Without minimizing the achievements of the civil rights movement, a recognition of its limits seems a standard lament among participants and historians.1 Federal legislation abolished legalized discrimination and protected African Americans’ voting rights, but the failure to redistribute economic power left some of the most important causes of inequality untouched. Political leaders and the majority of white Americans refused to acknowledge that ending racism required more far-reaching reforms. The backlash against civil rights initiatives and conservative dominance over national politics after 1970 ensured that subtle but powerful forms of discrimination and injustice would persist into the next century.
No one doubts that the events of the 1960s altered conditions in the South in important ways. Not least among the significant and lasting changes effected by the civil rights movement was the restoration of black southerners’ ability to vote. African American voter registration in Louisiana increased dramatically after 1965, rising from rates as low as 2 percent of those eligible to more than 90 percent in some parishes. Statewide, the proportion of black voters who were registered doubled, rising from 31 percent in 1964 to 59 percent in 1967. By the end of the 1970s, close to 70 percent of black Louisianans were registered.2
African Americans’ new voting strength opened the possibility of electing more sympathetic parish officials to replace the racist white men who had traditionally dominated police juries, school boards, town councils, and police forces in rural Louisiana. A fact sheet prepared by SEDFRE in October 1967 noted that African Americans in Louisiana seemed poised to greatly increase their political representation, with black candidates contesting almost every available elected position in some parishes.3 The following year the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights counted thirty-seven black elected officials in Louisiana, including ten police jurors, four school board members, eight constables, one mayor, and one representative in the state legislature.4
Even after passage of the Voting Rights Act, however, white supremacists contested black political participation. Forced to accept the reality of mass voter registration by African Americans, opponents of the freedom struggle shifted their attention to minimizing the impact of black votes. In 1966 dubious electoral practices prevented African American candidates from winning office in several parishes. In Tallulah, during the Democratic primary elections in April, officials provided only one polling place in the precinct where Zelma Wyche was running for nomination as city alderman. Fourteen hundred voters had to wait in long lines, and weariness or other commitments caused many to leave without casting their votes. Harrison Brown won the nomination for school board member in his ward in the same primary, but he was defeated in the general election after parish officials solicited more than five hundred absentee ballots favoring his white opponent. In West Feliciana Parish, poll workers prevented several African Americans from voting in the Democratic primary by claiming that they were registered as members of other parties. One black woman who had registered as a Democrat several months earlier was stunned to discover that she was listed as a member of the segregationist States’ Rights Party. Other subterfuges employed by opponents of the freedom struggle included switching from ward-based to at-large elections, gerrymandering electoral districts, denying black people assistance at the polls, vote buying, and the old methods of threats and intimidation.5
White recalcitrance was gradually overcome through the persistence of local activists, Justice Department lawsuits, and Supreme Court decisions that gave federal authorities the power to ensure not only that African Americans could vote, but also that their votes would mean something.6 Redistricting plans and electoral laws that attempted to dilute black votes were challenged and struck down, opening the way for a significant increase in the number of black elected officials in Louisiana. In 1975 more than two hundred African Americans held political office in the state, and over the next decade that number doubled. By the 1990s twenty Louisiana towns had African American mayors, and black people filled more than six hundred other elected positions.7
With African Americans in office, Louisiana's rural communities became much safer places for black inhabitants. Local activists often made it a priority to elect black law enforcement officers to ensure an end to police brutality. With African Americans also filling positions as judges and serving on juries, Klan members and other perpetrators of violence could no longer rely on an all-white justice system to absolve them of their crimes, which helped to deter the attacks on black people that had been so common before the 1960s. Interviewed in 1984, Spiver Gordon stated: “I can see night and day difference in terms of the fear that was there. I can drive in West Feliciana and not worry about it, because I know there are black folk in office. . . . I can drive through these places and not be worried about whether somebody's gonna shoot me or whether or not I'm gonna get arrested or hauled off to jail for something.”8 Most activists counted the realization of black people's desire for political participation and protection from violence as the main achievements of the civil rights movement.
