Big muddy meetin' in Ole Merced
There seems to have been an interesting speaker in town last week, Vaughn Grisham, director of the McLean Institute for Community Development at Ole Miss. The elite was there, led by Bob Carpenter, Mr. UC Merced. According to the local McClatchy Chain outlet, Grisham thought Merced had it made in the shade because of UC Merced. It made us wonder if that was his view, why he was invited at all to the sixth most economically stressed county in the nation with one of the three highest national foreclosure rates. But, apparently, Mr. UC Merced is now leading something called the Tupelo Committee of Merced County.
Prior to looking into Grisham and McLean, the editorial board only knew about Tupelo for two of its famous sons, Jimmy Rogers, the Singing Brakeman, and Elvis Presley, “T for Texas” and “You Ain’t Nothing but a Hound Dog (jest a-cryin’ all the time).”
George McLean was a great man. We’ve included some very inspiring material below about him and what he did in his lifetime in northeast Mississippi.
Grisham’s advice to the Merced elite was to invest in early childhood education so that the community could take advantage of our “high-tech, bio-tech engine of growth,” UC Merced. That seemed like a good idea and we are sure that our finance, insurance, real estate and political leaders will whip out their pens and contribute privately to this cause, because, as Grisham noted, there are no Santa Clauses in either Sacramento or Washington DC.
However, we doubt our leaders will follow his advice because we are led by the One Voice, devoted body and soul to the collective principle of ripping off public funds for private gain. In fact, former Gov. Gray Davis was our Santa Claus, paying off for the help he got, particularly from former Rep. Gary Condit, carrying the Valley in 1998. Davis ordered the fast-tracking of environmental permits for the campus. Condit has earlier arranged for the Mission Interchange to anchor the Campus Parkway (where the Wal-Mart distribution center will soon be built). University of California’s highly professional propagandists mounted a huge campaign, including buying the newspaper with advertising, every politician in office climbed on board the UC Merced Gravy Train, developers went on a feeding frenzy, and the real estate boondoggle called UC Merced became history. In a space of five years the least affordable homes in the nation became some of the cheapest and most foreclosed upon. We haven’t seen hide nor hair of the “high-tech, bio-tech engine of growth” yet. If Merced was in India we would be more likely to see it. In any event, should such firms start up here, the capital, labor and profits will all be outside. Here on the ground, winter in coming and we will take a wild stab that official unemployment will rise well above 20 percent.
Grisham’s message was that the community has to work together to raise itself by its own bootstraps. Unfortunately, the example he used about the origins of the “Tupelo Miracle” was particularly untimely – starting a dairy industry. Merced, second largest dairy county in the US, is suffering enormous losses in that industry due to price-rigging by the top corporations in the industry. Milk is becoming a dirty word in Merced.
George McLean, an independent newspaper publisher, was a man who cared very deeply about his poor little community and represented everything there is in the phrase, “a real Christian.” Our county board of supervisors recently slashed services for all the most needy people in the county and assumed from the state the Williamson Act subsidy for agricultural landowners. That was not “real Christian.”
Perhaps the Tupelo Committee of Merced County’s plan is to parcel split rural Merced County and create a “Ranchette Miracle.” We don’t think our elite class of real estate speculators have any other ideas beyond the next speculative bubble – the next flood of Santa Claus money. The hostility of this group is unfathomable to any idea that threatens its control of government and business in Merced County. Bob Carpenter, insurance broker, real estate speculator, and the real Mr. UC Merced, has always shown himself hostile to any legitimate question or argument. With Carpenter in the lead, we’ll get economic development by tea-bagging boosters demanding federal stimulus funds to tide them over until the next real estate boom – the Great Valley Whine. Only our speculating elite would think of importing a sociologist from the Deep South to advise us or naming the newest booster group for Tupelo, Mississippi. But, doubtless, even Chancellor Kang doesn’t know what happened to the discipline of rural sociology at UC after the publication of Walter Goldschmidt’s As Ye Sow in the late 1940s. So, after more than a half century of suppression of rural sociology in California, the speculators drag in a sociologist from Mississippi? How pathetic that the latest propaganda campaign for Merced growth has been kicked off by Dr. Santa Claus from Ole Miss.
