Life of a Klansman

by Edward Ball

  It is the first law of its kind. Yet the Civil Rights Act is a gesture at symbolic equity. It is not a material answer to 246 years of enslavement, and not at all an attempt at restitution. The army experiments with reparations after the war, trying land distribution in South Carolina, the origin of the phrase “forty acres and a mule.” But the Johnson government shuts down the program, and Congress does not revive it. Congress rejects financial reparations, and President Andrew Johnson and the Democrats are appalled by any equity, symbolic or real.

  The Civil Rights Act passes Congress over unanimous Democratic opposition. Johnson vetoes it, saying the law helps the wrong people. “The bill is made to operate in favor of the colored and against the white race.” Johnson speaks for the petits blancs of Louisiana. He speaks for the Lecorgnes and for millions of like minds.

  Ofay, as a general matter, dislike race parity.

  The Republicans override the president’s veto.

  In June, the U.S. House drafts an amendment that puts citizenship in the Constitution. By this time, the Thirteenth Amendment, which outlaws slavery, has been ratified, with Southern states accepting it as the price of being let back in the Union as states. The Fourteenth Amendment, about citizen and civil rights, goes to the states for a vote. But whites, as a rule, have trouble with civil rights.

  * * *

  Memphis, Tennessee, population forty thousand, sits on the banks of the Mississippi, four hundred miles north of New Orleans. Like Charleston, Atlanta, and elsewhere, Memphis is filled with black people who leave the plantations for new lives in town.

  On May 1, 1866, the telegraphs in newspaper offices rattle with word that white mobs are marauding through black streets in Memphis. When a white policeman tries to arrest a single black man, and he resists, gangs of whites come together and start to attack African Americans. The “race riot” kills forty-six, and many women are raped. All the victims are black. Union troops take three days to put an end to the so-called Memphis Riots.

  If you look at this episode, you may begin to think violence is a white monopoly.

  Black people in the South have seen much blood, typically as the people who bleed. Millions of slaves endure routine beatings and rapes. A culture of self-defense could not grow, because to fight back under slavery meant deadly reprisal. Over time, physical violence comes to be regarded as a white prerogative. In the slave days, a black person who strikes a white is often maimed or killed, and when slaves manage to put together a band of guerrillas, the attempt always ends in slaughter.

  After Emancipation, thousands of blacks join the Union Army. They grow familiar with tactical violence. But blacks in arms and uniform and in control of social space are the exception to long and deep tradition.

  By contrast, about a million white soldiers come home from the Civil War with advanced degrees in gang violence. Rebel veterans know how to kill people with guns, large and small. They can move a squad in the woods, ambush, stalk, and run raids. At least half of white men younger than forty have seen and done these things.

  There is also a flood of guns after the war. Gunmakers like Winchester, Remington, and Colt churn out weapons during the fight, earning a river of money from long guns and revolvers. Guns are supposed to be surrendered with the peace, and many rifles are. But handguns less so, and many return to closets.

  The explosion in Memphis in May 1866 is both a rage and a backlash. It is the first retaliation against a new world that is trying to be born. The next strike comes in Louisiana, and Constant is on hand.

  * * *

  The ex-rebels with the vote elect a mayor in New Orleans, John T. Monroe, a Democrat who regards whites as a mistreated minority that is to be lifted up again. Mayor Monroe learns of the killings in Memphis and, seemingly inspired, takes a series of steps. Monroe tells the New Orleans police not to interfere with “respectable persons” who carry concealed weapons. The army has tried to collect guns from the hands of ex-rebels. No more, says Monroe. Armed citizens may be called on to help the police if trouble hits the street. Next, the mayor doubles the all-white police force. He appoints a commissioner to hire five hundred officers at an exorbitant salary. The new cops are to receive $80 per month, four times the pay of a workingman. There is a stampede at Gallier Hall, seat of city government. One in three white men in New Orleans applies for a police badge.

