A Different Day Page 6
The enormous power of people like J. P. Savant and Andrew Yerger was most evident within the boundaries of their own properties. Unlike wage laborers in the North who could normally escape the influence of their employers once the work day ended, agricultural workers in the South were constantly under surveillance. Planters or their business allies or relatives owned the houses they lived in, the stores they shopped in, the land their churches and schools were built on. Landlords controlled the mail and telephones, enabling them to limit the amount of contact tenants had with the world outside the plantation. Planters also bestowed money, gifts, and favors on black people who kept them informed of developments within the African American community. In these ways plantation owners monitored not only black people's working lives, but their social lives as well. The knowledge that planters were likely to find out about any expression of dissatisfaction or any attempt to organize workers made challenging the system extremely difficult. Harrison Brown explained: “You couldn't be known resisting against the powers. . . . They always had a way to reach you and get you, you know. So . . . you'd have to take it slow.”56
Plantation store and post office, Melrose, Louisiana, June 1940. In the rural parishes, large landowners often combined agricultural and business interests, as well as holding public offices such as postmaster. These overlapping interests afforded some planters an extraordinary amount of power within and over their communities in the first half of the twentieth century. LC-USF34-54608-D, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
Conditions in the lumber camps were no more conducive to black political activity. Loggers and mill operators often had even worse reputations than plantation owners for using peonage, violence, and spying to control their workers.57 Company-owned towns provided all of the employees’ needs from housing, food, and clothing to schools and recreation. Many of these settlements were temporary and were dismantled when the timber ran out. Others, like Bogalusa in Washington Parish, lasted into the late twentieth century. The owners of the Great Southern Lumber Company founded Bogalusa in 1906, building houses, banks, hotels, schools, a hospital, and a store in addition to a sawmill. The company employed its own police force, and its manager, William Henry Sullivan, served as mayor until he died in 1929. According to one source, Sullivan's control over Bogalusa was “as complete as any ante-bellum master over his plantation.”58 Black (and white) laborers who challenged his power were as likely to be fired, evicted, beaten, or shot as those who worked for “real” planters.59
The few African Americans who were not directly employed by white people nonetheless remained subject to their authority. Black teachers depended on local school boards for their salaries, and they generally avoided actions that might jeopardize their livelihoods. Religious leaders in Louisiana's rural parishes also seemed reluctant to become involved in such activities. Few could survive solely on the contributions of the poverty-stricken tenants, domestic workers, and unskilled laborers who made up their congregations. Some ministers supplemented their incomes by farming or doing odd jobs, but others chose to improve their economic and social positions by accepting the patronage of prominent white people in return for discouraging challenges to the social order.60 Even ostensibly independent landowners or businesspeople might not be immune from manipulation, since prosperous black southerners often owed their success to white benefactors who loaned them money, secured business permits or political offices for them, and protected them from violence.61
Johnnie Jones's father was one of those who earned such privileges. At one time, he and another black man were appointed to the West Feliciana Parish school board by a white man who wanted to increase his own influence over educational policy. Later Jones often teased his father about his years on the board, asking him, “Daddy, when you was on the school board what did you do?” His father always replied, “Whatever Mr. Argus told us.”62 In 1940 the control that white people had over nearly all aspects of African American life drove an NAACP member in East Carroll Parish to despair. “Our plight here is bad,” he wrote in a letter to the national office. “A bunch of hopeless and helpless people with most preacher and school teachers being used by their white Lords to keep the people humble.”63
Perhaps the only entity capable of altering the southern social order in any meaningful way was the federal government. But except in times of crisis or war, national political leaders rarely showed any interest in ensuring equality or justice for African Americans. When they did decide to take action, sensitivity to local elites’ desire for control over their own affairs usually undermined these efforts, as was the case with the Justice Department's attempts to combat peonage at the turn of the century. Although lawyers for the United States managed to persuade the Supreme Court to declare some state laws unconstitutional, gaining convictions for individuals who used coercion or violence to control workers was more difficult. White southerners were apt to become upset over violations of “state rights” when federal officials interfered with their local law enforcement procedures. For this reason, the department usually tried to encourage punishment of offenders by local authorities before intervening itself. Convictions in these instances were rare, and even when cases were tried in federal courts, lawyers still had to contend with local juries’ sympathy for (or fear of) the defendants.64
Southern plantation owners exerted a considerable amount of influence in shaping national as well as local policy. Political corruption and the one-party system resulted in the election of the same senators and representatives from the region year after year, enabling these politicians to achieve a disproportionate amount of seniority and power within the national government. Southern Democrats often controlled the most important policy-making committees and positions. As a result, attempts to enforce the U.S. Constitution in the South were usually stymied. In the first half of the twentieth century, every proposed antilynching bill and most other measures aimed at increasing federal protection of black people's civil rights were killed by filibusters in the Senate or by the threatened withdrawal of southern Democrats’ support for other legislation deemed more important by national political leaders.65
Louisiana's Senator Allen J. Ellender, a member of a prominent sugar planting family, served his state for thirty-six years between 1937 and 1972. During one filibuster in 1938, he held the Senate floor for twenty-seven hours, arguing that the federal government should repeal the Fifteenth Amendment and outlaw interracial marriage instead of wasting its time debating legislation to prevent lynching. Throughout his term, the senator acted to protect the interests of Louisiana plantation owners and defeat measures aimed at increasing wages or improving conditions for sugar workers. In the 1950s farm union organizer H. L. Mitchell blamed Ellender for “perpetuating the labor conditions which have changed but little in the past 80 years when the Negro plantation workers in Louisiana were chattel slaves, openly bought and sold in the market like animals.”66
As Mitchell and scores of other white activists and officials discovered, the plantation system presented formidable obstacles to anyone desiring to bring law, democracy, equality, or justice to rural Louisiana. To black people living in the region, the difficulties often seemed insurmountable. Not surprisingly, local civil rights leaders who came of age in the decades before World War II remembered those years as times of much poverty, hardship, and violence, and little political activity. Harrison Brown recalled, “You'd do what you could, but—I don't know how to explain it, but you couldn't have the freedom to do or to be exposed to what was there to be exposed to. You couldn't take a part with it, you know.” Moses Williams stated, “You didn't have no kind of organization, no kind of resistance, nobody jumping on the boss man . . . if you raised up and hit one of them then, you'd be killed before sundown, or you'd have to run for the rest of your life.”67 As the next chapter will show, however, the absence of organized protest against white supremacy did not necessarily mean that African Americans in the region passively accepted their fate.
