South wired to bridge digital divide -Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Library Initiative leading the revolution

The current flap over Alabama’s Supreme Court chief justice and his attempt to display a granite slab of the Ten Commandments in the court lobby in Montgomery should not obscure the fact that the city has been at the center of two far more significant revolutions in American history.

By HUBERT G. LOCKE
SPECIAL TO THE POST-INTELLIGENCER

(Thanks to Marc Brenman for passing this along- Russ)

In the first, six states of the lower South announced their secession from the United States and sent delegates to Montgomery to form the Southern confederacy — the first step in what, two months later, became the Civil War. That was in 1861.

Almost a century later, Montgomery became the site of a second revolution — this one spawned by the refusal of a black seamstress to give her seat on a public bus to a white male rider — the beginning of an era since called the Civil Rights Struggle in America.

Currently, a third and quieter revolution is taking place in the South, Montgomery once again finds itself at its center, and its outcomes may be as significant as were those of the first two upheavals.

I had a chance to observe elements of this third revolution a few weeks ago while traveling with a University of Washington colleague through Montgomery, nearby Selma and the swath of rural Alabama that those two cities dominate. It is a stretch of farmland whites call the Black Belt, ostensibly because of its rich soil but one suspects covertly in acknowledgement of the overwhelmingly black populace that resides there.

We were there to look at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Library Initiative, an effort in which the foundation has installed computers in the public libraries of every county where 10 percent or more of the populace falls below the national poverty level. It is the largest, single effort to overcome the much-touted "digital divide" that threatens to leave massive numbers of the poor and undereducated behind in a society in which technological literacy has become a sine qua non of success.

So what’s happened in the Black Belt as a result of the Library Initiative? Well, it’s a pretty remarkable sight, even for a technological troglodyte like me for whom the Old South is an unremitting source of bad memories. We entered library after library — some in towns small enough to see their outskirts in any direction from town center one looked — to see older people as well as the young, black and white alike, hunkered down over computer keyboards, making use of machines that I would have never predicted would be used so avidly by people, many of whom likely find themselves in a library for the first time in their lives.

Given the customary distaste for prying, one had to be both casual and surreptitious to observe to what use the computers were being put. There were, to be sure, in one library, kids playing computer games, but it was the last week of summer vacation (schools start dreadfully early in the South) and the librarian seemed disinclined to be hard-nosed about the rules. Elsewhere, adults were doing resumes or looking up health data. The librarians tell us that the computers are eagerly sought sources of information for job searches or used by high schoolers to ferret out materials for term papers, and for preparing them.

In one community, women who operate day care centers in their homes come into the local library to obtain the latest word on regulatory requirements, program ideas and meal-planning guides. In another city, the library has a computer learning center that has enabled adults from 18 to 80 to prepare for and successfully pass high school equivalency exams.

The digital divide loomed as such a threat because it appeared, at the outset, to be one more instance in this society in which the well off would have access to a resource that the poor couldn’t afford. What’s revolutionary about the Gates Foundation effort is not only that it has helped dampened this criticism; but in the process, it has made what is perhaps an unanticipated but significant contribution to changes in the age-old patterns of life and relationships in the American South.

From the moment one arrives at a southern airport these days, the presence of the computer is everywhere — from the airlines and car rental ticket counters to the hotel reception desks to the check-out counters at the markets, the tellers at the banks, the cashiers at restaurants. In all these places, one now sees black faces — not only because the struggle of the ’60s demolished the traditional, segregated Southern way of life but also because black Southerners are gaining the same sets of technological skills that their white counterparts seek. Only those of us who remember the Old South can appreciate how truly revolutionary this is, and how potentially far-reaching it can be for a section of the country that has always lagged behind in nearly everything that is decent and progressive.

One cannot help but come away from a project like this speculating about what the next steps should or might be to sustain and build on what’s being accomplished here for the region’s poorest and most disconnected citizens. But one also cannot help but be pleased — in a period in our society in which there is so little that is positive or uplifting to take note of — that such a momentous change is occurring.

Hubert G. Locke, Seattle, is a retired professor and former dean of the Daniel J. Evans Graduate School of Public Affairs at the University of Washington.

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/137091_locke29.html