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  Black Americans’ aspirations for “social equality” and violent altercations like the incident in Texas were relatively minor concerns compared with a much larger problem that confronted southern plantation owners during the war. Touring Louisiana early in 1919 to assess the farm labor situation, one War Department official saw “hundreds of acres of untouched land formerly cultivated, and what land was planted proved to be in bad shape because of the lack of hands. . . . Scores of mules in pasture because there was no help to hitch them to the plow. . . . Tons and tons of cane soured on the ground, left from last year for lack of men.”23 The draft and migration created severe difficulties for planters, whose workers left rural areas by the thousands to take advantage of new economic opportunities. Between 1910 and 1920 Louisiana's black population dropped by 13,617. Although this was only about a 2 percent decrease for the state, the decline in the number of African Americans living in the sugar- and cotton-growing regions was much greater. Most of the plantation parishes lost between 15 and 30 percent of their black inhabitants during this period. (See Table 4.1.) Without their customary access to abundant and cheap labor, plantation owners faced the prospect of decreased production and declining profits.

  An incident that occurred even before the beginning of the war in Europe foreshadowed some of the later responses of Louisiana landowners. In March 1914 a group of armed sugar planters from Assumption Parish appeared at the Texas and Pacific Railroad passenger depot and dispersed about sixty African Americans who were awaiting the arrival of a northbound train. Witnesses reported that the white men were “among the most prominent and influential citizens of the lower Assumption neighborhood,” and that their action was designed to “put a stop to the work of the labor agents who have been enticing large numbers of negro fields hands away from this section during the last several weeks.” A newspaper article about the incident explained that initially the agents had not been a problem because there had been a large surplus of workers in the parish, but that “this surplus has long since been exhausted, and if the supply of labor is still further depleted the planters will face a serious situation in the cultivation of their crops.”24

  The following month the Houma Courier reported that a “new messiah” had recently appeared in Terrebonne Parish to lure black sugar workers away to the cotton parishes of northern Louisiana with promises of higher wages. The writer noted that the loss of labor from the parish was a serious problem and urged planters to take action to stop it. The article pointed out, “Other parishes warn these messiahs to keep out, and they find it healthier to heed the warning.” In December, Madison Parish plantation owners held a meeting to discuss the problems they too were experiencing with people who were attempting to “entice away” their labor. The result was a notice to labor agents, printed in the Madison Journal, that stated: “The planters of Madison Parish . . . will not tolerate any one in the parish enticing or in any way interfering with our labor. All white or colored strangers will be called upon to explain their business in Madison Parish and if they are not Labor Agents they will be welcome.”25

  After 1916, when the problems caused by migration reached acute proportions, labor agents faced more serious obstacles to their recruiting efforts. Local and state authorities passed legislation to restrict their activities, imposing expensive licensing fees and taxes along with hefty fines for violating the regulations governing their work. Those who still managed to continue their recruiting efforts risked physical violence when they ventured into rural towns and parishes. Plantation owners became so suspicious of outsiders that any strange face they encountered in their communities might be subject to attack. For instance, when Hizzie Pringle went to pay his sister's debt to her landlord, Benjamin Kinchen, the planter assaulted him with no provocation. According to an investigator, Kinchen justified his action “on the grounds that he thought Pringle was a labor agent.”26

  At the same time that they attempted to halt the flow of migrants to the North, white Louisianans sought to force all black people who remained in the state into “useful” employment, a term that often seemed to describe only those low-wage occupations that African Americans had traditionally held. Wartime necessity and the federal government's efforts to direct all the nation's resources into achieving victory offered employers and legislators a powerful tool for this purpose. In May 1918 Selective Service director Enoch Crowder issued a “work or fight” order mandating that all able-bodied men in the United States either serve in the armed forces or be engaged in a necessary civilian occupation. Local authorities eagerly enforced the order. The Louisiana state legislature applied the ruling to all men between the ages of seventeen and fifty-five (compared with the Selective Service age limit of forty-five) and empowered sheriffs to seek out and punish those not in compliance. Some parishes passed resolutions requiring