3 They Will Not Fight in the Open:
Strategies of Resistance in the Jim Crow Era
“Got one mind for white folks to see / ‘Nother for what I know is me,” went a song that was well known among black southerners in the Jim Crow era.1 Behind the mask of subservience and acceptance of the social order that many black people presented to the world lay a clandestine culture of resistance. In their music, folklore, religion, and value systems, African Americans in the rural South analyzed their world and critiqued the economic and political systems that kept most of them in poverty. At the same time, black individuals and communities adopted a variety of methods to undermine white people's efforts to keep them powerless and poor. That these forms of resistance were usually subtle or ineffective does not mean that they were unimportant. Many of the concerns that motivated organized political activity were also reflected in less obvious, “infrapolitical” strategies that black people employed to challenge their oppression during this period.
This chapter outlines the ways rural black Louisianans quietly struggled to gain economic opportunity, education, political power, and safety from violence in the Jim Crow era. Although these activities did not directly confront white supremacy and affected the social order only slightly, they reflected participants’ awareness of the sources of their oppression and provided the foundations of the twentieth-century freedom struggle. The goals and themes established by informal resistance carried over into the attempts at collective action discussed in later chapters of this book.
No movement to overthrow white supremacy could have emerged in the twentieth century if large numbers of black people had not believed that the system was unjust. Criticisms of the social order usually were not expressed openly for fear of reprisals, but they permeate the songs, stories, and jokes collected by students of black culture and folklore in the twentieth century. Had Louisiana sugar planters listened carefully to the verses sung by their black field hands, they might have detected a reproachful assessment of the economic arrangements that transferred most of the profits from black people's labor to white people who had done little to deserve them. Cane cutters frequently swung their knives to a work song containing these lyrics:
White folks want de niggers to work and sweat
Wants dem to cut de cane till dey is wringin’ wet
We poor niggers gits nothin’ atall
White boss cusses and gits it all.2
Visiting the state in the 1930s, black writer Zora Neale Hurston heard a similar complaint from a friend who told her a folk tale ending with the rhyme, “ought's a ought, figger's a figger; all for de white man, none for the nigger.” As Lawrence Levine has noted, music and storytelling provided forums for protest and social criticism when the usual avenues for political expression had been closed to black southerners.3
African American blues musicians drew on these cultural traditions to create one of the most important forms of creative expression to emerge within the United States in modern times. Historians of the blues have traced its origins to the plantation regions of the Deep South in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, just when the gains of Reconstruction were being negated by segregation, disfranchisement, and narrowing economic opportunities for African Americans. The distinctive, melancholy sounds of blues harmonicas, guitars, and voices, along with lyrical themes expressing sadness, anger, loss, and betrayal provided the sound-track to the period commonly referred to as the “nadir” of African American history. J. D. Miller, a record company owner who worked with local musicians in the Baton Rouge area in the 1940s, described some of the influences that shaped the songs of many artists that he recorded when he spoke to an interviewer about Lightnin’ Slim (Otis Hicks). “His father was a tenant farmer,” Miller explained, “and they lived out there in the country and after the men would get through work they used to sit out and they'd start playin’ and singin’ you know. And they'd sing these ole blues and the blues was generally bad luck and the troubles they have had.” Other Louisiana musicians grew up listening and playing at juke joints that catered to workers in the state's lumber and turpentine camps, traveling the “barrelhouse circuit” from tiny town to tiny town along a well-worn route from Alabama to Texas.4
Bluesmen and women took their experiences of oppression and turned them into art. Though some listeners found these tunes depressing and fatalistic, for others the blues offered comfort, inspiration, and hope. In rundown shacks and makeshift bars, black workers gathered on Friday and Saturday nights to drink, socialize, play music, sing, and dance, enjoying brief moments of relief from the hard, physical labor that filled most of their days. Such activities were central elements in the lives of many rural black people, despite the disapproval that was occasionally expressed by more upright, churchgoing African Americans in their communities. For some black people, religion and the blues were not so far apart. Of church services, blues player Willie Thomas noted, “They sing: Lord—have mercy . . . / Lord—have mercy . . . ooooh, / Lord—have mercy . . . save poor me. He's in the church singin’ that! He got the blues in church!”5
