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 training 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
Black Americans’ aspirations for “social equality” and violent altercations like the incident in Texas were relatively minor concerns compared with a much larger problem that confronted southern plantation owners during the war. Touring Louisiana early in 1919 to assess the farm labor situation, one War Department official saw “hundreds of acres of untouched land formerly cultivated, and what land was planted proved to be in bad shape because of the lack of hands. . . . Scores of mules in pasture because there was no help to hitch them to the plow. . . . Tons and tons of cane soured on the ground, left from last year for lack of men.”23 The draft and migration created severe difficulties for planters, whose workers left rural areas by the thousands to take advantage of new economic opportunities. Between 1910 and 1920 Louisiana's black population dropped by 13,617. Although this was only about a 2 percent decrease for the state, the decline in the number of African Americans living in the sugar- and cotton-growing regions was much greater. Most of the plantation parishes lost between 15 and 30 percent of their black inhabitants during this period. (See Table 4.1.) Without their customary access to abundant and cheap labor, plantation owners faced the prospect of decreased production and declining profits.
An incident that occurred even before the beginning of the war in Europe foreshadowed some of the later responses of Louisiana landowners. In March 1914 a group of armed sugar planters from Assumption Parish appeared at the Texas and Pacific Railroad passenger depot and dispersed about sixty African Americans who were awaiting the arrival of a northbound train. Witnesses reported that the white men were “among the most prominent and influential citizens of the lower Assumption neighborhood,” and that their action was designed to “put a stop to the work of the labor agents who have been enticing large numbers of negro fields hands away from this section during the last several weeks.” A newspaper article about the incident explained that initially the agents had not been a problem because there had been a large surplus of workers in the parish, but that “this surplus has long since been exhausted, and if the supply of labor is still further depleted the planters will face a serious situation in the cultivation of their crops.”24
The following month the Houma Courier reported that a “new messiah” had recently appeared in Terrebonne Parish to lure black sugar workers away to the cotton parishes of northern Louisiana with promises of higher wages. The writer noted that the loss of labor from the parish was a serious problem and urged planters to take action to stop it. The article pointed out, “Other parishes warn these messiahs to keep out, and they find it healthier to heed the warning.” In December, Madison Parish plantation owners held a meeting to discuss the problems they too were experiencing with people who were attempting to “entice away” their labor. The result was a notice to labor agents, printed in the Madison Journal, that stated: “The planters of Madison Parish . . . will not tolerate any one in the parish enticing or in any way interfering with our labor. All white or colored strangers will be called upon to explain their business in Madison Parish and if they are not Labor Agents they will be welcome.”25
After 1916, when the problems caused by migration reached acute proportions, labor agents faced more serious obstacles to their recruiting efforts. Local and state authorities passed legislation to restrict their activities, imposing expensive licensing fees and taxes along with hefty fines for violating the regulations governing their work. Those who still managed to continue their recruiting efforts risked physical violence when they ventured into rural towns and parishes. Plantation owners became so suspicious of outsiders that any strange face they encountered in their communities might be subject to attack. For instance, when Hizzie Pringle went to pay his sister's debt to her landlord, Benjamin Kinchen, the planter assaulted him with no provocation. According to an investigator, Kinchen justified his action “on the grounds that he thought Pringle was a labor agent.”26