  Table 4.1 African American Migration in Louisiana during World War I

  Number of African Americans in Parish

  Parish 1910 1920 Percentage Change

  Cotton Parishes

  Avoyelles 12,039 10,353 –14

  Bossier 16,735 15,730 –6

  Catahoula 5,195 5,122 –1

  Claiborne 14,938 14,798 –1

  Concordia 11,941 9,823 –18

  De Soto 17,932 17,914 –(-)a

  East Carroll 10,390 9,701 –7

  East Feliciana 14,536 12,004 –17

  Franklin 5,264 10,720 +104

  Madison 9,455 9,060 –4

  Morehouse 13,971 13,140 –6

  Natchitoches 20,334 20,697 +2

  Red River 6,212 7,589 +22

  Richland 10,463 11,996 +15

  St. Landryb 31,234 26,507 –15

  Tensas 15,613 10,314 –34

  Webster 9,900 11,387 +15

  West Carroll 2,724 2,370 –13

  West Feliciana 11,012 10,187 –7

  Sugar Parishes

  Ascension 11,255 9,490 –16

  Assumption 10,105 7,487 –26

  Iberia 14,474 10,898 –25

  Iberville 19,145 15,372 –20

  Lafayette 10,734 10,811 +1

  Lafourche 7,973 5,888 –26

  Plaquemines 6,847 5,393 –21

  Pointe Coupee 17,147 14,981 –13

  St. Charles 6,720 4,347 –35

  St. James 13,164 11,602 –12

  St. John the Baptist 8,126 6,415 –21

  St. Martin 9,836 7,902 –19

  St. Mary 21,266 15,174 –29

  Terrebonne 11,194 8,742 –22

  West Baton Rouge 9,223 7,485 –19

  Rice/Grain Parishes

  Acadia 6,546 7,526 +15

  Allen NAc 6,352 NA

  Beauregard NA 6,105 NA

  Cameron 538 585 +9

  Jefferson Davis NA 4,837 NA

  Vermilion 4,500 4,560 +1

  Subsistence/Truck Parishes

  Bienville 9,464 8,619 –9

  Caldwell 3,465 2,983 –14

  Evangeline NA 5,681 NA

  Grant 4,869 4,045 –17

  Jackson 3,996 4,006 +(-)

  Jefferson 6,785 5,880 –13

  La Salle 1,953 1,525 –22

  Lincoln 7,289 6,310 –13

  Livingston 1,377 1,667 +21

  Sabine 4,164 4,364 +5

  St. Bernard 1,933 1,597 –17

  St. Helena 4,573 4,229 –8

  St. Tammany 6,731 7,648 +14

  Tangipahoa 9,135 8,892 –3

  Union 7,448 6,114 –18

  Vernon 3,716 5,103 +37

  Washington 5,458 7,391 +35

  Winn 3,931 3,385 –14

  Parishes with Cities of 10,000 People or More

  Caddo 36,142 37,801 +5

  Calcasieub 16,562 8,736 –47

  East Baton Rouge 21,342 23,098 +8

  Orleans 89,262 100,930 +13

  Ouachita 14,153 13,897 –2

  Rapides 21,445 24,992 +17

  Total for Louisiana 713,874 700,257 –2

  SOURCE: Bureau of the Census, Thirteenth Census of the Unite
d States Taken in the Year 1910, Volume 2: Population (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1913), 790– 91, and Fourteenth Census of the United States Taken in the Year 1920, Volume 3: Population (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1922), 393–99.

  a(-) indicates less than 0.5 percent.

  bThe decreases in African American population in St. Landry and Calcasieu Parishes between 1910 and 1920 resulted in part from boundary changes.

  cNA indicates data not available (parishes created after 1910).

