The Westside Slugger
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The Westside Slugger

Joe Neal's Lifelong Fight for Social Justice

John L. Smith

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eBook - ePub

The Westside Slugger

Joe Neal's Lifelong Fight for Social Justice

John L. Smith

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About This Book

The Westside Slugger is the powerful story of civil rights in Las Vegas and Nevada through the eyes and experience of Joe Neal, a history-making state lawmaker in Nevada. Neal rose from humble beginnings in Mound, Louisiana, during the Great Depression to become the first African American to serve in the Nevada State Senate.Filled with an intense desire for education, he joined the United States Air Force and later graduated from Southern University—studying political science and the law at a time of great upheaval in the racial status quo. As part of a group of courageous men, Neal joined a Department of Justice effort to register the first black voters in Madison Parish.When Neal moved to southern Nevada in 1963 he found the Silver State to be every bit as discriminatory as his former Louisiana home. As Neal climbed through the political ranks, he used his position in the state senate to speak on behalf of the powerless for more than thirty years. He took on an array of powerful opponents ranging from the Clark County sheriff to the governor of the state, as well as Nevada's political kingmakers and casino titans. He didn't always succeed—he lost two runs for governor—but he never stopped fighting. His successes included improved rights for convicted felons and greater services for public education, mental health, and the state's libraries. He also played an integral role in improving hotel fire safety in the wake of the deadly MGM Grand fire and preserving the pristine waters of Lake Tahoe, which brought him national attention.Neal lived a life that personified what is right, just, and fair.Pushing through racial and civil rights hurdles and becoming a lifelong advocate for social justice, his dedication and determination are powerful reminders to always fight the good fight and never stop swinging.