Changes in other areas proved more difficult. White officials countered the struggle for equal education with as much determination as they had fought black voting rights and with more success. Most school districts waited until lawsuits were filed against them before taking any action to end segregation and then adopted plans that ensured integration would be minimal. Under “freedom of choice” plans that placed most responsibility for integrating the schools on black parents and children, little progress was made in the civil rights era. Fear of reprisals and concerns about sending children into hostile environments discouraged many African American families from requesting transfers to white schools. In 1969 more than 90 percent of black children in Louisiana still attended all-black schools. When federal courts began pushing school boards to adopt more effective desegregation measures, such as zoning and busing, many white parents pulled their children out of the public schools rather than allow them to attend classes with African Americans. Private, all-white academies sprang up across the state, particularly in parishes that had black majorities. White people apparently feared predictions like that made in the St. Francisville Democrat by columnist Ben Garris, who claimed that schools could not withstand more than a 30 percent black enrollment without becoming “unstable” and experiencing a decline in the quality of education. In Concordia Parish, the Ku Klux Klan issued a similar warning, portraying school desegregation as a communist plot to take over the country by ensuring the undereducation of American children.9
While white parents worried about the effect that attending classes with African Americans might have on their children, black families found that integrated schools did not necessarily afford black children a better education than they had received previously. Racist white teachers treated African American students with contempt, ignoring them when they asked questions, refusing to give them the same amount of attention that white students received, and in some cases physically abusing them. Administrators maintained segregation within integrated schools by partitioning facilities such as bathrooms, lunch tables, and play areas. Violent conflicts often erupted between white and black students, for which African Americans received a disproportionate amount of blame and punishment. Suspensions and expulsions of black students skyrocketed, with more than one hundred thousand occurring in the 1971–72 school year alone.10
The following decades saw a steady deterioration in conditions in the public schools of many parishes. In 1998 Eunice Hall Harris prepared a list of the shortcomings of the high school in St. Helena Parish that eerily echoed reports on black education from a century earlier: buildings that leaked, classes that were canceled in cold weather because of lack of heat, toilets and faucets that did not work, a gymnasium with no hot water, and a filthy cafeteria frequented by farm animals that wandered in through broken doors.11 The parish's African American school superintendent seemed reluctant to do anything for fear of upsetting his white superiors. Most power in the parish still lay with the white families who had dominated the community in previous decades. Incumbent officials managed to fight off challenges from black candidates by bribing poor residents to vote for them and threatening to remove people from welfare rolls if they supported African Americans in elections. Although physical violence subsided after the 1960s, economic reprisals remained a powerful tool for maintaining white supremacy.12
In St. Helena Parish and elsewhere, persistent poverty hindered black people's efforts to translate their new voting strength into meaningful change. Political campaigns cost money, placing poor people at a disadvantage when it came to running candidates for office. Wealthy white people funded the campaigns of some black candidates, expecting them to maintain the status quo once they were elected.13 In many communities black activists watched in anger as middle-class African Americans who had remained aloof from the movement in the 1960s became the chief beneficiaries of civil rights legislation. Working-class and rural poor people who had led the struggle in the early days were “suddenly unqualified to run for public office,” reported Ronnie Moore in 1967, and were urged by college-educated professionals to leave such activities to them. Once hopeful that black votes could transform communities, civil rights lawyer Lolis Elie stated in 1988 that traditional electoral politics had done little to address the problem of poverty. “What I grossly misunderstood or overestimated was the nature of the black people who were going to seek political power,” he said. “The same people who did nothing at all to change things, when things were changed . . . those were the ones who emerged and got the goodies—as a result of other people's efforts.”14
Although some black politicians seemed more concerned with pleasing their white benefactors than bringing about changes to benefit black communities, many others were genuinely interested in solving social problems. But often their influence on local government was not enough to combat the power of more conservative politicians and businesspeople. In West Feliciana Parish, for example, African American representatives had to work with white officials who openly expressed their contempt for the idea of black people voting or holding office. When two black men who had been elected to the school board attended their first meeting, president Thomas Spillman demanded to see their commissions to office, claiming that he did not know who they were. West Feliciana was the only parish in the state by the late 1960s that still required its voters to reregister every few years. In December 1968 the six white police jurors voted down a suggestion by the three black jurors that the parish introduce a system of permanent registration. Responding to the suggestion that the necessity of periodically returning to the registrars’ office might discourage many African Americans, particularly the elderly, from participating politically, white juror A. A. Wilkinson stated, “I was sorry when they cut the poll tax. . . . If a man can't register, then he doesn't need to vote.”15
Even when black officials were in the majority, as eventually happened in Madison Parish, poverty remained an obstacle to progress. Rural communities often lacked the financial resources and tax base necessary to improve public services or initiate programs to provide employment for jobless people. With the resurgent conservatism of the 1970s and 1980s, federal support for antipoverty efforts declined. At the same time, continued displacement of agricultural workers from the plantations created an even greater need for jobs and housing in the rural parishes. Martin Williams recalled that in Tallulah, “The people on the plantations was moving into town, people didn't need them, getting modern equipment—these people didn't have any place to stay—some of the places you would see where they'd sleep at night, you would cry.” Williams helped to finance and build two housing projects for low-income people in the town, but the lack of employment opportunities remained a problem in Madison Parish and elsewhere.16
In some parishes, white politicians and business leaders seemed to actively discourage any kind of economic development that could provide jobs for black people. According to black activist Wilbert Guillory, oil refineries and other industries that could have been located in St. Landry Parish were instead built in Lafayette, because local employers expressed concern that the new enterprises would “spoil the people . . . people was gonna get a job, and they would no longer work for four or five dollars a day.” Of St. Helena Parish, Eual Hall observed: “There's no future here. White people are not going to let no industry come here, the affluent leaders, they're not gonna let no industry come into this parish unless they have the controlling interest.” African Americans who aspired to occupations other than farming or low-paid wage work had to leave the parish. According to Clifton Hall, “If you were an aggressive individual, being a black man, you could not stay here in Greensburg. So their motive was to get you out of here and that was their way of doing it: if there's nothing here, you don't stay here.”17
At the end of the twentieth century, poverty and inequality remained the dominant features of many rural parishes. In 1989, 46 percent of African Americans in Louisiana—more than half a million people—earned incomes below poverty level. Three decades after the civil rights movement, both former CORE workers and local people expressed disappointment in its outcomes and emphasized the limits that low incomes and poor education placed on efforts to eradicate discrimination and injustice. Rudy Lombard stated: “I think that there is a kind of slavery still exists, we call poverty. . . . If you're financially poor you're a slave pretty much and your life is circumscribed by people who control wealth, and government.” Eual Hall raised the question that has plagued rural black people since the end of Reconstruction: “When everything is kept from you, how do you fight?”18
Yet, as most of these activists also emphasized, the freedom struggle continues. They work and put their children through college, remain active in their churches and lodges, support nonprofit organizations and other projects that aim to enhance economic opportunities for African Americans, lobby for improvements in the quality of education provided by the state's public schools, and vote in every election. Local black people draw strength from the knowledge that their ancestors endured conditions that were far worse and from the tradition of stubborn persistence that has characterized the centuries-long fight for equality. “The white man wonder how we still smile and go ahead on,” says Clifton Hall. “Well, we grew up with it, and we've lived with it, so we know how to survive and still deal with it.”19