A Different Day Read online

  CORE focused on seventeen parishes in rural Louisiana: Caddo, Clai-borne, Concordia, East Feliciana, Iberville, Jackson, Madison, Ouachita, Pointe Coupee, St. Helena, St. Landry, St. Tammany, Tangipahoa, Tensas, Washington, Webster, and West Feliciana.4 Historically, these had mostly been majority-black cotton and sugar plantation parishes but included some areas of hill country characterized by smaller diversified farms. By the 1960s plantation agriculture was no longer as dominant as it had once been in rural Louisiana, though its legacy of exploitation and violent oppression pervaded many of the communities that CORE workers sought to organize. Black migration away from the region meant that African Americans were no longer the majority in eleven of the parishes. However, black residents in all the parishes made up a substantial proportion of the population, ranging from 27 percent in St. Tammany Parish to 65 percent in Tensas Parish.5

  Map I.1. Parishes, Principal Cities, and Rivers of Louisiana

  I have concentrated primarily on nine parishes that were representative of the larger area covered by CORE (Concordia, East Feliciana, Iberville, Madison, Pointe Coupee, St. Helena, St. Landry, Washington, and West Feliciana), occasionally drawing evidence from the other CORE parishes and from parishes throughout Louisiana that resembled those in the main sample, particularly those along the Red River and the southern stem of the Mississippi River where the LFU was active in the 1930s. Neither CORE nor the LFU reached into the predominantly white, rice-growing parishes in the southwestern corner of the state, and they are not part of this study. Although New Orleans and other major cities are also largely neglected, it sometimes seemed appropriate to extend my scope to urban areas—as, for example, in the chapters on the two world wars, when migrants from the rural parishes swelled the black populations of the cities and contributed to an increase in protest activity. This book is not meant to be a comprehensive account of the freedom struggle in the entire state.6 The parishes studied do not represent all of Louisiana's diverse regions, but they are a suitable basis for examining the links between black resistance and protest in the Jim Crow era and the civil rights movement, and that is my main purpose.

  The book begins with a brief chapter outlining the historical background and development of the state in the first few decades after the Civil War. Chapters 2 and 3 cover the first half of the twentieth century, describing the limits that were placed on political activism and the ways that African Americans attempted to subtly challenge white supremacy. These chapters also establish four main themes that represent key aspirations of black people in the rural parishes: economic independence, education, political participation, and safety from violence. The themes recur throughout the study, with each successive chapter showing how changing social contexts enabled African Americans to pursue these goals in different ways. Chapters 4 and 5 demonstrate how activity that was usually clandestine and ineffective became more open and organized during World War I and the Great Depression, without becoming strong enough to significantly alter the social order. Chapters 6 and 7 link the emergence of the modern civil rights movement to shifts in the political economy of the rural South after World War II and the rise of a new class of relatively prosperous, economically independent African Americans who were better placed than earlier generations to press their demands for citizenship. Chapter 8 examines the interaction between CORE workers and local activists in the 1960s, highlighting local people's adherence to an indigenous political tradition that had its roots in the informal and organized struggles of earlier decades.

  This work draws on and contributes to three sets of historiography: the literature on the civil rights movement, studies of working-class and peasant resistance, and analyses of the transformation of the South wrought by the New Deal and World War II. Bringing all of these together, it demonstrates that rural black southerners were important participants in the freedom struggle throughout the twentieth century, and it highlights the connections between social protest and broader economic and political conditions.

  Traditional narratives of the civil rights movement have closely associated its origins and outcomes with the rise to prominence of Martin Luther King Jr., whose powerful articulation of African American demands for equality touched millions of people and helped move the nation toward abolishing legalized discrimination. Studies of King and of national organizations like the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), SNCC, and CORE often seem to imply that before the 1960s, working-class and rural poor black people in the South represented an inactive, apathetic mass, only realizing their collective power after middle-class civil rights activists arrived from outside the region to encourage voter registration and protests against racism.7

  More recent scholarship has begun to present a different picture. Two excellent books on the movement in Mississippi, John Dittmer's Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi (1994) and Charles Payne's I've Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle (1995), reveal the central importance of local leaders and participants, challenging the notion that rural black southerners played only supporting roles. Adam Fairclough's Race and Democracy: The Civil Rights Struggle in Louisiana, 1915–1972 (1995) also makes a significant contribution, tracing the development of local movements since World War I. However, his study focuses largely on urban areas that had strong NAACP branches, giving little attention to either informal or organized political activity in the rural parishes before the 1960s.

