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  3. Wyche et al. interview.

  4. Meier and Rudwick, CORE, 160.

  5. Bureau of the Census, Eighteenth Decennial Census . . . Population: 1960, Volume 1, Part 20, 90–95.

  6. Adam Fairclough's Race and Democracy provides a statewide study of the civil rights movement in Louisiana.

  7. Writing in 1960, for instance, Elliott Rudwick (W. E. B. Du Bois, 118) suggested that the majority of African Americans in the first half of the twentieth century were “little interested in politics” and required exceptionally inspirational leadership to stir them to action. The almost exclusive focus on national civil rights organizations and leaders that characterized studies of the movement for the next three decades did little to refute this view, though this does not detract from the significant contributions these works have made to the field. The most useful and comprehensive accounts are Meier and Rudwick, CORE; Carson, In Struggle; Garrow, Bearing the Cross; Fairclough, To Redeem the Soul of America; Branch, Parting the Waters; and Goldfield, Black, White, and Southern.

  8. McMillen, Dark Journey; Litwack, Trouble in Mind; Cecelski and Tyson, review of Trouble in Mind, 736.

  9. Aptheker, American Negro Slave Revolts; Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll; Thompson, Making of the English Working Class; Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness.

  10. James C. Scott, Moral Economy of the Peasant and Weapons of the Weak; Kelley, Race Rebels; Allen Isaacman et al., “ ‘Cotton Is the Mother of Poverty”’; Stern, Resistance, Rebellion, and Consciousness; Hunter, To ‘Joy My Freedom. See also Guha, Subaltern Studies, Volume I, and subsequent volumes in this series.

  11. For a summary of the main issues in this debate and some helpful critiques, see the essays in Journal of Peasant Studies 13 (January 1986), a special issue devoted to studies of everyday forms of peasant resistance in Southeast Asia, especially those by James Scott, Christine Pelzer White, and Benedict J. Tria Kerkvliet. Another useful overview is O'Hanlon, “Recovering the Subject.”

  12. Woodruff, “African-American Struggles for Citizenship.” Michael Honey (Black Workers Remember) provides further evidence that black activists viewed economic rights as an integral part of the fight for equality.

  13. James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance, 200–227. Steve Stern makes a similar point in his introduction and contribution to Resistance, Rebellion, and Consciousness, 9–10, 34–93. Stern suggests looking at “preexisting patterns of ‘resistant adaptation’” as a way to understand peasant rebellions, arguing that open protests might not reflect a sudden awakening to political consciousness on the part of the oppressed (as is often supposed), but rather the continuation, in new contexts, of earlier efforts to overcome injustice.

  14. Daniel, Breaking the Land; Kirby, Rural Worlds Lost.

  15. Grubbs, Cry from the Cotton; Kelley, Hammer and Hoe. See also Foley, White Scourge, 163–82.

  16. See, e.g., Kelley, Hammer and Hoe; Honey, Southern Labor and Black Civil Rights; and Sullivan, Days of Hope.

  17. One exception is Jeannie M. Whayne's New Plantation South.

  18. Harrison and Earnestine Brown, interview by author, THWC—LSU.

  Chapter One

  1. Vandal, Rethinking Southern Violence, 40–46.

  2. Smith and Hitt, People of Louisiana, 47–49; “The Social Setting of the Louisiana Negro Schools,” n.d. [ca. 1940], 2–3, file 8, box 226, CSJP.

  3. Johnson, Louisiana Educational Survey, 13, 15.

  4. Vandal, Rethinking Southern Violence, 52–53, 57; Hyde, Pistols and Politics, 186, 209.

  5. Vandal, Rethinking Southern Violence, 50–51; Johnson, Louisiana Educational Survey, 5.

  6. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, 453; Sitterson, Sugar Country, 104–7; Hall, African Americans in Colonial Louisiana, 150; Hyde, Pistols and Politics, 180–212. See also Thomas Becnel's study of labor organizing efforts in the sugar parishes and plantation owners’ responses in Labor, Church, and the Sugar Establishment. Becnel finds that most Catholic planters rejected the admonitions of priests who supported workers’ struggles, acting according to their economic interests rather than their religious beliefs in refusing to give in to union demands.

  7. This analysis is drawn from general works on the post–Civil War South and more specific studies of Louisiana itself. The best overviews of the period are Du Bois, Black Reconstruction; Woodward, Origins of the New South and Reunion and Reaction; Kousser, Shaping of Southern Politics; Powell, New Masters; and Foner, Reconstruction. For Louisiana, see Shugg, Origins of Class Struggle; Hair, Bourbonism and Agrarian Protest; Taylor, Louisiana Reconstructed; Vincent, Black Legislators; Tunnell, Crucible of Reconstruction; and Hyde, Pistols and Politics.

