A Different Day Read online

  Although Long was no less racist than the conservatives he replaced, for African Americans his governorship was an improvement over previous administrations. The Louisiana Weekly acknowledged that “Huey Long was for the common man, definitely throwing all his legislation in their favor, and as Negroes are certainly classed with the commoners, they benefited by Long's work.” Another source noted that despite Long's tendency to “mispronounce” the word “Negro,” African Americans shared in the better roads, free school textbooks, lower taxes, and reductions in phone, gas, and electricity rates that were among the achievements of Long's regime.3 An assassin killed Huey Long in 1935, but his legislative program for the most part remained intact even after his political opponents regained power. In addition, the growing economic crisis and demands for action from across the United States encouraged the federal government to implement similar social welfare measures on a national scale.

  The 1930s were promising years for Americans who believed that some regulation of capitalism was necessary to alleviate the effects of economic insecurity inherent in the system. The depth of the depression exposed the inaccuracy of the belief that prosperity was guaranteed to anyone who worked hard and obeyed the law. Poverty or the fear of poverty affected people of all classes, making them more willing to accept change. Nowhere was this truer than in the South. Some of Roosevelt's strongest supporters were rural southerners whose livelihoods were endangered by falling crop prices and crippling debts. In the early part of the decade, even the region's conservative plantation owners joined in demanding government intervention to protect farmers from the ravages of the free-market economy.4

  Roosevelt and a newly elected Democratic majority in Congress took power in 1933. Over the next decade the administration enacted a string of measures aimed at mitigating poverty and restoring economic stability. The Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA) and later the Works Progress Administration (WPA) allocated approximately $14 billion to the states to be used either as direct payments to unemployed people or wages for work on public projects. The National Recovery Administration (NRA) attempted to standardize business operations and improve workers’ lives by establishing industrywide codes for maximum hours and minimum wages. The Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) provided jobs and training for young Americans on reforestation, swamp drainage, and flood control schemes. To rescue the nation's farmers, the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA) paid subsidies to those who voluntarily reduced their crop acreages in an effort to eliminate overproduction, increase prices, and raise rural people's living standards. The Resettlement Administration and its successor agency, the Farm Security Administration (FSA), provided low-interest loans and other assistance to marginal farmers to help them achieve self-sufficiency.5

  The New Deal raised black people's expectations, encouraging them to believe that they might finally be recognized as citizens. Federal policy stipulated that the newly established relief agencies must treat everyone equally, and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt achieved notoriety among white southerners for speaking out against racism. Franklin Roosevelt's record in this respect was more ambiguous, but most black people nevertheless viewed his presidency as a positive development. In the 1930s those who were able to vote defected in large numbers from the Republican Party to the Democratic Party. For the first time since the Civil War and Reconstruction, African Americans believed that the government was on their side. A black sharecropper whose crops had been stolen by his landlord in Red River Parish expressed this new mood when he appealed to the Department of Justice for help. “I am told that President Roosevelt is a true friend to the negro people,” he wrote. “I want you and him to aid me, please.”6

  The New Deal did improve the lives of many African Americans. Between 1933 and 1939 approximately 8,600 young black people in Louisiana took part in the CCC program, with significant benefits for themselves and their families. Enrollees received thirty dollars per month and were required to send twenty-five dollars home to their parents or dependents. In addition, the training and opportunities offered enabled many of them to pursue careers other than unskilled farm labor. Madison Parish civil rights leader Martin Williams, who spent several years working at CCC camps near his hometown in Jackson, Alabama, remembered well the effect that the project had on participants. “We had some boys come there, had never seen a tractor or piece of heavy equipment,” he said. “Give them two weeks, they'd do anything you wanted done. They learned so quick—all they need is a chance.” As well as providing the basic education that many rural black people lacked, the CCC gave instruction in vocations such as carpentry, mechanics, landscaping, and clerical work. One project for African Americans in Pointe Coupee Parish offered a journalism course as well as classes in reading, writing, history, government, and debating. Such curricula were unlike anything most black people had been exposed to in the state's regular school system, and they were quick to recognize the value of these programs. Attendance at classes was voluntary but averaged around 90 percent. As one government study noted, African Americans used the camps “as a means of escaping the hardships of farm life and for [the] purpose of securing better pay and learning a trade.” This was exactly the path followed by Martin Williams, who came from a sharecropping family, trained as a drycleaner as part of the CCC program, and later established his own business in Tallulah.7

  Civilian Conservation Corps camp, location unknown, n.d. Thousands of African Americans in Louisiana took part in the CCC program between 1933 and 1939. The camps provided education and training for jobs—such as clerical work—that most rural black people had not had access to before the 1930s. RG 35-G-41-2124, National Archives, Washington, D.C.

