MY NEW ORLEANS STORY - part 1

This is the first part of an autobiographical sketch.  It begins slowly but perks up.  I think most readers will find it quite interesting.  I will add other parts later.-----Hugh Murray

            I received my MA in August and had to find a job.  I had taught for one semester in the New Orleans Public Schools – junior/senior high, but believed I had been a failure.  I was liberal and believed in allowing the kids to express themselves.  I quickly learned that this was a prescription to lose control of a class.  Once lost, restoring discipline proved difficult for me, and when another job opportunity opened, I took it.  This time, I would only be teaching 5^th grade, but it would be a small class of about 20 pupils in a brand new private school.  Even better, my salary would be higher than what I received in the public system.

            The school was a recently acquired, multi-storey building that had been an office building of the federal agricultural administration.  It was kindergarten or first grade up through high school, and three of us taught the 5^th grade – Mrs. Flagg, an older woman who had taught for many years in the public schools; a guy even younger than I (I was then 24), and this was his first full-time post; and me.  Our classes were near each other, and at first, we were “roughing it.”  To begin with, we had only fold-out metal chairs, no desks, and not even doors on the class rooms.  One 4^th grade teacher led her class in numerous songs, which drowned out our classes, but our complaints to the administrators resulted in reduced music echoing down the hall from her room.  Slowly, the physical surroundings improved: doors closed out much of the extraneous noise; three large tables provided writing space for each of my pupils, twice a week my students left my room for that of the French teacher, and one large room was used for physical recreation.  More importantly, a new system we used for teaching reading was working, and some parents thanked us for teaching the pupils to read for the first time.

            Although I quite enjoyed the teaching, some problems remained, and new ones rose.  For example, the November 1 payday saw many of us holding checks that bounced.  We were issued new ones, and after a week, everyone received our salaries.

            Later that month I was teaching one Friday while Mrs. Flagg was conducting her 5^th grade class’s lunch period with free time directly across the hall from my class room.  Doors were in place, so this was not disturbing.  She knocked on my door and requested that I come to her room.  I reluctantly left my room unattended, but assured the class I would be right back.  I closed my door, and then entered her room, swirling with the noise of kids enjoying the recess of lunch time recreation.  Mrs. Flagg directed me to a table where a pupil had brought to school one of the new, small transistor radios.  The 10-year-old, Mrs. Flagg, and I craned over the device to hear above the din of the kids.  We heard the main point of the broadcast, and I then returned to my class.

            I returned, shut the door behind me, and announced – it has just come over the radio that President Kennedy has been shot in Dallas.  Spontaneously, my pupils erupted in cheers of joy.  One girl reacted strangely – she put her head down in her arms on the table and wept.  I was shocked by the general reaction and proceeded to give one of my best history lectures – quite impromptu.  As I spoke, I did not know the seriousness of the President’s injuries, only that he had been shot.  But I had a rare feeling for what I wanted to say, because now I was angry with the kids whom I generally liked.  My speech could not disguise my anger.  “You think that this is the end of integration.  You think that if Kennedy is dead, then segregation will continue, that racial problems will cease.  That is wishful thinking.  At the end of the Civil War, the North won.  But some thought the South might still come back if Lincoln were eliminated.  Lincoln was assassinated.  Killing Lincoln did not restore slaver.  Killing Lincoln did not resurrect the Confederacy.  Killing Lincoln did not restore Southern power.  Lincoln was assassinated, and all that did was make the North more determined to press its ways upon the defeated South.”  My pupils’ initial reaction to the news of the shooting undoubtedly reflected the views of their parents.  Almost everyone assumed a segregationist had killed Kennedy.  About an hour later, the school released all classes early because of the assassination.

            Later that afternoon, I was at home – I was still living with my parents – when I received a phone call from Shelly.  Shelly was an attractive blond who had married Carlos Z. a good friend.  Carlos was of mixed Mexican and Cuban heritage.  He had attended the post St. Martin’s Episcopal School in a burb where his parents resided.  Carlos and I had both attended Tulane University the same years, and more importantly, we had both been members of New Orleans Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) during its first, formative year in the Crescent City (1960-61).  I had been arrested with six others in the very first lunch-counter sit-in in New Orleans in September 1960.  It was an era in the South when anyone who openly favored integration was viewed as a Communist.  Having been arrested in the first sit-in (we were even shown on Huntly Brinkly’s national NBC Nightly News, but I did not see it because we were still in jail then.), and just one of two whites arrested, many New Orleanians thought I was a Communist.  It was an era also when on the radio Rev. Martin Luther King might be referred to as Martin Lucifer King, or simply Lucifer King.