  8. Reed, “Race Legislation,” 380; General Assembly of . . . Louisiana, Acts of the General Assembly . . . 1865, 3–9.

  9. U.S. Senate, Report and Testimony, 176–77, 192–211 (quotation, p. 176).

  10. Engstrom et al., “Louisiana,” 104; Prestage and Williams, “Blacks in Louisiana Politics,” 293–96.

  11. Reed, “Race Legislation,” 381–84; Tunnell, Crucible of Reconstruction, 113–15, 117–18; Vincent, Black Legislators, 48–70.

  12. Crouch, “Black Education,” 289, 297–98; Anderson, Education of Blacks in the South, 21; Robert Dabney Calhoun, History of Concordia Parish, 136.

  13. Foner, Nothing but Freedom, 44–45; Aiken, Cotton Plantation South, 17–21.

  14. Shugg, Origins of Class Struggle, 228–29; Hair, Bourbonism and Agrarian Protest, 17–18, 56; Vandal, Rethinking Southern Violence, 34, 67–89.

  15. Hyde, Pistols and Politics, 166–68; Taylor, Louisiana, 111–12; Tunnell, Crucible of Reconstruction, 173–209; Vincent, Black Legislators, 183–85, 202–17; Vandal, Rethinking Southern Violence, 24, 29, 102–3.

  16. Vandal, Rethinking Southern Violence, 178, 10, 179; Warmoth, War, Politics, and Reconstruction, 67–68; Tunnell, Crucible of Reconstruction, 189–92.

  17. Woodward, Origins of the New South, 23–51; Vandal, Rethinking Southern Violence, 189–91. Nell Irvin Painter (Exodusters) provides a detailed account of the Exodus of 1879.

  18. Hair, Bourbonism and Agrarian Protest, 60–61, 142–233; Becnel, Labor, Church, and the Sugar Establishment, 7–8.

  19. Hair, Bourbonism and Agrarian Protest, 234–67 (quotation, p. 260).

  20. Dart, Civil Code of . . . Louisiana, 424–25; Act 50 of 1892, General Assembly of . . . Louisiana, Acts Passed by the General Assembly . . . 1892, 71–72; Constitution of . . . Louisiana . . . 1898, 77–87, 104.

  21. Foner, Nothing but Freedom, 72.

  Chapter Two

  1. Field workers normally picked between one hundred and two hundred pounds of cotton per day. Taylor, Louisiana, 66–67. Tom Alexander therefore owed the men between seven and fourteen dollars each.

  2. Bernice Wims to Attorney General Murphy, 25 October 1939, frames 0959–60, reel 9, PFUS.

  3. O. John Rogge to Bernice Wims, 7 November 1939, frame 0958, and Wims to Rogge, 18 November 1939, frame 0957, ibid.

  4. Key, Southern Politics, 664.

  5. C. Vann Woodward first suggested that post–Civil War southern society was shaped chiefly by northern capitalists and southern converts to new ideologies that emphasized industrial development, profits, and progress. Jonathan Wiener presented a different view, arguing that conservative plantation owners retained control over the economic development of their states, allowing them to limit industrialization and ensure that the South remained a primarily agricultural region powered by cheap black labor. Yet as scholars such as Stanley Greenberg, James Cobb, and Alex Lichtenstein have shown, the interests of planters and industrialists were not necessarily incompatible. Employers of all types of labor (in the North as well as the South) benefited from racist ideas and practices that originated in slavery and were perpetuated in the twentieth century. See Woodward, Origins of the New South; Wiener, Social Origins of the New South; Greenberg, Race and State in Capitalist Development; Cobb, Industrialization and Southern Society;
and Lichtenstein, Twice the Work of Free Labor. Two other very useful works are Fields, “Ideology and Race,” and Hale, Making Whiteness. Both argue persuasively that racism is not a static entity that has existed throughout time. Their analyses suggest that the twentieth-century southern social order did not necessarily have to be based on racist discrimination, and that these practices were perpetuated because they served the interests of powerful elites.

  6. M. Buck to Sister, 20 February [1866], 2, file 187, box 8, CLMP; John T. Bramhall, “The Exploitation of Louisiana,” Country Gentleman, 14 October 1909, 970; Nesom, “Louisiana Delta”; “Who's Who in the Making of Madison,” Madison Journal, 26 October 1930, 3; Shannon, Toward a New Politics, 38–53; Hair, Bourbonism and Agrarian Protest, 35–39; Hyde, Pistols and Politics, 145–46, 194–98.