The Valley has had a remarkable history of appropriating large ideas for its greedy little purposes. It appropriated socialism to develop its irrigation systems and recreated feudalism. Most fundamentalist mono-croppers don’t have a clue about the debt their form of agriculture owes to Darwin’s theory of evolution and natural advantage. The Great Valley Center took a number of liberal-left organizing tools and reorganized them under corporate developer sponsorship as a means to coopt every potential community leader in the Valley before he or she had a chance to think independently about anything or even learn to listen to the communities they now “lead.” The University of California took the idea of a university campus and turned it into an anchor tenant for urban sprawl, destruction of farmland, profit-taking by finance, insurance and real estate interests and ruin for many in the working classes. Merced County adopted the Williamson Act, a good farmland-preservation program, but only to buy agriculture's silence on the UC Merced project. Merced County turned its dysfunction, over-lapping planning departments and its "local" land-use authority councils, commissions and board into wholesale perverters of environmental law and regulation and laws and rules of public process for the benefit of UC Merced, finance, insurance and real estate special interests. As for democracy, most of our elected officials are bought and sold like bankrupt dairies and foreclosed homes.
Badlands Journal editorial board
11-5-09
Merced Sun-Star
Sociologist gives advice on turning around Merced
Citizen involvement is key to overcoming challenges...SCOTT JASON
http://www.mercedsunstar.com/167/v-print/story/1153354.html
Sociologist Vaughn Grisham said Wednesday he'd never bother to study Merced as it overcomes its challenges.
The area already has too much going its way.
"You people have an economic engine (UC Merced) most people would kill for," Grisham said.
Strange and perhaps startling words for a beaten-down community that saw a spectacular rise and fall in the last five years. But in his eyes, Merced can flourish. The biggest factor, he said, is catching up to the knowledge-based economy through adopting early childhood education programs.
As Merced County still works to reclaim its image, a dozen community members banded together to adopt and apply Grisham's community building philosophy that's based heavily on the transformation of Tupelo, Miss.
Grisham's book, "Tupelo: The Evolution of Community," chronicles how the revitalization began when a newspaper publisher banded business leaders together to buy a bull to jump-start a dairy industry.
In short, the philosophy is about residents growing tired of the status quo, pulling together and finding ways to make a difference.
The Tupelo Committee of Merced County hopes to hold more meetings before coming up with projects to tackle.
"We need to find a way to work cooperatively," said Bob Carpenter, a committee member who was a major player in bringing a University of California campus to Merced.
Grisham, a community development expert with a Ph.D. from University of North Carolina, toured the UC campus and Castle Commerce Center, spoke with the Sun-Star's editorial board and concluded with an hour-and-a-half speech to a packed Merced Senior Center about what can be done to build the community.
The audience included many business owners, average Mercedians and some of the area's top leaders, including UC Merced Chancellor Steve Kang, Merced College President Ben Duran, council members and supervisors.
Grisham, with a slight Southern drawl, wandered the center holding a microphone -- begrudgingly -- because it restricted where he could walk. He's one part inspirational speaker and one part tent revival preacher. Wry, witty and willing to be blunt, his gospel is what average people can accomplish without looking to government grants. "There's no Santa Claus in Sacramento," he said. "There's no Santa Claus in D.C."
One tale he told was about two people who founded a support group for children with palsy and expanded it into a medical program that serves 200,000 people.
He later highlighted a school that expanded its course offerings to adults when it was faced with closure because of low enrollment. Rather than letting the school close, the community rallied and began offering driving classes to people more than 80 years old.
The insurance companies kept customers, the drivers held onto their licenses and the school stayed open, Grisham explained. "That's the simplest lesson," he said. "You've got to have all winners."
A community's transformation must start small with projects that can succeed and build momentum. One idea is working to clean up the city by picking up garbage and painting buildings.
Grisham closed the evening by quoting anthropologist Margaret Mead: "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has."
University of Arkansas
Department of Agriculture Cooperative Extension
Breakthrough Solutions
Harnessing the Forces of Change
Ordinary People Doing Extraordinary Things – An Interview with Dr. Vaughn Grisham – June 2005
http://www.vworks.org/harnessing_change/ordinary_people.htm
If you have never heard of Dr. Vaughn Grisham, Director of the McLean Institute for Community Development at Ole Miss, you have really missed out. He is the author of four books on community development, an astute observer of the impact of global trends on communities, and best of all, a terrific story teller. Lately, his work has centered on identifying examples of ordinary communities and leaders who are doing extraordinary things. These are really breakthroughs – stories of community leaders who have created breakthrough solutions that will move their communities forward. Earlier this year, I had the privilege of interviewing Dr. Grisham, asking him how communities can be successful in the global, knowledge-based economy.
Question #1: Dr. Grisham, in your work in identifying the key factors in successful community development in Tupelo, Mississippi and other communities, what have you found to be the keys to success in the development of communities?
Mark, it begins with something that is very simple - it has to begin with someone who has fire in their belly, who has the passion that this is going to get done. It starts right there. But if it remains with an individual - the lone ranger - then it dies. It is these people who are not so much in love with themselves, but are in love with the idea that we are going to get these things done. And they move forward. So it always begins with that individual who has that sense of passion. I normally know after I have been to a community and meet these people whether they are going to be successful.