            It was in this background that I heard the words of Shelly Z. – they arrested the man who shot President Kennedy.  He was not a segregationist.  He was a Communist, from New Orleans.  My heart sank.  Fear gripped me.  A communist from New Orleans!  People thought I was a Communist from New Orleans.  What would happen now?

            I knew from history that in 1938 in Paris, a young Jew had shot a German Embassy official.  This would be the excuse a few days later for the massive, anti-Jewish pogrom all over Germany called Kristall Nacht.  Jewish shop windows smashed (the broken glass provided the image for the name of the pogrom), synagogues torched and fire brigades not permitted to intervene unless the blaze endangered neighboring Aryan properties, thousands of Jewish men rounded up, insurance companies ordered not to pay any damages, and Jews fined an amount basically confiscating most of their wealth in the Reich.  Kristall Nacht was the turning point when anti-Jewish actions vastly escalated.

            If this is what happened to Jews in Germany after a Jew killed an Embassy official, what will happen in New Orleans when and alleged local Communist kills the President?  My fears were not entirely irrational.  Kennedy was killed November 22, 1963.  On October 3, 1963 the round up of alleged Communists in New Orleans had already begun.

            A few houses down from where my parents rented, lived Mrs. Pfister, the neighbor who sold my mother Avon products.  Mrs. Pfister was an attractive young woman and good at sales.  Her husband was a bit older, very active in the American Legion, and he had been elected a few years prior to the Louisiana State House.  There, Representative James Pfister soon led the Louisiana Un-American Activities Committee, which competed with the State Sovereignty Committee in exposing Communist organizations.  It was in the 1950s that the State Sov. Committee investigated the subversive nature and Communist background of an organization, and the hearings were broadcast throughout Louisiana.  Listeners could readily learn how the American Civil Liberties Union was a subversive organization with links to the Communists.  After listening to some of the hearings, I joined the ACLU.

            On October 4, 1963 the LUAC led raids on Communists in New Orleans – confiscating the files and photos and such from the office of the Southern Conference Education Fund (SCEF), and arresting its leader James Dombrowski, and arresting two local attorneys, SCEF treasurer Ben Smith and his law partner Bruce Waltzer.  I was on the SCEF mailing list, and it issued a small, monthly promoting integration.  I knew Dombrowski and Smith slightly, and was a good friend of Jack P. a junior member of Smith’s law office.  Over 100 police and other officials partook in the raid, and when officers raided Smith’s home, they used an axe to get in the front door.  Eventually, the case would go to the US Supreme Court.

            The day that occurred, October 4, I had been teaching.  Because of the pleasant weather, I had made plans to play tennis after work, and did so.  When I returned home somewhat later than usual, my mother greeted me with, “Where were you?  I thought they had rounded you up too.”  I had no idea at that moment what she was referring to but quickly found out, as it was big news on the local radio, TV, and the next day’s papers.

            October 4, 1963 the round up of “Communists” in New Orleans had begun.  Now, less than two months later, with a New Orleans Communist killing the President, I was afraid.  The day I had sat-in in September 1960, I knew there would be consequences, and I planned for some.  Before my crime and arrest, I had made arrangements to stay at the homes of friends.  My parents, who like most natives were segregationists, would be safer during a period of frenzied hatred if I were not with them.  But November 22, 1963 was a total shock to me: 1) the killing, which everyone assumed was the deed of a segregationist, and 2) hearing that the killer was a Communist from New Orleans, which might spark mob action.

            So with the phone call from Shelly, which I confirmed by watching TV newscasts, I was emotionally frayed, with fear, and with questions.  Who was Lee Harvey Oswald?  The Left in New Orleans was quite small.  I did not recollect his name or his face when he appeared on TV.  I decided to go out and get drunk, for it might be my last opportunity to do so.  I drove to a place on N. Rampart Street (not far from the jail in which I was booked after the sit-in) called the Blue Note.  Today, my memory fails me.  I was hoping to see some people I knew and ask about Oswald.  I met no close friends that night, but drank a lot.  I drove home late, very drunk, and stayed in bed, hung, much of Saturday.  I was in a dark cloud.  It was not merely the alcohol that had me depressed.

            Sunday morning, or it seemed like Sunday morning, I was still in bed.  My parents called me to the living room where they were watching television – Oswald had been shot, live on TV.  I rushed to see the television with them.  Soon everyone seemed relieved; it was all over.  The murderer received the judgment he deserved.  It was over.

