Against the Klan

A Newspaper Publisher in South Louisiana during the 1960s

Lou Major, Robert Mann

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9780807175415
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

In 1964, less than one year into his tenure as publisher of the Bogalusa Daily News, New Orleans native Lou Major found himself guiding the newspaper through a turbulent period in the history of American civil rights. Bogalusa, Louisiana, became a flashpoint for clashes between African Americans advocating for equal treatment and white residents who resisted this change, a conflict that generated an upsurge in activity by the Ku Klux Klan. Local members of the KKK stepped up acts of terror and intimidation directed against residents and institutions they perceived as sympathetic to civil rights efforts. During this turmoil, the Daily News took a public stand against the Klan and its platform of hatred and white supremacy. Against the Klan, Major's memoir of those years, recounts his attempts to balance the good of the community, the health of the newspaper, and the safety of his family. He provides an in-depth look at the stance the Daily News took in response to the city's civil rights struggles, including the many fiery editorials he penned condemning the KKK's actions and urging peaceful relations in Bogalusa. Major's richly detailed personal account offers a ground-level view of the challenges local journalists faced when covering civil rights campaigns in the Deep South and of the role played by the press in exposing the nefarious activities of hate groups such as the Klan.

 

1

IS THAT A “W” OR AN “N”?

1951–1963

My career as a small town newspaperman began at the Bogalusa, Louisiana, Daily News following my graduation from the Louisiana State University School of Journalism in Baton Rouge. While the newspaper’s incorporated name was the Bogalusa Daily News, it was known simply to local residents as the Daily News because the name “Bogalusa” did not appear in the banner across the top of page one because the paper’s news coverage and distribution area went beyond Bogalusa.

In the “toe” of the Louisiana boot, the Daily News served all of Washington Parish: its largest city Bogalusa in the east; the parish seat of Franklinton twenty miles to the west; and the smaller Washington Parish communities of Angie, Enon, Mt. Hermon, Pine, Thomas, Varnado, and so many named and unnamed country road intersections in between. The paper also served the communities of Sun and Bush in the northern part of neighboring St. Tammany Parish to the south, and the western edge of Pearl River County, Mississippi, across the Pearl River that is the state line between southeastern Louisiana and neighboring Mississippi only a few miles east of Bogalusa.

Hiring on in July 1951 a few weeks after graduating from the LSU journalism school, I started out writing obituaries, weather reports, and other miscellaneous items before I was thrust into the sports editor’s chair due to the illness of then-writer Ned Lyons.

Since I grew up in the racially divided South, in New Orleans and adjacent suburban Jefferson Parish, becoming involved in the coverage of separate all-white and all-black high school sports seemed totally normal for me. I covered the entire high school sports scene in Bogalusa and surrounding Washington Parish with no second thoughts about all of the teams being fully segregated by race.

In the city, there were the all-white Bogalusa High School Lumberjacks and the all-black Central Memorial High School Spartans. Their athletes competed only against other segregated school teams of their own color. I wondered, after several years of writing about these teams, why they didn’t play one another, although my thoughts at that time were never put into print.

White football fans attended only Lumberjacks games and Black fans went only to Spartans games. Since both high school football teams played on Friday nights, I was always at the Lumberjacks games. Only once, when the Lumberjacks were not playing on the same night, did I cover one Spartans game in person. But I knew Coach Lucius Jefferson of the Spartans very well because he always accommodated me with full details of their games afterward. The schools’ other teams in basketball and baseball were similarly totally segregated.

In the 1950s, life in all its aspects was still similarly divided by color—whether in churches, restaurants, movie houses, or public transportation. It’s just the way things were. But in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the Black population of the country began to call for added civil rights. They no longer wanted to have to drink at separate water fountains marked “colored,” to be denied service at restaurants, or—in Bogalusa, at least—be forced to enter the movie houses by a separate door that led up the stairs to the balcony where they were allowed to sit.