  women as well as men to work; others tightened the enforcement of vagrancy laws to ensure that no “slackers” escaped performing their patriotic duty.27

  Often these efforts seemed directed particularly at African Americans. Perhaps (but probably not) by coincidence, a list of nonessential occupations prepared by the Louisiana State Council of Defense in September 1918 ruled out many jobs traditionally held by self-employed black people. Those who worked in barber shops, poolrooms, gambling establishments, shoe shine stands, fruit stands, and as porters were not recognized as contributing anything to the war effort and faced the threat of arrest unless they found some other employment. Rumors circulated among African Americans that the new work or fight laws would allow people to be forced to labor under conditions resembling peonage. The chairman of the federal government's War Labor Policy Board dismissed these concerns, saying that the orders simply reflected “the national spirit and the national will,—that everyone should contribute to the service for freedom upon which the nation is engaged either in useful industry or in useful military service.”28

  Whatever the intentions of lawmakers, black people's fears were well founded. When the NAACP's Walter White visited several southern states in 1918 to investigate complaints of abuse, he found that employers were indeed using compulsory work laws to force African Americans to labor for low wages. In St. Mary Parish, the sheriff walked into a black restaurant one morning and told its owner that two young men he employed must go and work at a nearby mill. When the restaurateur protested and pointed out that the youths were younger than drafting age, the sheriff swore at him, then told him to close his business down because he too would have to work at the mill or go to jail. Black people in Caddo, Rapides, and Ouachita Parishes told White of similar incidents. Civil rights leaders reported these abuses to federal agencies, but the authorities did nothing to prevent such practices. Director of Negro Economics George E. Haynes explained that the federal government had no power to interfere with local or state laws, regardless of how unjust they might be.29

  Coercive labor legislation seems only to have encouraged more African Americans to leave the South, as did the increasing levels of violence that accompanied frustrated planters’ efforts to prevent black people from going. Attempts to enlist the aid of prominent African Americans in encouraging workers to remain in the region were not successful either. A government researcher sent to investigate the causes of migration from Mississippi and Louisiana in 1917 found that black community leaders in those states did little to stop the exodus, for they knew that the resulting labor shortages could be used to force concessions from white people and improve conditions for those who remained behind. According to his account, African Americans were “silently hoping that the migration may continue in such increasing proportions as to bring about a successful bloodless revolution, assuring equal treatment in business, in the schools, on the trains, and under the law.”30 A letter written by New Orleans NAACP secretary H. George Davenport to the national office in May 1917 suggests that the investigator was right. Davenport planned to move to Chicago in June and stay there permanently. “[I] am tired of the South,” he wrote, “protest has failed here so far, the exodus will solve the problem quicker than protest I am sure, because the crackers here are all worked up over it, the planters held a meeting here to try and discourage migration north.”31

  Having failed to coerce black people into staying in the South, white people eventually realized that a more effective strategy might be to make the region a better place to live in. Heeding the advice that many black and some white observers had long been giving them, planters and local authorities began advocating higher wage rates, better treatment of tenants and sharecroppers, improvement of housing and schools, and efforts to protect black people from mob violence.32 In a speech delivered at an NAACP conference in 1919, Louisiana's state agent of rural schools explained that plantation owners and other employers of black labor usually showed scant interest in providing education for African Americans, but “the World War helped to broaden our vision. The Negro migration opened our eyes. Many of our large employers are ready now to provide school facilities for the colored youth.” He then outlined the improvements that many parishes were making in the quality of instruction provided to black children. St. Mary Parish had recently set aside six thousand dollars for African American schools, and Terrebonne Parish, “which never owned one dollar's worth of colored school property,” was completing one of nine schoolhouses that would eventually cost twenty thousand dollars. Natchitoches, Tangipahoa, Caddo, Bienville, Lincoln, Morehouse, Bossier, East Caroll, Beauregard, and Winn Parishes all had similar building plans.33