            Well, not quite all over.  I was still phoning friends and asking about Oswald.  Still, no one seemed to know him.  However, I now realized that a Tulane history grad student and his wife had heard Oswald on a WDSU radio interview program the previous summer, and they had told me at that time about the strange guy on radio who had lived in Russia and who was pro-Castro.  The couple had merely heard him on the air, and did not even recall his name.  They had certainly never met him.

            I phoned around and learned of a young Tulane student who had actually spoken to Oswald the previous summer.  Oswald was distributing his Fair Play for Cuba Committee flyers downtown, and Bob Heller, who was a New Yorker spoke with him.  Heller had also been active in New Orleans CORE during the early period, before the Black Nationalist purged the whites from the organization.  I recall his naiveté at an early 1960 meeting.  Heller was a freshman, new to Tulane, and new to New Orleans.  CORE met at the Negro YMCA on Dryades Street, and there was malaise in the group because of growing restrictions, and I think because of the school crisis in New Orleans when two schools were integrated, and a boycott by most white pupils ensued, and hostile parents greeting the handful of children who dared to attend.  Bob suggested members of CORE do something (perhaps picket a store, or sit-in, or I forgot the details).  His suggestion appeared to have support.  I raised my hand, “What if they are arrested?”  Rudy, the chair, shrugged.  Later, when I got to know him better, Bob thought my comment was absurd, for the CORE people were doing something so mild, there was no chance of arrest.  Well, he and some others did the action, and they were arrested.  Bob was more accustomed to law enforcement in liberal New York, not in liberal Democratic controlled New Orleans.  As a former CORE activist, it would have been natural for Bob to chat with someone distributing political literature.

            With all the information about Oswald circulating, I was now aware that I too had one of his FPCC leaflets.  In the summer of 1963 I was working frantically to finish my thesis to get my MA degree from Tulane.  My topic was the Scottsboro rape cases that had occurred in Alabama, beginning in 1931.  What made my thesis unique and controversial at the time, was summarized in one of my articles published in Phylon (1967) based on my work, “The NAACP vs. the Communist Party: The Scottsboro…”  I maintained that the Communist Party and its front organizations had provided a better defense for the young Blacks falsely accused of rape, than had the liberal NAACP.  In 1963 Louisiana, this was not simply heresy, this was nigh treason.  The History Dept. awarded me the MA, but it did not want me back for the Ph. D. program.  Of course, to finish that thesis, I had to spend considerable time in the Tulane Library.

            One day that summer of 1963 as I entered the library building (not the new library, but across from it is the old university library, now the J. Johnson Hall, that houses Special Collections), I noticed on a small table in the foyer, beside the main stairway, a stack of leaflets.  No one was around.  I saw the headline – “Hands Off Cuba!” and I took one.  It was distributed y the New Orleans branch of the FPCC.  I immediately assumed I knew who had left the flyers.  I walked up the stairs to the main desk, then walked behind it to the closed public area for the stacks and the carrels, where graduate students could work with the books they required.  Instead of trotting straight to my carrel, I stopped by that of philosophy grad student Harold Alderman.  I asked him as a raised the yellow flyer, “What are you putting out?”  Alderman had been a member of FPCC in another city, and we had both discussed how New Orleans could use such an organization.  “Let me see that,” he said.  He perused it, but clearly knew nothing about the leaflet or the New Orleans branch.  We were both curious.  There was no phone number listed on the leaflet, just a post office box (other leaflets did have an address, but I do not want to discuss that here).  Should we write?  We both joked that it might be the FBI setting a trap.  We decided to do nothing until we knew more about the organization through the grape vine.  I gave him my copy, and unbeknownst to me, he did do something about it.  He taped the leaflet to the door to his room in the dormitory.  It remained taped on his door until November 22.

            Monday November 25, 1963 was another work-day at school.  Same for Tuesday, November 26.  I returned from school to my parents’ home after work, and soon thereafter, there was a knock on the front door.  Two men in suits identified themselves as members of the FBI to both me and my mother.  As they wanted to speak with me, my mother withdrew to the kitchen.  I had been interviewed by the FBI in 1962, but that concerned the draft.  More pertinent was when I was interviewed in jail following my arrest in the first Woolworth’s sin-in.  Seven of us had been arrested; two of us whites.  Only the two whites were interviewed by the NOPD Red Squad.  We were questioned separately.  They wanted to know everything possible about the new CORE organization.  My objective was to yield as little information as possible.  How large was CORE?  How many members?  Other question directed about the organization.  I tried to be as evasive as possible.  I also refused to give any names.  They asked if I had read The Communist Manifesto.  I had.  Did I agree with it.  I thought the graduated income tax was a good idea.  The questioning was formal, and there was no violence or threat of violence by the police in that room.