It is interesting to me that often times it is not necessarily the best idea that carries the day. It is that person who has that passion and persistence to move forward. We start there, but then they begin to work with other people. There are individuals who link with others. And they will say to me "You know, I was thinking about the same thing."
One of the things I am intrigued with is this concept of vision. It is a concept I have studied very carefully. The leadership books talk about a leader as someone who has a sense of vision. I find that often it is a very vague idea, but the idea is that we are going to get things done; we are going to make some improvements. That’s where it starts, and then they begin to link together with other individuals.
Question #2: As you know, the word "strategy" in Greek means "the art of the general," because generals need to be able to understand the big picture as a basis for action. How important is it for community leaders to be able to think and act strategically – to see how their community fits into the big picture of the global economy and how their community fits into it?
What I find in most communities is that various individuals bring different strengths. There has got to be someone who understands the big picture. That is that individual’s role. They have got to be able to understand it, and to articulate it in a way that individuals see where their own interest lies, and to make that connection. So someone has got to fill that role. And invariably I find that is true. That someone has that role - of seeing the big picture, understanding these things - and some of these individuals have the good sense to know that they are good at the big picture, but they really stink at details. If they get their hands in the details, they will mess them up.
Question #3: Could you give an example of a community or community leader that understood their community’s role in the global economy?
The best that I have ever known is a man by the name of George McLean in Tupelo, Mississippi. People who didn’t know George McLean just marveled and thought he was some kind of intellect who understood things that the rest of us didn’t. But what George McLean would do is that he would read everything he could get his hands on. He was reading for ideas - getting the big picture. What was so amazing about Mr. McLean is that I don’t know if he ever had an original idea. But by and large, he understood that big picture, and then he surrounded himself with people who could do the nitty gritty, who could fill in where he was weak. And he didn’t have so much ego that it would get in the way. But no Question, McLean was the best at this that I have ever seen. But fairly consistently, someone in a group has to see that big picture.
Question #4: So when you talk about the big picture, are you talking about understanding the currents and major forces at work in the world and how they impact that local community?
Yes. They have got to know that - that these things come down to the community. In my research, I have studied agriculture. And of course agriculture in the United States, certainly in the South, has been linked to international trade throughout its existence. In fact, at the beginning of World War I, in 1914, something like 67 percent of the cotton raised in the South was traded overseas. So it was pretty easy for some of those folks to understand a more global and international picture.
Question #5: As one way to explain the major forces and trends impacting our rural communities, we have been talking about what we call "The Four Horsemen of the 21st Century Economy":
• relentless innovation,
• pervasive globalization,
• global connectivity, and
• the triumph of knowledge and technology over human toil
a) Have you seen examples of where innovation has been a tremendous asset to rural communities?
Rural communities were created by the steam engine - by the trains. One of the things I often do with students in the first semester is to say "Here’s a map of Arkansas, Minnesota, or another state, what do you see in common with these towns?" It is so obvious for a lot of them - they are on a railroad. And so it was this innovation that really created small towns all over the United States. That one kicks them off, but a lot of innovations go the other way.
b) Can you give examples of innovations that have been destructive to rural communities?
Yes. The coming of the tractor. And the coming of chemicals and pesticides, which eliminated the need for large numbers of workers. In terms of their impact, some of these, there is no Question, began to erode the workforce. We can drive through the Delta and see one abandoned place after another. The innovation came, they couldn’t make the adjustment, and they went out of existence.
c) The second of the four horsemen is pervasive globalization, which we can define as the movement of goods, services, jobs, information, technology, capital, and culture across national boundaries. Can you think of where globalization has been helpful to rural communities?
Here again, you have got to have that individual who sees those opportunities, who sees how this can work. There is a fellow over in Greenwood, Mississippi by the name of Fred Carl, who began to produce the Viking range. He took some of the most innovative business techniques from Japan and Germany, and blended them into the production of a range that by and large needed a global market. It is a very expensive product, and would need a global market. I am always intrigued by people who understand that they can produce a product but there is a limit to what they can sell in a certain area, because the product is so good, it is going to last a lifetime. You are not going to have a resale on these.
d) What about examples of where globalization has had a negative effect on rural communities?
Clearly I think one of the things that is happening with globalization is losing jobs because they are going to Taiwan or Mexico. Yes, that’s true, but I am convinced that people would lose those jobs anyway. Those jobs are going to be replaced with capital, equipment, or they are going to move them overseas. I think, for example, that there have got to be people in China with the vision to understand that they are getting their crack at it now, but it won’t last long. At the point where it is financially advantageous to move to capital goods and away from very cheap labor, then by and large, you are going to have those [industrial] jobs replaced by machinery. It is almost inevitable, it seems to me, if in fact with agriculture you can go from 95 percent of the workforce being agricultural workers to 2 percent using machinery and technology, the same thing is going to happen in industries.
e) This is a real shock to communities that depend on industrial development, wouldn’t you say?
