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Southern Echo: Building Power in Marginalized
Communities
Southern
Echo is a grassroots education and leadership organization
based in Jackson, Mississippi. Founded in 1989, it provides training
and technical and legal assistance to communities of color in
Mississippi and 11 states across the southern United States. FACT
has funded Southern Echo since 1996 and seen it grow from a small,
community-based group into a political powerbroker capable of
influencing the dynamics of the state legislature.
Echo first made its mark in redistricting, the process by which
states use census data to create voting districts. The party in
power draws the boundaries of each district, usually in a way
that helps it win elections, and limits the electoral prospects
of black candidates. In the early 1990s, with the technical assistance
of long-time FACT grantee, the Progressive Technology Project
(PTP), Southern Echo and other grassroots organizations led an
18-month campaign to force the state legislature to create majority
black districts that could elect candidates to represent their
needs and interests. By 1993, the legislature’s Black Caucus
held the balance of power on important bills such as appropriations,
and the grassroots redistricting coalition was strong enough to
defeat efforts by the governor and legislative leaders to dismantle
the new districts.
The legislature had similarly excluded blacks from educational
opportunities by cutting funds for the predominantly black public
school system, which cannot compete with all-white private funded
schools. In 1997, the Black Caucus and community groups prodded
the legislature to pass the first major public education appropriation
in a generation to fund capital improvements, teacher salaries,
and technology in poorer school districts. When the governor vetoed
the bill and the legislature agreed to cut the appropriation in
half, a black committee chair led the fight to override the veto
by four votes.
In 2000, state officials sought input from Southern Echo’s
coalition of grassroots community educational organizations on
how to hold local districts accountable for low performance on
standardized tests. The state eventually implemented the working
group’s proposals to allow parents and community leaders
to participate in evaluating local schools and developing and
implementing improvement plans. When the governor again proposed
cutting education funding in 2004, Southern Echo developed materials
and worked with an alliance of parents, teachers, students, and
others to gather signatures to resist the cuts, and most were
ultimately rescinded.
On the strength of this new educational alliance, Southern Echo
jointly sponsored a four-day conference in November 2004 called
“Dismantling the Achievement Gap.” More than 300 stakeholders
shared their experiences and discussed the problems and possible
solutions in the state education system. Based on analysis and
strategies that emerged during the conference, activists from
eight southern states are developing a regional approach to educational
reform. |
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