  7. As Gavin Wright (Old South, New South, 47–50) points out, whether post–Civil War landowners had been members of the antebellum planter class or were northern immigrants is not as important as the changes in economic relationships that resulted from the abolition of slavery. All postbellum planters were members of a new class whose interests were different from those of Old South plantation owners.

  8. “Who's Who in the Making of Madison,” Madison Journal, 26 October 1930, 3.

  9. Hyde, Pistols and Politics, 196–98. See also “Two Industries for Opelousas through Bureau,” St. Landry Clarion-Progress, 10 March 1923, 1; “The Future of Opelousas,” St. Landry Clarion-Progress, 17 October 1925, 6; “Louisiana Should Watch Her Step,” Madison Journal, 30 June 1928, 1; and “Industries for Tallulah,” Madison Journal, 29 November 1929, 1.

  10. Constitution of . . . Louisiana . . . 1898, 94, 128–30 (quotation, pp. 129–30).

  11. Reidy, “Mules and Machines and Men,” 184; “Cotton Planters Organize,” Country Gentleman, 2 July 1903, 575.

  12. Hair, Bourbonism and Agrarian Protest, 35–39; Sitterson, Sugar Country, 262–63, 311–13; “Excerpt from Regional Director's Weekly Report, Region VI,” 25 January 1937, 1, loose in box, box 4, RCFT, RG 83. Louisiana's “business plantations” closely resembled those described in studies of the Mississippi and Arkansas deltas by Robert Brandfon (Cotton Kingdom of the New South) and Jeannie Whayne (New Plantation South). Also useful for understanding the transformation of the plantation economy after the Civil War are Woodward, Origins of the New South, 178–85; Gaston, New South Creed; Powell, New Masters; Mandle, Roots of Black Poverty; and Woodman, New South—New Law.

  13. Goins and Caldwell, Historical Atlas of Louisiana, 68–69; Bureau of the Census, Eighteenth Decennial Census . . . Population: 1960, Volume 1, Part 20, 5, and Census of Manufactures: 1947, Volume 3, 251.

  14. Bureau of the Census, Thirteenth Census . . . 1910, Volume 2: Population, 778, and Volume 4: Population, Occupation Statistics, 465–66; John R. McMahon, “Scraping the American Sugar Bowl,” Country Gentleman, 15 December 1917, 1958–59, 1994; Whayne, New Plantation South, 27; Hair, Bourbonism and Agrarian Protest, 51–55, 87; Sitterson, Sugar Country, 292–93.

  15. Sitterson, Sugar Country, 221; Ferleger, “Problem of ‘Labor,’” 146; “Labor Troubles in North Louisiana,” New Orleans Times-Democrat, 26 April 1900, 4; Rodrigue, “ ‘Great Law of Demand and Supply,’” 168; M. Buck to Sister, 20 February [1866], 1, file 187, box 8, CLMP; P[aul] L. DeClouet, Diary, 1869–70, entries for 1–3 January 1870, vol. 5, box 2, Alexandre Etienne DeClouet and Family Papers, HML; Jas Selby to P[enelope] Mathews, 2 February 1871, 2–3, file 193, box 9, CLMP; Peter [Henry M. Stewart] to Nance [Annie L. Allain], 27 December 1906, 1–3, file 19, box 8, TAFP.

  16. Henry [M. Stewart] to Nan [Annie L. Allain], 29 November 1898, file 14, box 8, TAFP; Sarah T. Bowman to Nina Bowman, n.d. [1907], 7, file 7, box 2, Turnbull-Bowman-Lyons Family Papers, HML; “The Negro,” Madison Journal, 28 April 1928, 2.

  17. Bureau of the Census, Sixteenth Census . . . 1940, Agriculture Crop-Sharing Contracts, 14–16.

  18. Alston and Kauffman, “Up, Down, and Off the Agricultural Ladder,” 263–65; Bureau of the Census, Fifteenth Census . . . 1930, Agriculture, Volume 2, Part 2, 2–3; Woodman, New South—New Law, 105–6. In this study, I have sometimes used “tenants” to refer to all those who labored in return for a portion of the crop, including sharecroppers. “Sharecroppers” refers more specifically to those workers who owned no farm animals or implements, and “renters” is used to distinguish cash tenants from those farming on shares.

