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  Black participants in the programs viewed extension agents as potential allies in their struggle for economic independence. Harrison Brown recalled that agents offered sharecropping families valuable training in how to make their small plots of land more productive, saying, “That's what we mostly suffered for in every area—training, you know.”40 When the use of fertilizer or new seed varieties resulted in a better crop, tenants as well as plantation owners stood to benefit. Perhaps more importantly, extension agents encouraged “live at home” programs designed to free farmworkers from their dependence on planters and merchants for food that they could produce themselves. As a boy, Thomas Jordan had known many families who ended every crop year in debt to their landlords; he had heard his father say that these people would have been able to do better if they had not owed so much to the plantation commissary for food. Much of his and other extension agents’ work in Louisiana focused on increasing African Americans’ self-sufficiency.41

  Following the advice of agents, some black farm families prospered as they never had before. In 1915 S. W. Vance reported that sharecroppers on a plantation where he conducted one demonstration “made a good crop and owed very little the 1st year and only one came out behind. The second year . . . every negro has paid out of debt and has a lot of corn.” Two years later Vance stated that four of the African American families he had worked with in the past few years had recently bought land of their own, five had saved enough money to make the first payments on their farms, and “every cooperator was able to pay his account and have money left and they are buying good mule buggies and household furnitu[r]e and in fact have improved their condition wonderfully.”42

  Greater demand for agricultural products and high prices made the war years prosperous times for most American farmers, and this more than the activities of extension agents might have contributed to the increased prosperity of tenant families.43 But even during the postwar recession of the 1920s, farmers who had access to extension services generally did better than those who did not, suggesting that the agents did have an impact. Like many others who faced losing their land after a sudden drop in farm prices, black farmer Mose Matthews of West Feliciana Parish was heavily in debt and about to give up when agent J. E. Ringgold first met him in 1921. After four years of farming under Ringgold's direction, Matthews was debt-free and his crops were thriving. Ringgold stated in his 1925 report that he “could mention a score of men that have been able to finish paying for their homes and who are living happy by becoming demonstrators and following the advice and instructions as laid down in Farm Demonstration work.”44 Black farm ownership in West Feliciana almost doubled between 1925 and 1930, and increases occurred in other parishes as well.45 In 1931 the state agent for Louisiana noted that, at a time when farm ownership in general was on the decline and tenancy increasing, all of the nine parishes that had African American extension agents gained in farm ownership during the year.46

  The impact of the Extension Service went beyond the individual farmers who cooperated on projects. Agents were required to formulate ways to maximize the number of people who could be reached with the department's limited staff. One of the questions that had to be answered in their annual reports was, “Have you so thoroughly organized your county that you have someone in every community or school district assisting you in extension work and through whom you can reach EVERY farm family in your county?” Churches and other meeting places provided convenient forums for this purpose, with agents enlisting the aid of ministers and schoolteachers to disseminate information to large numbers of people at a time.47 The role of those chosen as demonstrators was not only to improve their own farming methods, but also to teach others what they knew. Black agent Myrtis Magee explained: “Information and help is given this group and they pass it along to their cooperators and others interested. . . . Economic and Civic conditions have been greatly improved through the tireless efforts of leaders and other agencies cooperating.”48

  Extension agents often sponsored projects designed to enhance the lives of all black people in their parishes. In 1918 O. G. Price reported that he arrived in St. Helena Parish to find African Americans eager to do demonstration work but hampered by their lack of education and suitable farm equipment. “I visited the negro schools of this parish with the Superintendent of Education and saw the teachers teaching two months terms at twenty dollars per month in church houses, old boxed houses, and in log cribs,” he wrote. “I decided the first thing the negroes needed was better schools.” After years of fund-raising by the local black people and lobbying for donations from white philanthropists, construction of a new industrial high school in the parish began in December 1921. J. E. Ringgold in West Feliciana Parish also assisted in raising money “to build schools, extend school terms and help the community generally.” In a tribute to black extension agent Myrtis Magee on his death in 1940, the Louisiana Weekly asserted, “Everywhere he was known as a hard cooperative worker and a real friend of the poor. He has built in Louisiana a monument, which will represent service, and which can be looked upon by generations to come.”49