  Other relief programs offered similar chances to escape from plantation labor or brought improvements to rural communities that benefited both white and black inhabitants. Access to government aid made African Americans less dependent on white employers and more likely to assert themselves when they thought they were being mistreated. Unemployment benefits and wages earned on public works projects provided recipients with stable incomes and pumped money into local economies, helping communities to recover from the depression. Louisiana reported a 4.3 percent increase in industrial employment between July and October 1936, with some regions experiencing economic growth for the first time since 1929. In Tallulah, the Chicago Mill and Lumber Company added a power plant, veneer mill, and box factory to the sawmill it had built there in 1928, creating more than four hundred new jobs.8 Operating under the NRA codes after 1933, the company paid sawmill workers a minimum wage of twenty-four cents per hour for a forty-hour week, significantly more than most farmworkers could expect to earn at that time.9 Both Martin Williams and Harrison Brown moved to Tallulah in the 1930s to take advantage of the new opportunities, forming part of a migration that increased the town's black population by a little over two thousand.10

  Another promising development for African Americans came in the area of education. Efforts to eliminate illiteracy in Louisiana initiated by state officials in the 1920s received added impetus when the federal government provided more funding for adult education programs. State WPA officials reported in 1937 that nearly ten thousand African Americans had enrolled in literacy classes and were learning “for the first time to read, write their names, figure the amount of their crops.” By 1939 more than twenty-five thousand black people were receiving instruction. Black people's dedicated participation in the program defied white stereotypes that had portrayed them as uninterested in education or incapable of learning. One account stated that students were “rearranging their entire lives in order to take advantage of the opportunity for knowledge,” noting that a group in De Soto Parish attended lessons during its noon break in the cotton fields each day. An issue of the Louisiana WPA's newsletter Work printed a photograph of some rural black people clustered around a table in a plantation schoolroom with the caption: “Both men and women have put in a hard day in the fields—but they never miss
a class.”11

  Having been deprived of education for so long, black students were not about to pass up the chance of achieving literacy when it presented itself. In a letter to President Roosevelt, J. H. Chapmon stated, “I truly do thank God for the blessing that he extended to the colored race here through you and those who took part in this great program. . . . I am thinking of when I was a school boy. They only let the colored people have four months in which to go to school. . . . Now you are helping me to get that that I was debarred of then.” Leola Dishman of Ferriday expressed similar sentiments. “We are trying and doing our best to learn the things heretofore we haven't had a chance to get,” she told the president. “We thank you for the privilege.” Annette Nelson from Ouachita Parish wrote to WPA administrator Harold Hopkins, “I am doing all in my power to grasp this wonderful opportunity. . . . Thanks for the opportunity.”12

  Adult literacy class being held in a “plantation shack,” Louisiana, 1938. This photograph appeared in a publication of the Louisiana Works Progress Administration with the caption “Both men and women have put in a hard day in the fields—but they never miss a class,” indicating participants’ determination to take advantage of this educational opportunity. Work , April 1938, 4, Hill Memorial Library, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge.

  The WPA's efforts to reduce illiteracy among black Louisianans were among the most significant contributions of the New Deal. In many other areas, the effects of government programs were disappointing. One of the chief limitations of federal relief measures was that the amount of money allocated was inadequate to provide for all those who needed assistance. The federal government's rural rehabilitation programs, for instance, reached only a fraction of the nation's low-income farmers.13 Similarly, public works projects could not provide employment for every person seeking a job. As was the case throughout the nation, many more people applied for aid in Louisiana than officials were able to handle. In July 1936 the WPA posted notices in local newspapers asking residents not to attempt to enroll in the program, since the relief quota for the state had been filled and no more applicants could be accepted.14

  Governor Richard Leche received hundreds of letters from impoverished Louisianans who had been rejected at their local welfare offices and did not know where else to turn. Charlie Young, a seventy-one-year-old black man from St. Mary Parish who was half blind and unable to work, was refused assistance because he had three children who supposedly were able to support him. He told Leche, “They Said for my children to help me But my children aint got nothing Them self.” Lillie Pearl Jackson begged the governor to help her find employment. She wrote, “I am hungry my two children are hungry we are without clothes, and shoes my husband needs medicine will you please help me? I do not mind working but I cannot get a job. . . . Please, please, please help me if you please or I will starve.” In 1938 twenty-four unemployed residents of Concordia Parish sent a petition to Leche demanding that he do something about their plight. “We have exhausted every known means at our disposal without avail in an effort to obtain work—or even information about work,” they stated. “Our credit has been exhausted through inability to pay; our rent is long overdue because of lack of funds. We are without food! We are hungry! We are desperate! . . . We look to yourOFFICE as a last desperate appeal!”15

