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six we฀are฀but฀americans Miss Georgia M. Johnson When you are militant you are simply placing a rope around your own neck. I n stark contrast to Mrs. D. J. Dupuy of Baton Rouge, Miss Georgia M. Johnson of Alexandria, Louisiana, helps to portray the expected role of NAACP women not because of her conformity to social and gender expectations but by many of the organizational taboos she breached. Johnson was a forceful individual in a racially conservative city in the Deep South who was extremely active in the early civil rights movement. She was highly conscious of the dual nature of discrimination , in particular of sexism and racism, within the community where she worked and among the white society she encountered during the first half of the 1940s. The record of Johnson’s leadership reveals the interpersonal dynamics of a local NAACP branch and the conflicts and frustrations, as well as the occasional successes, of an individual female activist within a bureaucratic and male-led organization.1 Georgia Johnson was one of the few people in Louisiana during the 1940s to articulate an extensive and coherent ideological stance for her involvement in civil rights protest, through a blend of religious belief, political activism, and class-consciousness. Her prolific and lengthy correspondence with the New Orleans NAACP branch and the national office in New York shows the motivation and passions of an individual who found it restrictive to work within an organization that did not accept women other than in a traditional and subordinate role. Women could safely be secretaries and chairpersons of committees on entertainment or fundraising, as long as they were collectivist organizers in the background rather than individual leaders in the public gaze. Johnson, however, was the only woman to chair a legal redress and legislation committee in an NAACP branch. This position, like president and treasurer, was a male preserve in Louisiana and other states, such as Alabama. The branch constitution stated broadly that the com- mittee existed to “examine local ordinances for possibilities of discrimination , work for better equal enforcement of the laws . . . and work for the repeal of discriminatory laws.” Its more significant and prominent role, however, was the investigation of “all cases reported to it for legal redress . . . and [the observation of] all litigation in which the Branch is interested.” Such a high-profile position was to lead to intense personal politicking within the Alexandria branch between the militant Johnson and the city’s gradualist male leadership, as well as direct threats from the white establishment to suppress her investigations into racism in the city.2 Alexandria in Rapides Parish, central Louisiana, had short-lived and struggling NAACP branches in 1921, 1927, and 1930, usually inspired by single issues that directly affected the city’s black community. During 1921 the city’s black elite organized a branch under the leadership of Rev. H. R. Norris in response to a constitutional convention being held in the state in which the franchise question was of prime interest, including the issue of female enfranchisement. The branch was reorganized in 1927 in response to the Mississippi floods and focused on welfare issues that affected African Americans in the disaster. At a national level the NAACP campaigned against labor peonage in levee camps in Mississippi and Louisiana and publicized discrimination in federal aid to blacks who had been displaced from their homes and workplaces. The chapter chartered in April 1930 proclaimed that it was “proud of the fact” that it had recruited 102 members in the depths of the economic depression, although it too was soon disbanded.3 The Alexandria branch did not establish itself again until May 1941, when it was inspired by the statewide NAACP campaign to equalize teacher salaries and to undertake vigorous voter registration drives. The economy was rapidly changing due to the war. There were five military bases within a five-mile radius of Alexandria, which acted as the center for all basic training of the U.S. armed forces, and the urban growth was to prove spectacular. Before 1941 the total population of the town stood at 26,000, of which 11,000 were black. By the latter part of that year the population had grown to 67,000, with 26,000 blacks. This included soldiers as well as civilians employed in the wartime industries. While the population explosion heightened racial tensions, the exaggerated military composition of Alexandria reflected general wartime stresses across the United...

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