  Certainly, as Fairclough and others have pointed out, the repressive plantation regime placed limits on black people's ability to contest the social order. Most African Americans in the rural South lived and worked as tenant farmers, day laborers, or domestics, closely supervised by their white employers. Poverty, inadequate education, disfranchisement, and the threat of violence discouraged organizing efforts, while plantation owners’ control over economic resources, political offices, and the law enabled them to stifle most challenges to the system. Black people who dared to protest these conditions risked being evicted, jailed, beaten, or murdered. The conditions that African Americans endured are well documented in studies such as Neil McMillen's Dark Journey: Black Mississippians in the Age of Jim Crow (1989) and Leon Litwack's Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow (1998). The oppressiveness of the Jim Crow era and its crippling impact on black activism cannot be ignored. However, as other scholars have noted, it is difficult to see how the freedom movement of the 1960s could have emerged from among the fearful, apolitical black southerners depicted in some studies of the period.8

  My research suggests that African Americans in rural Louisiana were not waiting passively for CORE activists to inspire them to action. Within the confines of the southern social order, local black people developed their own ways of fighting injustice in the early twentieth century. The analysis presented here reflects the influence of a growing body of literature that suggests scholars must look beyond traditional conceptions of politics to fully appreciate the extent that African Americans and other oppressed peoples have participated in their liberation movements. This field has a long lineage reaching back to innovative works on slavery by Herbert Aptheker and Eugene Genovese, E. P. Thompson's pioneering studies of the English working class, and Lawrence Levine's perceptive analysis of black culture as a site of resistance.9 These and more recent books by James Scott, Robin Kelley, and others indicate that even in contexts of extreme oppression, people find ways to express opposition to the social order. Proletarians in England, slaves and workers in the United States, and peasants in Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia have all engaged in what James Scott termed “infrapolitics”—subtle or unorganized forms of resistance such as creating their own cultural worlds and value systems, working slowly or poorly, stealing from their employers, destroying property, running away or quitting work, and occasionally engaging in violent attacks against their oppressors.10


  Scholars have argued over the significance of such activities and the extent that they reflected the political consciousness of those who engaged in them. It is often impossible to determine exactly what motivated actions like theft or malingering, and these tactics did little, if anything, to alter the power relationships between subordinate and dominant groups.11 Trying to decide which elements to include in a study of black political activism presents something of a dilemma. Focusing narrowly on organized movements excludes the majority of black southerners from the history of the freedom struggle and creates the perception that they were apathetic and uninterested in politics. But there are also problems in viewing nearly all aspects of black society and culture as forms of protest. Placing blues singers (or gangsta rappers) who complain of injustice on the same level as African Americans who faced down tear gas, fire hoses, and police dogs to try to end injustice seems a little unfair.

  We need not commit such an offense to appreciate the importance of black people's informal strategies of resistance. Infrapolitics and politics exist on a continuum, and it is difficult to define when one stops and the other begins. Rather than trying to decide whether some acts are more political than others, it makes more sense to see both subtle and overt expressions of dissent as different parts of the same process. Music, art, and folklore represented one layer of the struggle, presenting an analysis and a critique of the social system that were reflected in small acts of resistance as well as organized political action. Black freedom fighters might engage in some or all of these activities simultaneously or at different times, intensifying the struggle for justice whenever possible, and reverting to less obvious forms of resistance in response to repression.

  In this study the terms “resistance” and “infrapolitics” refer to those actions short of organized, open protest that suggest an awareness of the sources of oppression and were aimed at circumventing white supremacists’ attempts to keep African Americans powerless and poor. This includes both informal, individual acts such as violent attacks on white people that, although open, were unplanned, as well as more structured activities like institution building that, although they were collective, did not directly confront the system in the same way that forming unions or NAACP branches did. By showing how similar objectives drove both informal and organized political activities, I aim to clarify the relationship between various forms of black resistance and protest.

  Central to understanding the twentieth-century freedom struggle is that racial oppression was also class oppression, and African Americans fought both of these on many different fronts. Analyzing just those actions directed at overcoming segregation or disfranchisement reveals only part of the story. As Nan Elizabeth Woodruff has argued, rural black people's notions of citizenship encompassed economic rights as well as political and social rights.12 In addition, as this study shows, economic advancement facilitated the elimination of legalized discrimination. Attempts to break the bonds of class were therefore vital elements in the concurrent struggle against racism, even though many of the strategies employed were not unique to African Americans.