  I do not know whether Constant and his brother Joseph are among the men who clamor for the job of richly paid cop. I suspect they are, but I have no evidence. Yet Constant has a friend from Bouligny, Seymour Rapp, who is hired as a new officer.

  Seymour Rapp is thirty-seven, a veteran and a fireman, part of Home Hook & Ladder.

  Mayor Monroe is not finished. He appoints a sheriff, named Harry Hayes. Hayes is a leader in the city’s Carnival, head of the Krewe of Comus, the men’s club that sends out a rich parade on Mardi Gras night. An ex-rebel general, Hayes names dozens of men from his old regiment as deputies. They are there to help when trouble comes with the blacks.

  The elections of November are past. White voters in states around the South follow the pattern of Louisiana, setting up their own rebel legislatures that pass versions of the Black Codes. President Johnson likes this outcome. He declares that the Union is restored. Meanwhile, there is a rise in seemingly random attacks on blacks. The Freedmen’s Bureau adds up the number of violent attacks by whites against blacks during the period since the end of the war and reports that 86 freedpeople are killed in Louisiana and 230 injured in assaults, with no one convicted. In the same period, one white person is killed by a black man, who is hanged. It looks like a white monopoly.

  * * *

  It is summer 1866. Constant may have trouble making a living, but he feels wanted and needed at the firehouse, between its drills, banquets, drills, concerts, drills, and drinks. The three children are growing; Numa and Louis are in school. Despite the legal mandate, public schools remain racially separate. A handful of schools open for the giant number of never-educated black children. Dozens of white schools reopen and fill their classrooms.

  The Tribune publisher Louis Roudanez calls again and again for blacks to have the vote. At some point, he and comrades see a path to the ballot. A clause in the 1864 constitution allows delegates who wrote the document to meet again for more deliberations. Maybe a recall of the convention would do something. Most blacks and a tiny number of whites want the vote for black men. Probably ninety-five percent of whites do not. The newspapers say that black voting rights will mean “negro domination.” The Picayune, the Times, the Courier, and the French paper, L’Abeille, run nasty pages on “mixed marriage” and the disaster of “social equality,” two horrors that black voting would bring about.

  The position held by all the newspapers, except Roudanez’s Tribune, is that black people are monstrous. They are ignorant. They cannot hold any power, cannot be turned into leaders who tell anyone what to do. The position held by the newspapers is that whites are a wounded people who need to be nursed and healed.

  On June 23, an invitation to meet goes to ex-delegates who helped write the 1864 constitution. Ex-rebels in the government, the fire companies, and the police all see a threat. If blacks get the vote, white power is lost. Louisiana is one of two states with a black majority, the other being South Carolina. The papers say that a coup is in the making. If black people vote, the suffering that whites now endure will be made permanent.

  The convention is set for late July, in the statehouse. The brown brick Mechanics Institute stands outside the French Quarter, on Dryades Street near Canal Street. The governor’s office is here, and the Rebel Legislature meets in its auditorium, known as Mechanics Hall. The hall is booked for the end of the month.

  The Ku-klux in Louisiana, aided by police and firemen, conducted a first massacre at the Mechanics Institute in New Orleans.

  The ex-delegates are white, their popular support is black. Whites like the Lecorgnes regard the authors of the constitution as traitors to the state and to
their race. On Friday, July 27, delegates to the meeting stage a nighttime rally, and some five thousand attend, most of them freedpeople. Speakers call for political equality between whites and blacks, and the last man on the platform closes with a blast, shouting, “The decree of God has gone forth that there shall be universal freedom and universal suffrage throughout the South.”

  I am picking through the evidence. It is thin and circumstantial, and yet it seems to me these are the days that radicalize Constant. The trauma of the war affects him. His marriage may be under pressure. He has lost the house he built and seems to work hard to lose much of his income. And now the blacks are grasping.

  Les nègres are the cause of all that is wrong, really. They are to be blamed. If the blacks get the vote, they will flatten us. Let them make one wrong step, and they will pay.