  In a recent review essay, Alex Lichtenstein (“Was the Emancipated Slave a Proletarian?”) questioned whether sharecroppers should really be categorized as wage laborers, as Woodman and others have suggested. Highlighting some important distinctions between sharecropping and free labor as it existed elsewhere (e.g., year-long contracts that bound workers to the plantations, the use of family labor, and the illusion of autonomy gained from working individual plots of land), Lichtenstein argued that until the 1930s, southern sharecroppers constituted an American peasantry, not a displaced rural proletariat. Although Lichtenstein's approach might be useful for analyzing farm tenancy in some parts of the South, Woodman's wage labor thesis seems more appropriate for the region under study here. As is noted in Chapter 3, most African Americans who worked on plantations in rural Louisiana viewed themselves as exploited laborers, not semi-independent farmers.

  19. After 1920 agricultural censuses grouped African Americans, Native Americans, and Asian Americans together in the category of “nonwhite” farmers. Between 1900 and 1960 the vast majority of people in this category were African American, with other groups never making up more than 0.5 percent of the total nonwhite population in Louisiana. See Bureau of the Census, Census of the Population: 1970, Volume 1, Part 20, 42. In the agricultural statistics cited in this study, the terms “black” and “African American” correspond to the census category of “nonwhite.”

  20. Ramsey and Hoffsommer, Farm Tenancy in Louisiana, 7–8, 11–17. My interviews with civil rights activists who grew up on Louisiana plantations also suggest the prevalence of closely supervised tenancy arrangements. See, e.g., Harrison and Earnestine Brown, Moses Williams, and Robert and Essie Mae Lewis, interviews by author, THWC—LSU.

  21. Aiken, Cotton Plantation South, 97–100.

  22. Byron A. Case, “In the Mississippi Delta—II,” Country Gentleman, 28 March 1907, 322–23; “The Problem,” n.d., 3–4, file “LU-1 184-047, Farm Tenancy,” box 1, RCFT, RG 83; Hair, Bourbonism and Agrarian Protest, 51–52; Taylor, Louisiana Reconstructed, 401–3; Mertz, New Deal Policy, 8–9; Brown interview.

  23. Sitterson, Sugar Country, 240–41, 389–90.

  24. Ibid., 114–33; Reidy, “Mules and Machines and Men,” 185–94.

  25. Sugar wage rates fluctuated from year to year and during different times of the season, according to prices, market conditions, and the labor supply. Workers had some leverage during the harvest season, as planters could not afford to allow the cane to spoil. In the decades following the Civil War, field hands used that power to gain a few concessions from planters (like monthly instead of yearly payments) while plantation owners explored ways to undermine workers’ bargaining power. By adopting labor-saving cultivating methods and implements, agreeing among themselves not to pay more than a certain wage rate each season, and using violence and intimidation to crush strikes, sugar growers in Louisiana gradually brought their workforce under control. In the early 1890s wages stabilized at around 75¢ per day during the cultivating season and $1.00 per day during harvesting, rising slightly in the early twentieth century because of competition from the lumber industry. Sitterson, Sugar Country, 318–22; Reidy, “Mules and Machines and Men”; Rodrigue, “ ‘The Great Law of Demand and Supply.’”

  26. Laws, “Negroes of Cinclare Central Factory,” 107–12; Sitterson, Sugar Country, 391; Gordon McIntire to Miss La Budde, 12 October 1937, 3–4, file 3, reel 13, CLJP.

  27. Hair, Bourbonism and Agrarian Protest, 48–49; Mary White Ovington, Bogalusa (New York: NAACP [1920]), frames 0002–5, reel 10, part 10, PNAACP
—Micro; Dinwiddie, “International Woodworkers of America,” 4–5; John C. Howard, Negro in the Lumber Industry, 3–4, 7–8, 12, 26–28.

  28. “Abolish the Commissaries,” Louisiana Farmers’ Union News, 1 March 1938, 2; “Madison Parish; Its Customs—Yesterday and Today,” Madison Journal, 27 March 1926, 1.

  29. Act 50 of 1892, General Assembly of . . . Louisiana, Acts Passed by the General Assembly . . . 1892, 71–72.

  30. “Negroes in Keen Demand,” New York Sun, 30 January 1904, item 295, frame 30, Hampton University Peabody Newspaper Clipping File, microfiche; “Planters Resist Exodus of Labor,” New Orleans Daily Picayune, 25 March 1914, 7. William Cohen (At Freedom's Edge) provides a useful analysis of plantation owners’ attempts to control workers and African Americans’ ability to move about in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Cohen argues that peonage and restrictive labor practices were not constant elements but related to specific times and places—plantation owners were most likely to resort to such methods during labor shortages, and when labor was plentiful they allowed workers to leave. In addition, the conflicting interests of different classes of white people in the South, combined with periods of intense planter competition for labor, enabled a certain amount of worker mobility.