A Different Day Page 26
Americans who remember the civil rights movement are likely to recall with reverence the inspiring speeches of Martin Luther King Jr. and his commitment to nonviolence. But in the minds of at least some who were there, a different image stands out: African Americans fighting back. Twenty-five years after he participated in the Plaquemine demonstrations, local activist Kenny Johnson still recalled the sense of empowerment he felt at the sight of black people refusing to remain passive when confronted by white violence. “I could look over and see my father also out there taking the tear gas canisters that were thrown and throwing them back toward the police,” he said. “That's a real—a real high.”60
The achievements of Dr. King and others who struggled to remain non-violent under extremely trying circumstances deserve all of the recognition and respect they have received. But activists who rejected that strategy and took up arms to defend black communities were essential in helping to realize the goals that all participants were fighting for. Their insistence on protecting themselves and the young volunteers who had recently joined the freedom struggle was as important to the movement at the local level as nonviolence was to the national movement. African Americans who fought back against attempts to repress their demands for citizenship signaled to white and black southerners alike that they did not accept second-class status and helped to preserve the space for political action that had emerged as a result of developments at the national level.
The accounts of discrimination, threats, economic reprisals, and violent attacks that permeated civil rights workers’ field reports provided ample evidence that federal intervention was necessary to protect black southerners’ citizenship rights. As one study noted, the most important contribution of the VEP was “its demonstration, day by day for two and a half years, of the need for federal legislation if Negro enfranchisement were ever to be fully achieved for the present generations in the South.” In 1964 Congress finally passed a comprehensive Civil Rights Act that outlawed discrimination in public accommodations, employment, and unions; created the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission; and authorized the government to withhold federal funds from public programs that were operated in a discriminatory manner. A year later the Voting Rights Act of 1965 abolished the literacy and constitutional understanding tests that had been used to prevent black southerners from registering to vote and provided for federal registrars to be sent to districts where patterns of discrimination had been clearly demonstrated.61
The removal of arbitrarily enforced testing and qualifications requirements led to a rapid increase in black voter registration. In West Feliciana Parish, for instance, CORE had managed to register fewer than one hundred African Americans before the Voting Rights Act was passed. By October 1965 almost seven hundred black people were listed on the parish registration rolls. One month later, after the arrival of a federal registrar, that number more than doubled with the addition of one thousand newly registered voters. A similar increase occurred in East Feliciana Parish, where over one hundred people lined up to be registered each day. Local activists James Bell and Laura Spears remembered African Americans’ relief that the tests were no longer to be used. Bell stated, “The applications weren't any more long and drawn out, where you had to be a history student or a grad student to pass the exam.” Two thousand black people registered in the parish in eighteen days. Statewide, the number of black voters grew from 153,781 to 243,000 in the first year after passage of the Voting Rights Act.62
Compared with the strong support that rural black people gave voter registration efforts, CORE's attempts to desegregate public facilities received only a lukewarm response in some communities. In July 1963 Miriam Feingold reported: “One lady told me yesterday that she didn't care if the lunch counters everywhere were opened—she couldn't buy anything with the money she had. All she wants is a good job for her husband, and the chance to bring up her kids like everyone else's kids.” African Americans in Tallulah expressed similar sentiments. Early in the summer of 1965, CORE workers in cooperation with the local voters’ league succeeded in desegregating the downtown restaurants and triumphantly advertised this “big step toward first class citizenship” in their weekly newsletter. Local black people do not seem to have rushed to take advantage of these new opportunities, however. A later issue of CORE Freedom News reminded readers that the restaurants were integrated and urged them to use the facilities that were now open to them. The following month CORE workers admitted that desegregation was “only a scratch” on the surface of problems facing the African American community. After canvassing the town to assess black people's needs, civil rights activists discovered that most of them were more concerned with things like the suspiciously high readings of gas and electricity meters, the poor condition of streets, and the lack of garbage service, street lights, and fire protection in black neighborhoods.63
CORE workers had only to look around them to understand why local people cared more about economic issues than desegregation. Writing home to her parents about the extreme poverty that many black Louisianans endured, Miriam Feingold must have realized that exclusion from white restaurants or public facilities was not the biggest problem these people had. “Some areas haven't changed much since slavery,” she stated. “There is no running water, no indoor toilets, no street lights, no garbage collections, no paved roads. . . . The houses have holes in [the] walls and floor, and drainage ditches in the front.” Feingold saw mothers and their children walking around with bare feet in the middle of winter and found one family living in a shack where “a fire in a fireplace barely heated a room with more holes than walls.” By March 1964 the young civil rights worker had concluded, “What is needed, basically, are not desegregated libraries, but decent farm income and decent jobs for non-farm people.”64