  White fear of people of color is not a new fear. It is as old as the colonial settlement of America. It is so old and so established that it lies like an animal asleep in the mind. When the idea gets around that a new convention is coming together to change the constitution and spread the franchise, the beast of fear awakens.

  The delegates have a plan. They will come together in Mechanics Hall and issue a proclamation that calls for universal suffrage. Louis Roudanez has already printed the decree at the offices of the Tribune. It is stacked and ready to hand around. The first meeting is scheduled for Monday, July 30, at noon. Maybe forty delegates, all white. Maybe two hundred supporters, most of them black. The plan is to talk voting rights for two hours, and then adjourn.

  In the months after these events, the U.S. Congress will conduct an investigation. A committee will take testimony from dozens of witnesses, black and white, and publish the six-hundred-page Report of the Select Committee on the New Orleans Riots. It provides an hourly account.

  During the weekend, after the night rally, bunches of men are overheard on street corners talking over the “nigger meeting” and how to deal with it. I do not know whether Constant is one of the men in a huddle on the street. He does not need a street corner on which to huddle. The firehouse of Home Hook & Ladder is a better place to lurk, a den close to home.

  On Sunday, July 29, Mayor John Monroe and Sheriff Henry Hayes meet to discuss. The decision is taken to mobilize the police and to arm Hayes’s new deputies. The decision is also taken to mobilize the fire companies. Mayor Monroe tells his staff to “let all the fire companies assemble to monitor events,” according to the congressional report. At 5:00 p.m., the mayor and chief of police send out an order by telegraph that all police are to report to their stations the following morning, armed. Another bulletin goes to the city’s firehouses, telling them to “come out in force” when they “hear the strokes” of the fire bell. Two witnesses at Congress testify that members of every fire company are visible at the scene.

  Firemen across the city, on orders from their chiefs, meet at firehouses to plan their action. The chief of Home Hook & Ladder is Émile Chevalley, Constant’s neighbor and friend. Constant is also in touch with his friend on the police force, Seymour Rapp.

  Union soldiers are the blue line that protects, at least some of the time, black activists in politics and their handful of white allies. But the companies of Yankee soldiers are at their military base, Jackson Barracks, which lies three miles downriver.

  On the morning of Monday the 30th, the firemen turn out. They are milling about, not close to Mechanics Hall, but within sprint distance. Some have pistols in their belts. One man walking to Mechanics Hall—he calls himself “colored” but appears to be white, like many Creoles of color—is stopped in the street by an ex-rebel. The rebel says, “The police are coming, and we are going to have some fun. We are going to have all these niggers and half-niggers wiped out.”

  Before noon, at the eastern edge of the French Quarter, in faubourg Marigny, some three hundred black men and women meet for a parade to Mechanics Hall. Most of the marchers are Union Army men, some still in the service, some out. With drums and banners and a U.S. flag, they start on Bourbon Street near Esplanade Avenue and make their way west through the French Quarter. Mechanics Hall lies a mile distant. The procession is defiant and singing. Crowds of whites watch. They jeer. They spray spit.

  The circumstances seem to say that Constant goes with his friend Seymour Rapp to the scene of the meeting. Constant and Rapp are comrades from Home Hook & Ladder. And Rapp, as a police officer, has orders to show up.

  The black parade moves through the Vieux Carré, the old neighborhood of the Lecorgnes, twenty-five years back. It passes near the family’s old house address at 43 Dauphine Street. It drums down the blocks where Constant played when he was a boy. That was before the Lecorgnes moved out to the white suburb of Bouligny. A parade like this is equal and free, a celebration. A procession like this is an expression of power and community. The marchers come up Bourbon Street.

  At Mechanics Hall, now a half mile distant, the scene is menacing. Several hundred supporters of the convention, most of them black, turn out to watch the delegates enter the building. The number of delegates is small; many back out in fear. Angry white faces gather at the edges, surrounding the black crowd. The delegates pass through a gauntlet, a heckling mob of whites, a cheering section of blacks.