At the same time that they attempted to halt the flow of migrants to the North, white Louisianans sought to force all black people who remained in the state into “useful” employment, a term that often seemed to describe only those low-wage occupations that African Americans had traditionally held. Wartime necessity and the federal government's efforts to direct all the nation's resources into achieving victory offered employers and legislators a powerful tool for this purpose. In May 1918 Selective Service director Enoch Crowder issued a “work or fight” order mandating that all able-bodied men in the United States either serve in the armed forces or be engaged in a necessary civilian occupation. Local authorities eagerly enforced the order. The Louisiana state legislature applied the ruling to all men between the ages of seventeen and fifty-five (compared with the Selective Service age limit of forty-five) and empowered sheriffs to seek out and punish those not in compliance. Some parishes passed resolutions requiring
Table 4.1 African American Migration in Louisiana during World War I | |||
| Number of African Americans in Parish | |||
| Parish | 1910 | 1920 | Percentage Change |
| Cotton Parishes | |||
| Avoyelles | 12,039 | 10,353 | –14 |
| Bossier | 16,735 | 15,730 | –6 |
| Catahoula | 5,195 | 5,122 | –1 |
| Claiborne | 14,938 | 14,798 | –1 |
| Concordia | 11,941 | 9,823 | –18 |
| De Soto | 17,932 | 17,914 | –(-)a |
| East Carroll | 10,390 | 9,701 | –7 |
| East Feliciana | 14,536 | 12,004 | –17 |
| Franklin | 5,264 | 10,720 | +104 |
| Madison | 9,455 | 9,060 | –4 |
| Morehouse | 13,971 | 13,140 | –6 |
| Natchitoches | 20,334 | 20,697 | +2 |
| Red River | 6,212 | 7,589 | +22 |
| Richland | 10,463 | 11,996 | +15 |
| St. Landryb | 31,234 | 26,507 | –15 |
| Tensas | 15,613 | 10,314 | –34 |
| Webster | 9,900 | 11,387 | +15 |
| West Carroll | 2,724 | 2,370 | –13 |
| West Feliciana | 11,012 | 10,187 | –7 |
| Sugar Parishes | |||
| Ascension | 11,255 | 9,490 | –16 |
| Assumption | 10,105 | 7,487 | –26 |
| Iberia | 14,474 | 10,898 | –25 |
| Iberville | 19,145 | 15,372 | –20 |
| Lafayette | 10,734 | 10,811 | +1 |
| Lafourche | 7,973 | 5,888 | –26 |
| Plaquemines | 6,847 | 5,393 | –21 |
| Pointe Coupee | 17,147 | 14,981 | –13 |
| St. Charles | 6,720 | 4,347 | –35 |
| St. James | 13,164 | 11,602 | –12 |
| St. John the Baptist | 8,126 | 6,415 | –21 |
| St. Martin | 9,836 | 7,902 | –19 |
| St. Mary | 21,266 | 15,174 | –29 |
| Terrebonne | 11,194 | 8,742 | –22 |
| West Baton Rouge | 9,223 | 7,485 | –19 |
| Rice/Grain Parishes | |||
| Acadia | 6,546 | 7,526 | +15 |
| Allen | NAc | 6,352 | NA |
| Beauregard | NA | 6,105 | NA |
| Cameron | 538 | 585 | +9 |
| Jefferson Davis | NA | 4,837 | NA |
| Vermilion | 4,500 | 4,560 | +1 |
| Subsistence/Truck Parishes | |||
| Bienville | 9,464 | 8,619 | –9 |
| Caldwell | 3,465 | 2,983 | –14 |
| Evangeline | NA | 5,681 | NA |
| Grant | 4,869 | 4,045 | –17 |
| Jackson | 3,996 | 4,006 | +(-) |
| Jefferson | 6,785 | 5,880 | –13 |
| La Salle | 1,953 | 1,525 | –22 |
| Lincoln | 7,289 | 6,310 | –13 |
| Livingston | 1,377 | 1,667 | +21 |
| Sabine | 4,164 | 4,364 | +5 |
| St. Bernard | 1,933 | 1,597 | –17 |
| St. Helena | 4,573 | 4,229 | –8 |
| St. Tammany | 6,731 | 7,648 | +14 |
| Tangipahoa | 9,135 | 8,892 | –3 |
| Union | 7,448 | 6,114 | –18 |
| Vernon | 3,716 | 5,103 | +37 |
| Washington | 5,458 | 7,391 | +35 |
| Winn | 3,931 | 3,385 | –14 |
| Parishes with Cities of 10,000 People or More | |||
| Caddo | 36,142 | 37,801 | +5 |
| Calcasieub | 16,562 | 8,736 | –47 |
| East Baton Rouge | 21,342 | 23,098 | +8 |
| Orleans | 89,262 | 100,930 | +13 |
| Ouachita | 14,153 | 13,897 | –2 |
| Rapides | 21,445 | 24,992 | +17 |
| Total for Louisiana | 713,874 | 700,257 | –2 |
SOURCE: Bureau of the Census, Thirteenth Census of the United States Taken in the Year 1910, Volume 2: Population (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1913), 790– 91, and Fourteenth Census of the United States Taken in the Year 1920, Volume 3: Population (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1922), 393–99. a(-) indicates less than 0.5 percent. | |||
bThe decreases in African American population in St. Landry and Calcasieu Parishes between 1910 and 1920 resulted in part from boundary changes. cNA indicates data not available (parishes created after 1910). | |||
women as well as men to work; others tightened the enforcement of vagrancy laws to ensure that no “slackers” escaped performing their patriotic duty.27
