Bogalusa: The Economics of Tragedy

...By April, A. Z. Young had assumed the presidency and Bob Hicks the vice-presidency of the organization...

...But finally, in early 1964, Washington began to prod Crown into action...

...My job is predominantly colored...

...Bogalusa's anguish was not inspired by the economic demands of its Negroes...

...And if it's more than six weeks since he left his old job, he can't go back—he's out of luck...

...The Klan lost no time exploiting the fear of job loss to Negroes...

...This lengthy study period was not, however, entirely Crown's responsibility...

...Hicks, at this time...

...Chairman Franklin D. Roosevelt, Jr., conferred in New Orleans with top officials of Crown and the Negro and white locals of the United Papermakers...

...In 1906, the Great Southern Lumber Company decided that Bogue Lusa—Choctaw for "smoky water" —would make an ideal location for the world's largest sawmill, to be surrounded by a town "laid out with...

...Until recently, the voices of Knight and Phillips seemed to echo more loudly in Washington than those of Bogalusa's Negroes...

...When the invitation became public, a cross was burned in front of the home of Reverend Bruce Shepherd, a signer of the invitation, in whose church the meeting was to be held...

...We were aware that this was the first initiative in Bogalusa to alter the accepted pattern of race relations in the community and that we were taking it after a prolonged labor dispute," Chairman Hunt recalled for the stockholders...

...And he did not mention that only nine Negroes had moved into formerly white job lines during the first year of integration...

...If you try to place every man according to seniority, you'll have to shut down the mill...

...But this triumph may be more apparent than real...

...No company answer was forthcoming or expected at this meet ing, although Negroes credit it with two improvements later negotiated with Local 624: Negroes need no longer leave their old jobs and enter the Extra Board to apply for formerly white jobs, and they retain seniority on their old job in the event of return...

...Until recently the town has prospered under the influence of a progressive national corporation and strong Northern-based unions...

...Hicks: "Not all jobs are open because they have some jobs for colored and some for whites as of today...

...We made every effort to explain the situation to the union but tension inevitably developed...

...Since the Extra Board was segregated in 1961, displaced Negroes had access only to the most menial jobs...

...Bill Yates and Steve Miller of CORE were telling us how much we could do in Bogalusa if only we stuck together and kept fighting...

...They may not have been open in the past...

...you must take a test...

...I came to Crown in 1950," said Otha Peters, the current president of Negro Local 624, "the same time as Hilton Beard, the president of our white local...

...Thus the economic tragedy of B.ogalusa, planted by automation and nurtured by the indecision, delay, and timorousness of Crown Zellerbach and the unions, has become by default the problem of the federal government...

...nor did their locals take advantage of the mediation efforts of the AFL-CIO's Bussie, who returned to Bogalusa in April to help establish communications between the town officials and the Voters League, now under new leadership...

...Now these are the facts...

...Not until April 2 did the local Crown manager speak out against violence and intimidation, a reticence the company explained by insisting that civil rights is a community responsibilty...

...Sure," the agreement sounds good," says Bob Hicks...

...And to job anxiety was added the agitation for civil rights legislation, the national outcry at the murders of Chaney, Schwerner, and Goodman, and finally, the passage of the Civil Rights Act, Title VII which guaranteed the widening of the fair-employment breach so cautiously opened by Crown Zellerbach...

...Pedro Mondy, official of Negro Papermakers Local 189A, said it could hardly be otherwise: "Take the recovery room in the paper mill...

...I put in for this other [paste machine operator] my experience...

...Laughter) Hicks: "Since the white man was hired before the test [was instituted] and promoted in the line of progression and wasn't subject to a test, why subject a man to a test now because he is black...

...A few days ago, a Negro high school senior in a formerly all-white school was beaten up for the third time...

...At Crown as elsewhere, the demand for more jobs is inseparable from that for better jobs, since Negroes cannot hope to become a significant part of the work force without access to skilled jobs...

...But we had no one with us...

...they remained there until dark, although the children had long since fled...