Yes, it is. Right now, for many of them, they can’t see another way out. They can’t see it, because we had agriculture, then we had our manufacturing, and it is going away. I try to track a large number of manufacturing companies. Many of them had a lifetime of about 20 years. The 1970s were the peak years for small towns all over the United States, but particularly in the South, when all these factories came in. But if you look, in about 20 years, they ran their course. And then they began to move somewhere else.
I talked this evening about this town of Houston, Minnesota. Houston, Minnesota is a little town with a population of 1020, which understands it is part of an electronic world, and understands that you are not going to go back to an older way. So let’s figure out - how do you deal with this globalization? How do you deal with this electronic age? We don’t have any computer geniuses, but we don’t need them to solve some of these problems.
One of my favorite examples is in western North Carolina, in which those communities - here, Becky Anderson, who was the creator of Handmade in America. She was the industrial developer for Bunkham County. She went to New York, trying to find some new industries. And finally, one person said to Becky "They’re not here. You are not going to be able to recruit any more industries. You are just going to have to find a new way of making a living." And so she goes back and begins to work with people who have craft arts. The problem with a lot of people who make craft arts is that they were good at it, but they couldn’t make a living. She found a way of binding them together and creating a crafts arts trail, so they are working together, rather than working in competition with each other. Even small places can do well.
I know of a little town called Chimney Rock, population 97, and they understand that they are not going to get any factories, and that they are going to have to turn to other things.
f) The third horseman is global connectivity - connecting to the world through the Internet, or broadband connectivity. Can you think of examples of communities that have benefited from global connectivity or have had negative experiences with it?
Yes, I mentioned this place Houston, Minnesota, that is not necessarily a part of the broadband, but understands that you can connect yourself. You can connect the whole community. I told the story earlier this evening about this little population of 1020 in which every household has a computer and is online. And they are connected to the school and are connected to one another. They are rebuilding the whole community around this. It is very, very important. In my own area of northeast Mississippi, we are working to bring broadband to the area. This is a high priority. We are working through TVA and the universities and a number of other resources. We will establish broadband. It is too early to know how successful we will be. But one thing I am absolutely sure of is that just the process of working together on this will have outcomes, not just in electronic terms. We are building networks that we can do other things with.
g) Which do you see as the greatest barrier - is it the lack of broadband infrastructure, or is it that people don’t understand how broadband can transform their businesses and organizations?
It’s both. We are trying to do some work in some African-American churches now, in which some of the African-American businessmen have a sense "Maybe I can get in on the ground floor of this. But I need both the infrastructure and the skills." And so in some of the churches we are teaching the adults how to use the Internet in fairly innovative ways and looking for different opportunities to market their goods and to work through these things.
h) The last horseman is the triumph of knowledge and technology over human toil. Have you seen where knowledge and technology have been used to positive benefit in rural communities?
Oh absolutely. Absolutely. We talked earlier about how large numbers of people lost their jobs when tractors and cotton pickers came in. But the quality of their life went up. The town itself began to shrink. But these people were displaced from these jobs and in some cases, they got better jobs. Now I don’t want to be Pollyanna about this, because the actual truth is that the majority of these people went to the cities. This was when welfare came in, and I interviewed many of these people, and found that large numbers of them never held a job on a permanent basis again.
So there is no Question that this displacement was at a cost. One of the things I really fear is that these innovative transitions are going to come at a cost to African Americans and other minorities - Latinos and the like. One of the things I am looking to do is to try to get our people involved in the use of technology from the beginning. I work in an African-American school in Dallas, Texas. We begin our kids at 3 years of age in school, and they are using computers at 4.
i) Does it take a different mindset to understand this era and to take advantage of these opportunities?
Absolutely. It is a humbling and frightening experience for an adult with better-than- average intelligence like myself to come up against some of these electronic devices and find myself woefully ignorant. It is a scary thought. So I know how scary it must be to an individual who doesn’t have these kinds of backgrounds.
Question #6: You have talked about working together. Could you comment on the importance of collaboration and examples you have seen of collaboration within a community and across communities?
We began our conversation by asking about some of the keys to successful community development. The number one key - no Question about it - is that you must have that individual with a passion. And then that individual has to have the kinds of skills to link to other people to form partnerships in the community and out. What I find in these communities is that these individuals learn to work together. In a typical community, you have the county government going in one direction, the city is going in another direction, the school is going in another direction, and the chamber is going in another direction. It happens on a regular basis.