Often these efforts seemed directed particularly at African Americans. Perhaps (but probably not) by coincidence, a list of nonessential occupations prepared by the Louisiana State Council of Defense in September 1918 ruled out many jobs traditionally held by self-employed black people. Those who worked in barber shops, poolrooms, gambling establishments, shoe shine stands, fruit stands, and as porters were not recognized as contributing anything to the war effort and faced the threat of arrest unless they found some other employment. Rumors circulated among African Americans that the new work or fight laws would allow people to be forced to labor under conditions resembling peonage. The chairman of the federal government's War Labor Policy Board dismissed these concerns, saying that the orders simply reflected “the national spirit and the national will,—that everyone should contribute to the service for freedom upon which the nation is engaged either in useful industry or in useful military service.”28
Whatever the intentions of lawmakers, black people's fears were well founded. When the NAACP's Walter White visited several southern states in 1918 to investigate complaints of abuse, he found that employers were indeed using compulsory work laws to force African Americans to labor for low wages. In St. Mary Parish, the sheriff walked into a black restaurant one morning and told its owner that two young men he employed must go and work at a nearby mill. When the restaurateur protested and pointed out that the youths were younger than drafting age, the sheriff swore at him, then told him to close his business down because he too would have to work at the mill or go to jail. Black people in Caddo, Rapides, and Ouachita Parishes told White of similar incidents. Civil rights leaders reported these abuses to federal agencies, but the authorities did nothing to prevent such practices. Director of Negro Economics George E. Haynes explained that the federal government had no power to interfere with local or state laws, regardless of how unjust they might be.29
Coercive labor legislation seems only to have encouraged more African Americans to leave the South, as did the increasing levels of violence that accompanied frustrated planters’ efforts to prevent black people from going. Attempts to enlist the aid of prominent African Americans in encouraging workers to remain in the region were not successful either. A government researcher sent to investigate the causes of migration from Mississippi and Louisiana in 1917 found that black community leaders in those states did little to stop the exodus, for they knew that the resulting labor shortages could be used to force concessions from white people and improve conditions for those who remained behind. According to his account, African Americans were “silently hoping that the migration may continue in such increasing proportions as to bring about a successful bloodless revolution, assuring equal treatment in business, in the schools, on the trains, and under the law.”30 A letter written by New Orleans NAACP secretary H. George Davenport to the national office in May 1917 suggests that the investigator was right. Davenport planned to move to Chicago in June and stay there permanently. “[I] am tired of the South,” he wrote, “protest has failed here so far, the exodus will solve the problem quicker than protest I am sure, because the crackers here are all worked up over it, the planters held a meeting here to try and discourage migration north.”31
Having failed to coerce black people into staying in the South, white people eventually realized that a more effective strategy might be to make the region a better place to live in. Heeding the advice that many black and some white observers had long been giving them, planters and local authorities began advocating higher wage rates, better treatment of tenants and sharecroppers, improvement of housing and schools, and efforts to protect black people from mob violence.32 In a speech delivered at an NAACP conference in 1919, Louisiana's state agent of rural schools explained that plantation owners and other employers of black labor usually showed scant interest in providing education for African Americans, but “the World War helped to broaden our vision. The Negro migration opened our eyes. Many of our large employers are ready now to provide school facilities for the colored youth.” He then outlined the improvements that many parishes were making in the quality of instruction provided to black children. St. Mary Parish had recently set aside six thousand dollars for African American schools, and Terrebonne Parish, “which never owned one dollar's worth of colored school property,” was completing one of nine schoolhouses that would eventually cost twenty thousand dollars. Natchitoches, Tangipahoa, Caddo, Bienville, Lincoln, Morehouse, Bossier, East Caroll, Beauregard, and Winn Parishes all had similar building plans.33
