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  African Americans were intensely interested in obtaining credit from sources other than white landowners and merchants. In letters and statements to government authorities, black farmers often expressed the belief that all they needed was a chance to prove their ability free from the constraints of exorbitant interest rates and the dubious accounting practices of landlords.72 This theme permeated the affidavits collected by Gordon McIntire during the struggle to gain resettlement loans for the sharecroppers of St. Landry Farm. Almost all of those threatened with eviction wanted to buy the land they worked and believed that they would be able to support themselves if they could borrow money at reasonable interest rates. Harry Jack Rose summarized the prevailing view when he stated, “If I can just have the chance I sure would like to buy this farm. . . . I know how to work and I have eight children and four good hands. I can work 40 acres or more. If I can get a little piece with the government I know I can defend myself.”73

  African Americans’ faith in their own abilities was borne out by the experiences of many of those who did receive federal assistance. The first black farmer to pay back an FSA loan did so thirty-six years ahead of schedule. Over all, in the six years following the creation of the first rural rehabilitation agencies, the number of farmers who defaulted on federal loans amounted to only 2.6 percent of borrowers. As one study pointed out, a major achievement of the government's lending programs was the “liberation of the negro and white tenants from bondage to the ‘furnish’ system under which tenants paid an average of 20% to 50% for production credit and were consequently kept in perpetual debt—or perpetually in flight from unpaid obligations.”74

  Breaking the strangleholds of expensive credit and permanent debt allowed for great improvements in the lives of some African Americans. Between 1935 and 1937 FSA farmers in Pointe Coupee Parish increased their average net worth from $108 to $567.75 Rehabilitation loans enabled people to achieve a higher standard of living, with many black clients building “houses of the most modern design and with all the conveniences of a city home.” Some tenants became landowners, helping to reverse the trend from farm ownership to tenancy that had been the pattern in the previous three decades. Between 1935 and 1940 the proportion of black farm operators in Louisiana who owned part or all of the land they worked rose from 15 to 19 percent. Noting a similar increase in Tensas Parish, black extension agent J. A. M. Lloyd predicted, “With the present programs of the Federal Government continuing to exist . . . within the next ten or fifteen years every colored farmer in Tensas Parish will be well established on his own farm.”76 Such pronouncements were not very realistic, but the federal government's tenant loan programs nonetheless gave recipients cause for optimism. In 1938 an LFU member expressed these feelings in a letter to the union newspaper, saying, “My crop is coming along fine. With the aid of God and the F.S.A. I hope to establish a better home for myself and family and to help my fellow brothers.”77

  The same developments that held such promise for rural poor people elicited negative and sometimes violent responses from their employers. Union organizers’ initial hopes of operating free from harassment in Louisiana were not realized. After its early successes in the mid-1930s, the LFU encountered increasingly strong opposition from white landowners, politicians, and business people in the rural parishes. Opelousas newspapers accused the union of stirring up “class hatred” and turning “the negro against the white man, the sharecropper against the land owner.” Planters tried to discourage farmworkers from joining, claiming that the LFU only wanted to exploit them. One member reported: “Ed B. went to his boss’ office to get $2. that Mr. H. owed him. Mr. H. told Ed., ‘Now don't take this money and give it to that Union because you are only making some fellow rich in New Orleans.’”78 Another landlord called all his workers together one morning and told them not to join the union or there would be trouble: “You fellows going around writing to the government, it will be too bad. And anyone of you who joins that thing, you will have to move.” Gordon McIntire encountered intense hostility from planters, merchants, and local officials whenever he ventured into the rural parishes. One man told him, “We don't want a Union here. . . . We'll keep it out . . . with our lives if we have to.”79