What you want to go for is what Peter Senge talks about with alignment, where you can begin to get people moving, not in lockstep, but in a common direction, where they all see their at-stakeness, and where they can move forward. Tomorrow, I am going to show them from the corporate world examples of where some corporations have been able to gain this sense of alignment, and how the same principles will work in a community.
In the recent movie "The Aviator," there is a scene in which Howard Hughes is going for the world speed record in a plane. And he looks at the engineers, and they have all these studs sticking out, and he says "We’ve got to eliminate the drag." That’s a lot of what happens in these communities. To get rid of a lot of that drag, you have to learn to work together so there’s a meshing and there’s a moving forward. But that’s a real skill, and there are individuals who are good at that, and who can do that. Unless you can do that, you are lost.
What I see is these people in a community come together: they look first at their own assets, what is it we have that we can use, and how can we access these. Then they look to external assets - what is it we don’t have. Maybe they need the university, or some technical assistance. Rarely do I find the technical assistance they need in these small towns. They are just not there. You have to look outside yourself and find external resources, and bring them in as part of the alignment. You are creating these partnerships between yourself and these agencies, these technical kinds of skills. And then you are able to move forward.
I find that they move forward on a specific project. That is, "We are going to reduce the dropout of students in this school. That’s our project." "We are going to clean up downtown. That’s our project." Very specific, very focused, with a timetable. "By June we will have done this, and who is going to do this?"
Question #7: I remember you talking about how ordinary people can do extraordinary things, which I find very compelling. Could you elaborate on that?
What really gets my attention is where I have situations in which individuals without any extraordinary resources are able to achieve these things that are just a "wow factor." They just knock your socks off. I sometimes tell the story of this African-American school in Dallas - in the poorest neighborhood in Dallas, Texas; the least educated, highest unemployment, lowest economic level. The teachers themselves - when I looked at their vitas, I thought it was a joke. It looked like they decided to choose somebody with the worst grade point average from the worst schools in the southwest and make them their faculty. And they are. You couldn’t get good people to come into this area. Those people began to look, to see what they could do. They began to look at their assets, and the principal asked the teachers - what do you need to get better? And the teachers said "We need better training. We need better education."
Here’s where they set up a very interesting partnership. The principal set up a network. He went to the very best private schools in Dallas, Texas, and said "I have a group of teachers who are low achievers, but want to get better. Here’s the deal I am offering you. If they get better, our students will get better. You need black students, but you don’t want to lower your standards. We’ll give them to you. You come help train our teachers. Then they began to train the parents on how to be parents. We received the 91st percentile on achievement scores, with no dropouts, no kid ever in trouble. This is the kind of wow factor I am looking for. And I have found it in a lot of places.
The Colquitt, Georgia story of Swamp Gravy is a great story in and of itself, with extraordinary results. Here’s a community in which they are trying to find their assets. And somebody says facetiously "Well what we are good at is lying. We are great liars." Then this one lady puts a twist on this, and said, "We are, but we don’t call it lying. We call it storytelling." And so what they did was put together some stories. They hired a fine director-producer out of New York, a screenwriter out of Tennessee, and put on these plays, sold out every time. They started with a budget of $2,500, and they now have a budget of $2.5 million.
They used this money to buy every vacant building in Colquitt, Georgia. One they turned into a theater, another they turned into a bed and breakfast, another they turned into a mini-mall, another they turned into affordable housing, another into a community center. And so now they have created other revenue streams. We have movie makers who want to come in there and make movies - in a town of 1,869 people. Now that’s extraordinary results. The largest employer is the Miller County Arts Council. We haven’t added any new industry, nor will we ever. But we found other assets.
Question #8: Do you relate this notion of ordinary people doing extraordinary things to the notion of breakthroughs and of breakthrough solutions?
I do. In many of the cases, they are breakthroughs without necessarily technological breakthroughs. A lot of places I study don’t have those kinds of technological skills, but they are breakthroughs nevertheless. When I tell these stories, there is no Question that they are breakthroughs, because you can see the lights going on. Well, we can’t do stories, but we can do this or we can do that.
In my own home community, we have told stories through William Faulkner and others, but we have some assets that will make us a good retirement community, and we are beginning to do this. So there is no Question in my mind that these are breakthroughs.
Question #9: Is there hope for every community?
I wish I could say yes, but the answer is no. I wish I could say there is hope for every community, but there isn’t. When first I began my research, one of the articles I read was about communities that had become extinct. There were many communities in the 19th century that became extinct. There were many communities that have become extinct in the 20th century. Not all the communities will make it. It is in a very real sense, an elementary adaptation; it is the rule of nature. If you can’t adapt to the new environment, you will die. You are not going to change the environment. The environment is a given. You have to adapt to the global environment. You can’t go back. That’s the only ball game in town. Those that adapt will survive and go on. Those that don’t adapt will lose and die.
Question #10: But any one community could do this, could they not?