When black people did express interest in desegregation, they were not, as some white southerners believed, “begging for social acceptance.” Robert Lewis stated that when FFM members began pushing for more than token integration of Concordia Parish schools, it was not because they wanted to go to school with white people, “but rather . . . to be able to have the same economic opportunity as white had.” In his ranking of local activists’ priorities, Lewis placed gaining access to those opportunities second only to ending police brutality in Ferriday. A notice announcing a boycott of white-owned stores in the town declared: “Too long we the Negro citizens of Concordia Parish have been treated like animals and second class citizens. . . . We are fighting for equal rights, better jobs, better schools, better streets, better garbage service, more street lights, more fire [plugs], better mail service, better jobs downtown where we spend our money, and a countless number of other things.” The notice summarized the aims of the FFM as “First Class Citizenship [and] First Class Jobs.”65
By the mid-1960s CORE was redefining its own goals and programs to align more closely with the needs of the people its task force workers were trying to help. Plans for a “Louisiana Citizenship Program” drawn up by Ronnie Moore and his staff in September 1964 emphasized that it was necessary to survey local communities and ask people what issues were important to them rather than trying to impose a predetermined agenda. The group suggested combining voter registration with other activities like attacking discrimination in employment, building community centers, and establishing adult literacy programs. “In short,” they stated, “our program will emphasize community demands rather than a program priority of our own.” A discussion paper prepared for volunteers and supporters of CORE's 1965 summer projects made a similar point. “We have come to realize that voter registration and desegregation of public accommodations and facilities are not enough,” its authors explained. “The problems are deeper than lack of the vote and legislated segregation, and many aspects must be tackled at the same time if the whole is to emerge sound and sensible.”66
In the second half of the decade, CORE workers became involved in a broad range of activities designed to attack the root causes of poverty and r
acism. Volunteers assigned to Tallulah in the summer of 1965 worked with a group of black employees of the Chicago Mill and Lumber Company to press for equal employment opportunities in compliance with Title VII of the Civil Rights Act and attempted to reorganize the white-dominated union local.67 They also helped the local voters’ league to organize a selective buying campaign aimed at pressuring the owners of stores and businesses in the town to hire more black workers. Activists knew that change was much more likely to be achieved through exercising and enhancing their economic power than through moral persuasion. A flyer announcing the boycott stated that white people had not heeded the requests of civil rights groups, “but they will listen to the voices—and pocket books—of all Tallulah's Negroes speaking together.” After resisting for several months, the town's stubborn employers finally capitulated. Local leader Earnestine Brown explained that by the 1960s, most white people owned cars and could afford to travel to larger cities to shop, leaving the economic life of small rural towns like Tallulah heavily dependent on black people's dollars. White merchants ultimately realized that “they had to do something, you know—couldn't just remain as it was, because this was a different day now, and [black people's] money was all spent just like the white man.”68
Activists continued the struggle for better education by pressuring white officials to act more decisively on the issue of school desegregation. As a result of a CORE-sponsored lawsuit, federal district court judge E. Gordon West ordered that the first and twelfth grades of all public schools in West Feliciana Parish be desegregated in 1965 and formulated plans for the integration of the remaining grades over a two-year period.69 More than a decade after the Supreme Court's ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, parish school boards in Louisiana finally accepted the inevitability of desegregation. Judge West was himself a segregationist who had strongly criticized the higher court's decision. Nevertheless, he cut short the hearing in the West Feliciana case, stating that school boards in Louisiana were tired of fighting lawsuits and wanted to be taken “off the hook.” According to West, parish officials had to show some resistance to appease their white constituents, but ultimately they wanted “the Federal court to be their ‘fall guy’ and tell them this is what you will have to do.”70
In St. Helena Parish, efforts to force school board officials to implement a desegregation order that had been handed down in 1960 as a result of an NAACP lawsuit were combined with pressure from a local student group to improve facilities at the black high school. Members of the Students’ Association for Freedom and Equality (SAFE) organized a boycott of the school in January 1966, issuing those who participated in the protest absentee notes that read, “The reason I stayed out of school Friday is that I was sick . . . of second class education.” In response to rumors that black students might have to start paying for their textbooks, SAFE demanded that the school board cease its practice of forcing the black community to finance construction projects and amenities that white students received without charge. A leaflet advertising a meeting to discuss the issue reminded African Americans in the parish of the injustices they had endured and how they had struggled to overcome them. “We have had to cut down trees for our light poles. We have had to pay for the football field fence, We have had to put up our football bleachers, We have had to pay for our piano, We have had to plant grass and carry dirt. . . . Whites had all this done for them by school board money and state workers. We are sick and tired of paying for things the whites get for free.” Picketing, demonstrations, and the threat that newly enfranchised African Americans might vote them out of office forced school board members to give in to most of SAFE's demands in April 1966.71