One of the most effective measures taken to stem the migration, and one that benefited many rural black people, was the expansion of the federal government's Agricultural Extension Service. The Extension Service had its origins in government efforts to combat the boll weevil in the late 1890s. Agents from the U.S. Department of Agriculture visited farmers to educate them about the disease and to teach them methods of controlling it. By the early twentieth century, Extension Service functions had broadened to include training in a variety of techniques to produce better crop yields and higher incomes for farmers. However, its efforts mostly aided prosperous landowners who could afford to take advantage of new technologies and ignored poorer people—especially African Americans—at the bottom of the agricultural ladder.34
In 1906 black educator Booker T. Washington initiated the first agricultural extension project among African Americans through the “Movable School,” a program that sent teachers from Tuskegee Institute into rural Alabama to demonstrate new farming equipment and techniques. Washington's attempts to persuade the Department of Agriculture to establish a more wide-ranging program of black extension work met with only limited success until the beginning of World War I and the Great Migration. Fears that food shortages might result from the scarcity of labor and the need to supply European allies with agricultural products encouraged the Extension Service to pay more attention to black farmers. Administrators instructed white agents to assist African Americans in their districts and hired more black agents in the hope that they might persuade tenants and sharecroppers to remain on the plantations. Black extension agents thereafter became a permanent, though underfunded, part of the federal Extension Service.35
Extension work among African Americans in Louisiana began in 1913, when Tuskegee Institute graduate Thomas J. Jordan was assigned to two northern parishes. He operated in his first year without a salary, surviving on funds raised for him at church meetings and gifts of farm produce from the black people he worked with. In 1914 the Smith-Lever Act provided for the cooperative funding of extension agents through federal, state, and local authorities, and over the next four years sixteen more black extension agents were employed in Louisiana. The scope of their activities depended to a large extent on money provided by parish police juries and school boards, whose motivations were conservative. A report on the work of black agents written in 1920 emphasized the role they had played in decelerating the migration of African Americans out of the region. A white agent who worked with African Americans in a parish not served by any black agent revealed where planter priorities lay when he proudly noted, “I have practically accomplished to keep cheap labor here for all.” As soon as the war ended, six of the state's seventeen black agents were dropped because of “lack of funds.”36
Black extension workers’ dependence on local elites’ willingness to finance their services and close supervision of their activities by white agents meant that they were unlikely to become outspoken proponents of racial justice. An agent in Caddo Parish lost his position because, according to a report, he “failed to distinguish between his duties as an agent and his rights as a citizen.”37 Most others avoided doing anything that could be construed as interfering with “race relations” or encouraging political activism. In many ways extension agents fulfilled a similar role to the middle-class black reformers discussed in recent studies by Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham and Kevin Gaines.38 Their work helped to reinforce white supremacy by serving the interests of plantation owners, but agents also challenged dominant racial ideologies by attempting to “uplift” African Americans, individually and collectively. Despite the limits placed on them, extension agents’ efforts to improve the lives of black agricultural workers and the enthusiasm they brought to this task achieved some significant gains.
