Unlike the members of his parents’ generation, my great-grandfather Paul Broyard had the chance to enter adulthood as an equal to other men, rather than as a colored man subordinate to whites. In his heart Paul may have already felt as good as or even superior to the white kids he knew from his neighborhood—mostly the children of Italian, German, and Irish immigrants. According to one of his grandsons, Paul could understand their languages but few immigrant children mastered his mother tongue, French. Many of his white counterparts were heading toward careers as laborers like their fathers, while Paul was apprenticed in the respected trade of carpentry, showing a flair for drawing and attention to detail that suited him for the practice of architecture. Paul had the Creole community to thank for these advantages. Their long presence in New Orleans and years of freedom had allowed them to create a supportive social network, with a focus on education, a tradition of activism, and a history of artisanship that they passed down to the next generation. That the former slaves lacked these opportunities further elevated young Creoles of color like Paul in New Orleans’s social hierarchy.
Paul was also growing up to be handsome, which made him cocky. Of medium height, with long legs and a lean, sinewy build, he was known to strut around. Friends and family began referring to him as Belhomme—“beautiful man”—a nickname that would stick for the rest of his life. He wore his wavy brown hair parted on the side, and added a pencil mustache when he was older. With gently hooded pale green eyes, a long thin nose, and strong square chin, he could have easily passed for white. Only a yellow tinge to his skin alluded to his mother’s African ancestry.
If Paul had any fears about his ability to compete with whites, he had a chance to allay them after a judge in 1870 finally forced the city’s schools to integrate. While no records exist of my great-grandfather’s education, the mixed schools with the heaviest Negro attendance were concentrated in his neighborhood, making it likely that Paul learned side by side with white children. In no other city throughout the entire South during Reconstruction were whites and blacks educated in the same classroom.
A white reporter from the Picayune (a paper that didn’t usually favor black people) was assigned to cover the horrors of school integration. Instead he found “white ladies teaching negro boys; colored women showing the graces and dignity of mental and moral refinement...; children and youth of both races standing in the same classes, with black teachers pushing intelligently up into the intricacies of high school mathematics.” The journalist was almost certainly author George Washington Cable, who later wrote that the experience of reporting on desegregated schools convinced him that blacks and whites must share equally in public rights if the South were to thrive.
While arguing for school integration in the Tribune, Paul’s godfather, Paul Trévigne, had observed, “The objection ‘too soon’ is but laughable....When will the right time come? Is it, per chance, after we have separated for 10 or 20 years the two races in different schools, and when we shall have realized the separation of this nation into two peoples?” But many recently freed blacks weren’t comfortable demanding full and immediate integration. For ex-slaves living in the countryside, this conciliatory stance was partly a matter of self-preservation.
In 1867, in response to the Reconstruction Acts, some white men in the town of Franklin, a hundred miles west of New Orleans, founded a paramilitary group called the Knights of the White Camelia, designed to intimidate black voters. Other white citizen militias would spring up throughout Reconstruction, including the Ku Klux Klan. Over the next eleven years, between three thousand and ten thousand colored Republicans in the state would be murdered for political reasons, according to estimates by federal investigation committees.
Integration wasn’t the only issue dividing the ex-slaves and the free people of color. The colored Creole radicals made a number of missteps that alienated the ex-slaves from the political process. The free men of color insisted on deputizing themselves the leaders of the colored constituency, despite the fact that the emancipated slaves made up the voting majority. While the colored Creoles were committed in theory to securing civil and political equality for everyone of their race—Trévigne, for example, had helped to defeat a bill introduced by white lawmakers that would have granted the vote only to light-skinned Negroes like himself—they often snubbed their recently emancipated neighbors in practice. The Tribune had no former slaves on its editorial board, not even in the English section that had been added specifically to address them. One editorial went so far as publicly scolding the ex-slaves for their lack of “discipline” and habit of “boasting.”
The so-called carpetbaggers—white Northerners who’d come South as Union soldiers and stayed to make their fortunes—were happy to exploit these rifts in the black community. At the first Republican state convention following Reconstruction, the Tribune faction made the unwise decision to support in the gubernatorial race two former slave owners, one of whom had been among the largest Negro owners of slaves in the state. No matter that these men stood on the more radical end of the Republican platform, the newly emancipated blacks weren’t about to vote their old masters into office, especially not colored ones. The carpetbaggers, on the other hand, won the primary easily with their shrewdly chosen candidates: twenty-five-year-old white Illinoisan Henry Clay Warmoth, whose service in the Union army made him the face of liberation for bondsmen, and his running mate, Oscar Dunn, an African American barber who was dark-skinned, English-speaking, and the son of a slave.
In his inaugural address, Lieutenant Governor Dunn echoed the sentiments of many former slaves when he remarked: “As to myself and my people, we are not seeking social equality....We simply ask to be allowed an equal chance in the race of life; an equal opportunity of supporting our families, of educating our children, and of becoming worthy citizens of this government.” P.B.S. Pinchback, a black politician originally from Mississippi and a supporter of Governor Warmoth’s, put it more bluntly: “It is wholesale falsehood to say that we wish to force ourselves upon white people.” In his view blacks “could get no rights the whites did not see fit to give them.” But the colored Creoles couldn’t reconcile this attitude with their urgent desire “to be respected and treated as men.”
As the oldest son, my great-grandfather was forced to become the man of the Broyard family when his father died in 1873. At age sixteen Paul was suddenly responsible for supporting his mother and five younger brothers (their sister Pauline had died), who ranged in age from fourteen-year-old Pierre to the baby Octave, just six months old. Paul’s trade, carpentry, paid well, but his few years of experience would have made it hard to secure jobs on his own. Over the next few years, the family moved from one rented cottage in Tremé to another, in search of lower rents and closer proximity to relatives who could lend a hand.