  In some ways extension agents were the first “outside agitators” to arrive in rural Louisiana. They did not encourage people to try to vote, or challenge segregated facilities, or organize mass marches against discrimination, or engage in any of the other activities associated with the civil rights movement. They operated at another level of the freedom struggle, working to reduce poverty and subtly undermining plantation owners’ attempts to keep African Americans uneducated and immobile. Many black Louisianans took full advantage of the knowledge and resources extension agents brought to the region, recognizing them as valuable weapons in the fight against inequality and exploitation.

  The reactions of white landowners and officials to extension work among black people suggest that they too perceived the potential threat to the social order posed by the agents. Some people openly opposed the service, arguing that it encouraged African Americans to aspire to property ownership or professional careers instead of being content to work for white employers. Black agents were unable to assist many tenants and sharecroppers whose landlords refused to allow them to participate in demonstration programs. During debates over passage of the Smith-Lever Act, southern congressmen defeated amendments designed to ensure an equitable distribution of federal funds between the white and black agricultural colleges that administered extension work in each state. The money was instead channeled through the white colleges, ensuring separate and unequal services to black farmers.50 Planter-dominated local governments provided little funding for black agents, forcing them to perform their duties with minimal budgets and few resources. In 1930 Louisiana's state director of extension work noted the difficulties that afflicted African American agents, saying: “We have never been able to get any local support in the negro work. On this account, we have necessarily had to keep the salaries of the negro agents on a low basis and they scarcely have enough to get by with.”51

  At the same time, extension work among white farmers resulted in the formation of a powerful new organization to advance the interests of wealthy landowners. Created in 1920, the American Farm Bureau Federation (AFBF) grew out of county farmers’ bureaus that extension agents had established to facilitate their educational efforts. The AFBF and the Extension Service developed close cooperative relationships, often working together to formulate policy and lobby for legislation to benefit the nation's farmers. In many communities, the AFBF paid part or all of the county agent's salary. Planters dominated the AFBF in the South, and through their influence over extension agents they exerted a considerable amount of control over who received assistance and the types of programs that were available. Farmers who did not belong to the AFBF often complained of being neglected by their county agents. Despite efforts by the Department of Agriculture to ensure that extension services were available to all farm families, in the decades after World War I most poor white and black people were once again exc
luded from participation.52

  Wary of the subtle challenge to the racial order presented by black extension agents, white supremacists were even less tolerant of more open civil rights activity. Instead of extending democratic rights to African Americans as leaders like Du Bois had hoped, at the end of the war they quickly acted to negate the gains black people had made and force them back into their customary roles. African Americans suffered disproportionately from the postwar economic recession, many of them losing their jobs to returning white servicemen. Federal offices that had been created and staffed with black appointees in an attempt to reassure African Americans that the government was concerned about their problems were abolished soon after the fighting ended. Worst of all was the increasing friction between white and black Americans that often exploded into violence. In the summer of 1919 race riots occurred in twenty-six cities across the nation, resulting in dozens of deaths and injuries. Black analyst Emmett J. Scott observed, “Instead of a tendency to extend the right of franchise there has been something like a recrudescence . . . of the Ku Klux Klan so as to intimidate the Negroes of the South that they may not seek to reach this end.”53

  Disturbed by these developments, the NAACP sent Herbert Seligmann to southern troublespots to investigate the sources of racial tension. Seligmann discovered that white southerners deeply resented the defection of their black workers during the war and believed that military service had encouraged African Americans to think of themselves as equals. One Louisiana politician told him that black people should never be allowed to vote or acquire education and argued that lynching and other forms of violence were necessary to maintain white supremacy.54

