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~ 4 ~ Klieg Lights and Microphones Throughout the years, Louisiana State University has advocated a policy of segregation of the races. To my knowledge, no one at LSU has communistic leanings. —troy h. middleton, president, louisiana state university, 1958 O n February 1, 1960, four black college students sat down at the whites-only lunch counter of the Woolworth’s store on Elm Street in Greensboro, North Carolina. They refused to leave after they were denied service. This set off a wave of similar protests among black college students around the South. Louisiana had not yet been touched by protest . Blacks in New Orleans and Baton Rouge sat watchful and wary, waiting for a spark, waiting for a sign of change. There was a group of us who seemed more interested in these events than did the campus at large, and, for some reason, we became centered in a political science class taught by Professor Adolph Reed. Reed was one of those rare teachers who forced students to analyze and question their world. He challenged us and pushed us and in so doing took risks for us. He’d pace in front of the class, chain-smoking while he worked up a drenching sweat in the warm Louisiana weather and lectured incisively on the Cold War, Eisenhower , the Supreme Court, or the vast economic gap between the haves and the have-nots. His eyes captured everything beneath his dark, heavy brow, and when he suddenly stopped, turned, and leaned back on his heels to question you, there was no escaping him. Reed’s class drew some of the brightest minds on Southern’s campus, though not necessarily the students who made the best grades. Reed had a reputation as a heretic of sorts, and the students who signed up for his class were aware of this. They tended to be more political and perhaps off-center in their perception of things, and therefore open to Reed’s often scathing analy- 40 the education of a black radical sis of the world. Indeed, Reed’s commanding intelligence and incisive wit on all current topics and on black/white issues formed the focus of the class. “Why do black folks go around singing in their spirituals, ‘Take all the world and give me Jesus,’ as if that hasn’t happened yet? Look around you—he’s all you’ve got,” Reed would quip with jarring irreverence. Other Southern professors weren’t exactly talking that way. He was a gadfly, and he knew it. We eagerly absorbed his words. Though there was interplay between Reed and the class, most of us took his class not so much to discuss our views as to discover Reed’s. We were a mixed group from different areas of the country and with different personalities and beliefs. Most of us eventually would become involved in and committed to the protests that would rock Southern’s campus. Charles Peabody from East St. Louis, Illinois, was a well-informed and articulate if somewhat free-spirited man who walked tall beneath a thin-brimmed hat and ran a rap, or slick talk, a mile a minute. He, Walter, and I often went drinking together Saturday afternoons at the Triangle Lounge, a dark hole of a bar in Scotlandville. Mack Jones, from Minden, Louisiana, a reserved, intense married man, was also in the class, along with James Thomas, an actor from New York City with a carefree, “kiss-my-ass” attitude and long curly hair. Then there was Major Johns, a twenty-eight-year-old reverend whose conversation was a steady mixture of scripture and politics and who never hesitated to call on the ladies in the name of the Lord. My brother, Walter, was also in the class. He was going through a period when he began to rethink a career in sports and to look instead at careers addressing social, political, and legal issues. Although Reed’s class provided our most open forum for discussion of race-oriented topics, the classroom talk of protest seemed largely remote, like peripheral reverberations of struggles elsewhere. Even so, just a stone’s throw away on Capitol Hill, the Louisiana legislature in special session was passing a record thirty-five bills and four proposed constitutional amendments , spurred mainly by the impending integration of the Orleans Parish schools. I remember falling asleep in my dorm room at night as I listened to radio broadcasts of the legislative sessions, with fiery attacks on the “Fed’rl...

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