A measure of the extension agents’ contribution is that rural black people welcomed and appreciated their aid. Parish reports regularly praised the efforts of African American farmers and the dedication they showed in carrying out the new techniques they learned. In 1919 a white agent in Pointe Coupee Parish stated that he had “found many negro farmers very much alert and ambitious to learn more about better methods of farming.” Another agent reported that he had “many Negro friends of Demonstration work. They would utilize all my time if I would permit it.” T. J. Watson found black farmers in Madison Parish to be “responsive and apparently anxious for advice on better methods of farming, stock raising, poultry, gardening, orchard and general improvement of the home and its surroundings.” Some agents even concluded that African Americans were more interested in extension work than white farmers. According to the state administrative report for 1922, it was “a fact well recognized by County Agents and Specialists that the negro farmer responds to suggestions much more readily than does the white farmer.”39
Black participants in the programs viewed extension agents as potential allies in their struggle for economic independence. Harrison Brown recalled that agents offered sharecropping families valuable training in how to make their small plots of land more productive, saying, “That's what we mostly suffered for in every area—training, you know.”40 When the use of fertilizer or new seed varieties resulted in a better crop, tenants as well as plantation owners stood to benefit. Perhaps more importantly, extension agents encouraged “live at home” programs designed to free farmworkers from their dependence on planters and merchants for food that they could produce themselves. As a boy, Thomas Jordan had known many families who ended every crop year in debt to their landlords; he had heard his father say that these people would have been able to do better if they had not owed so much to the plantation commissary for food. Much of his and other extension agents’ work in Louisiana focused on increasing African Americans’ self-sufficiency.41
Following the advice of agents, some black farm families prospered as they never had before. In 1915 S. W. Vance reported that sharecroppers on a plantation where he conducted one demonstration “made a good crop and owed very little the 1st year and only one came out behind. The second year . . . every negro has paid out of debt and has a lot of corn.” Two years later Vance stated that four of the African American families he had worked with in the past few years had recently bought land of their own, five had saved enough money to make the first payments on their farms, and “every cooperator was able to pay his account and have money left and they are buying good mule buggies and household furnitu[r]e and in fact have improved their condition wonderfully.”42
Greater demand for agricultural products and high prices made the war years prosperous times for most American farmers, and this more than the activities of extension agents might have contributed to the increased prosperity of tenant families.43 But even during the postwar recession of the 1920s, farmers who had access to extension services generally did better than those who did not, suggesting that the agents did have an impact. Like many others who faced losing their land after a sudden drop in farm prices, black farmer Mose Matthews of West Feliciana Parish was heavily in debt and about to give up when agent J. E. Ringgold first met him in 1921. After four years of farming under Ringgold's direction, Matthews was debt-free and his crops were thriving. Ringgold stated in his 1925 report that he “could mention a score of men that have been able to finish paying for their homes and who are living happy by becoming demonstrators and following the advice and instructions as laid down in Farm Demonstration work.”44 Black farm ownership in West Feliciana almost doubled between 1925 and 1930, and increases occurred in other parishes as well.45 In 1931 the state agent for Louisiana noted that, at a time when farm ownership in general was on the decline and tenancy increasing, all of the nine parishes that had African American extension agents gained in farm ownership during the year.46
The impact of the Extension Service went beyond the individual farmers who cooperated on projects. Agents were required to formulate ways to maximize the number of people who could be reached with the department's limited staff. One of the questions that had to be answered in their annual reports was, “Have you so thoroughly organized your county that you have someone in every community or school district assisting you in extension work and through whom you can reach EVERY farm family in your county?” Churches and other meeting places provided convenient forums for this purpose, with agents enlisting the aid of ministers and schoolteachers to disseminate information to large numbers of people at a time.47 The role of those chosen as demonstrators was not only to improve their own farming methods, but also to teach others what they knew. Black agent Myrtis Magee explained: “Information and help is given this group and they pass it along to their cooperators and others interested. . . . Economic and Civic conditions have been greatly improved through the tireless efforts of leaders and other agencies cooperating.”48
Extension agents often sponsored projects designed to enhance the lives of all black people in their parishes. In 1918 O. G. Price reported that he arrived in St. Helena Parish to find African Americans eager to do demonstration work but hampered by their lack of education and suitable farm equipment. “I visited the negro schools of this parish with the Superintendent of Education and saw the teachers teaching two months terms at twenty dollars per month in church houses, old boxed houses, and in log cribs,” he wrote. “I decided the first thing the negroes needed was better schools.” After years of fund-raising by the local black people and lobbying for donations from white philanthropists, construction of a new industrial high school in the parish began in December 1921. J. E. Ringgold in West Feliciana Parish also assisted in raising money “to build schools, extend school terms and help the community generally.” In a tribute to black extension agent Myrtis Magee on his death in 1940, the Louisiana Weekly asserted, “Everywhere he was known as a hard cooperative worker and a real friend of the poor. He has built in Louisiana a monument, which will represent service, and which can be looked upon by generations to come.”49
In some ways extension agents were the first “outside agitators” to arrive in rural Louisiana. They did not encourage people to try to vote, or challenge segregated facilities, or organize mass marches against discrimination, or engage in any of the other activities associated with the civil rights movement. They operated at another level of the freedom struggle, working to reduce poverty and subtly undermining plantation owners’ attempts to keep African Americans uneducated and immobile. Many black Louisianans took full advantage of the knowledge and resources extension agents brought to the region, recognizing them as valuable weapons in the fight against inequality and exploitation.
