fought for it and have had friends who died for it and I will fly it when and where I please!
It is a sad day when a veteran is arrested for being patriotic!