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1

From Louisiana Soil

JOE NEAL COMES FROM northeastern Louisiana, whose history is a tale of conquest and a trail of tears. The story begins with aboriginal Americans who farmed its lush open spaces, hunted in its woods, and fished its great rivers and streams 3,500 years before Christ. They left their mark in the form of sacred mounds, the first of which predate the Great Pyramids and Stonehenge and are the earliest discovered in North America. Built “to celebrate their bond with the land,” they were consecrated high ground, one part burial monument and one part spiritual offering. When the waters jumped their banks and flowed across the land, the rises, some seventy feet high and 200 at the base, survived. Through the centuries, their construction was repeated throughout the Southeast and the Ohio Valley.
Louisiana’s Division of Archaeology counts at least 39 “Indian mounds” in the state, some dating back 5,000 years. Through its Office of Cultural Development, the state created the Ancient Mounds Heritage Area and Trails Initiative to celebrate and preserve the “magnificent earthworks.” As with so many stories of native culture, the natives were exterminated or relocated by force through a treaty that eventually would not be honored. In time, the remnants of what they left behind were considered worth preserving by descendants of the very people who pushed them out of their birthplaces and living spaces. The state officially began to see the wisdom in saving them for future generations in 1933.
The mound-builder communities were still active in the sixteenth century, when in 1541 they were observed by Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto. By 1682, when RenĂ©-Robert Cavelier claimed the region on behalf of France’s King Louis XIV, the mound people had been eclipsed by myriad tribes, the Chickasaw, Choctaw, Natchez, Osage, Seminole, and Yamasee, to name a few. Although at one time thought to be separate and distinct, the mound builders of the Mississippian culture are considered by most accounts to be ancestral to the better-known Native American tribes in the region.
The tribes warred often, and the Chickasaw took slaves long before the Europeans shipped the first Africans to America in 1619. When the United States purchased Louisiana from the French in 1803 for $15 million—about three cents per acre—slavery culture was nearly a century old. Louisiana was war-torn in 1812, the year it was granted statehood, but life for African slaves and increasingly harassed Native American tribes did not improve with time. In 1830, President Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act, which, combined with subsequent orders, forced the migration of entire nations of Native Americans from land they’d known for centuries to the comparatively barren territories of Oklahoma and Arkansas.
With the Indians marginalized, Antebellum Louisiana was a slaver’s paradise. By 1860, 47 percent of the state’s population lived under the lash. During the Civil War, Union troops battered and burned nearby Vicksburg, Mississippi. By the time they reached Tallulah, a town named for a railroad contractor’s mistress, beleaguered supporters of the Confederacy offered no resistance. The fighting eventually ceased, but efforts at Reconstruction were no match for the Louisiana legislature. With planters still stinging from defeat and seeking to protect their way of life, lawmakers rewrote laws won with the blood of hundreds of thousands of Americans to create a new constitution that disenfranchised blacks and gave rise to state-sponsored segregation that lasted until more blood was shed in the 1960s civil rights movement.
Northeastern Louisiana’s blend of cultures is as rich as its fertile soil with abundant native, African, French, and English influences. Where that diversity ought to have provided strength, Louisiana held fast to its Jim Crow mind-set. In Madison Parish, home to Tallulah, the racial lines were generations old. Named for the fourth president of the United States, Madison Parish had been predominantly black for more than a century. But blacks did not vote, held no public offices, and were allowed only marginal opportunities to trade. In short, it might be said they were relegated to second-class status because no third class was available.
For white residents, Tallulah offered civility amid squalor. For example, few shopping experiences rivaled a trip to Bloom’s Arcade, which opened in 1925 and is still touted as America’s first indoor “mall.” Near Highway 80 (now U.S. Interstate 20), the long, rectangular building was home to many shops and businesses. Officials started to pave the roads of Tallulah in 1938. Eleven miles to the east, the streets of Mound—what locals commonly pluralized as “Mounds”—would remain dirt for another decade.
The farm tenancy system underwritten by the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration during the “second” New Deal brought opportunity and agricultural education to poor sharecroppers, whether black or white, to the Maxwell-Yerger plantation near Mound. It was one of FDR’s earliest efforts at fighting the “war on poverty” at the ground level. As long as there was federal oversight, poor farmers received a fighting chance to work fields subdivided on the plantation. Landlords were paid, the people were trained and fed, and when the cotton was harvested and cashed the sharecroppers would have a little money in their pockets.
Joseph Neal and his pregnant wife, Josephine Watson Neal, left Arkansas for that opportunity, their young son, Willie, in tow as they traveled south to Tallulah and Mound. Desperate for work, Joseph hoped to grab a piece of Roosevelt’s agrarian American dream. But it was not to be. The popular program was brimming with tenant farmers from the immediate area.
Since a hospital was not an option for blacks, Joseph and Josephine had not been allowed to set foot inside the local health facility. In fact, no blacks could unless they carried a janitor’s mop and bucket. The nearest medical clinic that would accept minorities was the Charity Hospital in Monroe, some sixty miles west of Tallulah. So Josephine Neal relied on Missy Luster, an experienced midwife, to help bring her second baby boy into the world. Joseph M. Neal, Jr. was born on July 28, 1935. The midwife Luster would remain as close as an aunt to Neal and his older brother.
The son of the midwife who delivered Neal, Bo Luster, would mentor young Joe, influence his decision to pursue military service and higher education, and remain a lifelong friend. Luster would also provide a strong male influence at a time when Joe was away from both parents, who separated about the time he was born. While Josephine pursued work in distant towns, Joseph severed ties to the family. Neal wouldn’t meet his father until age 14, and he gleaned little from the conversation about his family or its breakup.
The elder Neal died of kidney failure in 1963 in Dumas, Arkansas.
