The African American Experience in Louisiana

Bogalusa even established separate YWCAs and YMCAs, which no other lumber company in
the state is reported to have done. 207 Although white and black men went to work together every
day, when they came home, each went unto his own world.
It must, then, have been an especially striking sight on a fall day in 1919, when the black
head of an African American union walked down the main street of town flanked by two white
union men bearing shot guns to protect him. It provoked a quick and violent response that
resulted in the massacre of both white union men and two others by a company security posse.
This incident was not the first time white union men took up arms to defend their black comrades
in Bogalusa. In June, some one hundred white union men with rifles and shotguns – some of
them veterans in full dress uniforms – had come to the black neighborhood to escort men to their
union meeting after the company had threatened to send gunmen to break it up. This was an
extraordinary case of white southerners taking up arms for rather than against African Americans
and it would have a lasting effect on the African American community. The murders of the union
men were effective in crushing biracial union organizing in Bogalusa for good, but they could
not reverse the empowerment that union participation and the well-deserved respect of fellow
hardworking men had given to the African American workers. The potential of that
empowerment was not lost on lumber company executives, one of whom remarked in objection
to black unions that the organization of African Americans would be a return to
Reconstruction. 208
A shift in Boglusa’s industry from lumber to paper and other events solidified racial
separation and racism and excluded African Americans from consequential union
participation. 209 By late 1964 – after the passage of the Civil Rights Act – the town was home to
an extremely aggressive Ku Klux Klan chapter. In 1965, forty-six years after the 1919 massacre,
Bogalusa was once more the site of historic events in racial relations that again involved union
men, army veterans, and the armed defense of African American residents; but under very
different circumstances. This time the union men were A. Z. Young and Robert Hicks. Both
were former presidents of the “colored” United Papermakers and Paperworkers local 189A and
Young was a World War II veteran (and the man who would later state the he’d been in the Civil
Rights movement all his life). One supporter noted that the pair’s “union experience equipped
them well to voice those fundamental economic grievances that do not surface in every civil
rights battle but could hardly be suppressed in Bogalusa.” 210 The organization which they led as
president and vice president, the Bogalusa Civic and Voters League (BCVL), has been called by
a leading scholar of Louisiana’s Civil Rights movement “perhaps the most dynamic local
movement in the entire South.” 211
The armed defenders of Bogalusa’s African Americans were the Deacons of Defense, a
surreptitious organization formed by army veterans in Jonesboro, that quickly jumped southeast
to Bogalusa. In both places, it was brazen KKK terrorism with the complicity of police that
convinced African American citizens of the need to protect themselves with firearms. It was in
207 Norwood, in Vincent, Part C, 64.
208 Ibid., 71.
209 Jones, 178.
210 Jones, 178.
211 Adam Fairclough, Race and Democracy: The Civil Rights Struggle in Louisiana, 1915-1972 (Athens: University
of Georgia Press, 1995), xx.
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