In many ways, churches and juke joints served similar functions. Both offered respite from the harsh realities of daily life, provided sustenance for the soul, and fostered a sense of community among people who shared the same problems and experiences. Both were spaces where black people asserted that they were more than just bodies forced to labor for others, and where they created distinct cultural and value systems away from the influence of white people.6 For Willie Thomas, the music was something that African Americans could own, in a world where most forms of opportunity and property were denied them. He explained: “The white man could get education and he could learn to read a note, and the Negro couldn't. All he had to get for his music what God give him in his heart. And that's the only thing he got. And he didn't get that from the white man; God give it to him.”7
The blues were an important form of self-expression that helped black people endure oppression and hardship. For those musicians who were fortunate enough to make a living from their art, playing the blues also offered more material benefits. Traveling entertainers enjoyed a greater degree of mobility, autonomy, and creativity than most African Americans in the early twentieth century. Some chose this profession precisely because it offered an alternative to economic exploitation and tight control by white employers. In the 1930s wandering minstrel Carolina Slim justified his rootless existence to a group of Louisiana folklorists by singing them a song that ended:
Bar and juke joint, Melrose, Louisiana, June 1940. Many rural black people gathered in establishments like this one on Friday and Saturday nights to drink, socialize, listen to music, and dance. These pursuits offered a brief respite each week from the hard labor that filled their days. LC-USF34-54355-D, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
The boys in Noo ’Leans they oughta be dead
They go to work for fish and bread.
. . . And I ain't bluffin’,
I ain't gonna work for nothin’.8
Similarly, blues musician Black Ace (B. K. Turner) remembered the lucrative career he made out of playing at house parties in Shreveport during the depression. “I couldn't get a li'l job nowhere,” he explained. “So I would go aroun’ play at house parties with this boy—make a dollar-an'-a-half whilst other folks was gettin’ that for one day's work on relief. . . . I get three or four parties, man—I made a lot of money. . . . Dollar-an'-a-half for fun!”9
African Americans who managed to evade plantation labor and other low-paid jobs were in the minority. Yet many others sought to improve their economic positions in whatever ways they could. Thousands of agricultural workers left their employers at the end of each year in search of higher wages and better treatment.10 To the chagrin of plantation owners, some of them did not even wait that long, preferring to abandon their crops before harvest time rather than endure beatings or face the probability of coming out in debt. Planters complained that black sharecroppers
and laborers were “always dissatisfied and moving from one place to another,” often attributing this to their supposedly inherent shiftlessness and unreliability.11 Contrary to white people's assumptions, black workers’ peripatetic tendencies were not random or unpurposeful. The statement given by sharecropper John Pickering to a notary public in Texas after he moved there from Louisiana in 1926 shows that his decision resulted from a carefully considered, accurate analysis of the plantation system and his chances of making a living if he had stayed with his previous employer. “I moved off of the place of the said William Wilson because he would not give me a fair settlement on what I had made and what I earned and would not account to me for my share of the cotton crop,” Pickering said. “I being an ignorant negro he would not furnish me with a statement showing what the cotton sold for and what goods I had procured from him, but insisted that, notwithstanding his getting all the cotton, I still owed him three hundred dollars. When I found out he would not give me a fair settlement and was getting all of my earnings, I decided to move into the State of Texas because I knew that in the State of Louisiana the big planters buy and sell negroes and never let one get out of debt.”12
Many other black people shared Pickering's views. Harrison Brown believed that white people aimed to maintain the supply of “free” (meaning unpaid) labor that they had enjoyed before the Civil War. Outlining the difficulties sharecroppers faced in finding good landlords or saving enough money to buy land of their own, he stated, “We mostly had to do their work, you know. . . . They didn't intend for you to get out.” Describing conditions in Bossier Parish in the 1920s, cotton farmer W. C. Brown wrote, “We as a rule gets everything but a square deal both in business and in law. . . . We are all through picking and ginning our cotton and the white people as a whole have it all in their hands and many have lived hard and will clear good money but the white people will wait until a few days to Christmas and then try to put the good and the bad in the same class and give them just what they want us to have and not mention justice to them.” James Willis related to an interviewer in 1939 how hard his parents worked on a sugar plantation in Iberville Parish and how little they received for their labor. He said, “Ma and pa couldn't figure, so they took whatever the man on the farm gave ’em. The folks said that pa worked himself a house. Yeah, in other words Pa made enough money to git him a house, but he never did git it. . . . And there is a lot of things I don't know about but I do know that pa was gipped.”13