Yes. The most encouraging for me are those communities of 97 people - in Chimney Rock, North Carolina, where this group of citizens decided that their most important asset was this beautiful little stream, but they couldn’t get to it. So these people, who worked all day, would come at night, and turn the headlights on their cars, and lay stones along the creek bank, and created this walkway. They attract thousands of people who come and walk on it. This is exciting. If a community of 97 can do that, then any community can do this.
What you are doing now, Mark, in gathering this information, has to be done. I mentioned earlier George McLean. Every Wednesday morning George McLean would have breakfast, and he would have a stack of newspapers and magazines on his left side, with his coffee and piece of toast. He would pick these up and go through it, and looking for ideas, and put it down. And everybody who worked for him would do the same. When you came to work that day, he wanted to know if you found an idea that would help this newspaper run a little better. And if you found an idea that would help this community do a little better, he would ask them to talk about it. In fact, there’s absolutely nothing original in Tupelo, Mississippi, which is a model for community development. They got their ideas from newspapers and other sources. If they heard of an idea that was working well in Kyoto, Japan, they would send a group there. They still have $4 million with which they will send teachers anywhere in the United States and anywhere in the world. If there is a new idea in Helsinki, they would send someone to go there, get that idea, come back, and teach it to us. Those kinds of exchanges are absolutely essential if you are going to the high level things.
You have to continually learn. One of the things will stop your innovation is if you don’t open up your community to the resources in your place - your people. You just have to listen to your people. One of the basic premises I say is that any organization that doesn’t listen to its people, to its constituency, will die. Listening to them is a way of building trust.
Question #11: Finally, you know the University of Arkansas Cooperative Extension Service and its Breakthrough Solutions partners will soon be making its Breakthrough Solutions program available to communities, with the purpose of equipping community leaders to understand the global economy and to create breakthrough solutions. Could you comment on it?
This is necessary. It is absolutely necessary. The work - I draw a parallel to the work of Peter Senge at MIT at the Sloan School of Management. What Peter Senge has done in his creating learning organizations is to bring together the best ideas from all kinds of corporations and share them and exchange them. And that’s what you are doing. You are bringing these things to these communities. Now ultimately they have to shape it in their own image. And there is a lot of creativity there. It always has to happen. In fact, Senge points out to these corporate leaders - "You can learn a lot from GE, you can learn a lot from Motorola, but ultimately you have to take all of these parts and make it work with your corporate culture. And the same is true with the kinds of things you are doing. They have got to have these things. They have to have these raw materials. They don’t have the time to read and study on their own. It’s just not possible. So this is an invaluable source - this is just terrific for these places.
Thank you for all the work you do here in Arkansas. As you know, I call on you to help us in Mississippi on a regular basis.
Dr. Grisham, thank you so very much for taking time from your busy schedule to visit with us. It has been most enlightening, and I know your insights will be of interest to everyone who can see this interview.
October 2004
Sojourners Magazine
The Tupelo Miracle
How faith and a newspaper transformed a Mississippi community…Danny Duncan Collum
http://www.sojo.net/index.cfm?action=magazine.article&issue=soj0410&arti...
Increasingly, Americans are becoming aware that a few large corporations control what most of us see, hear, and read. For example, 22 companies own 39 percent of the 1,457 daily newspapers in America, accounting for 69 percent of daily newspaper circulation, according to 2002 figures from the Editor & Publisher International Year Book. The top 10 companies control 51 percent of daily newspaper circulation.
But when we talk about the dangers of media consolidation, we tend to speak in abstractions. When a few corporations own all the media outlets, we might say, the country will lose its diversity of voices. The marketplace of ideas will be monopolized. Avenues for dissent will be closed.
All true. But when I think about what is lost with the demise of locally owned media, I also think of a particular media institution in my corner of the world. It embodies what locally owned and locally rooted media could be and the possibilities that disappear in a world conquered by CNN, Fox News, and USA Today.
For 70 years, the Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal (formerly the Tupelo Daily Journal) has been a voice of faith and reason and an engine for social progress in what was once one of the most underdeveloped and undereducated regions of America. The Journal—led by its publisher-owner, the late George McLean—was the lead-
ing force behind decades of economic and community development that transformed Lee County (of which Tupelo is county seat) from the poorest county in the nation’s poorest state to the second most affluent.
Along the way Tupelo and the surrounding area developed traditions of interracial cooperation, charitable giving, and enlightened self-interest that are the marvel of community development experts nationwide. Today all stock in the Daily Journal is owned by a charitable foundation that invests all dividends into projects for the development of families and communities in 16 counties of northeast Mississippi. And The Chronicle of Philanthropy recently reported that Lee County ranked 43rd of 3,091 counties in the nation in charitable giving.
If the Daily Journal were starting today, it might never happen.