  As the parade comes out of the French Quarter, a white man pushes a black marcher down on the street. He fights back, and the white man pulls a pistol and fires. The bullet misses, no one is hit, but the day moves to its lethal stage.

  The delegates and two hundred or more black supporters make their way inside, climb the stairs to the second floor, and enter Mechanics Hall. The room is 75 x 120 feet, and high-ceilinged. At one end of the hall is a platform, in the middle are rows of chairs. At 12:00 p.m., the chairman gavels the meeting and starts roll call.

  It is a little past noon when the black parade arrives in front of the building, followed by a seething crowd of whites. It is a little past noon when the fire alarm bells ring down the street.

  Fireboxes stand here and there around the city, a network linked by electric lines, with bells that clang in unison. The system uses simple signals to point to the location of a fire. Two strikes of the bell mean a fire in the city’s District 2, four strikes in District 4. But just after noon on this Monday, the fireboxes throughout the city all sound an alarm of twelve bells, more than the number of city districts. The signal of twelve bells has been used only once, during the Civil War, when Mayor Monroe had his first term in office. Then, the sound of twelve bells signaled not a fire but an invasion, a warning that the city was under attack. Five years have passed, but everyone remembers the meaning of the bells, not least the men in the fire companies.

  Twelve bells signal the start of killing.

  15

  I do not know with certainty whether Constant Lecorgne is among the marauders, but I believe he is. The membership in a fire company, the alarm calling all firemen. Yet the newspapers publish no lists of killers. There is no honor roll of volunteers who claim to have joined in the attack that historians refer to as the Mechanics Institute Riot. And I have no photographs or letters about the day. Still, the preponderant clues say that Constant is in the streets with the other firemen, who help the police to kill dozens of black people. I cannot escape the conclusion that the Mechanics Institute massacre is a blood baptism for him.

  Lines of police appear, spilling out from their stations and marching in columns toward Mechanics Hall. The police wear regulation hats with badge numbers on them, each officer’s number sewn onto a hatband. Witnesses notice that the badge numbers are reversed, turned upside down, and unreadable.

  One witness says, “A fire company came down with their fire apparatus as if they were running to a fire, which is a very good way to collect a crowd, and headed to the front of the Mechanics Institute.” After the alarm, armed men swarm the downtown streets. They wear different insignia, depending. A witness describes men “with a kind of blue badge or ribbon in the buttonhole of their coats”�
��the deputized police of Henry Hayes. Others wear a white handkerchief at the neck—rank and file in the fire companies. Men with a single rolled-up shirtsleeve are ex-rebel militia belonging to neither the police nor a firehouse. I think of them as freelancers for white rule.

  In front of the Institute, a white newsboy taunts the black demonstrators and starts a fight with one of the black men. A dozen others get ready to join a brawl. A marcher fires a shot, and the fight with the newsboy spreads. At this, a number of police pull their guns and open fire on the men and women in the parade. The shooting begins, and it is general. The beating of men and women starts, and it, too, is general. Knives are brought out by whites not fortunate enough to possess a pistol.

  The crowd of blacks in front of the building is attacked, charged from both ends of the street. There is no direction to retreat, and the crowd divides itself into two groups to face the twin assault. Hundreds of whites are armed, only a few blacks have guns. The marchers from the parade, caught in crossfire, fight back with sticks and stones. According to witnesses, the police and firemen act together. A survivor named James Thomas reports, “After the alarm I saw squads from all the fire companies with clubs and sticks. If the police could not kill all those at the convention, the plan was that they were to disperse them, and those they could not kill, the firemen were to kill outside.”

  Police and others shoot many to death at point-blank. They chase people down alleys and into nearby houses. The editor of the New Orleans Tribune is on the scene, but he somehow escapes. He writes, “What is the most hideous are the yells and calls of these savages whenever a defenseless man falls.” Ecstatic shrieks are heard when the mob seizes a victim. One survivor quotes some of the shouts he hears during the riot. “Kill the Yankee nigger!” “Shoot the nigger son of a bitch!” “There goes another nigger!” And “Another damned Yankee!”