  As always, plantation owners could rely on law enforcement officers and other public servants to protect their interests. One night Sheriff D. J. Doucet of St. Landry Parish visited the secretary of the LFU's Woodside local, threatened him, and gave him five days to leave the parish. In 1940 union members in Natchitoches Parish reported that “the landlords are telling the sheriff and deputies to visit all the meetings of the farmers and beat the people until they break up the unions.” Police in the parish held and interrogated one black sharecropper for two hours, telling him that it was illegal for people to pay any dues to the union. Local administrators of federal programs also discouraged farmers from joining the LFU by withholding aid from members. Resettlement Administration officials in Pointe Coupee Parish relocated those who had joined the union to poorer land, took their equipment away so that the farmers had nothing to work with, and held up their AAA checks. The secretary of one local in the parish complained, “The landlords are bitterly against the union in this section,” and added, “Resettlement and county agents are carrying on the same crooked work against us.”80 The danger posed to organizing efforts by the frequent overlap of planter and public authority was most clearly revealed in Rapides Parish during the struggle over sugar workers’ wages in 1939. According to Gordon McIntire, immediately after wage claims were submitted to the local agricultural committee, “terror broke out in Rapides Parish, where one of the big landlords against whom we had entered several claims, was Chairman of the Parish Committee.”81

  Union members lived with constant threats of evictions, beatings, imprisonment, and death. One man who dared to ask his landlord if his AAA payment had arrived reported that his employer “seemed to get offended because I asked about my check, and he told me I had been with him too long for him to hurt me, so I had better move before he killed me. And he gave me 24 hours to be gone off the farm.” In June 1937 a group of white men broke into the home of Willie Scott in West Feliciana Parish, seeking to lynch him. Finding only his wife Irene, they beat her severely in an attempt to gain information. Irene Scott survived by pretending to be knocked unconscious and fleeing to some woods while the men waited outside the house for her husband to return. With the help of other union members, the Scotts escaped to New Orleans. Frightening attacks like this were common. By the late 1930s most LFU members probably felt a lot like Joe Beraud, who feared that he would soon be murdered by his landlord. “MR. WARREN is going all around telling both whites and blacks that he is going to kill me,” he wrote in a letter to Gordon McIntire. “He is carrying his gun for me. . . . My life has come to be like a rabbit's.”82

  Black Louisianans who had joined the LFU in the hope of achieving better living and working conditions struggled determinedly against plantation owners’ attempts to repress their efforts. African Americans in Woodside responded to the threats made against their union secretary by forming an armed guard to watch over his home and family. Communist organizers supported the right of black people to protect themselves against violence and encouraged the use of armed self-defense. In a letter to LFU members during the St. Landry Farm fight, for instance, Gordon McIntire wrote, “If any members house is threatened by crazy hoodlums they have a right to protect their home with guns. We are not going to make trouble but must protect our rights.”83 A 1937 report on the situation in West Feliciana Parish noted that “some of the negro union officers were quite capable of determined, courageous and effective leadership and quite competent to take care of themselves in a test of strength with the whites.” Despite planters’ attempts to kill them, Willie and Irene Scott returned to the parish and continued their union activities. The LFU newsletter reported in February 1938 that members in West Feliciana had “bandaged up the victims and dug deep into their pockets for
food and other aid,” and that the parish locals remained strong even though they could not meet as openly as before. “Maybe poor folks just don't have good sense,” the report stated, “but when other people are getting shot at, poor folks want to know why. And so more people join up and the Union rocks on, for Union men are hard to scare.”84

