From sorry to Surry: Family and faith revive a poor rural community

Policy Review, Winter 1994 by Jendryka, Brian

Twenty-five years ago, it was called Sorry County. The education system was in shambles, the area was economically depressed, and black residents--64 percent of the county's population--were shut out of the political process. Today, in Surry County, Virginia, 90 percent of high school graduates go on to further education or training after high school, the community has new medical and recreation centers, and blacks hold a majority on the school board and the county board of supervisors. What happened? Surry County residents decided to take charge of their lives, and the result has been a vastly improved school system, a low crime rate, a county where the citizens respect one another, and a place where the family and the community come first.

A short ferry ride across the James River brings visitors to Surry, a rural, wooded county in southeastern Virginia. Dotted with cotton fields, Surry resembles a typical county in the Southern "black belt." The population has remained stable at 6,000 residents for over 200 years. Surry residents are hard-working, religious, and mostly black. Until 1971, they lived in what Don Anderson, founder of the National Association for the Southern Poor, calls the "apartheid south": They had a majority of the population, but no representation in the government.

THE ASSEMBLY CONCEPT

Mr. Anderson's organization, which he founded in 1967, is responsible for promoting a self-help style of governing through a Jeffersonian-based representation structure called an assembly. To promote local, grassroots politics, Thomas Jefferson favored subdividing counties into wards, where "each small ward would thus become a republic within itself, and every man in the state would thus become an acting member of the common government." Such a system of local government compels citizen involvement. Indeed, this notion of representation and self-help, embodied in the assemblies, has helped many Southern counties, including Surry, get back on track. Assemblies now help mobilize the poor in 41 counties in North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and Virginia. "The wit of man cannot devise a more solid base for a free, durable and well-administered republic," Jefferson said.

The Surry County Assembly, the first and most successful of its kind, began in 1968. At the time, the scene for blacks in Surry County was a common one in the impoverished south: inadequate housing, hunger, unsanitary conditions and widespread poverty. Houses with running water were the exception, not the rule.

The Assembly helped solve the county's biggest problem--the disorganization and disjointedness of the poor. Originally conceived by Mr. Anderson in the 1950s, the assembly works by dividing a community's adult population into conferences of 50 people. Each conference is represented by one person, who works with a committee of seven people. Each of these seven people represent seven additional community members. Thus, a community of 5,000 adults has 50 representatives, with each person working with no more than seven other people. The result is the mobilization of a large group of people, each a part of a very small constituency.

"The Assembly brought everyone to a central place. It brought all those minds together," says Charles Pettaway, one of the county's leaders at the time, and the Assembly's first president. At its peak in the mid-seventies, the Surry Assembly consisted of 27 conferences, representing almost 1,500 adults, nearly half the county's adult population. Galvanized by poor schools and lack of representation in the county government, the Assembly went to work. After intense voter-registration and organization efforts, the assembly was able to elect a black majority to the county board of supervisors in 1971. As a result, Surry's majority poor now had political advocates in office for a range of social issues. Says Mr. Pettaway: "We moved this county."

EDUCATIONAL REVOLUTION

The first thing they moved was the deficient school system. At the time, there were two public high schools, one for black students and one for white students. In 1964, Mr. Pettaway won the right to have his children go to the white school, which enjoyed numerous academic and physical advantages (among them more qualified teachers and a better gym and cafeteria) over its black counterpart.

Another step in this direction was to bring in Charles Penn as superintendent in 1977. When he arrived, Mr. Penn found an education system badly neglected. Though blacks had won the right to go to the white public high school, parents of the white students had transferred their kids--and money--out of the public schools and into a local private institution. The superintendent of schools, in charge of both the public schools and the local private academy, gave white students scholarships drawn from public school money. As a result, the majority of public funds were being spent on white students in the private school, leaving black students in the public school with leaky roofs, broken boilers and other calamities. The Surry public school system was spending just $169 per student, compared with a national average of $1,638.