A Different Day Page 25
Access to these resources might have decreased some people's fears of eviction or unemployment, but those emboldened enough to attempt to register still had to contend with other obstacles. Parish officials limited the number of successful applicants by slowing down the application process, requiring multiple forms of identification, and strictly implementing the literacy and constitutional understanding tests. Under “Reason for Failure” on complaint forms sent to the Justice Department, black Louisianans wrote things like “I failed to dot the letter I in writing Plaquemine and the registrar said my writing was not clear enough” and “I didn't have sufficient identification to prove my age; even though I had in my possession a Social Security card and NAACP membership card, and besides this I am sixty years old and this should prove that I look over 21.” Every day that black people visited Fletcher Harvey's office in West Feliciana Parish, he told them that there were white applicants who had to be processed first, yet activists there said they had never seen any white people in or around the building. In another parish, the registrar told an applicant who passed the test that before he could vote he would have to obtain a doctor's certificate proving that his “health would permit it.”38
In addition to the machinations of local officials, vigilante groups like the Ku Klux Klan and other terrorists worked to discourage civil rights activity through intimidation and violence. White “friends” visited African Americans who attempted to register to vote and warned them that they risked harm to their homes and families if they continued with such behavior. On the night of 18 October 1963, five cars filled with armed white men circled the house of John Brannon, a bus driver who had transported people to the registrar's office in St. Francisville, and fired several shots into his home. Vandals threw rocks at the church that civil rights workers used as a meeting place in East Feliciana Parish, breaking all of the windows along one side. In January 1964 both East and West Feliciana were hit by a wave of cross burnings. The following month, arsonists attempted to burn down the Masonic Hall in West Feliciana Parish by disconnecting the gas heaters and leaving a lighted candle on the floor. Local black people who spotted the flames and rushed to put them out were shot at by a carload of white men as they drove along Highway 61. The hall was set alight a second time in December. African Americans who lived nearby once again saved the building while repeated calls to the fire department went unanswered for more than an hour.39
Under these circumstances, CORE's goal of changing the social order through nonviolence, love, patience, and appealing to the consciences of white southerners was unlikely to succeed. Local black people who had lived with violence and terror throughout their lives were aware of this fact, and many of them demonstrated early on their determination to defend themselves against the numerous crossburners, firebombers, thugs, and assassins who aimed to destroy the movement. In November 1963 Mike Lesser told a friend, “The really beautiful thing to see and be a part of is the movement—the spirit, the people, the courage and the shotguns.” He reported that weekly voter registration clinics held at the Masonic Hall in West Feliciana Parish were protected by an armed guard, and any unwelcome intruders would be confronted with “15–20 highpowered, long-range shotguns before they got within 50 yards of the building.”40
Although many rural black people who worked with volunteers shared their religious beliefs, few were willing to become pacifists in the absolutist sense initially advocated by CORE. Task force workers found that teaching nonviolence to local activists was far from easy. A field report from West Feliciana in 1964 observed: “A great deal of education is needed to cement the relation between CORE and the people of West Feliciana Parish. The idea of non-violence is a new one, and will require much discussion and training, especially for the older people.” Another report from the same parish noted of one local leader that he was “young, extremely militant, with nothing to lose. . . . Will take some time for him to get used to non-violence.” CORE worker Meldon Acheson arrived in Ferriday in the summer of 1965 to find that almost everyone in the town was “armed to the teeth.” When the local student group that CORE worked with in Ferriday organized a march, Acheson opposed it, stating, “the people aren't prepared for NV (= non violence), they say they'll hit back if attacked.”41
Most local people who became involved in the movement did accept the importance of remaining nonviolent during demonstrations, although they did not always succeed at doing so. A report on the picketing of a store in Pointe Coupee Parish in July 1965 stated that when the protesters were harassed and attacked, one local activist hit a white man, giving him several cuts in the face. In contexts where there were no news reporters or television cameras, black Louisianans were even more likely to depart from the teachings of CORE. FFM secretary Mary Boyd saw no reason to remain passive when group members were arrested and beaten by police while putting up posters to advertise a planned demonstration. Boyd attempted to stop the officers from dragging one of her friends along the ground by her feet; after one policeman slapped her in the face, she pulled off her shoe and hit him with it twice before being knocked down from behind by a man with a soda bottle.42
Activists frequently employed more lethal weapons than shoes against their attackers. The most common response of African Americans to the numerous drive-by shootings and bombings carried out by white supremacists in black neighborhoods was to reach for their firearms. The night after Joseph Carter registered to vote, he was awakened by shots fired at a neighbor's house. Carter immediately grabbed his gun and prepared to fight off the intruders. In July 1965 night riders shot into a black woman's house in Ferriday and she shot back, reportedly hitting the windshield of their car. A few months later, when police arrived at the home of Robert Lewis after it had been bombed, they found him standing on the lawn with a loaded shotgun. The bomber was perhaps fortunate that the gun was not loaded before the attack. Lewis had seen the man jump out of a truck and place the firebomb on the porch. He later stated, “I had enough time to blow his brain out, had I found some shells.”43
