A Different Day Page 7

  Moving from plantation to plantation or from state to state was one of the few means available to agricultural workers to protest their working conditions. Though employers generally denied any connection between black migration and unfair labor practices, they sometimes admitted that it existed. Early in the twentieth century, newspapers in northern Louisiana reported that attempts by planters to “restore a form of forced labor” in the state had resulted in a mass exodus of African Americans to Arkansas, where they hoped to gain better treatment.14 In 1907 cotton planter Henry Stewart complained to a friend: “There is not enough labor here to go around and what is here is too unreliable and I think thoroughly organised. If one has labor one year it is a good sign that they will be short the next year, so in reality you make a little money one year and the next the place lies idle for the negro is punishing you for some small misdemenor which you have committed.”15

  Black workers who stayed with their employers often took every opportunity they could to supplement their earnings. After inspecting his cousin Sarah's plantation in West Feliciana Parish in August 1910, Robert Stirling found one tenant “pasturing of horses” as well as making the expected crops, and told her, “He trades in horses at your expense.” Of another employee, Stirling advised his cousin not to charge any less than fifty dollars a month for rent because “Vattore is getting $50.00 per month from Ry Co. and yet he is trying to get house rent free from you[;] he and his boy also have quite a lot of cattle in your pasture.” Other planters in the parish found it necessary to post weekly notices in the local newspaper asking members of the public not to purchase wood, posts, livestock, or other farm products from tenants on their plantations without first gaining permission from the owners.16

  For Louisiana planters in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, theft was a serious problem. “The negroes around here have reduced cattle stealing to a fine art,” bemoaned Henry Stewart in 1906. “Some years ago we had 160 head and now I can count but 76 head of branded cattle and none sold in these years. I wonder if cows evaporate.” A year later, the owner of Hazelwood Plantation in West Feliciana Parish reported that several black tenant families had stolen cotton from the place, in spite of her manager's “seeming watchfulness.” Other items likely to disappear included harnesses, small pieces of machinery, hogs, corn, and seeds that workers either used themselves or sold to unscrupulous merchants in the dead of night.17

  African American family moving, Opelousas, Louisiana, October 1938. For many plantation workers, abandoning their employers at the end of each crop year was one of the few means through which they could express their dissatisfaction with working conditions without risking eviction or physical violence. LCUSF33-011863-M3, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

  Black domestic workers as well as field hands commonly appropriated property from the homes of the white families they worked for. Taking away leftovers, or “pan toting,” was a widely accepted custom throughout the South. But as Jacqueline Jones has noted, “the service pan expanded in proportion to a black woman's needs and resourcefulness,” often without the knowledge or consent of employers. One white Louisianan who complained of being without domestic help in the 1940s stated that despite having to cook meals herself, “It is rather nice not to have a nigger eating up all your food and carrying off what they can't eat!” White people resented their servants’ tendency to take more than what was willingly given them, but domestic workers usually saw nothing wrong in these actions. One black cook chided an employer who initially refused to allow her to take home leftover food, saying, “The only thing we cullud people can do is get home and eat a little sumpin’ you white folks can't eat. Has that ever crossed yo’ mind, Missus Jakes? Is you humanity?” Smuggling food and other necessities out of the house to take home to their own families helped compensate for the low wages these women earned. Given the conditions of poverty that most were forced to endure, the justification was plain: white people had more than they could eat, and black people did not have enough, therefore they had a right to take what they needed. African Americans used theft to partially redress inequalities in the social order that white Americans had created.18 One white southerner observed that black people were “like the Isr[ae]lites when they left the land of Egypt, think they have a right to borrow and take all they could beat the Egyptians out off. The negro still think they have this right and exercise it when opportunity affords.”19

  Though attempts by African Americans to improve their material status might be seen as simply matters of survival, they were more than that. As many black people realized, economic independence was a prerequisite to achieving real freedom and equality. They knew that during Reconstruction, their ancestors had voted and held political offices, and that those gains had been lost through violence, intimidation, and economic reprisals.20 As long as they too were forced to rely on white people for food, shelter, and other necessities, they could not hope to launch a powerful movement for change. In 1918 the president of a struggling NAACP branch in Shreveport suggested to the national office that the organization make some effort to provide “relief for the farmer that is swindled and cheated out of his money. . . . Loan these men and women (farmers) money assist them in securing credit and in a great many other ways help them.” Two decades later, another local leader noted the restraints that economic dependence placed on some African Americans’ ability to take part in organizing efforts, saying, “The man who has your job has you.”21

