Black Philosopher, White Academy: The Career of William Fontaine

Chapter Three: Ambition Constrained

  Ambition Constrained Louisiana Southern Louisiana had a French (Cajun) and Spanish heritage reflected in mixed European and African American (Creole) cultures. These cultures were centered in New Orleans, a large and thriving metropolis with a permissive flavor. Black Catholics abounded. The one Roman Catholic black college, Xavier, was located in the city. Up and down the Mississippi, on which New Orleans sat, oil refineries made Louisiana a wealthy southern state. It also had more people living in cities, although the exotic New Orleans did not represent more conventional southern towns such as Baton Rouge, Shreveport , and Alexandria. Northern Louisiana and the eastern counties, the so-called Florida parishes , typified the South more. Commentators described them as being like Alabama and Mississippi. The ‘‘black belts’’ in Louisiana, also along the rivers , held most of the African Americans, although by  they had fallen from  percent to  percent of the population. Outside of New Orleans, the blacks had little money. Uneducated small farmers, they had begun to move off the farms and into Louisiana’s cities, or to the North.1 The rise of the famous or infamous Huey Long, one of the most compelling and eccentric southern politicians of the early twentieth century, complicated the social geography of the state. As governor and then senator, Long dominated politics in the late s and early s, and ‘‘Longism’’ defined public life in Louisiana even after Huey’s murder in Baton Rouge in , about a year before Fontaine arrived. Huey’s brother Earl briefly governed    the state in  and , and then another Democratic faction wrested power from him until the late s, when Earl again took control. The Longs harnessed the support of poor ‘‘red-neck’’ whites, often underrepresented in voting, and constructed a machine that roughly catered to their needs but in a brutal and despotic fashion. According to one expert, Longism ‘‘built upon Louisiana’s well-established traditions of political thuggery, flagrant disregard for civil liberties, and racial oppression.’’ Nonetheless, Longism had its own idiosyncrasies, and it tilted toward the masses. Neither Huey nor Earl looked antiblack in the overall context of southern politics. Quite the contrary. The brothers inspired Louisiana’s African Americans to think about what a movement based in the lower class might accomplish.2 Before the Longs, black striving for political rights had been limited to the tiny black educated class, which was genteel and conservative. What might happen if blacks mobilized the thousands of disadvantaged, rural, and illiterate African Americans? Faced with such a threat, the Longs accommodated blacks in their organization and garnered what black vote there was. Shortly before his murder Huey told a young NAACP official, Roy Wilkins, that he, Huey, was working ‘‘quietly for the niggers.’’ Under Earl the percentage of black voters in the state increased as the southern prohibition on the African American franchise slowly eroded. But even Earl’s racial attitudes make one’s skin crawl. Campaigning before black audiences, he would regularly hold up a smoked ham and say, ‘‘I want the biggest, blackest, ugliest nigger in the crowd to come up here and get this ham.’’ In the governor’s mansion he would entertain white guests by having the black servants dance jigs or do routines imitating Stepin Fetchit, an actor widely known for his stereotypical portrayal of a lazy, shiftless black character.3 From this mix of forces came the culture of ‘‘The Big Easy’’ in New Orleans and the nastiest sorts of racism and a proclivity for lynching elsewhere in the state. Louisiana after all gave America the Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court decision of  that upheld the state’s railroad segregation law and the doctrine that permitted segregation under ‘‘separate but equal’’ public facilities. Between  and , with  lynchings, Louisiana came in second to Mississippi in proportion of killings to population. The Ku Klux Klan often relied on lynchings to maintain its version of white supremacy, and the gruesome rituals kept blacks in line. The South pursued a frightening form of social control and gave a sport to mobs. Vivid fears of interracial sex between black men and inviolate white women often motivated lynching. By convention only rape could explain such sex, and so offending blacks de- Ambition Constrained  served the supreme punishment. Lynching occurred mainly in the northern black parishes. Incidents declined in the s but went up in the early s, just before Fontaine arrived, probably due to the economic stress of...