Although the accuracy of the newspaper's prediction in this particular case cannot be ascertained, the lives of many people who became involved in the civil rights movement seem to support the general thesis. In her study of the young black people who formed CORE's New Orleans chapter in the 1960s, Kim Lacy Rogers found that they were often the children of militant parents who had encouraged them to engage in informal acts of resistance against white supremacy. Rudy Lombard, who later became the project director for CORE's voter registration efforts in rural Louisiana, once defied the state's segregation laws by throwing a ball into a white-only park and inviting his friends to join him in playing there. For this action, his father rewarded him with a case of root beer. Lolis Elie described his parents as people with little money or education who nonetheless had “a great deal of pride.” His father once stood up to a foreman who harassed him at work and “told the story over and over how he took that white man on.” Jerome Smith remembered watching his father remove segregation signs on streetcars and said that his mother always insisted that white merchants address her as “Mrs.” Asked when he first became active in the freedom movement, Smith found it difficult to answer, explaining, “When I entered the civil rights struggle in a formal sense I had been involved in things in a personal and private sense for so long.”56
Local activist Robert Lewis's experience also reflected the connection between infrapolitics and organized politics. Lewis frequently expressed his dissatisfaction with the social order in small ways before CORE arrived in Concordia Parish and provided a structure for more open protest. When the white high school in Ferriday invited children from the black school to watch their football team play, Lewis and his classmates arrived to find that they would not be allowed into the stadium. They were expected to go to one end of the field where there was a gap in the fence and peer through that. Lewis refused to be insulted in this way and left. Another time Lewis took revenge on a fast-food vendor who always made African Americans wait at a side window while he served white people at the front of his van. “I ordered about five hot dogs, chili dogs with the works, and five chocolate malts, and while he was fixing them, when he got on the last one I got on my bicycle and . . . left him there,” he said. “I learned how to protest, I guess, in my way.”57
Despite the enormous obstacles to black political activity in the first half of the twentieth century, African Americans in rural Louisiana were not apathetic or inactive during this period. By leaving plantations where they were mistreated, ensuring access to education for their children, creating strong social institutions, and fighting back against violence, black people showed that they did not accept their assigned place in the social order and laid the foundations for protest that organized movements built on. As the following chapters will demonstrate, when changes in the political and economic landscape of the region opened space for action, black activists were quick to take advantage of opportunities to openly demand their citizenship rights.
4 We Feel You All Aut to Help Us:
Struggles for Citizenship, 1914–1929
The outbreak of war in Europe in 1914 presented African Americans in rural Louisiana with an opportunity to challenge the repressive social system that had emerged in the South after Reconstruction. Northern industrialists’ supply of cheap immigrant labor halted abruptly, causing employers to look to the southern states for replacement workers. The result was a mass departure of black people from the region that had profound consequences for the freedom struggle. The Great Migration swelled the African American population of the North, contributing to the emergence of newspapers, civil rights organizations, and political leaders dedicated to the eradication of discrimination and the recognition of black people's citizenship rights. Historians have long acknowledged World War I as a signal event in African American history, and northern migrants have been the focus of some excellent scholarship in the last decade.1
Less well known are the stories of those who remained behind. Wartime rhetoric and encouragement from the NAACP inspired a small number of black southerners to form their own organizations and to openly demand justice. Meanwhile, white people responded to the threatened loss of their labor supply with a mixture of coercive legislation and improvement measures aimed at persuading African Americans to remain on the plantations. Rural black Louisianans made some gains during this period, but they did not last long. The end of the fighting in Europe brought a new wave of violence and repression in the United States as white supremacists acted to prevent African Americans from converting the fight to “make the world safe for democracy” into a battle for equal rights at home.
