Much had happened since we had left for Europe. Despite strong resistance, the school board gave in to the federal court and allowed a small number of black children to attend the formerly white schools. Benjamin Franklin High School for gifted students had opened its doors. About three hundred blacks were registered on the New Orleans campus of the formerly white Louisiana State University. At the same time the state also founded a campus of the black Southern University in New Orleans, in order to prevent “too many” blacks from attending the white Louisiana State campus. Tulane admitted a few black students.
Racial segregation had been abolished on public carriers in 1958 by the federal courts. In the private sector, restaurants, hotels, movie theaters, hospitals and swimming pools were still segregated, but that did not prevent us from frequenting Dooky Chase, the restaurant where the Frontiers of America met.
While the struggle against the abolition of racial segregation was fought in the fifties almost exclusively in the courts, around 1960 a new phase of civil resistance began. Young blacks and whites sat down together at lunch counters and were promptly arrested. Many young blacks and whites had the courage to travel together in the South, where they were often brutally mistreated by the police. The mood of the black population had changed completely. For many, especially students, the tactics of avoiding direct confrontation seemed outdated. Two new radical groups emerged: SNCC, Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, and CORE, Committee on Racial Equality. To begin with, whites had participated in these groups, but by 1962 they were largely excluded. There also was Martin Luther Kings Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which tried to build bridges between the races and to overcome racial discrimination through civil disobedience.
On behalf of the NAACP I investigated conditions in the New Orleans schools on the basis of statistics from the school administration. The inequalities were shocking. As in Little Rock several years earlier, in 1962 the black schools in New Orleans were overcrowded, while there was plenty of space in the white schools. In the black schools the children were taught for half a day, mornings or afternoons, while the white children were taught mornings and afternoons. Besides, there were not enough teachers in the black schools.
Transporting the children in school buses was another ticklish issue. Following the legal abolition of segregation, the segregationists fought bussing, even though ironically, bussing had been used extensively in order to maintain segregation.
The Southern racists knew that they would have to give in to the legal abolition of segregation sooner or later, but wanted to postpone the implementation of the decision of the courts as long as possible. For that they had the support of whites who considered themselves moderate and who rejected violent resistance. The populist-racist wing of the white voters, which was represented especially in the rural districts and had a majority in both chambers of the Louisiana legislature, launched a witchhunt against supporters of desegregation and civil rights, and the legislature declared the NAACP illegal. Following the example of the Un-American Activities Committee in the U.S. House of Representatives, the Louisiana legislature created a “Louisiana Un-American Activities Committee.” LUAC was supposed to prove that there was a connection between the civil rights movement and the Communist Party, but was not able to prove it. However, LUAC held many ugly and hateful hearings, mainly with whites on the stand.
Source: Wilma and Georg Iggers, Two Lives in Uncertain Times, New York: Berghahn Books, 2006, p. 138f