  The LFU's ability to call on federal assistance in the 1930s might have contributed to its members’ tenacity. After Gordon McIntire had complained repeatedly to government officials, both the Department of Agriculture and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) finally sent investigators to the sugar parishes in 1939.85 In its September newsletter, the LFU assured members that government officials were “determined to investigate every case of intimidation or any other violations of civil liberties.” Although this statement greatly exaggerated the Roosevelt administration's commitment to ensuring justice in the sugar parishes, the mere presence of the federal agents had a positive effect. The interest that events in rural Louisiana attracted from people outside the region threatened to undermine the tight control that planters had over their communities. Consequently, they sought to avoid actions that might provide material for sensational headlines in northern newspapers or draw national attention. Fear of federal intervention prevented officials in Natchitoches Parish from lynching Clinton Clark after he was arrested and jailed there in 1940. According to one account, there was every likelihood that Clark would be killed until the state attorney general made a telephone call to the parish district attorney. “No—no lynching!” he reportedly stated. “We've got to be careful. The State is on the spot. Can't afford that kind of thing with the federal government like it is.”86 Violence continued in Natchitoches and other parishes where the union was active, but the situation almost certainly would have been worse had it not been for the contacts that the LFU had established with officials in Washington.

  Southern political and economic leaders deeply resented the encroachment of national authority into local affairs. Although they welcomed efforts to stabilize agricultural prices and benefited greatly from the AAA, planters viewed any attempt by the federal government to address more fundamental issues of poverty and inequality with suspicion. Plantation owners had been wary of the New Deal from the time of its inception, and they grew increasingly uneasy as the decade progressed. The new federal presence in the South and the encouragement that liberal officials in Washington provided to organizations like the LFU threatened the existing social order. In the early 1940s southern lobbyists joined forces with conservative northern business leaders to demand an end to the government's “socialistic” experiment.

  Much of this opposition focused on the FSA. Critics charged that the FSA's efforts on behalf of poor farmers interfered with natural economic forces that dictated the failure of inefficient or incompetent enterprises, that its encouragement of cooperative farms was “communistic,” and that attempts to combat the high incidence of disease among its poverty-stricken clients risked introducing “socialized medicine” into the United States. The agency was vilified in country newspapers and at mass meetings of plantation owners throughout the South, and enemies of the FSA in Congress succeeded in passing budget amendments in 1940 that restricted appropriations for its tenant loan program. At its annual meeting in December of that year, the powerful AFBF called for the abolition of the FSA and the transfer of federal loan programs to the Agricultural Extension Service, whose agents generally supported the interests of large producers. Although the FSA officially survived until its replacement by the Farmers’ Home Administration (FaHA) in 1946, its activities were sharply curtailed after 1942 by further budget cuts and the shifting of many of its responsibilities to the Extension Service. After the reorganization of the government's farm credit agencies, assistance was denied the majority of poor farmers who applied for loans. The displacement of plantation workers continued with little to cushion the effect, relegating many people to the status of seasonal wage laborers forced to work for low pay during the harvest seasons and dependent on public welfare services at other times of the year.87

  At around the same time, the fortunes of the LFU began to decline. After reaching a high point of about three thousand members in 1940, both membership and finances decreased dramatically over the next several years.88 Organizing efforts had always been hindered by widespread poverty among the people the union sought to recruit. Most rural families could barely afford to spare even the meager amount it cost to join the union, and the LFU had many members who paid their dues irregularly, if at all. The union was therefore heavily dependent on donations from liberal sympathizers to finance its activities. Those funds became harder to obtain as the United States prepared to support the European democracies in World War II, a move that most liberals supported, while the Communist Party and union leaders advocated American neutrality and attempts to resolve European problems peacefully. In June 1941 one staff member wrote of the difficulties the LFU was experiencing in raising funds from former benefactors, saying, “the war has changed the attitudes of ‘liberals’ who once contributed liberally. . . . Try to appeal to the [deleted words] today! There's a red bogeyman hiding behind everything except a defense poster.” Later that month Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union prompted an abrupt switch in the party line, but the transition to all-out support for the war only further weakened the LFU, as activists shifted their attention from the rural South to the fight against fascism overseas.89

