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  In almost every parish, two groups seemed especially reluctant to become involved in civil rights work: teachers and preachers.16 Black schoolteachers naturally feared losing their jobs, especially given the experiences of those in Iberville and other parishes who had been fired during the salary equalization struggles of the 1940s. The state had further undermined their security by passing legislation in 1956 that enabled school boards to dismiss any employee who advocated integration. Although most black educators adopted a position of cautious neutrality on civil rights, some of them actively discouraged others from joining the movement. In November 1963 East Feliciana principal W. W. Wilson suspended twenty-three students from West High School for wearing CORE buttons and refusing to take them off. He later called his teachers together and told them he would not allow such buttons in his school, adding that they could all join CORE and get fired if they wanted to, but he would not jeopardize his own position. Attempts by CORE workers and local activists to mobilize black people in Pointe Coupee Parish around plans to boycott Mardi Gras celebrations in January 1964 encountered strong opposition from school principals. Even in St. Helena Parish, where support for the movement was generally strong and several teachers did become involved, other teachers worked to undermine CORE. The principal of the local black high school tried to embarrass student civil rights leaders and warned others not to listen to them. According to task force member Fred Lacey, some teachers in the parish informed white people of everything that activists were doing and advised their students, “You better keep your minds on your grades and leave that freedom mess behind.”17

  Activists encountered similar problems with ministers. Robert Lewis believed that church leaders in Ferriday could have assisted greatly in the movement, “But instead, they refused because they were bought off by money, and worried about the building—that the church was going to be burned.” With black churches and meeting halls in Louisiana regularly being burned to the ground by white vigilante groups in the 1960s, this was an understandable fear. At one point, white insurance companies canceled the policies of every black church in Concordia Parish to discourage civil rights activity. But as Lewis suggested, some ministers avoided becoming involved in the struggle because they did not want to lose the patronage of powerful white friends. In the summer of 1963 a local activist who was working with CORE in Iberville Parish reported: “Our greatest problem here now is the unwillingness on the part of the local ministers to take an active stand in this movement. It is our belief that the political figures of this parish have gained control of these ministers which inclines to slow the movement down.” Task force workers’ letters and field reports echoed these sentiments, citing multiple complaints about “Uncle Tom ministers.”18 Miriam Feingold wrote: “In my area I have a mess of them. One has refused to let us step beyond the doors of the church; another lets us speak for five minutes, and in his own speech undoes everything we did. As old-time community leaders, I think they are afraid of losing their position and power, but the way they're acting is not designed to win them perpetual support, that's for sure.”19

  Feingold's prediction turned out to be accurate. At a meeting of CORE workers and local activists in St. Francisville, someone stated that the group needed to gain the support of black community leaders. One of the local people, a Mr. Minor, asked, “But who are the leaders?” “The teachers and the ministers,” came the reply. Minor pointed out: “They are way behind us—they should be walking in front of us, but they are not. So we'll have to find other leaders.” Civil rights leadership eventually emerged not from the traditional black elite—teachers, ministers, and professionals whose positions of influence depended on the support of white people—but from an entirely different source. As Ronnie Moore later stated, in the little towns and farming hamlets of rural Louisiana “the poor, farmers, the unemployed, and young people led the struggle.”20

  Partly because CORE workers were youthful themselves and because activities such as demonstrations, picketing, and sit-ins held the most appeal to people their own age, high school students and other young adults were often the first to join the movement. Kenny Johnson estimated that around 90 percent of those who attended his high school in Plaquemine participated in some form of civil rights activity in the 1960s. A strike by approximately five hundred students to protest segregation, lack of employment opportunities, and the firing of a black cafeteria worker who had attended a recent demonstration closed down the school in October 1963. A CORE worker reported, “CORE has been enjoined from demonstrating, but the high school students have not, and they have been raising hell.” Young people in East and West Feliciana Parishes seemed less timid than most others in the region, and activists wrote late in 1963 of plans to establish CORE chapters in both parishes. By January the following year, these groups were “raring to go sit-in.”21

  Such eagerness was not simply the result of youthful exuberance. It also reflected these participants’ relative immunity from economic reprisals. Robert Lewis provided insight into why some people became involved in the civil rights movement while others did not when he described the members of the Ferriday Freedom Movement (FFM), a local group that CORE workers helped to establish in Concordia Parish in the summer of 1965. Asked what their occupations were, Lewis said that most of them “weren't doing anything”—they were unemployed people or homemakers who had some independence as well as the time to devote to the freedom struggle. At twenty-five, Lewis was one of the group's oldest members. He had attended college in Natchez, Mississippi, for two years on a basketball scholarship until an illness forced him to take a break from his studies. When CORE arrived in Ferriday, he and his wife were living on welfare payments and whatever other income they managed to scrape up. Other participants were students or young people like Mary Whatley (later Mary Boyd) and her nephew David who had both recently finished school and not yet found jobs. The two youths lived with an older relative, Alberta Whatley, who was retired. Lewis recalled Alberta Whatley's courage and dedication, saying, “I would consider her the mother of the freedom movement in Ferriday, because when no one else would allow the CORE person to come through their gates, she allowed them in her home. Her whole family became very involved in it.”22