“As I looked back on my life during these times,” Neal recalled many years later, he didn’t really say he knew his father, and “I had not bonded with my mother; but my brother had. I bonded with my older brother and the Prater family who took us in.”
With so much work to do, there was little time to dwell on what life hadn’t provided. He came to appreciate and cherish the family that had taken him in.
When Josephine found work several months later at an FDR camp in Alexandria, Louisiana, she was forced to rely on friends and family to care for young Willie and Joe. They were a handful. While Josephine worked, the boys were basically left to their own devices with predictable results. Joe ignited his trousers while “popping” bamboo cane on an open fire. Ever the protective big brother, Willie put out the flames with his bare hands, but not before Joe suffered a severe leg burn. Willie carried his brother to a nearby house where the burn was cleaned and dressed. The accident turned out to be fortuitous, for after that the boys were placed in the charge of Mary and Goins Prater—sharecroppers who gave the youngsters guidance and looked after them responsibly.
The burn would heal in time, but it provided lively fodder for brothers who would remain the best of friends throughout their lives. “There was never any conflict between Willie and myself,” Neal would recall more than seventy-five years later. “Whenever Willie and I had an argument, he would bring up the fact he saved my life. Which was true. When I was burned at the age of two, Willie, as a four-year-old, put out the fire with his bare hands.”
The Praters often told young Joe stories of the Prater family’s long history in the area. Mary’s tales predated slavery. She firmly believed that her people were in that part of the country when it was tribal land before slavery. Although the white society considered her black, she believed she was part Yamasee. But for those few years there were just hardworking members of one of the great social experiments of the Roosevelt era. As a part of President Roosevelt’s New Deal programs, the Farm Security Administration embarked on a far-reaching and not entirely successful plan to assist poor farmers during the Dust Bowl and Great Depression. Through drought, blight, and boll weevil infestations, the FSA and its predecessor Resettlement Administration worked with sharecroppers in the region in an effort to help save their fields and properties and improve their lives. As participants in the La Delta Project at Thomastown, Louisiana, black farm families received training in everything from soil management to home economics in hope that education would lead to independence despite their segregated status and institutional racism. Photojournalist Marion Post Wolcott famously depicted scenes in 1940 of productive black women canning squash in an impeccable test kitchen while paying close attention to the instructor during a meeting of the “Home Demonstration Group.” Farmers were depicted disking and plowing fields and admiring a new barn, cotton gin, chicken house, and whitewashed homes. There were also photographs of old slave quarters and the clapboard shanties farmers had been accustomed to inhabiting as sharecroppers on the Yerger plantation.
Against long odds that few would take, the federal government had sent experts to these farmers to aid them immediately while also teaching them to help themselves. Of all the images captured by Wolcott’s camera, none had a greater impact on young Joe Neal’s life than the freshly painted, one-story Thomastown School. Before its construction, the only education available to black children was to be found at the local church, where Neal received his first school experience at the Shady Grove Missionary Baptist Church from a woman named Minnie Koontz. The classroom was small and full, and the available materials were rudimentary. “She wrote my name on a small blackboard about four feet by four feet: Joseph Martin Neal Jr. Then she asked me to copy it,” he said. Joe thought that was fantastic in its own right. But when he found out that apples, oranges, and plums were delivered to the school on a regular basis, he was bowled over. “Now that was worth getting up in the morning for!”
It was at the Baptist church that Neal had his first taste of orange juice. In those days, the delivery of the fruits and juices was a mystery. Only later did Neal discover that it arrived courtesy of the political machine created by Louisiana governor Huey P. Long. Dubbed the “Kingfish,” Long knew that a little fresh produce in what would be called a “food desert” seventy-five years later in America went a long way in the minds of the poor. Even though the populist politician Long would be assassinated in 1935, his tradition would continue. For years to come, out of respect to the two political figures that embodied their struggle, Louisiana blacks often named their children after the beloved “Huey” and “Roosevelt.” Roosevelt and Long engaged in a fierce rivalry to win the hearts and minds of the Depression-era poor. For much of the 1930s their personal and political battle benefited blacks and whites alike. Roosevelt brought federal programs that Long fought, and which he countered with generous handouts. In both instances, America’s downtrodden benefited. (Future U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall himself would recall the story of eating an orange outside a Mississippi courthouse in the 1940s.)
Neal attended his church school until the fourth grade. Then it closed and was replaced by the Thomastown School, with its crisply clean exterior and Roosevelt administration seal of approval. It was tangible proof that the federal government, as harried as it was during the Depression, had its eye on the poor of Madison Parish. The Thomastown School, originally controlled by blacks, was turned over to the local school district, and was soon known for its used books and other classroom hand-me-downs.
That section of the South was a socioeconomic laboratory where experimental programs meant to train and feed the poor in real time were tried out against a backdrop of a veritable American apartheid. While some programs were flawed, others were crushed by political infighting between federal and state agencies.
With millions of acres of previous plantation soil divided and under contract to black families, there was money to be made through both accommodation and exploitation of the new laws of the land. Those fortunate families commonly received up to 100 acres, a plow and mule, a sow, a farmhouse, and even a stove and cooking utensils. A soil conservation expert named “Massengale,” and one “Mrs. Nettles” taught the women to can food. Neal recalled that black farmers prospered despite the boll weevil infestations that damaged the nearby fields of white sharecroppers.
