A Different Day Read online

  In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, lumber companies joined cotton and sugar planters as major employers of African Americans in Louisiana. Northern speculators and corporations purchased large tracts of forest, built sawmills and railroads, and began exporting lumber to other parts of the United States and to Europe. Farmers whose landholdings included wooded areas sometimes built small, portable mills that they used to clear stands of trees, moving on when the task had been completed. Operators employed mostly black male workers to cut and trim the timber, then transport it by river or rail to the sawmills, where the logs were sawed into planks and dried. The work was difficult, dangerous, and poorly compensated. The fifty to seventy-five cents per day that most sawmill workers earned in 1910 were the lowest wages paid by any nonagricultural southern industry. Weather conditions could sometimes put men out of work for days or weeks, and they depended on credit extended by their employers or local merchants to carry them over periods of unemployment. In some places there emerged company towns that resembled plantations in the organization and treatment of labor. Payment in scrip and employer-operated stores were common throughout the lumber camps of Louisiana.27

  Though there were some differences in the experiences of cotton, sugar, and lumber workers, there were also important similarities. Low incomes, the centrality of credit, and the “furnish system” held many black families in perpetual poverty or indebtedness. Some employers deliberately cheated workers out of their earnings, either by overcharging them at commissaries or manipulating accounts. One family of sugar workers in Pointe Coupee Parish that kept records of its purchases from a plantation store discovered, when the time came to settle the account, that its employer had debited twice the correct amount. Although it is difficult to quantify the extent of these practices, an article that appeared in the Madison Journal in 1926 suggests that they were common and that white people made no attempt to deny them. Under the heading “Madison Parish; Its Customs—Yesterday and Today,” an old-time resident reminisced about the day one of the most prominent planters in the area hired a woman to tutor his son, instructing her to “Teach him how to figger. Teach him how to beat the nigger out of his half, take the other half and leave him satisfied.”28

  Many plantation owners and lumber companies used such methods to hold their workers in peonage, assisted by an 1892 law that made it illegal for workers to leave employers without paying their debts.29 White people were never able to completely restrict laborers’ movements, and the extent of coercive practices varied according to the needs of employers. Black mobility was also assisted by competition among planters for labor and by the practice of allowing workers to leave if another employer agreed to pay off what they owed.30 When planters wanted workers, however, holding employees in debt was a useful means of labor control. One resident of Clai-borne Parish estimated in 1903 that there were an “average five or six peon slave holders and workers in every parish and county throughout the cotton belt” and reported that approximately twenty black people were working under such conditions in Claiborne itself. In 1905 Henry Stewart of West Feliciana Parish commented on the difficulty of finding black tenants who were not too indebted to their previous employers to move, saying, “I fear that the planters make as much money selling negroes as they do selling cotton.”31

  “The home of a negro plantation worker,” New Roads, Louisiana, October 1938. Many rural black families lived in dilapidated shacks like this one well into the later twentieth century. LC-USF34-31792-D, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

  In the early 1900s the U.S. Department of Justice attempted to stamp out involuntary servitude and enforce the Thirteenth Amendment in the South, leading to investigations and trials of several plantation owners in Louisiana and the modification of some state laws.32 However, control over local police and the courts remained with the planters. Even after the legislation that prohibited indebted laborers from moving was declared unconstitutional in 1918, those who attempted to leave without settling their accounts remained subject to arrest, harassment, and violence well into the later twentieth century. In 1937 a white resident of Caddo Parish reported:

  These large planters and ranchers here in Louisiana, Arkansas and Texas, have men (White and Black) working and farming for shares. . . . When the cotton is picked and ginned and sold. . . . The rancher figures up their bills and says they owe him $200.00 to $300.00 after the sale of the cotton is take off of the bills that they owe, and he makes them stay on his place for the next year. . . . Some times the man slips his family out and goes to some other rancher. The rancher finds out where he is goes after him whips him (usually) and makes him return to work his debts out. Which he can never do. They are really held in bondage or slavery.33

  As late as the 1950s, an investigation into working conditions in the sugar parishes found that if a field worker attempted to move off a plantation without the landowner's consent, “he may find a deputy sheriff's car parked in front of his house with a notice that he is to pay an accumulation of debts and obligations—some legitimate, some doubtful, before he can reach the highroad with his belongings.”34

  Limiting black people's access to education was another way to restrict their economic opportunities. According to one newspaper editor, it was well known that “the negroes, as soon as they can read and write with facility, seem to feel that they have entered a new era of existence and that they are raised above the necessity of having to till the soil.” Educational policy in the rural parishes reflected the belief shared by many landowners that “an educated Negro is a ruined field hand.”35 School terms accommodated planters’ need for labor during the crop seasons, with most black children attending classes for only three or four months a year.36 Teachers often lacked proper qualifications and were poorly paid. Even those who were competent instructors faced difficulties such as overcrowding, lack of equipment, and dilapidated buildings. In many parishes African Americans received only an elementary education, as no high school existed. In 1910 only 1,199 of the state's 76,868 black youths aged between fifteen and nineteen were enrolled in high school, and 1,101 of these students were attending private institutions. White and black reformers were able to gain some improvements in the first few decades of the twentieth century, but as late as 1940 only twenty-six of the state's sixty-four parishes had more than one high school for African Americans, and fourteen parishes still had no facilities for providing secondary education to black children.37