...Yet it was here that the economic urgency of the civil rights movement has most clearly come into focus: Negroes and whites fighting for the same jobs in a work force drastically reduced by technological change...

...Yates and Miller had arrived at the Robert Hicks's home on East Ninth Street, where they were to spend the night...

...We searched our souls day and night," said Shepherd, a former combat bombardier in Korea...

...Nearly 100 people were arrested during those hectic weeks...

...There was no program, city-, company-, or union-sponsored, to attract new industry or to retrain displaced workers...

...But the job I'm in, no white men have ever worked in it...

...Next followed an illuminating exchange between management and Bob Hicks: Ferguson: "All jobs are open, Mr...

...They were merely placed in Crown's pool of unassigned labor, known as the Extra Board, where from time to time they could find temporary work...

...As Robert F. Collins, one of the League's attorneys, said in summation: "The real issue is what, if anything, the company is willing to do to compensate for the past discrimination...

...Crown waited more than a year before it moved, and moved, by its own admission, only its mouth...

...The resounding stillness extended into December before it was broken by the ill-fated invitation to Brooks Hays...

...Separate plant entrances for Negroes and whites were abolished, along with separate drinking fountains (which now have long spouts and paper cups...

...In the rare, fortunate Southern community, a danger signal like this is promptly answered by a firm call for law and order from the powers that be...

...It was also clear that the mill was greatly overstaffed and that the work force would have to be reduced...

...Yet and still, you turn right around and hire these [white] men that did not pass the test to come to work in the job that is especially for Negroes...

...But the Hays episode was widely reported by the press, and Crown's switchboard in San Francisco was soon deluged with calls from news media, irate citizens, and government officials...

...When the company invited Victor Bussie, president of the Louisiana AFL-CIO Council, to assist in these discussions, these Unionists told him to go home...

...To merely say that at this point you are going to be fair is not enough...

...But three days after it was made, a Negro recently promoted into a white job line found twenty hooded Klansmen waiting for him in the company parking lot, about ten yards from the mill entrance...

...We felt it was essential to move ahead on the basis of a patient and thorough explanation...

...In this tense social climate Crown Zellerbach confronted Executive Order 10925, signed by President Kennedy in March, 1961, requiring all firms under government contract to provide equal-employment opportunities for their workers...

...A few days later, the vestrymen of St...

...The company no longer hesitated to make its influence felt...

...We just knew that if Yates and Miller left our house at that moment, we would never see them alive again," Bob Hicks recalls...

...But the League's fundamental demand was access to better-paid skilled jobs...

...But the Voters League, fired up by indignation, publicity, and hope, scheduled a rally to launch a systematic assault on all of Bogalusa's segregated facilities...

...We will know the names of all who are invited to the Brooks Hays meeting and we will know who did and did not attend this meeting...

...But within fourteen years the monster mill, consuming fifty acres a day, had almost depleted the surrounding forests...

...Here, the mantle rested on Crown Zellerbach, whose $19 million annual payroll provides 70 per cent of Bogalusa's income and which employs two of the town's four commissioners and several of its councilmen...

...Bringing the same progressive spirit to bear on its relations with the community, Crown began divesting itself of such utilities, houses, and stores still under traditional company control...

...The whites won't stand for it...

...There was another, though silent, partner to this company-union talkathon which lasted from the spring of 1962 until December, 1963— the General Services Administration, which had awarded several lucrative Federal contracts to Crown...

...The Voters League launched a vigorous campaign for more and better jobs—whose thrust was naturally directed at Crown...

...For Bogalusa is no redneck hamlet, dominated by musty tradition and the paternalism of an entrenched and locally controlled industry...

...Within minutes, carloads of armed Negroes poured into East Ninth Street...

...And in the department where I work, they bring white men in on these jobs that have training in other departments...

...This is the view that most appalls the company and the white unions...

...However, Crown's most significant act was to integrate its Extra Board in May, 1964, enabling Negroes as well as whites to be assigned to jobs on the basis of seniority...

...He's got to leave his job, give up his seniority, go into the Extra Board, pass a tough test, and then wait his turn on the Extra Board...