  One of the most effective measures taken to stem the migration, and one that benefited many rural black people, was the expansion of the federal government's Agricultural Extension Service. The Extension Service had its origins in government efforts to combat the boll weevil in the late 1890s. Agents from the U.S. Department of Agriculture visited farmers to educate them about the disease and to teach them methods of controlling it. By the early twentieth century, Extension Service functions had broadened to include training in a variety of techniques to produce better crop yields and higher incomes for farmers. However, its efforts mostly aided prosperous landowners who could afford to take advantage of new technologies and ignored poorer people—especially African Americans—at the bottom of the agricultural ladder.34

  In 1906 black educator Booker T. Washington initiated the first agricultural extension project among African Americans through the “Movable School,” a program that sent teachers from Tuskegee Institute into rural Alabama to demonstrate new farming equipment and techniques. Washington's attempts to persuade the Department of Agriculture to establish a more wide-ranging program of black extension work met with only limited success until the beginning of World War I and the Great Migration. Fears that food shortages might result from the scarcity of labor and the need to supply European allies with agricultural products encouraged the Extension Service to pay more attention to black farmers. Administrators instructed white agents to assist African Americans in their districts and hired more black agents in the hope that they might persuade tenants and sharecroppers to remain on the plantations. Black extension agents thereafter became a permanent, though underfunded, part of the federal Extension Service.35

  Extension work among African Americans in Louisiana began in 1913, when Tuskegee Institute graduate Thomas J. Jordan was assigned to two northern parishes. He operated in his first year without a salary, surviving on funds raised for him at church meetings and gifts of farm produce from the black people he worked with. In 1914 the Smith-Lever Act provided for the cooperative funding of extension agents through federal, state, and local authorities, and over the next four years sixteen more black extension agents were employed in Louisiana. The scope of their activities depended to a large extent on money provided by parish police juries and school boards, whose motivations were conservative. A report on the work of black agents written in 1920 emphasized the role they had played in decelerating the migration of African Americans out of the region. A white agent who worked with African Americans in a parish not served by any black agent revealed where planter priorities lay when he proudly noted, “I have practically accomplished to keep cheap labor here for all.” As soon as the war ended, six of the state's seventeen black agents were dropped because of “lack of funds.”36

  Black extension workers’ dependence on local elites’ willingness to
finance their services and close supervision of their activities by white agents meant that they were unlikely to become outspoken proponents of racial justice. An agent in Caddo Parish lost his position because, according to a report, he “failed to distinguish between his duties as an agent and his rights as a citizen.”37 Most others avoided doing anything that could be construed as interfering with “race relations” or encouraging political activism. In many ways extension agents fulfilled a similar role to the middle-class black reformers discussed in recent studies by Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham and Kevin Gaines.38 Their work helped to reinforce white supremacy by serving the interests of plantation owners, but agents also challenged dominant racial ideologies by attempting to “uplift” African Americans, individually and collectively. Despite the limits placed on them, extension agents’ efforts to improve the lives of black agricultural workers and the enthusiasm they brought to this task achieved some significant gains.

  A measure of the extension agents’ contribution is that rural black people welcomed and appreciated their aid. Parish reports regularly praised the efforts of African American farmers and the dedication they showed in carrying out the new techniques they learned. In 1919 a white agent in Pointe Coupee Parish stated that he had “found many negro farmers very much alert and ambitious to learn more about better methods of farming.” Another agent reported that he had “many Negro friends of Demonstration work. They would utilize all my time if I would permit it.” T. J. Watson found black farmers in Madison Parish to be “responsive and apparently anxious for advice on better methods of farming, stock raising, poultry, gardening, orchard and general improvement of the home and its surroundings.” Some agents even concluded that African Americans were more interested in extension work than white farmers. According to the state administrative report for 1922, it was “a fact well recognized by County Agents and Specialists that the negro farmer responds to suggestions much more readily than does the white farmer.”39