  The inadequacy of relief affected both white and black Louisianans. African Americans faced the added problem of racism. Establishing a general commitment to equality at the national level was easier than ensuring the impartial administration of programs at the local level, particularly in the South. In 1933 the higher wages and shorter hours demanded by NRA codes resulted in mass layoffs of black workers, whose jobs were given to white people. The Louisiana Weekly reported that although the official policy of the government was to “thunder against discrimination,” employers were “disregarding it right and left, where Negro labor is concerned.” Louis Israel informed black lawyer A. P. Tureaud that African Americans in Iberville Parish received lower wages than the white laborers employed on public works and were being treated unfairly in other relief programs. In 1935 federal WPA director Aubrey Williams told a congressional committee that racism was a serious problem in New Deal agencies, attributing it to “‘local traditions’ invoked in many sections of the country.”16

  Rather than discouraging or undermining the South's “local traditions,” in many respects the New Deal reinforced existing power relationships. Throughout the region, administrators were selected by the same planters and business owners who dominated everything else. In West Feliciana Parish, some of the men appointed to oversee federal programs included merchant, farmer, and sheriff T. H. Martin, plantation owner Howard Spillman, and storekeeper Thomas Woods. Wealthy landowners like Dr. J. H. Hobgood served on the parish board of public welfare in Pointe Coupee Parish. A survey of the landholdings of AAA committee members in the Louisiana sugar belt found that the majority were large growers and corporation owners unsympathetic to the problems of small farmers, tenants, and sharecroppers. Control over crop acreage allotments enabled planters to ensure that they received the biggest share, while the amount of land other farmers could cultivate was drastically reduced. As had always been the case, the authority to decide who would or would not receive aid lay with the most powerful people in towns and parishes. Access to federal dollars in addition to their own wealth only increased their influence.17

  The policy of placing New Deal programs in the hands of local elites proved disastrous for black people. One man who informed the WPA's national office about the terrible working conditions and low wage rates African Americans endured on a project in Louisiana stated, “We are now worser off on the WPA . . . than our foreparents was in slavery. If we open our mouths to say anything we loses our job, which the Federal government have provided for us.” In 1936 C. L. Kennon of Webster Parish complained, “just because I would not leave my home and go work on half [as a sharecropper] for another man they cut me of[f] the relief—and won't let me back on. I have ben begin this relief office hear for 6 month to put me to work so I can buy my little children some clothe and shoes to send them to school.” In Iberville Parish, merchants subverted relief programs by having food and other supplies intended for needy people sent to their stores, where they sold the goods instead of distributing them to the poor.18

  White employers believed that government handouts made black people “lazy” and discouraged them from accepting work when jobs were available. Welfare payments and the wages paid by the WPA were meager, but they were still more than African Americans could earn as agricultural laborers and domestics. Many people showed an understandable preference for government over private employment. According to one official, a household workers’ training project that operated in Louisiana for about a year “spoiled Negro women” by offering wages of up to seven dollars a week compared to the three or four dollars a week most had previously been paid. Now, he said, they thought they were “superior maids who could command big wages.” Some of them refused to do any domestic work at all, preferring “sewing or some other WPA project.” The white extension agent in West Feliciana Parish reported that “farm laborers and tenants have received so much assistance from relief agencies . . . that a great many of them have concluded that the Government will take care of them whether they work or not, and, therefore, they take things easy and get by with [as] little work as possible.” In a similar vein, Guy Campbell of Monroe complained to Senator Allen Ellender that New Deal programs were having the “worst possible evil effect” on African Americans in the region. He claimed that black laborers who drew ten dollars a week on relief refused to go to work picking cotton despite plantation owners’ desperate need for their services.19

  Faced with such threats to the social order, white community leaders sought to prevent black people from taking advantage of the alternatives to plantation labor offered by federal agencies. Public works projects could be established only in response to requests by local offi
cials, and police juries seemed reluctant to take the initiative. A WPA administrator who had been trying to encourage statewide plans for building farm-to-market roads reported, “many of the parishes are unable to pay engineering costs and in other cases, the Police Jurors who are the governing bodies of the parish, have been very slow in getting up data for projects. I am inclined to believe that they have been told to do nothing and not to cooperate with us.” Similarly, district supervisor Mildred Taylor found that a black women's sewing unit in Concordia Parish was poorly operated, observing, “The Sponsors have contributed nothing and apparently have showed very little interest.” Complaints that African Americans made too much money on WPA projects resulted in new regulations that cut the amount of time they were allowed to work in half, so that black people could earn only $19.25 for two weeks of labor a month instead of $38.50 for the full thirty days.20