The Segregation Struggle in Louisiana, 1862-77 (review)

88CIVIL WAR HISTORY The Carpenter biography is attractively printed. Moreover, it contains illustrations and a first-rate index. We can hope that additional publications of this type will come from the revived press of the State Historical Society of Iowa. H. Roger Grant The University of Akron The Segregation Struggle in Louisiana, 1862-77. By Roger A. Fischer. (Urbana, Chicago, and London: University of Illinois Press, 1974. Pp. xiv, 168. $6.95.) This is a thorough study and a model monograph. It is informative, imaginative, and exceptionally well written; and it illustrates the needs and opportunities that exist respecting familiar topics that have escaped definitive study. Fischer focuses upon the dispute over racial segregation in public schools and public accommodations. He not only establishes the crucial importance of those issues, but he also reveals the central role of blacks in pushing the desegregation fight. His emphasis upon a traditional and persistent white demand for segregation also agrees with Joel Williamson in challenging the central thesis of C. Vann Woodward's Strange Career of Jim Crow. The author acknowledges that, compared to slavery, segregation did play a weak secondary role in the antebellum maintenance of black subordination. But he also clearly shows how under certain circumstances a strong white demand for segregation arose, which during the fifty years preceding the Civil War established a pattern of enforced separation in jails, inns, street cars, clubs, education, hospitals, and other institutions and relationships. Segregation also quickly emerged as a crucial element in the general controversy respecting blacks following the federal occupation of New Orleans during the Civil War. The Union command catered to segregation demands, and white supremacists committed to segregationist principles won decisive triumphs in the state elections of 1864 and 1865. A few radical whites resisted that racist trend, but a major resistance emerged from the gens de couleur of New Orleans. These remarkable blacks, who had been free before the war, emerged as champions of the rights of all blacks and initiated a persistent onslaught against all manifestations of racism in the state. Their ability and their demand for desegregation clearly made the history of Reconstruction in Louisiana unique, but Fischer finds their efforts undermined by the failure of the desegregation goal to arouse the real interest or support of the masses of freed slaves while intensifying determined white resistance. The advent of Radical Reconstruction in 1867 momentarily did tip BOOK REVIEWS89 the scales in favor of black demands, and during the initial period of military supremacy, blacks succeeded in destroying the segregated street car system in New Orleans. Blacks and white radicals also dominated the constitutional convention of 1867-1868 and "drafted a document which had, at least theoretically, outlawed racial segregation in public schools and places of public accommodations and had made a sworn belief in racial equality a qualification for public office" ( ? 55) . When blacks pushed for the effective implementation of these constitutional guarantees, however, they encountered not only angry resistance from the Democrats but an opposition from moderate white Republicans that split the party and prevented the effective desegregation of public accommodations. The record in public schools was quite different , thanks largely to the efforts of the radical State Superintendant of Education, Thomas W. Conway. While rural schools remained almost entirely segregated, an impressive integration of New Orleans' public schools was implemented which, despite vigorous and varied resistance, continued until the final collapse of Republicanism in 1877. It is a major point of this volume that the segregation dispute was central to Reconstruction politics and that the Redeemers moved as quickly as practical to end any and all desegregation. Any hesitancy was a reflection of uncertainty about social need and federal law and not of any flexibility in southern racial attitudes. In fact the Redeemers steadily moved toward extending segregation demands in practice and in law, and Fischer's depiction of that extension during the 1880's is effective and convincing. Contrary to Woodward, Fischer considers the Jim Crow laws of the 1890's a culmination of trends underway since 1877 rather than a turning point. That Fischer establishes the existence of a long standing practice of racial segregation cannot be denied, although a few of...