Beware of Limbo Dancers: A Correspondent’s Adventures with the New York Times

12. Bigots I Have Known

CHAPTER 12 Bigots I Have Known The other big civil rights story of  was in Louisiana. There are people in New Orleans who claim they have never been north of Lake Pontchartrain except to travel in Europe. They see nothing of interest and little of real civilization north of the lake. Those folks have not got over the shock of being declared Americans against their will a couple of centuries ago. The objects of their scorn are personified in the north-of-the-lake Anglo-Saxon town of Bogalusa. The town got its name from a Choctaw term, bogue lusa, meaning “dark water.” The countryside is pine forest drained by slow-moving streams. The pines have been the economic mainstay of the area for more than a hundred years. The town was established as a colonial outpost by a Northern company that owned an immense swath of woods extending from southern Mississippi almost to Lake Pontchartrain. After the virgin timber was all cut, the company turned to paper manufacturing. The CrownZellerbach mill was the main employer in the s when I paid my first visit there. Bogalusa is seventy miles north of New Orleans.More pertinently, it is a ten-minute drive from Mississippi. The state border is the Pearl River,Mack Charles Parker’s tomb.The jail from which he was dragged is in Poplarville, Mississippi, only a few miles east of the state border. That same year,Washington Parish—Bogalusa is the parish seat— had contorted an old Reconstruction law that had been designed to protect Negroes to strike , of the parish’s , Negro voters from the rolls. It took action from the Justice Department and eventually a Supreme Court decision to get them restored.  Washington Parish’s action had set the stage for one of the most bizarre episodes in Louisiana history. Governor Earl K. Long was trying to persuade the legislature to change the old registration law so that it no longer could be used to discriminate against Negroes. He was opposed by a strong contingent of white supremacists led by a stiff-necked state senator named Willie Rainach from the Protestant Bible Belt of northern Louisiana. At the height of the debate,the governor elbowed his way onto the floor of the legislature, probably against all the rules, and grabbed the microphone. There he delivered the most inelegant rebuke of a racist demagogue that I have ever heard. A. J. Liebling, writing for the New Yorker, described it. Pointing to Rainach,Long said,“After all this is over,he’ll probably go up there to Summerfield, get up on his front porch, take off his shoes, wash his feet, look at the moon and get close to God.” Liebling said the governor shouted, “And when you do, you got to recognize that niggers is human beings!” It reminded me of his brother Huey’s promising a group of black leaders that he would get black nurses hired at the new Charity Hospital in New Orleans. You won’t like the way I do it, he said, but I’ll get it done. He defused possible white opposition by putting it about that he was not going have white nurses forced to look after black male patients. During the days-long contretemps between Earl Long and Rainach—whom Long called “a little pissant”—the governor’s mind finally came unhinged. He had to be led off by a kindly newspaper woman and shortly afterward was institutionalized for an emotional breakdown. Margaret Dixon, on whose arm the governor was led from the chamber,had covered Louisiana’s serpentine politics for years and had developed a kind of fondness for old Earl. She was editor of the Baton Rouge Morning Advocate and was one of a handful of women news paper editors in the United States.Women editors are numerous now, but in those days the conventional view was that women had no place in the profane atmosphere of a newsroom. Their tender sensibilities could not stand it, and they risked being sullied for life. I remember a couple of other exceptions in Arkansas. My friend  BIGOTS I HAVE KNOWN Tom Dearmore,whose family had deep roots in an Ozarks newspaper, found out that his young cousin Ginger Shiras had quit journalism to go to law school. He said he guessed that was all right, but he had always thought a woman’s place was in...