  Nine African Americans were lynched in Louisiana in 1918, and three more were killed by mobs in the first six weeks of the following year. Many of the victims were former soldiers like Lucius McCarty, who was executed in Bogalusa by a crowd of over one thousand people after a white woman accused him of attacking her. Black novelist Ernest Gaines, a native of Pointe Coupee Parish, later depicted in fictional form a shocking yet common experience that African American servicemen encountered after the war. In A Gathering of Old Men (1983), one character recalls his return home to Louisiana after serving on the front lines in France and earning decorations for his bravery. “I was proud as I could be,” he says, “till I got back home. The first white man I met, the very first one . . . told me I better not ever wear that uniform or that medal again no matter how long I lived. He told me I was back home now, and they didn't cotton to no nigger wearing medals for killing white folks.”55

  Such behavior toward those who had risked their lives for the nation and for world democracy was depressing enough. Even more frustrating was the federal government's failure to do anything to stop the wave of violence that threatened black Americans’ lives and property. In a letter informing President Woodrow Wilson of a series of atrocities that occurred in More-house Parish in 1919, one black Louisianan wrote: “Mr Officer of USA we feel you all aut to help us in some way as you all got the power & as we Have put up our Lives for this U.S.A. We have ben in France on Front lines we have Lost our sons on acct of USA . . . & still we treated like we wasnt men.” In 1921 an anonymous letter from Shreveport referred to a lynching that had recently occurred there and asked that U.S. soldiers be sent to the region to prevent more violence against black people. “We needs help here in La,” the author stated, “Because this is a Slave Country Down here.”56

  No troops materialized, and the post–World War I period turned out to be one of violent repression aimed not only at African Americans, but also against all potential threats to the social order. Extreme anticommunism in the wake of the Russian Revolution led to the systematic destruction of progressive social movements by business leaders, vigilante groups, and the federal government. Civil rights activists, immigrants, socialists, feminists, and labor unionists all came to be seen as dangerous radicals and enemies of the state. During the postwar “Red Scare” and continuing through the 1920s, many Americans were harassed, jailed, beaten, or killed for their political beliefs.57

  In this climate, the owners of the Great Southern Lumber Company responded to union organizing efforts by white and black workers in Bogalusa with intimidation, evictions, and murder. Early in 1919 two unions affiliated with the American Federation of Labor (AFL) began a campaign to organize lumber workers in eastern Louisiana and southern Mississippi. The United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners focused on white skilled workers, while the International Union of Timber Workers attempted to encourage unskilled laborers, mostly African Americans, to join the effort. Organizers found both white and black workers in Bogalusa receptive to the call, especially after company managers diminished their incomes by raising house rents. Great Southern's owners attempted to obstruct unionizing by offering bribes to leaders and threatening members. Bogalusa's Self-Preservation and Loyalty League, an organization of white business owners formed during the war to enforce the state's work-or-fight legislation, then began terrorizing workers to force them to withdraw from the union. Mob violence wreaked havoc in the town on the night of 21 November 1919, and the following day members of the Loyalty League shot and killed four white union men who obstructed their attempt to arrest black organizer Sol Dacus. Dacus fled the area, state and federal authorities refused to investigate the incident, and the union campaign disintegrated.58

  Similarly, economic depression, the revival of the Ku Klux Klan, and intimidation by local officials exacted a devastating toll on black southerners’ fledgling civil rights organizations. More than half of the NAACP's 342 branches were “completely delinquent” in July 1920, having reported no new members or renewals and made no contributions to the national office in the past seven months. Nationwide, membership in the organization dropped from a wartime high of around 91,000 to a mere 23,500 in 1928.59