...On December 18, the commission finally acted...

...This care and provision included company houses, utilities, hospital, YM- and YWCA...

...But Paul Phillips, inter national president of the United Papermakers and Paperworkers, which maintains white and Negro locals in Bogalusa, hotly disagrees: "All that consultation stuff is malarkey...

...I had done this job for a number of years before this automation came in...

...Within an hour, a hundred white men had assembled in front of the store...

...We didn't want to give in to the Klan...

...If he does get the job, he'll be the first one laid off...

...the Klan never came near East Ninth Street...

...This company cannot be expected to solve these problems by itself...

...The company made those decisions unilaterally— that's why we struck...

...In doing so, Crown ignored the experience of other Southern firms which have desegregated without incident: namely, that once a policy of integration is announced, a clear-cut procedure pursued with reasonable speed is far less inflammatory than a "patient and thorough explanation" —particularly if it lasts a year and a half...

...Hicks was a trustee for years...

...We didn't have labor, business, city officials, or the law...

...The first day of testing went smoothly, and Mayor Cutrer, clearly relieved, declared the tests successful—and concluded...

...Few whites have moved into jobs formerly held by Negroes...

...Five days after the injunction, Crown Vice-President Francis M. Barnes flew from San Francisco to confer with the Bogalusa Voters League...

...You can't turn the whole plant upside down and fire the people already working for you in order to right the wrongs of the past...

...But no sooner did the Negroes arrive than the whites left, and the private concessionaire was forced to close...

...Sometimes we talk about it, and Hilton says, 'You should've been born a white boy.'" When Chairman Hunt announced the integration of the Extra Board, he acknowledged the limitations imposed on this policy by the low labor turnover, due to automation and reduced sales, which left the plant operating at half capacity...

...The tests that Hicks referred to were instituted in January, 1963, after the company's announced intention of complying with Presidential Executive Order 10925...

...They invited former Arkansas Congressman Brooks Hays, a racial moderate, now associate director of the Community Relations Service, to speak on the experience of Southern communities in complying with the new law...

...The toilets, always a hazard, were integrated but with partitions between the white and Negro sections...

...So did Mayor Jesse F. Cutrer, the protege of Vertrees Young, a prominent local moderate and retired Crown vice-president...

...By 1938, however, the local timber resources proved inadequate, and the company sold out to the Gaylord Container Corporation, a paper-products firm that in 1955 merged with the much larger Crown Zellerbach Corporation...

...The old preacher-teacher-insurance-agent leadership of the Voters League lacked the nerve for the aggressive enterprises of Bogalusa's aroused Negroes...

...Though the details remain to be settled, the agreement appears to be a major triumph for law enforcement and for Bogalusa's Negroes...

...Our people felt the rug had been pulled out from under them...

...Confronting Barnes were three Negro women who had applied at Crown and "been turned around so often" that they kept asking local plant manager Roy Ferguson to repeat his assurance that henceforth the applications of Negro women would be accepted...

...While CORE, alerted by Yates and Miller, reached out frantically for help from Washington, word of the impending siege at the Hickses flashed through Jewtown, Poplas, Moden Quarters, and other widely separated Negro sections...

...45 per cent of them have disaffiliated...

...by 1957, Crown had already built a new bag plant in Bogahisa...

...Its headquarters are in San Francisco and its 26,000 employees are scattered for the most part across the Pacific States...

...We were just six guys bucking the whole town...

...their insurance did not cover bombing...

...The Movement had finally arrived in Bogalusa...

...care and provision for the future...

...he advised them to leave at once...

...During this period, the agency completed twenty-four reviews of the company's fair-employment practices and found them in compliance with government policy...

...To the white workers the integration of the Extra Board, after three years of reduced employment caused by automation, was the nightmare of Negro competition come true...

...Since 1955, its sales have risen 58 per cent, to $622 million, making it the second largest paper-products manufacturer in the country...

...And on January 5, the invitation to Hays was withdrawn...

...These [white] men had no experience, yet they were selected and put on that job...

