My grandfather Paul Anatole Broyard was born in his parents’ home on January 21, 1889. His name—invoking his father and his mother’s father—was typical of an eldest son’s, but Paul Anatole was actually the sixth child, and third boy, born to Paul and Rosa. They’d lost their first male child, christened Anatole Paul, in 1880, and were apparently too superstitious to recycle the name for their next son. By the time my grandfather came along, the curse had worn off, or else Paul couldn’t wait any longer for his namesake. My grandfather must have felt his name to be cursed in a different way. To be the “junior” of a man like Belhomme was a lot of pressure for a young boy. When he was twelve or so, my grandfather nicknamed himself Nat, although his father persisted in calling him Paul Jr., and as an adult he reversed his name to Anatole Paul, which further distinguished him from Paul Sr.
By the time Nat was born, Paul was clearly the patriarch of the extended Broyard clan. With neither a father or father-in-law present, he was the oldest male in the family. He’d already been serving for the previous fifteen years as the surrogate father for his five younger brothers. When all of their families gathered for Sunday dinner, Paul occupied the head of the table, carving the duck that Rosa prepared and doling out the wine—two fingers apiece for Nat and his cousins. Paul’s construction business was steadily growing, particularly after his carpentry skills were showcased at the World’s Cotton Exposition held in New Orleans in 1884. Creoles of color and whites alike were hiring him for bigger and bigger buildings, for which he employed his younger brothers and cousins.
During the early 1890s, Paul also became involved in politics, joining the new generation of Creole radicals who’d begun to fight back against the ascendance of white supremacy in the state. For most of the decade, Paul served as Republican president for the Fifth Ward, which included the Creole neighborhood of Tremé. In this elected position, he participated in every aspect of the political process: from electing delegates to the Republican state convention, to leading party meetings and setting party platforms, to securing polling sites and running the primaries. Paul also served on the Republican Party’s state central committee, which was responsible for assembling the state tickets.
During his period of political activity, Paul focused particularly on uniting the disparate parts of the Republican Party. The Reconstruction-era division between American blacks and the Creoles of color had persisted. At the same time, white planters, unhappy with the Democratic Party’s antiprotectionism policies, began entering the Republican fold, along with poorer whites who were fed up with a governing style that favored the wealthy. Although the white newcomers to the Republican Party had to be coaxed into supporting the Negroes’ fight for equality, Paul worked to make room for them, recognizing that an interracial coalition was the party’s only chance to win back control of the South. His efforts very nearly paid off.
When Nat was grown and had children himself, he often told stories about his father, but he never mentioned Paul’s political activity. The ultimately disappointing outcome might have made him reluctant to share these memories, or else he was too young to understand anything more than that his father seemed to be always busy.
By day Paul was supervising hundreds of men (black and white) in the construction of some of the most elegant and modern buildings the city had ever seen. A few weeks before Christmas in 1893, when Nat was four, Paul completed the Grunewald, New Orleans’s first “modern” luxury hotel. The 250-room property boasted two elevators, its own electric plant, steam heating, an interior finished in carved cypress, and a roof garden big enough to accommodate three thousand people. The following year Paul was hired to build the southern headquarters for Liverpool & London & Globe Insurance, the largest insurance company in the city.
By night Paul ran from one political rally to another, meeting with everyone from other colored Republicans to the recently converted white planters to U.S. senators who came to New Orleans as representatives of the national Republican Party. As a ward president, Paul also played a hand in doling out federal patronage, such as jobs at the post office and customhouse or contracts for federal buildings or roads. Along with the work generated by his construction firm—which oversaw budgets up to $250,000 (almost $5 million today) and crews of as many as 250 men—my great-grandfather was in the position to improve many people’s fortunes.
Even without knowing the specifics of his father’s activities, Nat would be able to see from his father’s example that being colored didn’t necessarily prevent a person from being respected and treated as a man, no matter how much the segregation imposed by southern whites might try to convince him otherwise.
Ever since federal troops had pulled out of Louisiana, Democrats had been trying to repeal whatever gains blacks had secured during Reconstruction. In his inaugural speech on May 19, 1884, Governor Samuel McEnery declared: “That many of our best citizens, who have given thought and attention to public affairs, are practically disfranchised by a larger class of citizens who are unacquainted with the operations of the government, and are absolutely ignorant of passing events, is evident....I believe that public opinion imperatively demands that the right of suffrage be restricted to those who can intelligently exercise it.” While the federal constitution prevented Governor McEnery from legally disenfranchising blacks, the Democrats’ tactics of intimidation, bribery, and fraud gave the party control of elective offices across the state.