Black people wanted the right to vote without intimidation and contrived limitations. They wanted to attend the church of their choice and they wanted their children to attend better-funded schools with white children in order to get a better education. They no longer wanted to be forced to sit “at the back of the bus.”

But nothing began to change until passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. As far as anyone in Bogalusa was concerned, that meant only that schools and restaurants would be integrated. That is a massive generalization, of course, but people who wanted things to stay as they always had been could only interpret the Civil Rights Act in those terms.

It meant that when school opened for the next term, there would be Black children sitting beside white children (full desegregation actually took several years to implement). It meant that Black people could go to the movie house and sit downstairs where the whites did, and they could even use the same front door and drink from the same water fountain. It also meant that Black people would be able to enter and eat in the same restaurants as white people—and at the same time!

And, Lord Almighty, they could even go to a “white man’s church” and praise the Lord there, if they wanted to.

The times they were a changin’, as Bob Dylan sang that year, and it was a change that would tear through the middle of our small-town, mostly rural-minded society—if, indeed, “society” existed in the piney woods of the Louisiana-Mississippi borderlands.

Long before civil rights was popular as a societal concept and way of life, the Daily News played its normal Southern role of recording the news of the day in terms of race. A Black person was a “colored” person in our town, and that’s the way the newspaper reported it. A white John Doe was referred to as “Mr. John Doe,” receiving that honorific “Mr.” even when charged with some heinous crime. A Black John Doe, however, was referred to in the paper with no such honorific. He was “John Doe, colored . . . ” It was the way things were done; it was the way most small-town Southern newspapers did it.

After I had been with the newspaper as a “cub” reporter for several years, and following my time at the sports desk, I began covering the police beat. My morning routine after arriving at the office was to head to police headquarters and check the arrest log for the previous day’s and night’s arrests. One morning, as I was checking the log, there was an entry about the arrest of a man who had been charged with selling lewd and lascivious literature.

Police officers in those days wrote either a “W” or an “N” (White or Negro) in the log next to the name of the person who had been arrested. On that particular morning, I mistook the “W” next to the name of the man arrested for selling bawdy material as an “N” and I went back to the office and wrote the story that way, identifying the arrested man as a “Negro.” The paper hit the street that afternoon and I learned my first lesson in carelessness the next morning.

I was sitting at my desk when a man came into the office and was ranting at Hal Houser, my editor and publisher whose no-door office was just behind me. The man was yelling loudly to Houser that he was “not a damned nigger,” and he wanted something done about my error that had identified him as one. Houser tried to calm him down, with little success. I wanted to hide, but I dared not get out of my chair.

The man yelled that he was going to sue the Daily News for libeling him by calling him a Negro in the police reports. Houser talked with him about the situation for a few minutes and then the offended “literature” salesman left the office. Houser, a very stern publisher and stickler for accuracy, told me he hoped that this would be a lesson for me in the future. Thank goodness he didn’t fire me on the spot.

Then Houser contacted the newspaper’s attorney and asked for advice. When all was said and done, a settlement was reached. I learned later that the newspaper had given the man $75 and bought him a new suit. The best news was that Houser didn’t make me pay for it.

A few years later when I had become publisher, I inherited a newspaper situation that was rather unusual, I suppose—but not so unusual when you consider the time and place.

Each Friday afternoon, we printed what was called the “colored edition” of the Daily News—and that had nothing to do with the color of the ink on the newsprint. It was a separate edition of the paper that included a single page dedicated to news stories and photos concerning the town’s Black community. After a short start-up pressrun of several hundred issues containing that special page, the press was stopped and the page that was specific to the Black community was removed from the press and replaced by a page of “regular” news containing news about white people. Then the rest of the 8,500-or-so pressrun was completed. There was nothing on the front page or anywhere else in the colored edition to indicate that it was a different edition, other than that single page with news and photos of Black residents.