...The other major parties were the white paper unions...

...Bussie, one of the South's most effective labor leaders, was somewhat nonplussed by the United Papermakers and Paperworkers and the International Brotherhood of Pulp, Sulphite and Papermill Workers, who share jurisdiction over the 2,900 workers at Crown and another 13,000 in the state: "The state council has managed to keep the allegiance of most locals throughout the integration crisis, but not the paper unions...

...their sentiments were immovable...

...But Crown still won't discuss any community problems with the Voters League...

...It began in December, 1964, when six prominent white residents became concerned because the town's public facilities were still segregated five months after passage of the Civil Rights Act...

...Between 1961 and 1965, Crown spent more than $35 million on plant modernization and laid off 500 Bogalusans, black and white...

...People in the aisles, in back, everywhere," Jacqueline Hicks, a leading militant, recalls...

...Meanwhile equal excitement was stirring on Columbia Road, the town's main street, where white men were assembling and talking about the two white "outsiders" from CORE bringing trouble to Bogalusa...

...It doesn't require a test for a man to do work that he has been doing for years...

...At the time, the vigilante victory in forcing the withdrawal of the invitation was complete—inside Bogalusa...

...But the company chose to remain silent...

...The company said it couldn't do a thing about it...

...About noon on July 3, 1964, the day after the Civil Rights Act became law, two Negro girls, about twelve years old, sat down at the lunch counter of Woolworth's and requested service...

...League Lawyer: "An employee told me that an examination for a manual labor category contained a question: 'If a man was fishing for two hours and caught three fish, if he fished the next day for five hours, how many fish would he catch?'" Barnes: "What did he use for bait...

...But the company frankly concedes that the impact of this innovation was limited: "Due to the manpower situation in the mill, the labor turnover since the policy was put into effect has not been great...

...The government will have to lay down industrywide guidelines...

...But in 1960, the demands of competition collided with those of communal harmony...

...You can't do more than start Negroes and whites in all job lines...

...yet of Crown's 2,900 employees, Negroes account for a mere 390, or one out of seven, and they are grouped in the poorest paid and least skilled jobs...

...And on July 10, CORE obtained a Federal injunction ordering the police to provide full protection to civil rights workers (subsequent injunctions have been issued against local officials, the Klan, and individual members of the police...

...Informed that the two CORE workers would stay, Chief Knight took his leave with a parting warning: "We have better things to do than protect people who aren't wanted here...

...Why was it that Bogalusa, like Sodom, could not produce ten good men in a crisis...

...before '64, the top seventeen were restricted to whites, the bottom five to Negroes...

...And then the same thing...

...But in this highly competitive industry, this means only 4 per cent of the market...

...Matthews Episcopal Church voted seven to one against opening the parish hall for the Hays meeting...

...It also means continual plant modernization to keep pace with the industry's rapid technological change...

...Nevertheless, unemployed whites were shocked to find themselves confronting Negroes in the same predicament—and in the context of a civil rights movement determined to destroy the social equilibrium upon which they depended...

...Despite warm expressions of interest from the President's Commission on Fair Employment Practices, the last five months of 1965 saw no increase in the number of Negroes in white job lines at Crown...

...The company insists that, while it was a costly strike for all concerned, there was no residue of bitterness...

...Their union experience equipped them to voice those fundamental economic grievances that do not surface in every civil rights battle but could hardly be surpressed in Bogalusa, where the median income for Negro families is $2,200 a year...

...This changing of the guard is a frequent occurrence in the civil rights struggle...

...he wants to quit, too...

...The press has done justice to the woeful catalogue of demonstrations, shootings, and court injunctions suffered by this papermill town in the past year...

...It's the most fundamental kind of Southern conservatism, the hardest kind to reason with...

...its ranks increased during 1964 to an estimated 800 members in a population of 22,000, reportedly the highest concentration in the South...

...And as long as the Company keeps these attitudes, Bogalusa's troubles will continue...

...yet we have to show them or they can't make it...

...They told him he'd better quit, and he did...