Some activists preferred to head off trouble before it started. Returning home one day to find a local Klansman parked in front of his house, Frank Norman of Tallulah took his gun and fired a shot behind the man's vehicle, causing it to move off rapidly. Martin Williams kept firearms in his house and car just in case he ever needed them. Other black residents of Tallulah who were involved in the movement did the same. Williams said, “As far as I know, there wasn't nobody who was afraid—I don't know what they carried, but nobody was afraid back in them times. Nobody. And you could get on the phone and call one, in a few minutes you'd have a hundred to your rescue.”44
Similarly, CORE worker Meg Redden remembered that most of the people she worked with in Pointe Coupee Parish were armed. Redden stayed at the home of Siegent Caulfield, a longtime activist and construction worker who had to leave his family for several months during the summer of 1964 to work in New Orleans. Caulfield taught his seventeen-year-old daughter Thelma how to use the family's shotgun, and after vigilantes shot into their house, Redden also learned how to handle the firearm.45
African Americans’ use of armed self-defense cut across class, gender, and generational lines. The black men and women who carried guns and used them were farmers, homemakers, students, laborers, ministers, and small business owners who wanted only to be recognized as citizens and were forced to defend themselves from those who attempted to deny them that right. The civil rights movement provoked responses from white supremacists in Louisiana that rivaled the notorious and more widely publicized actions of their counterparts in Alabama and Mississippi. In Plaquemine, peaceful demonstrations held in August 1963 were broken up by law enforcement officials using tear gas, electric cattle prods, and clubs. On 1 September, after mounted police had dispersed a crowd of about one thousand African Americans who rallied to protest the earlier acts of brutality, more terror was unleashed on the black community. Police and vigilantes arrested or attacked any black people th
ey found on the streets and forced others out of the homes and churches where they were hiding by throwing tear gas into the buildings. A twelve-year-old girl died after being trampled by a horse, 150 other people required hospitalization, and the church where the demonstrations had been based was virtually destroyed.46
As elsewhere in the South, CORE workers and local people who were involved in the Louisiana movement faced threats to their lives every day. In 1964, at around the same time that national attention was focused on the disappearance of three civil rights activists in Mississippi, the bodies of two black men were found floating in a river near Tallulah. David Whatley reported in 1966 that several attempts had been made to destroy his grandmother’s house “and us along with it,” and that a reward of one thousand dollars had been offered for anyone who would kill him. In some places merely being black was reason enough to be afraid. The proprietor of a shoe repair shop in Ferriday was burned to death when vigilantes poured gasoline over the store and its owner, setting both alight. The incident perplexed civil rights workers because the man had never been involved in the movement. One writer concluded wearily, “He was a Negro, and someone found him guilty of breathing.”47
Incidents of harassment and intimidation were routinely reported to local and federal authorities, and, almost as routinely, they were ignored. Around midnight on 19 January 1964, task force workers in East Feliciana Parish informed the fire chief that a cross was burning outside CORE headquarters in Clinton. He refused to do anything, saying, “We cain't be bothered with putting out fires in the middle of the night burning in the middle of the street.” As in previous decades, parish officials often knew about, helped to plan, and participated in the violence. The day CORE volunteers arrived in Ferriday, the town sheriff drove his car up to where they were talking with a group of African Americans, let out two criminals he had brought with him from the jail, and watched as the men beat up the civil rights workers. Like the local black people, CORE members became accustomed to treatment that suggested police in Louisiana were not bound by national laws or statutes protecting citizens’ constitutional rights. Bill Brown was once arrested for speeding while he was sitting on a front porch; another time he was jailed for “obstructing the highway” after the town marshal's car swerved off the road in an attempt to hit him. A discussion paper prepared for a CORE training session warned: “One does not ‘reason’ with a Southern cop . . . and ‘laws of the land’ do not apply to him. ‘I[']m the law here’ is a standard thing to hear—and the hardest thing to accept is its truth.”48
Federal agencies also seemed reluctant to intervene. Civil rights workers rarely saw action on complaints sent to the FBI or the Department of Justice in Washington. Miriam Feingold observed, “The FBI snoops around, writes a lot, and sits on its rear ends as it were.”49 In a 1966 interview, Gayle Jenkins of the Bogalusa Voters League laughed when she was asked if activists had received much help from the federal government. “Mostly what they do is take notes,” she said. “You have the FBI agents in here and they take notes and they say that's all they can do.” When a group of African Americans attempted to integrate a city park, federal officials scribbled on notepads while local police and Klan members violently attacked the activists. Later the Klan killed a black deputy sheriff, and the authorities failed to apprehend anyone for the crime. Jenkins concluded: “I don't know what you would do to get protection from the federal government. . . . Even if somebody’s killing you they can't stop [it], they can only take a note.”50