The reactions of white landowners and officials to extension work among black people suggest that they too perceived the potential threat to the social order posed by the agents. Some people openly opposed the service, arguing that it encouraged African Americans to aspire to property ownership or professional careers instead of being content to work for white employers. Black agents were unable to assist many tenants and sharecroppers whose landlords refused to allow them to participate in demonstration programs. During debates over passage of the Smith-Lever Act, southern congressmen defeated amendments designed to ensure an equitable distribution of federal funds between the white and black agricultural colleges that administered extension work in each state. The money was instead channeled through the white colleges, ensuring separate and unequal services to black farmers.50 Planter-dominated local governments provided little funding for black agents, forcing them to perform their duties with minimal budgets and few resources. In 1930 Louisiana's state director of extension work noted the difficulties that afflicted African American agents, saying: “We have never been able to get any local support in the negro work. On this account, we have necessarily had to keep the salaries of the negro agents on a low basis and they scarcely have enough to get by with.”51
At the same time, extension work among white farmers resulted in the formation of a powerful new organization to advance the interests of wealthy landowners. Created in 1920, the American Farm Bureau Federation (AFBF) grew out of county farmers’ bureaus that extension agents had established to facilitate their educational efforts. The AFBF and the Extension Service developed close cooperative relationships, often working together to formulate policy and lobby for legislation to benefit the nation's farmers. In many communities, the AFBF paid part or all of the county agent's salary. Planters dominated the AFBF in the South, and through their influence over extension agents they exerted a considerable amount of control over who received assistance and the types of programs that were available. Farmers who did not belong to the AFBF often complained of being neglected by their county agents. Despite efforts by the Department of Agriculture to ensure that extension services were available to all farm families, in the decades after World War I most poor white and black people were once again excluded from participation.52
Wary of the subtle challenge to the racial order presented by black extension agents, white supremacists were even less tolerant of more open civil rights activity. Instead of extending democratic rights to African Americans as leaders like Du Bois had hoped, at the end of the war they quickly acted to negate the gains black people had made and force them back into their customary roles. African Americans suffered disproportionately from the postwar economic recession, many of them losing their jobs to returning white servicemen. Federal offices that had been created and staffed with black appointees in an attempt to reassure African Americans that the government was concerned about their problems were abolished soon after the fighting ended. Worst of all was the increasing friction between white and black Americans that often exploded into violence. In the summer of 1919 race riots occurred in twenty-six cities across the nation, resulting in dozens of deaths and injuries. Black analyst Emmett J. Scott observed, “Instead of a tendency to extend the right of franchise there has been something like a recrudescence . . . of the Ku Klux Klan so as to intimidate the Negroes of the South that they may not seek to reach this end.”53
Disturbed by these developments, the NAACP sent Herbert Seligmann to southern troublespots to investigate the sources of racial tension. Seligmann discovered that white southerners deeply resented the defection of their black workers during the war and believed that military service had encouraged African Americans to think of themselves as equals. One Louisiana politician told him that black people should never be allowed to vote or acquire education and argued that lynching and other forms of violence were necessary to maintain white supremacy.54
Nine African Americans were lynched in Louisiana in 1918, and three more were killed by mobs in the first six weeks of the following year. Many of the victims were former soldiers like Lucius McCarty, who was executed in Bogalusa by a crowd of over one thousand people after a white woman accused him of attacking her. Black novelist Ernest Gaines, a native of Pointe Coupee Parish, later depicted in fictional form a shocking yet common experience that African American servicemen encountered after the war. In A Gathering of Old Men (1983), one character recalls his return home to Louisiana after serving on the front lines in France and earning decorations for his bravery. “I was proud as I could be,” he says, “till I got back home. The first white man I met, the very first one . . . told me I better not ever wear that uniform or that medal again no matter how long I lived. He told me I was back home now, and they didn't cotton to no nigger wearing medals for killing white folks.”55
