A Different Day Page 27

  Such comments reflected local activists’ belief that the people most qualified to run antipoverty programs were those who were poor themselves. Only when they had experienced firsthand the kinds of problems created by desperate economic circumstances could administrators fully understand what was needed to solve them. In 1966 a group of rural farm women in St. Landry Parish gave eloquent expression to this idea in a grant proposal they submitted to the OEO. The women were members of a homemakers’ club that had been established as part of the Home Demonstration Program (a branch of agricultural extension work) in the parish. They explained: “Our club is not very big because most of the people who really need to learn and get help do not come to our meetings. Most poor people have to work too hard and have too many children to be able to come to meetings.” They wanted to organize a program that enabled volunteers to visit people in their own homes instead. “Most people don't have time to listen to small people, but we will take time and learn by what we hear,” the women wrote. “We want to help poor people learn to stick together to fight for the things they really want. This is the only way we will change things for poor people. This is what we think ‘community action’ is all about. . . . We feel that the real purpose of the Anti-poverty program was to HELP THE POOR TO HELP THEMSELVES and our own proposal was written by concerned poor people in our community through employing other poor people to bring this assistance to them.”79

  The idea of granting funds directly to poor people to enable them solve their own problems was a fundamentally different approach from traditional welfare systems that had kept thousands of displaced, unskilled, and uneducated black workers dependent on unemployment benefits and seasonal, low-wage jobs. It offered the possibility of breaking the cycle of poverty by providing access to job training, employment, loans, and other forms of assistance that could help people achieve economic independence. As in the 1930s, that possibility was anathema to many white political and business leaders in rural Louisiana. The threat to their power that antipoverty initiatives represented, as well as the thousands of dollars in federal grants that had suddenly become available, provided incentives for police juries and other administrative bodies to stake out their own claims on the Great Society. In almost every community where CAPs were established, local activists and CORE workers became embroiled in bitter struggles with parish officials over control of these programs.

  Developments in East Feliciana Parish represented a typical scenario. In May 1965 a group of white residents organized a committee to work on setting up a CAP agency for the parish that consisted of twenty-five white and five black people. According to county agent Farrell Roberts, those behind the move included “bankers, education leaders, political leaders, and business men” who were interested in “promoting economic development in the parish.” Many committee members openly opposed the civil rights movement. L. D. Peay, for instance, had assaulted two activists who picketed his store in December 1963. Others, including Roy Chaney and police jury president L. E. Brian, had held key positions in the East Feliciana Citizens’ Council until the organization dissolved itself in June 1965 so that its members could help set up the CAP agency without being tainted by their segregationist affiliations. The CAP organizers held no public meetings to discuss their plans, nor did they consult African Americans in the community about who should represent them. The five black appointees to the committee, including extension agent Prince Lewis and school principal W. W. Wilson, had all distanced themselves from civil rights activity. CORE workers reported that these people were completely controlled by white officials.80

  The CAP agency, Community Development Incorporated, was formed and its fourteen board members were chosen from among the thirty people who had served on the planning committee. The board then applied for and received an OEO grant of just over forty thousand dollars to establish a Head Start program in the parish. W. W. Wilson was appointed as director. Among the other paid staff were to be eighteen certified teachers and eighteen teachers’ aides, two secretaries, two lunchroom workers, and five bus drivers. Wilson and a few other black community “leaders” then chose candidates for these positions. Little was done to publicize the jobs or encourage others to apply for them, and no African Americans who had been active in the civil rights movement were hired.81

  A similar situation developed in St. Landry Parish. Black lawyer Marion Overton White reported in May 1966 that the directors of Acadiana Neuf, a CAP agency that had been formed to serve St. Landry and eight other parishes in southwestern Louisiana, were “in the truest sense racists and ‘Nigger haters.’” White asked for help from the OEO in ensuring that anti-poverty funds reached the poor people they were intended to help instead of being used by wealthy white people to further their own interests. The white administrators had wrested control of Acadiana Neuf from Southern Consumers’ Cooperative (SCC), an organization based in Lafayette that had a strong history of working with poor black people. Its founder, Father Albert McKnight, told OEO staff members, “They used us . . . to get approved, and now since they are approved, we are not involved at all.”82

  The OEO received hundreds of identical complaints about CAPs that were dominated by white people who appointed “pet” African Americans to create the illusion that administrative boards were integrated and representative of everyone. Federal officials attempted to solve these problems by investigating the composition of CAP boards more closely and withholding funds from those that did not seem to genuinely represent their local communities. But even when federal intervention resulted in more participation by poor people, administrators still had to contend with opposition from local officials. In 1966 the OEO rejected an application from a conservative, segregationist, white-dominated CAP in St. Mary Parish and granted funding to operate Head Start programs in the region to SCC instead. The white people responded by persuading Governor John McKeithen to exercise his right to veto the project and putting pressure on administrators at the OEO's regional office in Austin, Texas, to support their own grant proposal. In Rapides Parish, African Americans on the board of directors of Total Community Action successfully handled the antipoverty program for a year, then split between members who strongly supported civil rights work and others who were indifferent. According to local activist Louis Berry, tensions resulted in the moderates leaving to set up a rival agency “with the tacit consent and blessing of the white power structure for the latent purpose of neutralizing our full participation in Poverty Projects.” The new organization received funding to operate Head Start in the parish, and Berry's group was “rebuffed, thwarted and frustrated in project after project” that it submitted to the local CAP and the regional office.83