No wonder, then, that local activists decided to take control of the situation themselves. In the northern Louisiana town of Jonesboro, a group of African Americans that included several war veterans founded the Deacons for Defense and Justice to protect civil rights workers from violence. They assigned CORE project director Charles Fenton his own bodyguard, provided armed escorts for activists traveling through and around the town, guarded meetings and demonstrations, and patrolled black neighborhoods at night to deter the Klan. The Deacons proved so effective that black people in other communities formed similar groups. Residents of Bogalusa, Ferriday, Tallulah, St. Francisville, Minden, Homer, Grambling, and New Orleans established their own chapters of the Deacons, and eventually the movement spread outside the state.51 In June 1965 Deacons president Earnest Thomas told the Louisiana Weekly that the organization had over fifty-five chapters in various stages of development in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama.52
Like other aspects of the freedom struggle in the 1960s, the spread of armed self-defense groups reflected a transition from the mostly unplanned, individual responses of the Jim Crow era to more organized forms of fighting back against white violence. It also indicated CORE's failure to convert the majority of rural black people into Gandhian Satyagrahis. Although non-violence was an effective tactic for national civil rights organizations seeking to appeal to white Americans’ sense of justice, in the context of many local activists’ lives it seemed hopelessly irrelevant. CORE workers did what they could to persuade people otherwise, with only limited success. Just two days after FFM members voted in favor of requiring everyone who belonged to the organization to take an oath of nonviolence, they decided that this should only apply while members were participating in demonstrations. Task force volunteers soon realized that they could not prevent residents from taking up arms to protect their homes and families, and at least some of them were grateful that the local people were prepared to carry guns even if they refused to do so themselves. As Mike Lesser stated, “We cannot tell someone not to defend his property and the lives of his family, and let me tell you, those 15–20 shotguns guarding our meetings are very reassuring.”53
Discussions within CORE about the commitment to nonviolence were frequent. National officers argued that the organization could not allow the use of violence to fight violence and urged volunteers to try to discourage people from carrying weapons. “This is our responsibility,” CORE leaders asserted. “It is our responsibility to provide leadership and an example.” But many workers in the field found the arguments of those who were directing operations from the safety of CORE's headquarters in New York unconvincing. In the summer of 1963 Miriam Feingold informed her family: “Most everyone, especially the kids who have been most active, are disillusioned with non-violence, & see the situation very much turning toward violence. They think that we must do as the masses feel—& if it means violence, then that's what we do.” At a staff meeting a few months later she wrote in her notebook: “Jim McCain says CORE can't afford to advocate retaliation. But Dave Dennis, Jerome Smith say to hell w/ CORE, we're w/ the people!”54
Local black people's determination to fight back against violence was crucial to the survival of the civil rights movement in rural Louisiana. Activists struggled daily to overcome the fear of reprisals that prevented many African Americans from participating in voter registration efforts and demonstrations against segregation. The armed guards who watched over meetings and escorted civil rights workers safely through Klan territory offered the protection and security that law enforcement agencies had failed to provide. Significantly, voter registration clinics in West Feliciana Parish typically drew over one hundred people, whereas in neighboring parishes where there were no armed guards it was harder to persuade people to attend meetings. CORE worker Catherine Patterson remembered the difference that the Deacons made in Jonesboro. When she first visited the town in the spring of 1964, no African Americans would allow civil rights workers to stay with them, but the following spring local people were more willing to invite them into their homes. “I think it had a lot to do with the Deacons,” she said. “And I think it had a lot to do with members of the community sensing their own capacity to protect themselves.”55
Where African Americans showed their willingness to defend themselves, violence seems to have diminished. Mike Lesser reported that when black people first began registering to vote in West Feliciana, they were threatened and beaten, “But as soon as Neg[ro]es started carr
ying sho[t]guns and announced they would shoot any strange white face on their property the attacks stopped and haven't resumed.”56 In St. Helena Parish, black students attending a newly integrated high school hit back when they were tormented by white classmates. Task force workers there reported that “these episodes created something of a stir, but the Negro students have not been bothered since.”57 Bogalusa Deacons leader Charles Sims found that would-be harassers normally backed down once they realized he had a gun. “The showing of a weapon stops many things,” he said. “Everybody want to live and nobody want to die.”58
Partly in response to the use of armed self-defense by black people, federal officials finally began to crack down on white violence to avert what they feared could become a race war. The FBI initiated counterintelligence operations against the Ku Klux Klan in September 1964, and the evidence of illegal activity gathered by agents enabled the Justice Department to gain a court order in December 1965 that enjoined Klan members in Bogalusa from using threats, intimidation, and violence. The belated action failed to impress some local activists, however. Several members of the Bogalusa Voters League expressed the view that the presence of the Deacons for Defense and Justice was the only thing that enabled civil rights work to continue in their town. That belief was shared by Steven Rubin, of the Louisiana Civil Liberties Union, who stated in 1966 that he had “not the slightest doubt that the presence of the Deacons, rather than the police, has served as a deterrent to the Klan. But for the Deacons, there would have been a lot of dead Negroes in Bogalusa.”59