  White attitudes toward education for African Americans were not monolithic. In parishes where small farms predominated, black people sometimes fared a little better than their counterparts in the plantation regions. Washington Parish schools, for example, were relatively well equipped and housed, and black principals reported having little trouble with local officials. Some white administrators actively supported efforts to improve conditions in the black schools. One superintendent persisted for twenty years in his attempts to build a new school in his parish and finally succeeded. Another recalled the support he had received from a school board member who made the construction of a black high school in his parish his life's work, then retired from the board after his goal had been achieved. State Department of Education officials also expressed concern about inequities in the educational system, although they seemed powerless to alter practices at the local level.38

  Proponents of black education faced strong opposition from those who believed that teaching African Americans to read and write was a waste of resources and a threat to the social order. State Agent for Negro Education Leo Favrot reported that he had met with the school superintendent of Terrebonne Parish in 1920 and found the man supportive of a program to improve black schools. Visiting the parish three years later, however, Favrot found that the superintendent had given up his efforts. Favrot concluded, “It must be, since the school board seemed so willing to go forward with Negro education, that the superintendent was deterred either by prominent sugar planters in his parish whose influ
ence he feared, or by the influence of a neighboring superintendent who is distinctly hostile to Negro education and who seems to dominate school affairs to some extent in that section of the state.”39

  Workers who could not read, write, or count were unlikely to move out of agricultural and other unskilled jobs; they also made easy targets for the dishonest practices some employers used to cheat them out of their earnings. One analyst in the 1930s noted, “All educational improvements are vigorously fought by the rich sugar growers, who find it more profitable to engage poor and ignorant labor.”40 In the plantation parishes, officials who were too supportive of black education risked losing their jobs. The school superintendent of Concordia Parish explained to researchers, “You know we've got to live here with these people and we have to get along with them even if we can't convince them about the right thing to do. . . . We can't get the things done we need to get done because whenever we start with anything some big fellow will object and if he wants to . . . he'll make it very difficult for you.”41

  Louisiana's decentralized political structure left reformers with few options apart from trying to persuade individual school boards to do a better job. State authorities supervised the superintendents and provided some funding for education, but most control over the schools lay at the local level. Parish officials decided how many and what kinds of schools to build, how many teachers to hire, how long the school terms should be, and how to distribute funds. Inequality and corruption permeated the educational system, with parish boards commonly misappropriating money that the state provided for training black children. In the 1936–37 school year, only six parishes directed the entire amount of their grants to facilities for African Americans, and of those parishes four had negligible black populations. The overall spending rate was 70 percent, but in many parishes the proportion was much less—St. Landry Parish, for instance, received $153,262 but allocated only $39,033 (25 percent) to its black schools, diverting the remainder to white children. These statistics prompted the state superintendent of education to conclude that there was “no serious intention in most of the parishes to provide school facilities for Negro children.”42

  African Americans who acquired or aspired to higher levels of education were wise to keep this to themselves, for few threats seemed more dangerous to white Louisianans than black people who appeared to be smart. Black lawyer Johnnie Jones, who grew up in West Feliciana Parish in the 1930s, recalled that another young man he knew was killed by the supervisor of the railroad yard where he worked after displaying a little too much mathematical ability in counting planks of wood. Sharecropper Sonny Smith of Pointe Coupee Parish received similar treatment from his landlord after defying an order not to attend school. The plantation owner beat Smith so severely that he never went to another class.43

  For most African Americans in the South, wherever they worked or lived, violence was a pervasive fact of life. Recent studies of lynching have shown that black plantation workers were the most likely victims of this and other forms of brutality. Some planters in Louisiana routinely used violence to discourage laborers from protesting their working conditions or attempting to leave. Civil rights activist Moses Williams noted that on the plantation where he lived as a child, people were beaten if they were late for work or questioned an order given by the landlord. Several decades after witnessing one such incident, he could still describe in detail the hooked stick the planter had used to beat a man “half to death.” Testimony at the trial of Joel F. Johnson, the owner of a plantation in Madison Parish accused of practicing peonage in 1909, revealed that “Negroes on his plantation were worked without pay and many of them were horribly beaten.” According to witnesses, several workers who had tried to escape from the plantation were captured and “severely whipped by a colored man . . . acting under directions of Joel F. Johnson.” Similar abuses occurred on the plantation of Tommy Walker in Webster Parish. A federal investigator found that the Walker family was well known for its tyrannical treatment of black laborers, and that Tommy Walker's brother, Lee Walker, had reportedly “killed several negroes in cold blood, and forced others to work for him against their will.”44