Such behavior toward those who had risked their lives for the nation and for world democracy was depressing enough. Even more frustrating was the federal government's failure to do anything to stop the wave of violence that threatened black Americans’ lives and property. In a letter informing President Woodrow Wilson of a series of atrocities that occurred in More-house Parish in 1919, one black Louisianan wrote: “Mr Officer of USA we feel you all aut to help us in some way as you all got the power & as we Have put up our Lives for this U.S.A. We have ben in France on Front lines we have Lost our sons on acct of USA . . . & still we treated like we wasnt men.” In 1921 an anonymous letter from Shreveport referred to a lynching that had recently occurred there and asked that U.S. soldiers be sent to the region to prevent more violence against black people. “We needs help here in La,” the author stated, “Because this is a Slave Country Down here.”56
No troops materialized, and the post–World War I period turned out to be one of violent repression aimed not only at African Americans, but also against all potential threats to the social order. Extreme anticommunism in the wake of the Russian Revolution led to the systematic destruction of progressive social movements by business leaders, vigilante groups, and the federal government. Civil rights activists, immigrants, socialists, feminists, and labor unionists all came to be seen as dangerous radicals and enemies of the state. During the postwar “Red Scare” and continuing through the 1920s, many Americans were harassed, jailed, beaten, or killed for their political beliefs.57
In this climate, the owners of the Great Southern Lumber Company responded to union organizing efforts by white and black workers in Bogalusa with intimidation, evictions, and murder. Early in 1919 two unions affiliated with the American Federation of Labor (AFL) began a campaign to organize lumber workers in eastern Louisiana and southern Mississippi. The United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners focused on white skilled workers, while the International Union of Timber Workers attempted to encourage unskilled laborers, mostly African Americans, to join the effort. Organizers found both white and black workers in Bogalusa receptive to the call, especially after company managers diminished their incomes by raising house rents. Great Southern's owners attempted to obstruct unionizing by offering bribes to leaders and threatening members. Bogalusa's Self-Preservation and Loyalty League, an organization of white business owners formed during the war to enforce the state's work-or-fight legislation, then began terrorizing workers to force them to withdraw from the union. Mob violence wreaked havoc in the town on the night of 21 November 1919, and the following day members of the Loyalty League shot and killed four white union men who obstructed their attempt to arrest black organizer Sol Dacus. Dacus fled the area, state and federal authorities refused to investigate the incident, and the union campaign disintegrated.58
Similarly, economic depression, the revival of the Ku Klux Klan, and intimidation by local officials exacted a devastating toll on black southerners’ fledgling civil rights organizations. More than half of the NAACP's 342 branches were “completely delinquent” in July 1920, having reported no new members or renewals and made no contributions to the national office in the past seven months. Nationwide, membership in the organization dropped from a wartime high of around 91,000 to a mere 23,500 in 1928.59
The seven NAACP branches that black Louisianans managed to form between 1914 and 1925 struggled to survive, but their activities were hindered by poverty and the threat of reprisals against members. The Baton Rouge branch's charter was revoked after three years of inactivity, and civil rights work in most other areas outside New Orleans also faded. In 1923 H. C. Hudson of Shreveport reported to the national office: “The N.A.A.C.P. is deeply hated in this section. . . . As to the conditions elsewhere I cannot state with any degree of certainty, but you can rest assure that any man that is actively engaged in this work is liabl[e] to the same treatment. . . . That accounts for the large number of good towns with no branches in them.” Both the Shreveport and Alexandria branches lapsed and then revived several times over the next ten years, reflecting cycles of organized protest followed by repression.60
Postwar reaction crushed any hope that the ideological implications of World War I and black Americans’ participation in it would force the nation to abolish racial discrimination. The freedom struggle in rural Louisiana was once again pushed underground, awaiting the next opportunity to emerge from its subterranean existence. In 1929 the beginning of the Great Depression set in motion the events that made possible a resurgence of open political activism.