            That was September 1960.  November 1963 was different.  I wanted to cooperate as much as possible without hurting anyone unnecessarily.  At that time, the only person I knew to have spoken with Oswald was Heller.  I gave his name and told what I had heard of their conversing on the street downtown.  I told of picking up the leaflet at the Tulane library from a table, but no one was there so I had and still have no idea who put the leaflets there.  I mentioned discussing the leaflet with a grad student.  I neither gave Alderman’s name, nor did I mention that we speculated that mailing to the p. o. box might have been an FBI ruse.

 About 15 minutes after the FBI men left, I received a telephone call from Alderman informing me that he had given the FBI my name, and they might come to see me.  (I had given Heller’s name, and the FBI went to interview him.  And thereafter, wherever Phil Good, another Tulanian saw me on campus, he would blurt “Fink” at me as I passed.  Well, I am glad I cooperated with the agency on this issue.  I think everyone should have done all possible to discover the truth.  And had I not cooperated, then how could I criticize the Warren Report?)

When the FBI knocked that afternoon, I answered the front door with my mother.  They identified themselves as we both stood by the door.  They interviewed me in the living room, while my mother went to the kitchen.  Soon after they left, my mother asked me, “Who were those men?”  I answered, “They were salesmen.”  Later, when my father returned from work and we were eating supper, my mother asked me, “Who were those men who came by today?”  Again I lied, “They were salesmen.”  The cost of swimming against the stream is not only paid by the individual, but by the families and all those close to that individual.  (When my mother died two years later, my father wondered if I should attend the funeral.  He thought some of her brothers might slug me.  Or as he rephrased it, “You killed your mother.”  Sadly, there is more truth in his charge than I dare admit.)

And it was still not over.  I think it was that very week in November 1963 that a small notice appeared in the local newspaper (I forget if I read it in the NO Times-Picayune or the States-Item).  The one paragraph story stated that David Ferrie had been arrested in connection with the assassination of President Kennedy.  What??  I clipped the small item and sent it to my former roommate, Oliver, who was then in Laos.

Oliver St. Pe and I were opposites in many ways.  His folks had come from the country, and I think his parents were more at home in French than English.  They were not rich, and lived in a burb quite a distance from the city.  Oliver as a child was mixing up two languages, so he basically became monolingual.  While I had been “a good boy,” with all the negatives that that includes, Oliver had been a hell-raiser, a semi juvenile delinquent, on the road to trouble.  But he changed, and attended Loyola University of the South, which is physically next to Tulane U.  But in the 1950s there was a chasm separating the Jesuit institution and its neighbor.  Oliver was two years older than I, but when we roomed together, I was already a graduate student in history at Tulane, and he was a senior in sociology at Loyola.  He was a staunch Roman Catholic, and though I had been christened as a baby as a Catholic, by high school I was a member of the First Unitarian Church in New Orleans.  While the students at Loyola were overwhelmingly Catholic, Tulane was about 1/3 Catholic (New Orleanians), 1/3 Protestants (mainly from the rest of the South), and 1/3 Jewish (from NO, the rest of the South, and New York).  There were also differences in curriculum.  The history of philosophy course I took at Tulane was 2 semesters – the first on the ancient philosophers, the second on the moderns.  A few lectures on the medieval philosophers were squeezed in too.  At Loyola, 4 semesters were required, 1 on the ancients, 2 semesters on medieval, 1 on the moderns.

I do not recall when I first met Oliver.  I suspect it was at a gathering of the ICIC, the Intercollegiate Council for Interracial Cooperation.  Under Father Fichter’s sociological umbrella, students from Loyola, Tulane, Dillard (Black Protestant), and Xavier (Black Catholic) could gather.  The ICIC I first learned of around 1958 or 59.  We would not have met at Tulane, because Tulane was all white.  The main purpose of groups like these was to get nice people of differing backgrounds and races together.  The main activity of the ICIC was a general mailing of a cartoon that had initially appeared in a Methodist periodical.  It showed three simply drawn characters – one guy, another sitting atop his shoulders and pounding him on the head, and a third who says, “Well, I can see both sides of it.”  For our mailing, we darkened the color of the victim, and sent it to many in New Orleans.  I probably met Oliver there, but really did not know him them.
I will be adding to this story.----Hugh Murray