  Not all plantation owners were as vicious as these men. Other planters in Webster Parish condemned the actions of the Walkers, and the files of federal government departments contain enough letters from concerned white Louisianans to suggest that at least some of them were troubled by the injustices that African Americans in their communities suffered. Many of the black people who were interviewed for this study remembered white people who had shown kindness, or helped them, or supported their struggles for equality in some way.45 But white sympathizers often found it difficult to intervene on black people's behalf. For instance, when Armas Sylvester attempted to stop a mob from whipping one of his tenants, he was told that “if he interfered, they would give him the same dose.” As black leader Martin Williams explained, not all white people were bad, but “good white people was scared of his neighbor.”46

  White liberals’ powerlessness cannot compare with that of African Americans themselves. Without a voice in local or state government, black people lacked access to legal processes that might have protected them from abuse. An informant in the Walker peonage case stated, “the plain fact is that there isn't any law around Shongaloo, Louisiana, and . . . the negroes are very badly treated.”47 There were federal and state laws against peonage, assault, and murder, of course, but local political and judicial systems made it almost impossible to enforce them. Sheriffs and deputies often were relatives or friends of wealthy planters and business owners, so employers could mistreat their workers without much risk of arrest.48 In the rare instances when lawbreakers were prosecuted, all-white juries generally acquitted the perpetrators of even the most horrifying crimes. Late in 1914 a spate of lynchings occurred in Caddo Parish, including one where an elderly black man was tortured and then burned to death. The levels of cruelty involved in these incidents so shocked state officials that they ordered an investigation of the killings. After much difficulty (witnesses were reluctant to name members of the mob), Attorney General Ruffin G. Pleasant finally identified five men believed to be the ringleaders and recommended charging them with murder. In April 1915 a grand jury declined to act on the recommendation and instead issued a report criticizing the sheriff's office for “failing to make any attempt to prevent the examples of mob law.”49

  The “better classes” of white Louisianans often attributed beatings, lynchings, and other violence to the actions of poor white people, whose virulent racism supposedly contrasted with their own benevolent attitudes toward African Americans. In reality, all classes of white people participated in such acts, and plantation owners, merchants, lawyers, police, and parish officials were themselves among the worst offenders. “Public sentiment among the leading white people in this section of the state approve[s] lynching,” wrote J. Leo Hardy of Shreveport in 1918, after the president of a local bank had attempted to reassure the “good niggers” of the town that only “guilty” African Americans need fear for their lives.50 Ample evidence supports Hardy's contention. In 1935, for instance, a black man who was arrested and jailed in Iberville Parish after fighting with a white neighbor was found the next day hanging from a tree. There being no signs that anyone had broken into the jail, the most obvious suspects in the murder were the police who had him in custody. But as was common with lynchings, the coroner's report stated that the man “came to his death at the hands of unknown parties.”51 When black driver James Smith was involved in a car accident in West Feliciana Parish on his way to New Orleans in 1940, he filed a lawsuit against Ewan Ritchie, the white man whose vehicle had collided with his. At the trial in St. Francisville the court returned a verdict in favor of Ritchie, and afterward a group of white men ambushed Smith, took him to some woods, and beat him. Smith identified four of his attackers as follows: Sheriff T. H. Martin, “who appeared to be the ring-leader”; A. P. LeBlanc, a prominent businessman who had appeare
d as a witness for Ritchie; Sam J. D'Amico, Ritchie's attorney; and Ritchie himself.52

  Even when they did not participate in such activities themselves, middle-and upper-class white Louisianans were complicit in the violence that pervaded black people's lives. Whippings and lynchings could not have occurred without the acquiescence of the planters, business owners, and professionals who dominated economic and political life in these communities. Local police could prevent vigilante action when they wanted to, as in the case of one sheriff in Rapides Parish who told a mob that it would have to kill him and his deputies first if it wanted to take a black prisoner from his jail. A story told by Johnnie Jones reveals where the real responsibility for life or death decisions lay. When Jones was blamed for a car accident that killed a white woman in West Feliciana Parish in the 1930s, there were rumors that he might be killed himself until powerful white friends of his father put a stop to such talk. As Jones stated, “when the white power structure speak . . . other white just shut their mouths up.”53

  The plantation elite's control over people and resources in rural Louisiana was never absolute, but it often seemed close to being so. Some parishes resembled personal fiefdoms, governed by a few individuals or families whose influence extended over everyone in the community, white or black. In the first few decades of the twentieth century, St. Landry Parish planter, merchant, and postmaster J. P. Savant monopolized power in the town of White-ville and its surrounding areas. Savant kept his workers in peonage, threatened them with death if they tried to leave, and beat them if they displeased him. “All the negros [for] several miles are afraid of him and do any thing he says,” one resident reported. “The white as well as the negros are afraid to say a word for if they offend Mr Johnie they know that they will have to move or be carried out of the neighborhood.”54 A similar situation existed in Madison Parish, where the sheriff and other officials in Tallulah took their orders from Andrew Yerger, a cotton grower and president of the police jury. According to black activist Martin Williams, “the Yergers was running this town back then, a bunch of rich plantation owners, and everybody had to dance by their music.”55