  Women like Alberta Whatley played key roles in other parishes as well. Both Ronnie Sigal Bouma and another CORE activist, Meg Redden (formerly Peggy Ewan), vividly remembered Josephine Holmes, an outspoken woman in her seventies who lived in East Feliciana Parish. When ministers refused to allow CORE workers to use their churches for meetings or registration clinics, Holmes opened her home to the freedom fighters. “She was just . . . outrageous,” Redden stated. “I mean, she was just willing to do anything.” “Anything” included facing down the local sheriff with a loaded shotgun when he came to her home to harass the volunteers who were staying there. Holmes's actions inspired others to join the movement, and by the end of the first summer project a few ministers had agreed to allow civil rights activities in their churches. Eighty-two-year-old Charlotte Greenup was also a strong supporter of CORE. In 1964 the Louisiana Weekly described her as “one of the most gracious, articulate, vibrant, and militant Negroes” in Clinton. Though a native of East Feliciana Parish, Greenup had spent most of her life in Chicago, where she had worked as, among other things, a political secretary to black congressman Oscar DePriest. She returned to the parish in the 1960s to help manage the family homestead and to assist in civil rights work in her home state. As the owner of a 191-acre farm, Greenup was in a better position than most other African Americans in East Feliciana Parish to lend her support to the movement.23

  Black landowners were central to civil rights work in neighboring West Feliciana Parish as well. Voter registration in the parish began in large part through the efforts of just one man, Joseph Carter, a minister, laborer, and owner of a small farm located about six miles from St. Francisville. Carter had heard that CORE was conducting voter registration drives in the region, and early in August 1963 he a
ttended a meeting at a church in East Feliciana Parish where he met Ronnie Moore and two other task force workers.24 A few days later Carter and another minister, Rudolph Davis, made their first attempt to register. Although registrar Fletcher Harvey knew both Carter and Davis well, he told them that they must each find two registered voters to verify their identities before he could allow them to take the registration test. Since no black people were registered in the parish and no white people were willing to vouch for them, meeting the identification requirement was impossible. Davis left, but Carter stayed and questioned Harvey further about how he might qualify to vote. This resulted in his being arrested for “disturbing the peace.” CORE provided two hundred dollars in bond money to secure his release from jail and then helped him to file a lawsuit in federal court charging the registrar and sheriff with violating his civil rights.25

  Carter was a member of the Knights of Pythias in addition to being a Baptist minister, and he used his church and fraternal order connections to bring other people into the movement. Farm owner and Knights of Pythias president Nathaniel Smith became a key participant in the struggle, along with William Minor and his son Raymond, members of a black farming family who had worked their way out of sharecropping with the help of the Agricultural Extension Service. Voter registration classes held at the Masonic Hall in September and October gradually increased in size, with even some tenant farmers braving the wrath of their employers to learn how to exercise their citizenship rights.26

  Local activists and CORE workers in West Feliciana carefully formulated a plan to register black voters that they hoped would minimize the threat of violence or other reprisals. The group deliberately waited until after the farmers had sold their sweet potato crops to the local cannery to avoid the possibility of economic retaliation, and Ronnie Moore asked the Department of Justice to send federal agents to the parish on the day the black people planned to register. Early on the morning of 17 October 1963, forty-three African Americans met at the Masonic Hall and traveled from there to the courthouse in St. Francisville. Although they arrived almost as soon as Fletcher Harvey opened his office, the registrar told them that eight white people were ahead of them and made them wait. The group stood outside for almost six hours before the registrar finally called Joseph Carter into the building. With CORE workers, newspaper reporters, FBI agents, and Justice Department officials stationed around the courthouse, Carter took and passed the voter registration test, becoming the first African American to register in the parish since 1902. Four other applicants who tried to register that afternoon failed the test.27

  Threats made against two black families by their landlord that night did not prevent thirty applicants from returning to the courthouse the following day. Harvey allowed seven people to take the test, and three of them passed. The next week the Justice Department filed suit against Harvey in the federal district court, charging him with discriminating against African Americans by requiring them to meet stricter requirements for proving their residence than he asked of white applicants and taking an excessively long time to process their applications. Federal intervention in addition to the lawsuit filed by Joseph Carter encouraged more people to join the movement. Early in November, Mike Lesser reported that African Americans in West Feliciana seemed much more confident and that white people in the region were beginning to realize that their black neighbors would no longer accept discrimination. He observed, “The social and political structure of the parish is being shaken to its roots.”28

