The Bogalusa Movement: Self-Defense and Black Power in the Civil Rights Struggle

Abstract

THE FIRST recorded attempt by black people in Bogalusa, Louisiana to register to vote occurred in 1950. However, an organized civil rights movement did not begin there until 1965, when the all-black Bogalusa Civic and Voters League (the League) sought to test Bogalusa’s compliance with the Civil Rights Act of 1964. From the beginning, the efforts to organize protests and demonstrations against racial segregation and public exclusion were met with white violence. The first national civil rights organization to come to the assistance of the League was the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). As protests and demonstrations expanded to include the fight to secure voting rights following the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) joined the League and CORE to organize and support a broad based civil rights movement. However, the Bogalusa movement was an authentically organic movement, organized and led by local people. The Bogalusa movement was a dual movement. First, typical of the Southern civil rights struggles, it mobilized and organized black people against racial segregation, voter disenfranchisement, and for inclusion into the city’s body politic. Second, the movement organized against racial segregation at the Crown Zellerbach Corporation; the largest employer and taxpayer in Bogalusa and Washington Parish. In 1965, Crown Zellerbach was one of the largest paper manufacturers in the US. Headquartered in San Francisco, California, Crown Zellerbach’s Bogalusa plant practiced job discrimination against black people and maintained segregated labor unions among its black and white workers. The most progressive leadership the Bogalusa Civic and Voters League enjoyed during its existence emerged in 1965 from among black laborers at Crown Zellerbach, who were the organizers and leaders of the black local of the Pulp, Sulphite and Paper Workers union. In 1965, a dietician at a local medical clinic and two workers and union leaders at Crown Zellerbach came to lead the Bogalusa Civic and Voters League and organize the Bogalusa movement. Unlike traditional civil rights organizations of the time, the League organized a self-defense unit. It formed a chapter of the Deacons for Defense and Justice to serve as its armed defense entity to protect the black community and civil rights workers from the vigilante violence of the area Ku Klux Klan and Bogalusa’s rabid, allwhite police force. The leadership of the League personified a longstanding fervor among black working people to demand and organize for change in the racial order. The formation of the Deacons represented the League’s strategic and tactical defense of the lives of black people. In 1966, the Bogalusa Deacons would become one of the organizational models employed by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale in the founding of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California.