  Activists Eual and Lorin Hall, who came from a family of black landowners in St. Helena Parish, remembered how this idea was passed down (and continues to be passed down) through the generations. “If you have no land, and no money, you're worthless,” Eual Hall stated. “There's nothing you can do, there's no fear you can put into nobody.” The Halls’ parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents were “independent and free” and determined to keep themselves that way. Some were farmers, some were self-employed entrepreneurs, “and they were very, very strong in unity. . . . They believed in keeping things together . . . they would help one another maintain their property, whatever had to be done.” Older members of the Hall family still emphasized to younger people the importance of economic and political independence, both for themselves and for African Americans as a group. Identical values were impressed upon Willa Suddeth during her childhood. Raised on a farm near Shreveport, she recalled that her father told her repeatedly to “own your own,” and to strive for autonomy. “Grandfather and his brother went to great lengths to buy their own land,” she told an interviewer, “and it's still in the family.”22

  Equally important to the freedom struggle was education. Since the passage of the first laws prohibiting enslaved people from learning to read and write, African Americans have recognized the empowering potential of literacy. In the twentieth-century South, the lessons were no less clear than they had been in the antebellum period. David Bibens, who grew up on a plantation in Pointe Coupee Parish, remembered that his grandfather's reading abilities and mathematical skills prevented the manager from cheating him at settlement time. After other sharecroppers began asking him to calculate their accounts as well, the manager arranged for some local thugs to administer a beating, causing him to stop this practice. Civil rights leader Robert Lewis of Concordia Parish recalled a similar incident that occurred on the plantation where he had lived as a boy. A sharecropper who had kept his own records confronted the landlord with his account book after being told that he had come out in debt, making the white man so angry that he refused to settle any more accounts that day. In the end the sharecropper received his money but was ordered to leave the plantation. Bibens, Lewis, and other rural African Americans were keenly aware of the value of education and the possibilities it offered for creating a better life for themselves and their children. Harrison Brown succinctly expressed the feelings of many black people when he stated, “Education—I ain't got it but I know the benefit of it.”23

  Rural black people d
evised a variety of strategies to circumvent plantation owners’ efforts to deny them knowledge and power. By following their teachers as they moved from one regional classroom to the next, some students extended the length of time they attended school beyond the limits set by their parish school boards. Families living in communities that lacked high schools commonly sent older children to stay with friends or relatives in neighboring parishes to complete their secondary education. When state and local governments refused to build schools for black communities, African Americans constructed their own or held classes in churches and fraternal society halls. In a typical case, a study of schools in St. Helena Parish conducted in the 1940s found that the school board owned only two of the buildings used for educating African Americans. The remaining twenty-eight, attended by over 80 percent of the black children, were “housed in churches and in buildings erected mainly at the expense and efforts of the Negroes themselves.”24

  Such feats were the result of a long history of school-building efforts by black communities dating back to Reconstruction. After conservatives ousted the Republicans from office in the 1870s, northern white philanthropists helped to fill the financial void left by state and local governments that refused to support black education. In the early twentieth century, donations from the Slater Fund, Anna T. Jeanes Fund, General Education Board, and Julius Rosenwald Fund supplemented the money raised by black communities to construct buildings, hire and train teachers, and buy equipment for classrooms. Small one- and two-teacher schools sprang up in parishes across the state, standing as tiny wooden monuments to African Americans’ commitment to education. After a decade of these efforts Leo Favrot reported to Julius Rosenwald, “No single effort in Negro education in Louisiana has created as much enthusiasm for better schools among these people as your benefaction. It will not be possible to supply the demand for new schoolhouses this year.” Between 1917 and 1932 the Rosenwald Fund helped to finance 435 school buildings that catered to more than 51,000 black students in Louisiana.25

  Accepting help from white sympathizers was not without its problems. In return for their generous contributions, northern philanthropists expected teachers and administrators of the schools they funded to produce model black citizens who knew their “place.”26 Grambling College, the primary training ground of teachers for the rural schools, sought to make every graduate “an able teacher, a community leader, a farmer, a handyman, and an ambassador of good will between the races,” according to its president. The State Department of Education's Course of Study for Negro High Schools and Training Schools (1931) required teachers to “develop in the pupils an appreciation of the dignity and importance of manual labor,” and to impress upon students that “professional and ‘white collar’ jobs cannot absorb all.” Robert Lewis recalled that in the black schools of Concordia Parish, students never learned about African American rebels like Nat Turner or Harriet Tubman but were taught to admire “Booker Uncle Tom Washington” and other accommodationist leaders instead.27

  Rosenwald school under construction, Millikens Bend, Louisiana, n.d. Efforts to ensure access to education for black children were among the most important elements of the long-term freedom struggle. L1167, Papers of Jackson Davis, Special Collections Department, University of Virginia Library, Charlottesville.