  The seven NAACP branches that black Louisianans managed to form between 1914 and 1925 struggled to survive, but their activities were hindered by poverty and the threat of reprisals against members. The Baton Rouge branch's charter was revoked after three years of inactivity, and civil rights work in most other areas outside New Orleans also faded. In 1923 H. C. Hudson of Shreveport reported to the national office: “The N.A.A.C.P. is deeply hated in this section. . . . As to the conditions elsewhere I cannot state with any degree of certainty, but you can rest assure that any man that is actively engaged in this work is liabl[e] to the same treatment. . . . That accounts for the large number of good towns with no branches in them.” Both the Shreveport and Alexandria branches lapsed and then revived several times over the next ten years, reflecting cycles of organized protest followed by repression.60

  Postwar reaction crushed any hope that the ideological implications of World War I and black Americans’ participation in it would force the nation to abolish racial discrimination. The freedom struggle in rural Louisiana was once again pushed underground, awaiting the next opportunity to emerge from its subterranean existence. In 1929 the beginning of the Great Depression set in motion the events that made possible a resurgence of open political activism.

  5 With the Aid of God and the F.S.A.:

  The Louisiana Farmers’ Union and the Freedom Struggle in the New Deal Era

  Beginning with a sharp drop in agricultural prices soon after the end of World War I, rural Americans were the first to experience the effects of the economic crisis that eventually afflicted the entire nation. Severe flooding in 1927 followed by the worst drought on record compounded the situation in Louisiana's plantation parishes. Landowners lost their farms, tenants’ debts increased, and competition for jobs drove down wages. National economic growth began to slow in 1929, and the financial panic of October that year precipitated a wave of bank failures, forced businesses into bankruptcy, and threw millions of people out of work. The effects of the Great Depression were particularly harsh for African Americans. Already among the poorest and most vulnerable segments of the population, black people's i
ncomes now dropped even further below subsistence level. In the parish where Moses Williams grew up in the 1930s, farmers who could no longer afford to buy shells for their shotguns were reduced to chasing rabbits and other wildlife with sticks to obtain food for their families.1

  Similar scenes of desperation were repeated all over the nation. The United States had experienced economic slumps before but never on such a wide scale. The extent and duration of the depression provided the rationale for a decade of experimentation by the federal government in an attempt to find solutions to social problems. Although President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal policies brought some benefits for African Americans, the limits of these reforms were soon exposed in the South, where local elites used their control over the administration of government programs to further enhance their power. Meanwhile, left-wing groups organized farmers and working-class people across the nation to push for more far-reaching changes.

  Encouraged by the communist organizers of the SCU, poor white and black farmers in rural Louisiana formed the LFU to challenge federal agricultural policies that mostly benefited large, corporate landowners. African Americans provided the union's strongest leadership and support and used their locals to demand economic justice, better schools, political rights, and the safeguarding of their lives and property. Plantation owners responded with threats, evictions, violence, and attacks on government farm programs that assisted poor people. By the end of the decade the forces of reaction had succeeded in turning back reform efforts and minimizing threats to the social order. Nonetheless, the New Deal era brought important changes to the region and to the lives of African Americans, portending even greater transformations that encouraged more protest activity in later decades.

  The small group of elite white people who monopolized power in Louisiana had not been without opposition in the early twentieth century. Poor white farmers and workers whose interests clashed with those of planters, merchants, and corporation owners nurtured deep resentment toward the state's conservative rulers, and middle-class progressives hated the rampant corruption that characterized electoral processes. Pressure from these groups resulted in some educational and political reforms during the governorships of Newton Blanchard (1904–8) and John Parker (1920–24), but real change came only with the election of Huey Long in 1928. A native of Winn Parish, an area that was mostly populated by white small farmers who had a long history of antiplanter sentiment, Long garnered mass support by pledging to pass legislation to curb the power of the wealthy minority and enhance the fortunes of people who were less well off. In a paradox that has invited both condemnation and praise from his biographers, Long combined corrupt and brutal political practices that placed Louisiana under a virtual dictatorship with measures designed to help the state's poor. During his term he abolished the poll tax, introduced a graduated income tax, regulated utility rates, and increased spending on public schools and transportation networks.2