I first saw the Daily Journal in the summer of 1997, when my family was preparing to move from Alexandria, Virginia, to a small town in the northeast region of my native state. My wife, Polly, and I were staying in a motel in our new home town while we looked for a house. On our first morning I stepped out of the room to get a morning newspaper. And there it was, staring out at me through the clear plastic cover on the newspaper box: Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal— "A locally owned newspaper dedicated to the service of God and mankind."
I prepared myself for the worst. Who else but a bunch of fundamentalists would put a religious slogan on the front of a daily newspaper? The only time I’d seen anything remotely similar was decades earlier in Indianapolis when I spotted an intensely conservative local paper that printed a Bible verse on the front page of each edition. But at least the Journal was local, so I put in two quarters, fetched a cup of coffee from the motel lobby, and sat down expecting to read the day’s news according to Donald Wildmon (founder of the Tupelo-based American Family Association).
What I found instead was a thoroughly professional small city paper that, when it betrayed a bias, seemed firmly in favor of public education, racial reconciliation, and a bottom-up vision of economic development. The ethos of the paper, like that of the community it served, was Protestant and Christian, but (disregarding the archaic reference to "mankind") it was more Tony Campolo than Jerry Falwell.
This was a pleasant surprise. But it also presented me with a puzzle. How did such an anomalous institution come about? And even more baffling, how did it survive in today’s cutthroat, merger-driven media environment?
I’d just had my first brush with what many people around the country call "The Tupelo Miracle." In the months to come, I learned the whole remarkable story behind this remarkable daily newspaper and, to declare all interests, became an occasional contributor to its Sunday op-ed page.
In 1934, George McLean was, like much of the country, out of work. He had most recently been a sociology instructor at what was then Southwestern College (now Rhodes College) in Memphis, Tennessee. McLean, a devout Presbyterian, was fired from that position when his Christianity drove him to cross the river into Arkansas and get involved with a cadre of Christian radicals who were organizing the interracial Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union. But unlike most of the Depression-era unemployed, McLean had a small sum of family money to fall back on. He began looking for a business that would allow him to make a living and still practice his social gospel ideals.
The Tupelo Journal was for sale. So, as McLean wrote later, he "bought a bankrupt biweekly from a bankrupt bank in the middle of a Depression." The paper became the lecture podium for McLean’s theories of Christian community development, and Lee County became his laboratory.
One of McLean’s key principles held that "human resources are our most vital assets" and that development of the community depended upon "the fullest possible development of each person in our community."
That was a very convenient principle for northeast Mississippi, since it had no natural resources. There were no extractable minerals. The farmland was of poor quality. There were no navigable rivers in the region and few railroads. People were all it had. Most of them were poor white people (like the family of Tupelo native Elvis Presley) who descended from subsistence farmers who’d scratched a meager living from the red clay hillsides since the Chickasaw were driven out a century before.
McLean set about getting his newspaper back on a solid footing. He turned out to have a knack for the news business. The Journal became a daily in 1936, and even in the depths of the Depression it attracted readers and advertisers. As soon as the paper was making money, McLean began to spend it on community development projects. The first was the formation of Rural Community Development Councils (RCDCs) throughout Lee and neighboring counties. This helped foster community projects in the countryside, built bridges between town and country, and encouraged a sense of regional identity.
In 1948 McLean led in the establishment of Tupelo’s Community Development Foundation. In the 1950s and ’60s the mechanization of agriculture created mass unemployment and out-migration across much of Mississippi, but throughout those years Tupelo was growing and developing by attracting what were, for Mississippi, good-paying industrial production jobs. When Southern communities were desperate for any source of employment, Tupelo actually turned away companies that were mainly interested in a source of cheap labor. This story is told in detail in Tupelo: The Evolution of a Community by University of Mississippi sociologist Vaughn L. Grisham, published by the Kettering Foundation. Grisham heads the George McLean Institute for Community Development at the university, which supports community development efforts on the "Tupelo model" in the rest of northeast Mississippi. As a consultant he carries the Tupelo message to dozens of community development groups in small towns across the country.
Due to the influence of McLean and the Journal, and unlike the rest of the state, Tupelo complied peacefully with civil rights laws and integrated its public schools without a court order. McLean’s second core principle of community development was interdependence—the success of any individual or group within the community depended upon the success of the entire community. That meant that, country or city, black or white, northeast Mississippians were encouraged to see themselves as being in the same boat. So when other communities around the Deep South experienced the conflict of sit-ins, lynchings, and battles over school desegregation, Tupelo united and prospered. "We managed to get through the civil rights era with minimal confrontation," says Journal editorial page editor Joe Rutherford, "and with a somewhat better perspective on human relations."