Contemporary observers viewed the movement of thousands of rural black southerners to the North during World War I as the natural result of economic “push” and “pull” factors. Demand for labor in the North was increasing at the same time that crop failures caused by flooding and the boll weevil drove many southern farmworkers from the land. According to some analysts, African Americans were responding to changes caused by forces beyond their control as a matter of survival.2 Others, especially white southerners, argued that labor agents and northern black newspaper editors were responsible. Black people in the South were well treated and content, they claimed, and would not think of moving unless irresponsible outsiders encouraged them to do so. Neither of these interpretations accorded migrants much capacity for analyzing their situation on their own, or of acting independently to improve the conditions of their lives.3
In a report on black migration prepared in the 1930s, African American scholar Charles S. Johnson presented a different view. Johnson referred to the exodus of 1916–18 as “a leaderless mass-movement” and stated, “Such mass-movements can result only after a long period of gestation.” Connecting migration out of the South to the constant movement between plantations and states within the region that had long been a feature of the rural black experience, Johnson suggested that dissatisfaction with the southern social order was the main reason why African Americans had left. As he noted, black people “had been churning about in the south, seeking newer fields for many years before hope dawned for them in the industries of the north.” Symbolically, the major routes northward during the Great Migration were roughly the same as those of the Underground Railroad that some African Americans had used to escape enslavement in the decades preceding the Civil War.4
Letters written by migrants themselves also placed their actions squarely within the tradition of black resistance and protest, revealing that something more than impersonal economic forces was at work. The motives of many were summarized by one black Louisianan who was “desirous of leaving the South for the beterment of my condition generaly.” Another stated that he and many others he knew wanted to go north, writing: “please notifie me at once bee cors I am tired of bene dog as I was a beast and wee will come at wonce. So I will bee oblige to you if you will help us out of the south.” A black man from Ouachita Parish explained that he and his brother wanted to leave Louisiana “to get where we would be able to have a chanse in the world and get out from among all of the prejudice of the southern white man.”5
When they were more specific, black Louisianans cited multiple reasons for leaving their state that reflected their ongoing struggles against the plantation regime. Prominent among the factors that attracted them to the North was the promise of higher wages. “I am working hard in the south and can hardly earn a living,” was one variation on a common complaint. A young woman from Alexandria stated, “There isnt a thing here for me to do, the wages here is from a dollar and a half a week. What could I earn Nothing.” Another writer emphasized this point, saying, “Compared with other things to which we have almost become resigned, the high cost of living coupled with unreasonably low wages is of greatest concern.”6 Later in the war, a government study of labor shortages in the South concluded that one of the chief determinants of whether black tenants and sharecroppers left the region or stayed was the fairness of working arrangements
. The author wrote, “With a proper agreement, the labor will remain, but with a poor one it will leave.”7
The desire for better educational opportunities also motivated numerous migrants. One parent wrote, “I has been here all my life but would be glad to go wher I can educate my children where they can be of service to themselves, and this will never be here.” For some people, the urge to move north represented a continuation of earlier efforts to achieve similar goals. A man who had recently moved his family to New Orleans explained, “I have been living here . . . only seven years I formerly live in the country but owing to bad conditions of schools for my children I sold my property and moved here I didnt think there was any justice in my paying school taxes and had no fit school to send [m]y children to.”8
Many black people wrote of their hopes of escaping mistreatment and violence when they requested information about migrating north. One man declared that he was willing to move anywhere “away from the Lynchman's noose and torchman's fire.” Another wanted only to live out his life peacefully and “without fear of molestation.” Acts of violence against African Americans during the war sometimes precipitated the evacuation of entire black communities. Even some white people admitted that brutal lynchings and beatings, more than the persuasive tactics of labor agents, contributed to the movement of black workers from the South.9
Finally, the chance to participate politically attracted many black people to the North. Migrants often registered to vote as soon as they arrived in their new home states. In the second ward of Chicago, the section of the city with the highest proportion of African American inhabitants, 72 percent of eligible voters were registered in 1920 compared with 66 percent for the city as a whole. By the next decade, more than one-fifth of the nation's black population had settled in the North, forming a constituency that national political parties could no longer afford to ignore. The entry of large numbers of black people into politics made possible the election of black Republican congressman Oscar DePriest in 1928 and enabled African Americans to gain some significant concessions at the national level in the decades that followed.10
Approximately half a million black people left the South between 1916 and 1919, followed by another million in the 1920s.11 Although migrants often experienced poverty and racism in the North that was as bad as anything they had experienced in their home states, they enjoyed a greater degree of freedom. Membership in civil rights organizations and the circulation of black newspapers like the Chicago Defender shot up exponentially, reflecting migrants’ liberation from supervision and control by white employers. On a smaller scale, hundreds of mini-migrations that occurred within the South as rural people moved from plantations to towns and cities encouraged some protest activity there as well. In 1918–19 alone, the NAACP grew from 80 branches with 9,200 members to more than 229 branches with 62,000 members. Almost half of the branches and 23,500 members were in the southern states.12