In 1890 passage of the Separate Car Law, which segregated travel on state railroads, presented the Creole radicals with their chance to call a national referendum on the declining state of southern race relations in the form of the court case Plessy v. Ferguson. Rodolphe Desdunes, Paul Broyard’s friend and a fellow Creole of color, came up with the idea. While studying for his law degree at an integrated law school in the 1880s, Desdunes had concluded that the U.S. federal courts offered blacks their best option to contest the loss of their civil and political rights. In response to the Separate Car Law, he proposed setting up a test case in order to force the U.S. Supreme Court to rule on its constitutionality. Another Creole lawyer, Louis Martinet, started a Republican newspaper, the Crusader, to publicize the legal fight, and a group of leading Creoles formed the Citizens Committee to raise money for the defense. The white civil rights lawyer Albion Tourgée, from upstate New York, signed on as legal counsel.
The judicial battle wasn’t going to be easy. Even if the Supreme Court agreed to hear their case, the Creole radicals had no guarantee of winning the decision. Since the end of Reconstruction, the mood in Washington had turned against African Americans. In 1883 the Supreme Court had ruled that the Civil Rights Acts of 1875, which ensured equal access to public buildings and conveyances, was unconstitutional. So far federal courts weren’t objecting to the appearance across the South of “Jim Crow” laws (named after a popular minstrel show character, an old crippled black slave), despite their clear violation of the Fourteenth Amendment.
On February 24, 1892, Rodolphe Desdunes’s son, a thirty-year-old musician named Daniel Desdunes, boarded a train headed for Mobile, Alabama, and took a seat in a “whites only” car. The idea was to first test the constitutionality of train travel between states. Since only Congress had the power to regulate interstate commerce, this case presented a better chance for a favorable ruling. Desdunes hadn’t traveled two miles when the conductor stopped the train and a private detective stepped forward to arrest him. This had all been arranged beforehand with the railroad company, which disliked the Jim Crow law as much as the colored men. Maintaining separate cars for blacks and whites was expensive and inconvenient. Also, if a conductor wrongly accused a white person of being colored, he ran the risk of being sued for damages.
While waiting for Desdunes’s case to come to trial, the Citizens Committee launched a second, more challenging, legal battle to test train travel within the state. One of the younger members of the committee, a thirty-year-old shoemaker named Homer Plessy, volunteered as the rider. A Creole of color, Plessy looked white enough to enter the “whites only” coach without calling attention to himself, but was black enough—one-eighth—to get himself arrested. On June 7, 1892, he boarded a train for Covington, across Lake Pontchartrain. Again the railroad company was in cahoots with the Creole activists, and the train had barely pulled out of the station when the conductor confronted Plessy. After the young shoemaker was arrested, his case was placed on the docket of Judge John H. Ferguson of the New Orleans Criminal Court.
In June of 1892, the Creole radicals celebrated their first victory. As they had anticipated, the court threw out the charges against Desdunes’s son, holding that the Separate Car Law when applied to passengers traveling between states was unconstitutional. But in the Plessy case, concerning travel within Louisiana, Judge Ferguson ruled against them: “There is no pretense that [Plessy] was not provided with equal accommodations with the white passengers. He was simply deprived of the liberty of doing as he pleased.” In other words, the white and black cars were separate but not unequal, and therefore the law didn’t violate the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
The ruling didn’t come as a complete surprise, nor did the decision of the Louisiana Supreme Court to uphold the decision on appeal. The Creole activists had always expected that they would have to take their battle to the federal courts. But by the time the case was placed on the U.S. Supreme Court’s docket, their prospects for success had changed considerably. Democrat Grover Cleveland’s victory in the 1892 presidential election had brought about a change to the court’s political complexion. By the count of attorney Albion Tourgée, five of the eight justices would be against them. In Tourgée’s view their best option was to try to rally support for the cause in the press. If each of these justices “hears from the country,” perhaps one of them could be convinced to change his position.
Accordingly, Louis Martinet stepped up publication of the Crusader. In 1894 the paper became the only black daily newspaper in the United States and the sole Republican daily in the South. But the country at the moment wasn’t feeling receptive to political action on behalf of colored people. Many northerners blamed blacks for the failure of Reconstruction. Also, the country was in the middle of a depression: hundreds of banks had folded, thousands of businesses were in bankruptcy, 4 million people were out of work, and farmers across the South and West were teetering on the edge of ruin. Even well-meaning white Americans were too concerned with putting food on their table to rally for racial equality. For many of the country’s colored citizens, Booker T. Washington’s focus on job training and accommodation to white prejudice made a lot more sense than the New Orleans committee’s push for integration.