  Such conflicts were a nationwide phenomenon that greatly hindered the effectiveness of antipoverty measures, provided ammunition for conservative opponents of the War on Poverty in Congress, and contributed to a growing public perception that millions of tax dollars were being wasted on useless projects.84 In addition, many white Americans rejected the notion that economic equality for African Americans was necessary to eliminate racism. The Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts were enough, they thought. Now that legalized segregation and disfranchisement had been abolished, black people's success or failure depended on their own abilities and actions, just like everyone else's. Affirmative action programs threatened white workers’ economic security, intensifying opposition to the civil rights movement. These problems were compounded by the negative publicity surrounding the emerging Black Power movement and the rise to national prominence of black spokespeople who advocated a radical restructuring of society, if necessary through violent revolution.85

  In the second half of the 1960s, thousands of Americans withdrew their support for the civil rights movement, leaving both local and national activists without the finances or other resources necessary to sustain the struggle for more meaningful social change. Limited funds had been a major hindrance to civil rights work in rural Louisiana since the beginning of
the decade, and CORE's Freedom Task Force could not survive the dramatic losses in income that began to afflict the organization in 1964.86 In a memorandum of April 1965, Ronnie Moore informed staff members that the project was more than $1,600 in debt and asked them to limit travel and long-distance telephone calls. The following month, CORE reported an excess of expenditures over income of $220,059 for the previous financial year. Most of the volunteers for the summer project of 1965 paid all of their own expenses because, as one worker put it, “CORE is broke.”87 At the same time, Black Power advocates within CORE made it clear that white people were no longer welcome in the organization. When Floyd McKissick took over from James Farmer as national director in 1966, several experienced staff members who still adhered to the ideal of integration were either fired by the national office or resigned, and thousands of rank-and-file members also left.88 Greatly weakened both administratively and financially, CORE abandoned its projects in rural Louisiana after the summer of that year.89

  Though they had not always agreed with task force workers, local activists deeply appreciated the assistance that CORE had provided to the freedom struggle. After recounting the history of violent repression that characterized Ferriday before 1965, Robert Lewis stated, “Then . . . CORE came to Ferriday, and Ferriday . . . hasn't been the same since.” CORE workers informed black people of their legal rights, showed them how to organize demonstrations, and told them which federal agencies to contact to make complaints. “Once we found out what our rights were,” Lewis said, “once we found out we had a legitimate right to assemble peacefully . . . to speak or say what we wanted to say . . . then we knew we didn't have any problems.” Zelma Wyche told Miriam Feingold in 1966, “People need help at all times, local people, and had it not been for the civil rights groups throughout America I doubt if Madison Parish would really have started moving.” In the face of Klan violence, police brutality, church burnings, and other efforts to stifle the movement, the members of Wyche's group kept struggling because they knew that “the federal government was finally moving into the South with force, only because they had been pushed by these national civil rights organizations.” Moses Williams concurred, asserting, “CORE played a major, a major role, in helping us to move up the ladder, so to speak.”90

  As these statements attest, civil rights workers from outside rural Louisiana were vital and valued participants in the freedom movement. But those members of CORE who believed that they needed to provide local people with “leadership and an example” were mistaken. Moses Williams stated, “I came [to Tallulah] late, in the last part of ‘52, and I found in Madison Parish, some Roy Wilkinses, Martin Luther Kings, and James Farmers right here in Madison Parish—not in New York or Chicago, they were here.” The desire to achieve first-class citizenship existed before the 1960s, but often the financial resources to sustain a powerful movement did not. As Martin Williams explained: “Nobody got no money, nobody got a lawyer to get nobody out of jail. . . . How can you do something when you ain't got nothing? And CORE had all kind of money and connection. We didn't have nothing.”91

  Black Louisianans looked to national civil rights groups not for inspiration or guidance, but as important means of support for their own agenda. When CORE's ideas or priorities differed from those of local activists, as was the case with the organization's emphasis on nonviolence and direct action against segregation, task force workers—not local people—ultimately adjusted their approach to the freedom struggle. As Charles Payne has argued and this study reiterates, rural black southerners were not passive recipients of the ideas or leadership of national civil rights groups. They were agents in their own right who helped shape the development and outcomes of the movement.92