Peaceful integration of the schools and continuing white support for public education was just one part of McLean’s crusade for quality public education, which was at the core of developing the region’s human resources. In the 1970s, the Daily Journal decided to help raise the reading level of Lee County’s public school students. So it laid out company money to hire a teacher’s aide for every first and second grade class in every public school in Lee County.
Current Journal associate editor Danny McKenzie recalls, "I worked at the Journal from 1974 until 1979, when I moved to Owensboro, Kentucky, and became sports editor of the Messenger Inquirer. After I’d been there about a year, a story about the Daily Journal and Mr. McLean moved on the Associated Press wire service. It specifically mentioned Mr. McLean paying for a classroom reading assistant in every first-grade classroom…. The publisher of the Owensboro paper read the story, was intrigued by it, came to me, and asked how much Mr. McLean and the Journal spent on the program. I found out the Journal had spent about a million bucks. When I gave the information to my publisher in Owensboro, he turned pale and said he would get back to me. That was nearly 25 years ago, and I’ve not heard from him."
In 1973, McLean unveiled the final phase of his community development strategy when he turned over the Journal and its allied enterprises to a nonprofit foundation, called Christian Research Education Action Technical Enterprises, abbreviated as CREATE. For 31 years now, CREATE has been the sole stockholder in the Daily Journal and used its dividends throughout northeast Mississippi to serve the purposes McLean set for it: 1) The "development of the very young," especially in the first five years of life; 2) job training; and 3) "the conscious, planned development of competent, unselfish leaders."
The foundation also ensured the Journal’s local ownership. McLean wrote prophetically at the time: We believe that a newspaper is a public trust and that it should constantly serve the people to the greatest possible extent…. We believe that locally owned newspapers can best reflect the values and serve the interests of the people of any community. We regard the increasing concentration of ownership of newspapers, radio, and television stations in the hands of a few big chains as potentially very dangerous to freedom of information in this country. Another serious problem with increasing outside control of the media is that the "bottom line," that is the desire for more and more profits, will take the place of service to readers, listeners, or advertisers.
Danny McKenzie, who put in several years at the Gannett-owned paper in Jackson, Mississippi, confirms McLean’s wisdom. "No matter how good the intentions of a chain newspaper might be, it still has to get every little expenditure cleared through corporate headquarters, and oftentimes that headquarters knows little, if anything, about the local community."
According to Journal editor Lloyd Gray, "Especially in today’s chain-dominated atmosphere, [the Journal] stands out as seeing profitability as a means to carrying out its mission rather than the sum of its existence. Our profit margin expectations, while healthy, are far below the norm for chain newspapers." Today the Daily Journal has a circulation of about 36,000. The population of Lee County is about 75,000.
How Does the "service of God and mankind" figure in the operation of a daily newspaper? Lloyd Gray, whose grandfather, father, and brother have all been Episcopal bishops of Mississippi, says, "I have always had a view of my work, wherever it was, as a vocational calling. Theologically I am drawn by the notion of community, and building community is the way the Daily Journal is in ‘service of God and mankind.’ It requires concern for the welfare of every individual, which in turn leads to the strengthening of the whole." Gray also notes, "We are probably one of the smallest daily papers, for example, to have a full-time religion editor [and] we declare ourselves firmly in the Christian tradition each weekend with an editorial that reflects on the ramifications of faith in how we live our individual and corporate lives."
Those Sunday editorials are in fact one of the Journal’s most distinctive features. They might include reflections from Richard Foster or Henri Nouwen; hardly what you’d expect in the Baptist-ruled Bible Belt. A recent one on election-year religion consisted mostly of quotes from Jim Wallis’ The Soul of Politics. Gray says the editorials "affirm the religiosity of our readership while offering, sometimes subtly and sometimes not, a different sort of theology than that of the dominant religious culture. I know of no chain-based newspaper that would believe ‘faith-based’ editorials to be appropriate. I may be wrong, but I believe this practice is virtually unique among secular daily newspapers."
In 1970, on the 100th anniversary of the paper he bought, McLean wrote down his 10 guiding principles for a newspaper or other business institution. The last one came from Luke 6:38: "Give and it will be given to you; good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over, will be put into your lap." McLean wrote, "There is far more real truth in this than in anything that Adam Smith, the father of Capitalism, or Karl Marx, the father of Communism, ever said."
Among other things, the existence of the Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal proves that, in the right hands, the teachings of Jesus can be a business model. It also proves that a local media outlet can change the way people see themselves and their community and inspire them to act in new ways. That’s a possibility that is being extinguished with every media merger.
As Joe Rutherford put it when asked what makes the Journal different from chain-owned newspapers, "We actually give a damn about place and people."
Danny Duncan Collum, a Sojourners contributing editor, teaches writing at Rust College in Holly Springs, Mississippi.