“That farm tenancy system was established by the Yergers and Maxwells, who were an inter-married family,” Neal described the situation. “The Mound Project was the nation’s first war-on-poverty plan by the FDR administration. There were many blacks that owned their farms through the FDR administration, which allowed them to purchase land with government loans. They were given technical assistance from the government in land usage and food planning.” Eventually, the federal programs were either discontinued or run to ground by members of Congress from the South who had accrued seniority and wielded great power, especially in the Senate.
The Prater family was kind, but demanding, and the Neal boys sought to contribute to the small farm in any way they could, eager to be useful and unobtrusive. The Praters’ fenced slice of the Yerger plantation was less than ten acres, but large enough to grow cotton and a robust vegetable garden. “We had chickens, hogs, and milk cows,” Neal would recall. The seven acres of land the Yergers rented to grow cotton were Joe’s responsibility. It was his task to plow and grow the cotton crop, and he would never forget working those acres under moonlight. Although the work was hard, it taught Neal the value of manual labor and his calloused hands reminded him daily to pay attention in school if he dreamed of a life away from the fields. At the end of the harvesting season the Praters shared in the proceeds gained from the Neal boys’ efforts. “In the 1940s, this amounted to about a hundred dollars each for my brother and me.” Joe supplemented that income by selling eggs and butter to neighbors.
The 1940 Census counted 145 residents in Mound. By 2000, the figure had dwindled to a paltry twelve. Neighboring Tallulah’s black population had flattened as the result of cross-country migrations to the West from the Great Depression through post–World War II, when an enormous populace sought work on Hoover Dam and other construction sites throughout the West and Southwest. Still, segregation was the law of the land, and real opportunities at home in the South were the stuff of dreams only.
Meanwhile at the Prater homestead, what couldn’t be sold could often be bartered for needed dry goods and supplies. And when the Prater family field was in order, Joe and Willie often found themselves working the fields of their neighbors for a portion of the harvest. It wasn’t simply a part-time job. “Survival depended upon your skills to prepare for lean times in your life,” Neal said. “We never bought food from the store, other than flour. Everything else we made or canned. As to clothing, one pair of pants that was washed at night and hanged by the fire to dry.” Willie and Joe were “free spirits” in their Mound childhood. “There wasn’t a lot of control, and we went where we wanted to go. As long as we finished our chores, we had the day to ourselves.”
During the summers Joe spent his free time cooling off in the bayou, where the children of white sharecroppers, with whom blacks shared a common poverty, often joined him. Neal fished and caught bullfrogs. And although “frogs from Tallulah” were a delicacy, and endless barrels of them were shipped from Louisiana to St. Louis for distribution across the country, Neal wasn’t interested in the croaking amphibians for commercial purposes. He just liked eating them the way Mary Prater prepared them.
He also enjoyed reading, but since blacks weren’t allowed to check out books at the public library in Tallulah, there wasn’t much material available. “We didn’t have any books or things in my house,” Neal recalled. “We used newspapers for insulation. I’d read the old newspapers that a white guy named Mr. Jones would save for us. He used to subscribe to the newspapers from Vicksburg. Mama would wash his clothes for him every other week at his house, and she’d bring them home. I’d read them, and then they’d be put to use to insulate the house and help keep us warm in winter. Occasionally I’d get my hands on a ten-cent copy of Jet magazine, which contained news of the civil rights movement and let you know about racial issues at a time most newspapers refused to cover the issues.”
It was in the pages of Jet that Neal would learn of the lynching of Emmett Till, the fourteen-year-old African-American boy who was tortured and murdered on August 28, 1955 in Money, Mississippi after allegedly flirting with a white girl. “Through Jet you got the sense of who you were in relationship to the larger society.”
Mound was 123 miles due south of Money, just a few hours by car, but right next door in soul. In high school, the principal subscribed to the black-owned Pittsburgh Courier. Neal read its purple headlines and pages of prose whenever he could get his hands on a copy. It was far more relevant than the books on the shelves of the Mound library, what Neal would remember years later as “a bunch of books, middle-class stuff that didn’t fit us.” When he needed a reminder about doing the right thing and keeping up with his high school studies, Albert “Bo” Luster was someone Joe looked up to. Bo was focused on getting up and out of Mound, and he planned to use the opportunities provided by the military to achieve his goal. He joined the ROTC at Southern University in Baton Rouge, Louisiana and upon graduation became a career soldier in the United States Army and eventually a helicopter pilot with the rank of colonel. Bo Luster provided a valuable example that, although the playing field wasn’t level and institutional racism placed innumerable obstacles in a striver’s path, success was possible.
Neal’s lifelong friend Richmond Calvin observed, “That was the only environment we were familiar with. We weren’t a part of the white establishment. It was probably one of the worst systems you could be a part of, but you enjoyed what you had. As you grew, you understood the social and psychological differences and challenges of being an African American in a white society. It was very much against the Judeo-Christian heritage we talk about. You wonder, ‘How could people who profess to believe in Jesus Christ as their Savior, how could they mistreat people in such an inhumane way?’ As a youngster it was hard to conceptualize.”
In time, Calvin and Neal and others learned the vocabulary of hate even if they did not practice it. “It was very cruel, very cruel,” Calvin recalled. “We knew people who were raped, who were murdered. We saw all that. We couldn’t get decent jobs. If you got jobs, you got the jobs the whites didn’t want. I didn’t get angry about it until I was 40 or 50 years old. You look back and get angry, but at the time, well, that’s the way things were. We knew no other way.
“What that did for Joe and a lot of us in comparable situations is it gave us a desire to succeed, but it also gave you a desire to bring others along, to take time to motivate others. You become givers, not just receivers. I’m not sure who said, ‘I’m not free unless those below me are free,’ but it’s a pretty good line.”
At Thomastown Sch...

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