  This assessment of events proved too optimistic. In reality, the pace of change was extremely slow. White supremacists in the plantation parishes responded to the civil rights movement with their usual tactics of intimidation, arrests, legal delays, economic reprisals, and violence.29 In East and West Feliciana, CORE's work was obstructed by some of the most recalcitrant officials in the state. The two parishes made up Louisiana's Twentieth Judicial District, presided over by Judge John R. Rarick and District Attorney Richard Kilbourne, both staunch segregationists. Rarick was openly contemptuous of federal authority and given to ignoring court rulings that conflicted with his desire to uphold white supremacy. He ran for Congress in 1966 with strong support from the Ku Klux Klan. Kilbourne was secretary of the East Feliciana Citizens’ Council and had been instrumental in purging African Americans from the parish voter registration rolls in the 1950s—this despite the fact that it involved removing his own cousin, Charles Kilbourne, from his position as registrar. In the 1960s CORE workers described him as a “vicious, coniving individual” who was prepared to do everything in his legal power, and a few things that were not, to destroy the civil rights movement in his district.30

  Task force volunteers became aware of the strength of white resistance to their activities almost as soon as they arrived. Early in August 1963 Mike Lesser accompanied several black residents of East Feliciana Parish to the registrar's office and was ordered to remain outside. While sitting quietly on some stairs waiting for the registrar to admit him, Lesser was arrested and charged with disturbing the peace. Judge Rarick refused to accept a property bond that was offered to secure Lesser's release, setting the amount of bail at two thousand dollars in cash. This was an extraordinary action considering that the maximum fine for disturbing the peace was half that amount, but no less than CORE workers came to expect from local officials who repeatedly demonstrated their lack of respect for the law.31

  Some scholars have noted changes in the composition of the dominant class of white people in the South after World War II, as urbanization and economic diversification diluted the influence of the rural plantation-owning elite. They suggest that the rise of a managerial and professional white middle class whose interests relied less heavily on maintaining overt racism—and who feared the negative publicity generated by protests and demonstrations—contributed to the success of the civil rights movement in the 1960s.32 Although this was the case in some towns and cities of Louisiana (for example, Opelousas, where civic leaders self-consciously tried to maintain a “progressive” image and activists encountered little violent opposition), it was not a uniform pattern throughout the state. In the Felicianas, power remained with the same individuals and families who had ruled for generations and whose commitment to white supremacy was unshakable. Members of the Woods, Spillman, and Daniel families in West Feliciana Parish still owned most of the land, stores, and businesses in the parish and served in some of the same public offices they had held in the 1930s. At the time CORE arrived, Thomas E. Spillman had been a member of the school board for more than forty years. Similarly, Richard Kilbourne belonged to a family of East Feliciana planters and lawyers who had monopolized the offices of judge and district attorney in the Twentieth Judicial District since 1920.33

  Powerful white Louisianans used familiar tactics to hinder civil rights work. In November 1963 the district attorney and sheriff harassed black voter registration applicants as they waited outside the registrar's office in East Feliciana Parish. Armed with a tape recorder, Richard Kilbourne asked people to tell him their names, why they wanted to register, and who had sent them. Police stationed themselves across the street from the building used for voter registration clinics in Clinton and wrote down the license plate numbers of all the cars parked nearby. Shortly afterward, African Americans who had never before had trouble at work began losing their jobs. Ester Lee Daniel's employer of fourteen years fired him after he tried to register. According to Daniel, the white man told him: “I will have to lay you off. We are going to have a meeting to put a stop to Negroes’ registering to vote. I'll have to lay you off until things cool off.”34

  The following year, the Princeville Canning Company refused to grant contracts to more than 150 black sweet potato growers in West Feliciana Parish. Although many of the farmers had not attempted to register to vote and some of those who were registered received contracts, CORE workers and local activists believed the action was taken to punish black people for asserting their citizenship right
s. Most of the farmers had grown potatoes for Princeville for many years and none of them had experienced problems gaining contracts before. Ronnie Moore argued that the company's owners avoided establishing a clear pattern of discrimination to evade prosecution and that they intended not so much to retaliate against individual African Americans but to warn the whole community. He stated, “The significance of Princeville's action as a threat against the community is clear when one learns that never before the onset of Negro voting had Princeville similarly c[u]t off contracts.”35

  Whether or not this analysis was correct, CORE's response to the incident revealed how valuable a national organization's contacts and resources could be to local people's struggles against oppression. Feeling partly responsible for what had happened, task force members worked to find alternative markets for the black farmers’ sweet potatoes and researched the possibility of helping them form a cooperative to sell their own crops. In addition, CORE publicized Princeville's actions and urged a nationwide boycott of its canned products. Though the company's owners steadfastly denied that they had intended to discriminate against African Americans when they failed to renew the contracts, economic pressure forced them to modify their action. In September 1964 all the farmers who had been refused contracts received letters inviting them to sell their sweet potatoes to the Princeville Canning Company.36

  CORE's presence helped cushion the effect of economic reprisals in other parishes as well. When local activist Corrie Collins was fired from his position at a hospital in East Feliciana Parish in October 1963, CORE's lawyers appealed to the Louisiana Civil Service Commission on his behalf. A few months later, Collins was reinstated. Civil rights workers established community relief programs in several parishes to assist people who lost their jobs because of their participation in the movement. Supporters of CORE's work across the country sent donations of money, food, and clothing, which were distributed to those in need by committees of local people.37