In initiatives that were reminiscent of the LFU's efforts in the 1930s, CORE activists also worked with local people to increase black participation in federal farm programs. Many black farmers had been denied access to federal loans and ignored by their county agents after the demise of the New Deal in the 1940s, and CORE workers found that this was a major complaint of the African Americans they spoke with. They informed black farmers of government financial assistance that was available and attempted to gain representation for African Americans on local administrative committees of the Agricultural Soil Conservation Service. In rural communities, the decisions made by ASCS committees were as important to many people as those of police juries and school boards. Committee members ran the government's crop allotment and price support programs, and allocated federal funds to farmers who adopted agricultural conservation practices. According to one report, their power was such that “in many areas county government operations are dwarfed by ASC programs as measured in dollar expenditures or impact on residents or both.”72
Not surprisingly, given what was at stake, the white men who controlled the ASCS committees were just as determined to prevent any African American influence here as in other areas. In West Feliciana Parish, officials had for years neglected to send ballots for ASCS elections to many eligible farmers, preventing them from participating. When CORE accused them of discriminating against black people, members of the all-white local committee drafted an integrated slate of candidates and agreed to mail ballots to every farm family in the parish. However, as was often the case when African Americans were finally included in the political process, the black candidates were handpicked by white administrators. The farmers CORE was working with chose their own representatives and attempted to elect them with write-in votes, but none of the candidates received enough support to make it onto the committee.73
In a similar initiative in Pointe Coupee Parish, seven black candidates contested the ASCS election. White committee leaders responded by placing the names of eight other African Americans on the ballot who were unqualified and had not expressed any interest in running, but who could be easily manipulated. CORE workers complained to the Department of Agriculture and an agent visited the parish to investigate. Yet according to Paul Kleyman, “His ‘investigation’ consisted of talking to the clerks in the ASC office. He wasn't interested in the list of complaints we had prepared nor in speaking with the Negro farmers and discussing their complaints about the unqualified Negroes put on the ballot without their knowledge.” As in West Feliciana and seven other parishes where CORE tried to increase black representation on the agricultural committees, no African Americans were elected.74
A more promising development occurred in St. Landry Parish, where CORE worker John Zippert helped a group of white and black farmers to organize the Grand Marie Vegetable Producers’ Cooperative (GMVPC). Small farmers in the region were finding it difficult to survive in the face of increasing competition from large-scale corporate farms that monopolized the processing and selling of sweet potatoes, their primary cash crop. Black farmers usually received between fifty cents and one dollar per fifty-pound crate of potatoes they sold to the larger growers, who were organized and sought to keep the prices they paid as low as possible.75 In 1965 six farmers who had already joined together to purchase machinery began meeting with others and discussing the idea of forming a marketing cooperative. Interest in the project was strong, especially among African Americans, and membership in the GMVPC grew steadily after its official incorporation in February 1966.
Zippert assisted the group in gaining financial support from various sources, including the Scholarship, Education, and Defense Fund for Racial Equality (SEDFRE), the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO), and the Farmers’ Home Administration. After buying storage facilities and processing equipment, the GMVPC assumed control over the preparation, packaging, and marketing of its members’ potatoes, offering them prices that were double or triple those they had received before. By providing an alternative market, the cooperative forced other buyers to compete with its prices and in this way benefited all the farmers in the community. In addition, the GMVPC used some of its funds to launch an educational program that provided much-needed advice and assistance to rural poor people in St. Landry and three other parishes. Field workers for the GMVPC's
Sweet Potato Alert Program renewed efforts to involve black people in government farm programs by visiting farmers and arranging lectures and seminars to explain the various types of aid that were available from federal antipoverty agencies.76
Community organizing efforts like the project in St. Landry became the primary focus of CORE's work after 1965, encouraged by President Lyndon Johnson's Great Society programs. The War on Poverty provided funding and technical assistance for local initiatives to supply needed services and employment opportunities for the nation's most impoverished citizens. Examples of the types of activities financed by the OEO in cooperation with local Community Action Programs (CAPs) included the construction of low-income housing and the establishment of early childhood education and day care programs (Head Start), health clinics, adult literacy classes, and community information centers where people could go for legal assistance and other aid.77
Guidelines for the antipoverty programs called for “maximum feasible participation” of the poor, a mandate that CORE workers and local people took seriously. In discussions about how to organize the Head Start program in East Feliciana Parish, for example, several local activists argued passionately that the opportunities for employment generated should be given to black people who were not college graduates or professionals. One woman expressed concern that if too much emphasis was placed on hiring people with educational qualifications, the jobs would go to teachers who did not need them; instead, administrators should hire “people who ain't got no jobs.” At a similar meeting attended by representatives from several parishes, one person suggested that Head Start staff should have at least some college education. Bernice Noflin of West Feliciana Parish retorted that she thought the program was supposed to help poor people, and “in poor parishes you don't find many people running around w[ith] college degrees.”78