  During the Jim Crow era black people in rural Louisiana rarely tried to register to vote or to openly criticize the white supremacist social order. Yet in a multitude of other ways, they attempted to improve their living and working conditions and to assert their citizenship rights. Many of the issues that motivated rural black people's participation in the civil rights movement were prefigured in activities such as leaving or stealing from employers, developing strategies for educating black children, creating strong community institutions, and fighting back against white violence. Incorporating everyday forms of resistance as well as organized politics into our definition of black activism reveals some continuity in the goals of rural black people, even though the methods of achieving them did not remain static. This study lends support to the idea that infrapolitics is “real politics,” and that more powerful social movements can emerge from the base it provides when social conditions encourage such transitions.13

  The political and economic changes that swept the South in the 1930s and 1940s have been the focus of rich scholarly inquiry in recent years. Historians such as Pete Daniel and Jack Temple Kirby have described the ways New Deal agricultural policies enhanced the power of plantation owners and exacerbated the problems of sharecroppers, tenants, and small farmers in the region.14 Donald Grubbs and Robin Kelley have examined rural poor people's responses to these developments in their studies of the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union (STFU) and the Alabama Share Croppers’ Union (SCU).15 Recent scholarship has suggested links between the struggles of farmers and workers in the 1930s and those of black Americans in the 1960s, although the exact nature of the relationship has yet to be delineated.16

  Placing the social movements of these two decades in a broader historical context reveals how they are intertwined. Black activists in rural Louisiana took advantage of political and economic developments between 1933 and 1945 to take the freedom struggle to the level of organized protest. With the help of the communist organizers of the SCU, poor white and black farmers formed the LFU to fight planter abuses of the New Deal and demand a fair share of federal aid. African Americans, in particular, embraced the union as an ally in their ongoing fight to gain fair compensation for their labor, adequate education for their children, a chance to participate politically, and protection from violence. Black people's involvement in the LFU showed an awareness of the power of collective action and an appreciation of the causes of their problems that resurfaced when similar opportunities presented themselves during and after World War II.

  The nation's mobilization for war in the 1940s accelerated changes in the social order initiated by the New Deal. Thousands of farmworkers left the plantations to take new jobs in defense industries, and the resulting labor scarcity encouraged cotton and sugar growers to mechanize as many tasks as possible. Agricultural historians have described these developments at the macro level, but we do not have many detailed studies of their effect at the local level.17 Examining the impact of economic transformations on black individuals and communities provides some insight into the reasons why the civil rights movement emerged when it did, and not before.

  Black farm owners, businesspeople, factory laborers, students, home-makers, and unemployed workers who had escaped agricultural labor and were no longer tied to the plantation economy provided the backbone of the postwar freedom movement. In the 1950s these former sharecroppers and their children established voters’ leagues, formed NAACP branches, joined unions, and openly demanded equal economic, educational, political, and legal rights. In the 1960s they welcomed CORE workers into their homes and communities. Local black people's courage and persistence, combined with the financial and other resources provided by national organizations, were crucial to the success of the civil rights movement.

  Change did not come easily to rural Louisiana or anywhere else in the South. Though participants in the struggle were no longer as subject to white reprisals as in previous decades, no one was ever completely immune from retaliation. Black people who became involved in the movement still faced the threat of physical violence and of having their businesses, churches, and homes bombed or burned. But terrorist acts like these involved more planning and greater risks on the part of white supremacists than the methods they had most often used to combat challenges to their power, namely firings and evictions. White southerners’ increasing resort to violence and arson was in itself a sign that the political and economic balance in the region had changed. And it was those kinds of actions that captured national attention and finally forced the federal government to intervene. The Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts were a culmination of many decades of struggle by black people, who were newly empowered in the 1960s to press their demands for citizenship. For African Americans, the post– World War II era truly was what local activist Earnestine Brown called “a different day.”18

  1 And Did Not Pay Them a Cent: />
  Reconstruction and the Roots of the Twentieth-Century Freedom Struggle

  Louisiana's geographic diversity and its unique history of colonization by the Spanish and French before the arrival of Anglo-Americans in some ways set it apart from the other Deep South states. Scholars have typically distinguished between French Catholic parishes and Anglo-Protestant parishes, between New Orleans and the rural areas, and between the different agricultural regions that developed along the rivers, on the southwestern prairies, and in the hill country of the north central and southeastern parts of the state. Attempts to classify parishes according to environmental, economic, and cultural characteristics have resulted in estimates ranging from two to thirteen distinct regions of Louisiana.1

  For the purposes of this study, the rural parishes (which for much of the period covered meant the entire area outside New Orleans) can be divided into four main types. Along the southern stem of the Mississippi, the parishes from Pointe Coupee in the north to Terrebonne and Plaquemines in the south made up the Sugar Bowl area, characterized by large sugar plantations. This region retained many aspects of the language and culture of early French settlers. In contrast to other parts of the South, most residents of the sugar parishes were Catholic rather than Protestant. Relationships between white and black people also varied slightly from the rigid color lines that were drawn elsewhere. French colonists had accepted interracial marriages and partnerships to a greater extent than the Americans who arrived later on, giving rise to a significant population of native Louisianans with mixed ancestry. Lighter-skinned African Americans were not treated equally with white people yet enjoyed privileges that set them apart from most other black people in the South. Even after their incorporation into the United States, the French-speaking, Catholic parishes of southern Louisiana retained reputations for being more racially tolerant than those farther north.2