...It was a paralyzing moment for the Hickses: their two youngest children were at home, and it had not been easy to finance their pleasant, sprawling ranch house...

...That was February 1st, and the [Negro] Union Hall was packed...

...But we didn't even have to remember Chaney, Schwerner, and Goodman...

...Cars filled with Klansmen kept going by our houses...

...These events still did not elicit a law-and-order statement from Crown or the unions...

...Now supposing that after the company announced the integration, the senior Negro wants to move into a white job, which he knows how to handle 'cause he's done it in emergencies...

...I couldn't go beyond porter, so I make $2.16 an hour, while Hilton, who is a millwright, makes $3.45...

...It was a pilgrimage at least partially motivated by the prodding of the GSA, which had just awarded Crown a new $12 million contract...

...As Board Chairman Reed 0. Hunt later explained...

...The League pounded away at the statistics: 9,000, or one out of three, Bogalusans are Negroes...

...On June 2, Washington Parish Deputy Sheriff O'Neal Moore, a Negro, was slain by night riders...

...Several thousand handbills with the following text were distributed door to door: [the purpose of this meeting] is to convince you that you should help integration by sitting in church with the black man, hiring more of them in your business, serving and eating with them in your cafes, and allowing your children to sit by filthy, runny-nosed, ragged, ugly little niggers in your public schools...

...There is no instant solution...

...This tension erupted in August, 1961, into a strike that lasted seven months...

...When the Klan responded by intimidating the entire community, it ignited the racial confrontation that still continues...

...Great Southern responded by instituting the first large-scale reforestation program in the history of the Southern lumber industry...

...Crown which employed 200 white women, did not have a single Negro woman on the payroll...

...A partial answer is to be found in the brief but contradictory history of the town itself...

...On July 8, Henry Austin of the black Deacons for Defense shot a white man who attacked a Negro child during a demonstration...

...Consequently, few Negroes have been able to obtain permanent jobs in progression lines formerly set aside for whites...

...The integration of time clocks was delayed until 1965, and, although the signs have been removed from the pay windows, Negroes are still to queue up at their old windows...

...Both men had developed their skills in the service of Local 624, the Negro wing of the Pulp, Sulphite Union: Young was the local's president for a decade...

...to make the mill fully competitive in the industry it had to be extensively modernized...

...Crown knew little about the South when it came to Bogalusa...

...The Voters League's first proposal was jobs for women, who presently lack any alternative to working as maids for $18 a week...

...The international unions made no statement at all...

...Crown Lawyer: "Would you go over that again...

...Most of these locals are in small towns, and the bulk of their membership consists of farmers who quit the land recently or one generation back...

...Only after violence erupted last year did the company try to desegregate its restaurant...

...There are twenty-two jobs...

...We never had a meeting like that in this town before...

...Those who do attend [will be] dealt with accordingly by the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan...

...Repeated conferences during the first half of 1965 between the company, the unions, the Voters League, and local officials failed to produce a single new job for a Negro in Bogalusa...

...Despite all the new machines, men still have to hold the paper up to the light to see if it's okay...

...But later, Delos Knight, Crown's public relations officer in Bogalusa, spoke quite frankly about the League's demands: "Papermaking is still an art...

...At 11:15 p.m., Chief of Police Claxton Knight came to inform them that he could no longer guarantee their safety in Bogalusa...

...Now the rumors began to travel the other way...

...The pace of demonstrations accelerated, as did the physical attacks by white men and the jeering by their women and children...

...a few days later Mayor Cutrer notified the Bogalusa Civic and Voters League, which represents the Negro community, that his police would provide full protection for the testing of public accommodations, starting on January 28, 1965...

...There has been little exploration, however, of the causes of Bogalusa's agony: automation, economic frustration, and civic myopia...

...He extracted a pledge from both locals to accept full integration of functionally related job lines, according to seniority, without bars to competent Negroes...

...GSA obviously based its approval on the company's plans for integration, since the plant remained totally segregated...

...President Phillips of the Papermakers put it in even stronger terms: "Even in all-white plants in the North, the top machine jobs take five years of training...