Those several hundred copies of the colored edition were circulated only in the then-strictly segregated areas of the city and were intended for the eyes of Blacks only. There were absolute and strict safeguards in place to make very sure whites never saw the colored edition. The system of safeguards wasn’t failsafe, however, and occasionally the paper received irate phone calls from white subscribers who had received the colored edition of the paper by mistake.

This segregated news edition continued even into the early 1960s. In late 1962, upon becoming publisher of the newspaper, I put an end to it. The few irate phone calls from whites who happened to get a “colored edition” from time to time was nothing compared with the calls we received when I began running news and photos from the Black community intermingled in the single edition of the Daily News. Old habits die hard, and there were many who did not want to see “those niggers” in their Daily News. But there was no question of returning to the old way, and the newspaper did not suffer from the change beyond the verbal abuse on the phone.

2

THE MARK OF THE CROSS

1963–1964

I had been at the Daily News publisher’s desk for a little more than a year at the end of 1963, and so much was happening all over the nation in the closing months and weeks of that year. Under the forceful leadership of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., the Black citizenry across the country had become a force for social change, and civil rights legislation was moving along in Washington, DC. The assassination of President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963, stunned the nation, and Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson assumed the presidency to carry forth. In the months after the assassination, the South seemed even more stunned that now-President Johnson—a Texan and fellow Southerner!—pushed the civil rights legislation to its conclusion. On June 29, 1964, it became law.

It was during those early days of 1964, between the Kennedy killing and the signing of the Civil Rights Act, that racial unrest really began to intensify in Bogalusa.

At one time, the Daily News had published on its editorial page columns by both conservative columnist Ralph de Toledano and the more liberal Drew Pearson. However, in the years leading up to civil rights legislation—and when I was not yet the publisher and therefore not involved in making decisions such as which syndicated columnists the paper would carry—the liberal Pearson was “pulled.”

In 1963, shortly after I had become publisher, I announced in the paper that the Drew Pearson column would return to the Daily News. Some of our Black readers had requested the return of Pearson to the editorial page several times—and even offered to pay for it—and I felt at the time it was journalistically fair to have an opinionated columnist such as Pearson to help balance an editorial page that also featured the archconservative de Toledano. In normal times, this might not have seemed to be a consequential decision, but in the early 1960s, it was a move that most of the white readers of the Daily News did not like.

Unrest was being seen all over the South as the wheels had been set in motion to desegregate public schools. On September 4, 1963, there were protests in Hammond, Louisiana. Following the lead of the state capital Baton Rouge, Hammond’s mayor announced the formation of a biracial committee on September 9. On September 24, demonstrators were arrested by police in Selma, Alabama.

On October 8, Louisiana labor leader Victor Bussie, a politically strong figure in the state in the 1960s, came to Bogalusa to speak to the local Rotary Club’s weekly lunch meeting at the downtown Acme Cafe. Bussie’s scheduled speaking engagement was known by the public, and even in this—at the time—strong labor town, he was jeered and told to go home by standers-by on the sidewalk as he entered the cafe to speak to the Rotarians. He was considered too close a follower of President Kennedy and the ideas of racial liberalism. Bussie spoke anyway and left without incident.

About that time, the Daily Ne...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Is That a “W” or an “N”? 1951–1963
• 2 The Mark of the Cross: 1963–1964
• 3 A Course of Racial Moderation: 1964
• 4 A Gun, a Camera, and a Cross: 1964
• 5 The Klan Wins a Round: 1964–1965
• 6 Swimming across the Ocean All Alone: 1965
• 7 Leave This Town to the Devil: 1965
• 8 CORE, Go Home: 1965
• 9 A Bolt Out of the Blue: 1965
• 10 Meetings, Marches, Courts, and Congress: 1965
• 11 Blumberg Is a Liar: 1966
• 12 Has the Klan Story Really Ended? 1967 and Beyond
• Afterword
• Photographs