  Yet a willingness to outwardly conform to social expectations often benefited black individuals and communities. Robert Lewis learned this when he watched an older man persuade white people to allow him to fish on their property by talking to them in a subservient manner. Martin Williams of Tallulah consciously “worked the system” using accommodationist tactics. “That was my strategy,” he said, and usually it was effective. In his home-town of Jackson, Alabama, Williams had a job driving a grocery delivery truck and became a favorite of several white families on his route by giving their children rides home from school whenever it rained. As a result, they always treated him well. Williams could not see any point in upsetting white people because, as he put it, “we ain't got no money.” Leaders like Williams reasoned that it was necessary to work through white people to get anything done because they were the ones who controlled the finances in Louisiana's rural communities. Willie Crain, a schoolteacher in Washington Parish, phrased it this way: “My race is alright, but they can't do anything for you.” Crain then related the story of how an extra room came to be added to the black schoolhouse. When the need for the addition first arose, some of the other teachers offered to donate money. But they were so poor that there was no way they could raise the necessary funds themselves. Crain said, “Then they had a meeting one Sunday afternoon, and I had Mr. Bateman [the superintendent] out to it, and he give us this extra room, just like that.” Both Williams and Crain were adept at persuading white people to provide needed resources for black communities. In their own way, these men and others like them were participants in the freedom struggle.28

  Despite the assistance of white benefactors, most of the burden of improving educational conditions fell on African Americans. To construct a high school in the 1930s, residents of East Feliciana Parish had to first overcome the opposition of some white members of the community who argued that “the time is not ripe for one here because the colored children were needed on the farm or could work in the sawmill.” Next, they set about raising money and soliciting contributions. “We had to disrupt the school program and have teachers be responsible for a certain amount of money and the giving of entertainment made it impossible to conduct classes normally,” said the woman who spearheaded the effort. “But that was the only way we were able to get the training school.” In this and countless other cases, local black people initiated school-building programs, donated money and materials, and did most of the work themselves. As James Anderson has noted, African Americans incorporated financial aid from other sources into an existing tradition of self-help and fund-raising to provide for their own education.29

  The struggle for education reflected and reinforced strong community ties that African Americans developed in their families, churches, benevolent societies, and fraternal orders. These institutions offered valuable support networks that black Louisianans relied on for survival. Sugar workers in Pointe Coupee Parish recalled that when people became ill and unable to work, friends and relatives “took up orders” for them at plantation stores, charging food and other necessities to their own accounts so that families who had fallen on difficult times did not starve.30 In a study of black workers on two plantations in West Baton Rouge and St. Mary Parishes, white investigator J. Bradford Laws noted derisively that his subjects had “an unfortunate notion of generosity, which enables the more worthless to borrow fuel, food, and what not on all hands from the more thrifty.” Laws and other white people criticized black people's failure to adopt entirely the individualistic, profit-seeking values of capitalist society, citing it as a major reason for their general poverty. But it was partly in response to poverty and insecurity that African Americans developed such mutualistic practices. The idea that no one should have to starve because of a bad crop, bad landlord, or bad luck held immense appeal to people who were acutely aware of their own vulnerability to economic disaster. Ruth Cherry explained the dominant philosophy among black people in her parish this way: “What you have, I have. What would hurt one, would hurt the other. Hospitality they call it, but it was the only way we made it through.” By emphasizing people's interdependence and their obligation to look after one another, black communities offered what James Scott calls “an alternative moral universe” in opposition to the dominant culture's self-centeredness and materialism.31

  In addition to relatives and neighbors, African Americans could rely on their churches for spiritual, emotional, and material assistance. A study of twenty parishes conducted in the 1940s found that almost every black person belonged to a church and attended services and other meetings regularly. “To the church they contributed seemingly enormous amounts of money in proportion to their meager and inconceiv
ably low incomes,” the researchers wrote. “Even those persons unemployed with no apparent source of income frequently stated that they made regular contributions to the support of the church. They have placed their utmost faith in this institution and willingly support it in all programs which it undertakes.” For many, the church was a haven, a place that offered some respite from work and suffering. One youth's account of a conversion experience reveals how religion brought joy to people whose lives offered few opportunities to savor such emotions: “Look like everything was new and I felt happy . . . and I told the Lord if He freed my soul, I'd serve Him all my days. . . . That was the happiest time my family had—when my brother and I got religion.”32

  Some analysts have viewed the black church as a conservative force that deflected people's concerns away from the problems of this world and encouraged them to think only of what awaited them in the next. There is some truth in this assessment. In Louisiana, many African Americans belonged to the Roman Catholic Church, and their spiritual guides were usually white priests and nuns who had been assigned to, not chosen by, their communities. White religious leaders taught acceptance of white supremacy as a reflection of God's will and discouraged attempts by black people to rise above their prescribed station in life.33 In the black-controlled Protestant churches, limited training and a tendency to avoid challenging the social order made most rural preachers ineffective community leaders; even members of their own congregations sometimes viewed them with suspicion and scorn. Several Louisiana folk songs alluded to lazy, thieving, or philandering ministers, traits that seemed common among those who claimed that God had called them to preach. “I wouldn't trust a preacher out o’ my sight,” went one tune, “‘Cause dey believes in doin’ too many things far in de night.”34