The political situation in the state had grown more uncertain too. Shortly into his term as governor, Warmoth had traveled up to Washington to meet with President Grant, whom he assured that he would not let Louisiana become an “African State.” To that end he vetoed a bill that would have imposed fines on any Louisiana business or public resorts and conveyances that continued to practice segregation. Warmoth later explained that efforts to “Africanize Louisiana were bound to lead to civil war and to the ultimate destruction of the rights of all our colored citizens.”
The blacks who helped put Warmoth into office were outraged by his veto of the enforcement bill. His own lieutenant governor, Oscar Dunn, called him the country’s first Ku Klux Klan governor, only to die soon afterward under mysterious circumstances. Warmoth silenced protests from Trévigne and his fellow editors by cutting off the Tribune’s main source of funding. The paper had been serving as the state Republican Party’s “official printer,” but Warmoth convinced party delegates to switch their patronage to the New Orleans Republican, a more conservative paper that—conveniently—supported him. After leading the struggle for universal suffrage for seven years, the Tribune had to close its doors just a few months after blacks were finally able to exercise their franchise.
While fighting between Warmoth and his detractors tore apart Republican ranks, Louisiana’s white Democrats furthered their efforts to reclaim the state offices—a process called “redemption.” If the disarray among Republican leadership wasn’t enough to discourage Negro voters from heading to the polls, the Knights of the White Camelia gave them reason to stay away.
Prior to one election in the city of Shreveport, sixty merchants and bankers vowed to withhold advancing supplies or money to any planter whose laborers or tenants voted a Republican ticket. If colored Republicans did risk their lives and livelihood to cast a ballot, their votes were often stolen or disregarded. Many northern parishes routinely reported 100 percent Democratic election returns, despite their large black populations. It’s not surprising that many blacks took the cash rewards for their votes offered by Democratic Party operatives.
To combat the Democrats’ tactics of corruption and violence, Republicans began resorting to fraud themselves. Election results in the state were regularly contested. In the 1872 gubernatorial race, both Democrats and Republicans claimed victory, leading to the bloodiest episode in Reconstruction history, where 3 white and 150 black Republicans were killed when trying to defend their claim to the parish seat in the northern town of Colfax. In New Orleans a white paramilitary group stormed the city and seized control of the statehouse, until President Grant called in federal troops to restore order. A few months later, gangs of white boys traveled from school to school for three days, ejecting colored children from the classrooms. Students like Paul, whose black ancestry wasn’t obvious, were able to escape detection by sitting quietly and not calling attention to themselves.
In 1876 Louisiana produced conflicting election returns yet again—this time throwing the outcome of the presidential race into question. Neither the Democratic presidential candidate, Samuel Tilden, nor the Republican, Rutherford B. Hayes, had a majority of electoral votes without the results from Louisiana or the two other contested Southern states, South Carolina and Florida. In Congress, Democrats kept blocking attempts to resolve the dispute, and when President Grant reached his last week in office, still no successor had been named. There was talk of another civil war if Tilden wasn’t declared the victor.
With just a few days to spare, Hayes met with a group of Southern representatives with whom he hammered out the famous Compromise of 1877. The Republicans agreed to remove the remaining federal troops from South Carolina and Louisiana (the only Southern states that had not yet been “redeemed” by whites), so long as the Democrats would let them have the presidency. In effect, the Southerners chose to regain local sovereignty in exchange for giving up their candidate as president, and the Republicans opted to sacrifice the cause of the Negro in exchange for the peaceful possession of the White House. Two days later the Democrats ended their filibuster, the vote counting continued, and Hayes was declared the country’s nineteenth president. On April 24, 1877, the last of the federal troops pulled out of Louisiana, and the fifty-year reign of the “Solid South” began.
As part of the deal, Democratic candidate Francis T. Nicholls was declared the winner of Louisiana’s gubernatorial race. Nicholls, who’d lost an arm and a leg for the Confederate cause, had run on a platform that promised to respect black rights secured by the Reconstruction amendments. But when New Orleans’s children, including three of Paul Broyard’s younger brothers, headed back to school in September 1877, the superintendent began segregating them into separate black and white facilities. Paul Trévigne, who’d been on the school board during Reconstruction, immediately filed a lawsuit, alleging a violation of the equal protection clause of the U.S.’s Fourteenth Amendment, along with the article in Louisiana’s state constitution that forbade establishing separate schools for the races. The judge dodged the case, saying it was too late to hear it once school was in session. Also, Trévigne’s children weren’t directly affected by the law.
Arnold Bertonneau, whose two sons had been turned away from the white public school down the street, quickly followed with a suit of his own. After a year-and-a-half delay, his case was also dismissed, with a ruling that no discrimination had been practiced. The opinion read: “Both races are treated precisely alike. White children and colored children are compelled to attend different schools. That is all.” Eventually this “separate but equal” ruse would drive Bertonneau from his hometown to California, where he and his family, including the mother of my friend Julia Hilla, would begin living as white. That a man like Bertonneau—who’d met with Lincoln to argue for the Negro’s vote—would resort to passing is a measure of the desperation felt by New Orleans’s colored community in coming years.
Over the summer, my great-grandfather had turned twenty-one, which meant that he no longer had to watch this fight from the sidelines. In the election the following November, Paul would be able to finally exercise the franchise that his father and godfather had fought to obtain. Given the departure of the federal troops, it remained to be seen whether Paul’s vote would carry any meaning. By election time Paul was responsible for a family of his own, with his first child on the way and a wedding around the corner, which made his own stake in the outcome even higher.