Louisiana's first NAACP branch was born in Shreveport in 1914. Located in Caddo Parish in the northwestern corner of the state, the city originated as a trade center for cotton planters in the Red River delta region, and its growth was further boosted by the discovery of oil deposits in the parish in 1906. By 1910 Shreveport's population had grown to 28,015 and included 13,896 African Americans. In the next decade, the number of black residents increased to 17,485. The twenty people who founded the NAACP branch worked as real estate agents, insurance agents, porters, laborers, small business owners, waiters, and cooks—a diverse range of occupations that embraced the entire class spectrum of the African American community. Black people in New Orleans (1917), Alexandria (1918), Baton Rouge (1919), and Monroe (1925) also established NAACP branches, with memberships that were similar to the branch in Shreveport. Businesspeople represented the largest proportion of members in most branches, followed by laborers and semiskilled workers like mechanics and railroad brakemen. A small number of physicians and dentists also participated, along with a few ministers and teachers.13
Black people in some smaller communities also organized during this period. Truck farmers and laborers made up the majority of African Americans who chartered an NAACP branch in St. Rose, a tiny settlement of about five hundred people located in St. Charles Parish. Members of the Clarence branch in Natchitoches Parish were all farmers except for one minister and one man who gave his occupation as “public work.”14
One of the appeals of the NAACP to black Louisianans was its investigative and publicity campaigns against lynching. Caddo Parish had one of the worst records for mob violence of any region in Louisiana in the early twentieth century, and members of the Shreveport branch made this issue their first priority. In August 1914, following the lynching of seven black people in the state in seven days, they asked Governor Luther E. Hall to lend his authority by speaking out against the sadistic practice. In making this request, they stated, “We ask no favors, no privileges, no special advantages . . . but instead we pray for a living chance; an opportunity for defense before the Courts and justice at the hands of the law.”15 Several years later, branch president George Lewis suggested that NAACP headquarters send someone to the parish to investigate another lynching, saying, “If the members of the branch can get your assistance in this matter it will greatly stimulate them.” Similarly, black people in Clarence looked to the national organization for the protection they believed it could provide. Local leader Forest Trottie wrote to branch director Robert Bagnall in January 1922 asking him to quickly mail back the members’ charter so that their activities might appear to have more legitimacy. “Send it at wonse or just as soon as you can Because the white people here are Talking about against this move of ours so please get the charter out to us soon as possible,” he urged.16
Both national and local civil rights leaders hoped that black Americans’ participation in the war to defend freedom and democracy might result in the extension of those ideals to African Americans. Most black newspapers and magazine editors encouraged their readers to lend all possible support to the war effort, arguing that if they did so, white Americans could not continue to deny them equality.17 Writing in the Crisis, W. E. B. Du Bois predicted, “Out of this war will rise, too, an American Negro with the right to vote and the right to work and the right to live without insult”; he urged African Americans to put aside their grievances and stand “shoulder to shoulder with our own white fellow citizens and the allied nations that are fighting for democracy.” Echoing these sentiments, the New Orleans NAACP's newsletter reassured African Americans: “If we keep the Huns on the run, we will get everything that we have been desiring for the past sixty years. Men let's fight for our rights.”18
Not everyone agreed with this strategy. Writing to the national office in 1917, Shreveport NAACP member T. G. Garrett expressed his disgust with black community leaders who had spoken at a recent patriotic meeting held in the city. Enclosing some newspaper reports on the event, he stated: “Thes is some of the things that is so much harm to the negro in the southland. This is one of the ways that the negros is being rushed into the war. What has the Southern white man ever done for us. Thes kind of negros is the ones that making it so hard for us today. Thay want some money that all thay want.”19
Continued discrimination and mistreatment of African Americans during World War I proved skeptics like Garrett right. Black men who served in the U.S. armed forces remained subject to Jim Crow laws, harassment, and physical violence from their commanding officers, local law enforcement agents, and private citizens. Moreover, most black soldiers served as laborers in supply regiments. Their housing and recreational facilities were inferior to those provided for white soldiers and their movements more restricted. Often they suffered harsh treatment from white officers who believed this was the only way to train black people. In addition, local residents resented the presence of African Americans in military training camps in the South, sometimes expressing their opposition violently.20
White southerners feared that the train
ing of black men as soldiers and their service overseas might encourage them to think of themselves as equals. Following a trip to France in 1918, Louisiana congressman James B. Aswell predicted, “The war will [raise] serious questions to us, one of which is the race question.” Aswell had noticed the French people's comparatively tolerant attitude toward interracial couples and worried that “Negro soldiers who walk the streets with white women and white girls for several years will give trouble at home.”21 The actions of African Americans who remained in the United States were also cause for concern. Racial tensions evolving out of consistent disregard for segregation laws by black soldiers stationed near Houston, Texas, exploded into riots in the summer of 1917 after a white police officer used excessive violence in arresting one offender. Fifteen white people were killed and twelve others injured, pointing to the emergence of what some wartime analysts called the “New Negro”—black people who were determined to demand equal rights and who were unafraid to fight back against abuse.22
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