  The union also suffered from the loss of two of its most experienced organizers. Gordon McIntire contracted tuberculosis and was forced to give up work in January 1940. He left Louisiana six months later, and Peggy Dallet shortly followed. Two other staff members, Roald Peterson and Kenneth Adams, attempted to keep the New Orleans office functioning, but insufficient funds and continued repression by plantation owners hindered their efforts. Failure to collect annual dues in the fall, the only time most rural workers had any cash, left the LFU with only one paid-up member on record in 1941. Peterson and Adams found themselves in an impossible predicament, lacking money because they were unable to visit union locals to collect it and unable to visit locals because they had no money. The union's financial difficulties resulted in the suspension of its state charter by the NFU in December. Concordia Parish officials took advantage of the situation to arrest Adams and Clinton Clark for “collecting money under false pretenses” when they ventured into the parish on a fund-raising trip in January 1942. The two organizers were not released for three months.90

  Meanwhile, the planter-dominated Louisiana Farm Bureau used its influence with the Agricultural Extension Service to encourage rural people to join the bureau instead of the LFU. Extension agents printed and distributed notices of farmers’ meetings, promoting the Farm Bureau as an organization that had close ties with the government and could do more for farmers than other agricultural unions. An additional “advantage” for poor sharecroppers and tenants was that their landlords were often willing to pay Farm Bureau dues for them.91

  Developments during World War II also contributed to the demise of the LFU. New economic opportunities drew thousands of rural people to the cities, where they worked in factories for wages that were higher than they could ever hope to earn as farmers. Wartime prosperity and the increasing demand for labor offered an easier solution to farmworkers’ problems than remaining on the land and fighting plantation owners. Many of the LFU's rural constituents drifted away, either migrating to urban areas or moving into nonagricultural employment.92 In March 1942 Gordon McIntire wrote a circular letter to LFU members from a Denver sanatorium urging them to continue their union activities while organizers worked to collect enough dues to have the state charter restored, but his appeal failed to halt the disintegration of the union. Although a few locals continued to hold meetings and recruit members, the LFU was not rechartered, and there is no trace of official union activity after the mid-1940s.93

  The New Deal era was a crucial point in the history of rura
l black political activism. The extension of federal influence into the South and agitation by farmers’ unions like the LFU provided opportunities for African Americans to lift the freedom struggle to the level of organized politics. Plantation owners fought these efforts with intimidation, violence, and congressional action to limit social change. But even as elites appeared to preserve their power during this period, the New Deal precipitated changes in the region's economy that had profound consequences. Southern agriculture came increasingly to rely on seasonal wage labor instead of tenant families supported year-round by planters. At the same time, federal farm programs helped a few black people to achieve economic independence. As the nation prepared for war in the 1940s, these trends accelerated and resulted in even greater disruptions to the social order. Once again, African Americans took advantage of the situation to intensify their fight for equality.

  6 I Am an American Born Negro:

  Black Empowerment and White Responses during World War II

  Though studies of the civil rights movement generally acknowledge the ideological and economic significance of World War II, the early 1940s have not received nearly the same amount of attention from scholars as the postwar period. Existing histories mostly focus on the activities of national leaders and organizations and the ways they used the war to pressure the federal government to implement antidiscrimination measures.1 Yet the actions of black activists in Louisiana reveal that the freedom struggle was just as intense at the local level.

  The war brought dramatic changes to the rural parishes. Once again thousands of black people left the region to join the armed forces or to seek industrial employment in urban centers both within and outside the state. Higher incomes and liberation from the control of planters enabled African Americans to launch some powerful offensives against white supremacy during this period. Adopting the slogan of the “Double V” for victory over racism at home as well as abroad, black people worked to bring freedom, equality, and justice not only to the occupied nations but to their own country as well. Newspaper editors and civil rights groups highlighted the contradiction of fighting for democracy overseas while allowing segregation, disfranchisement, and violence against black people to continue in the United States. Soldiers and defense workers protested discrimination in the armed forces and war industry employment. White Louisianans responded by attempting to force their former farm laborers and domestics back into subservience, but they were unable to reverse the massive changes brought about by the war. After World War II, neither the South nor the nation would ever be the same.