In his famous Atlanta Compromise speech in September of 1895, Washington declared: “The wisest among my race understand that the agitation of questions of social equality is the extremest folly, and that progress in the enjoyment of all the privileges that will come to us must be the result of severe and constant struggle rather than of artificial forcing.” Washington’s reasoning that “the opportunity to earn a dollar in a factory just now is worth infinitely more than the opportunity to spend a dollar in an opera-house” obliquely criticized the New Orleans committee for being out of touch with the realities of most black people.
It was true that the relative economic security of my great-grandfather and his New Orleans compatriots afforded them the luxury to fight for equality on other fronts. But this battle meant much more than earning the right to sit next to whites at the opera. Louisiana’s general assembly had already outlawed intermarriage and was in the process of trying to pass a suffrage amendment that would impose property and education requirements on voters. My great-grandfather and his fellow Creole radicals recognized that the Democrats were on the verge of turning back the clock on race relations in the South to the preemancipation days.
While waiting for the ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson, Paul was hard at work helping to assemble a compromise ticket to challenge the incumbent Democratic candidate in the April 1896 gubernatorial election. For the first time since the state had been redeemed, the Republicans actually had a chance of their man’s winning the election. An interracial coalition of disgruntled white Democrats and colored Republicans joined together to support a white sugar planter named Captain John N. Pharr, who was running on a Populist ticket. Further uniting the disparate group was opposition to the suffrage amendment, which would disenfranchise poor whites and blacks alike.
At the Washington Artillery Hall, Pharr announced to a crowd of nine hundred—half of whom were black—his willingness to run against the amendment and for equal rights, “especially for the nigger,” who he declared had no bad traits except for what he’d learned from white people. His speech drew cheers, especially from the black contingent, but Pharr’s base of support was far from solid. In the weeks leading up to the election, Paul and other Republican leaders had to repeatedly thwart efforts by one faction or another to establish a splinter ticket that would siphon off votes.
Pharr ended up winning every white parish in the state. In the black parishes, however, the Democrats—by alternately stealing and buying black votes—returned an outstanding number of ballots for their candidate, resulting in his victory. The close election results demonstrated the ability of black voters to decide a race when whites were divided. The sugar planters, in particular, feared the potential power of future cross-racial alliances among blacks and small white farmers, and set about eliminating colored voters altogether through jury-rigged reforms of state election laws and then the amendment of the state constitution. (The number of blacks on Louisiana’s voter rolls would eventually drop from 154,000 in 1896 to fewer than 500 in 1908.) Just a month after this blow came a second one. On May 18, 1896, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the lower court’s decision in the Plessy v. Ferguson case with its finding that segregated facilities were not unconstitutional because separate did not necessarily mean unequal.
During the preparations for the Plessy trial, the Creole newspaper publisher Louis Martinet had written to Albion Tourgée about the stakes for New Orleans’s colored population: “You don’t know what the feeling is...knowing that you are a freeman, & yet not allowed to enjoy a freeman’s liberty, rights, and privileges unless you stake your life every time you try it. To live always under the feeling of restraint is worse than living behind prison bars.” Martinet had told the lawyer that he wasn’t willing to raise his child in the “prejudiced southern atmosphere.” Neither, apparently, was my great-grandfather.
Over the next few weeks following the Plessy decision, Paul finished up his various construction jobs and gave a local lawyer power of attorney to conduct his business affairs in his absence. Then he boarded a train with Rosa and their six children for California. No matter that the Broyards had lived in New Orleans for the last 150 years, no matter that Paul owed everything he was to the city’s Creole culture, my great-grandfather was willing to leave if it meant that his children could grow up believing themselves to be equals. One way to ensure that would be for the family to live as white.
The Broyard kids were all pale enough that they could probably get away with it. Perhaps Paul had even bought tickets for the white compartment of the train as a trial run of sorts. Los Angeles at the turn of the century was nowhere near as race conscious as the Deep South. A thriving agriculture and the recent discovery of oil were drawing people to California from across the country. The Broyards would have been one of many families who were trying to start over. But something made Paul decide to come back to New Orleans in time to start the school year in September. It’s possible that he didn’t have the necessary connections to find work; at least in New Orleans, Paul could hold his head up as one of the biggest builders in town. Or maybe he found that he didn’t like living as white. After expending so much energy fighting against them, jumping to the other side of the color line wasn’t so simple or appealing. But I think the most likely explanation for his return is that he simply felt homesick. Out in California, Belhomme was just another lonely immigrant lost inside customs and a culture that were mysterious to everyone else.
My grandfather Nat was seven that summer, old enough to remember the transcontinental train travel, the daytrips to the Pacific Ocean, the relative freedom from racial discrimination, and his father’s somber moods. One day he would make a similar trip, leaving New Orleans in search of a better life for his children, when his son, my father, was just about the same age as Nat had been. The one difference would be that when Nat left his hometown, he would make a point of vowing never to return.