  Significantly, the issues that motivated black protest and political activity in the 1960s showed some continuity with earlier struggles: higher wages, access to good jobs and education, helping poor people to achieve economic independence, preventing white violence, and federal protection of African Americans’ citizenship rights. These same concerns lay behind the broad range of methods that black Louisianans had used in their attempts to challenge white supremacy throughout the twentieth century. By leaving plantations in search of fair treatment, accepting advice and assistance from extension agents, participating in the labor movements of the 1930s and 1940s, fighting racism at home and abroad during World War II, establishing NAACP branches, and supporting CORE's efforts in the 1960s, African Americans signaled their rejection of the second-class status assigned them in the social order and pressured white Americans to accord them real freedom and equality. These activities should not be seen as separate and unrelated to each other. For black people who engaged in some or all of them, they were different parts of the same struggle.

  Epilogue

  Without minimizing the achievements of the civil rights movement, a recognition of its limits seems a standard lament among participants and historians.1 Federal legislation abolished legalized discrimination and protected African Americans’ voting rights, but the failure to redistribute economic power left some of the most important causes of inequality untouched. Political leaders and the majority of white Americans refused to acknowledge that ending racism required more far-reaching reforms. The backlash against civil rights initiatives and conservative dominance over national politics after 1970 ensured that subtle but powerful forms of discrimination and injustice would persist into the next century.

  No one doubts that the events of the 1960s altered conditions in the South in important ways. Not least among the significant and lasting changes effected by the civil rights movement was the restoration of black southerners’ ability to vote. African American voter registration in Louisiana increased dramatically after 1965, rising from rates as low as 2 percent of those eligible to more than 90 percent in some parishes. Statewide, the proportion of black voters who were registered doubled, rising from 31 percent in 1964 to 59 percent in 1967. By the end of the 1970s, close to 70 percent of black Louisianans were registered.2

  African Americans’ new voting strength opened the possibility of electing more sympathetic parish officials to replace the racist white men who had traditionally dominated police juries, school boards, town councils, and police forces in rural Louisiana. A fact sheet prepared by SEDFRE in October 1967 noted that African Americans in Louisiana seemed poised to greatly increase their political representation, with black candidates contesting almost every available elected position in some parishes.3 The following year the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights counted thirty-seven black elected officials in Louisiana, including ten police jurors, four school board members, eight constables, one mayor, and one representative in the state legislature.4

  Even after passage of the Voting Rights Act, however, white supremacists contested black political participation. Forced to accept the reality of mass voter registration by African Americans, opponents of the freedom struggle shifted their attention to minimizing the impact of black votes. In 1966 dubious electoral practices prevented African American candidates from winning office in several parishes. In Tallulah, during the Democratic primary elections in April, officials provided only one polling place in the precinct where Zelma Wyche was running for nomination as city alderman. Fourteen hundred voters had to wait in long lines, and weariness or other commitments caused many to leave without casting their votes. Harrison Brown won the nomination for school board member in his ward in the same primary, but he was defeated in the general election after parish officials solicited more than five hundred absentee ballots favoring his white opponent. In West Feliciana Parish, poll workers prevented several African Americans from voting in the Democratic primary by claiming that they were registered as members of other parties. One black woman who had registered as a Democrat several months earlier was stunned to discover that she was listed as a member of the segregationist States’ Rights Party. Other subterfuges employed by opponents of the freedom struggle included switching from ward-based to at-large elec
tions, gerrymandering electoral districts, denying black people assistance at the polls, vote buying, and the old methods of threats and intimidation.5

  White recalcitrance was gradually overcome through the persistence of local activists, Justice Department lawsuits, and Supreme Court decisions that gave federal authorities the power to ensure not only that African Americans could vote, but also that their votes would mean something.6 Redistricting plans and electoral laws that attempted to dilute black votes were challenged and struck down, opening the way for a significant increase in the number of black elected officials in Louisiana. In 1975 more than two hundred African Americans held political office in the state, and over the next decade that number doubled. By the 1990s twenty Louisiana towns had African American mayors, and black people filled more than six hundred other elected positions.7

  With African Americans in office, Louisiana's rural communities became much safer places for black inhabitants. Local activists often made it a priority to elect black law enforcement officers to ensure an end to police brutality. With African Americans also filling positions as judges and serving on juries, Klan members and other perpetrators of violence could no longer rely on an all-white justice system to absolve them of their crimes, which helped to deter the attacks on black people that had been so common before the 1960s. Interviewed in 1984, Spiver Gordon stated: “I can see night and day difference in terms of the fear that was there. I can drive in West Feliciana and not worry about it, because I know there are black folk in office. . . . I can drive through these places and not be worried about whether somebody's gonna shoot me or whether or not I'm gonna get arrested or hauled off to jail for something.”8 Most activists counted the realization of black people's desire for political participation and protection from violence as the main achievements of the civil rights movement.