In a previous post, I discussed attending Boys State in Louisiana when I was 16 years old in summer 1955. Let me clarify. I attended Pelican Boys State. In Louisiana there was another boys state - Bayou Boys State for black teens. Pelican (whites) began in 1940; Bayou, also conducted by the American Legion, began in 1949. They had to be segregated or the Legion would have violated Louisiana race laws. I suspect this was true throughout the South, even when the Boys State Governor in Arkansas got to shake the hand of Pres. Kennedy in the early 1960s.
The objective of the Boys States was to encourage civic participation, knowledge of government, etc. Yet, there was a certain contradiction when considering the black conclaves. For example, in Louisiana, I think there were whole parishes (counties) where no blacks were on the voting rolls. Indeed, in 1960, when I first registered to vote, I had reached 21, the required voting age, and hoped to vote for JFK. I also passed the test so I could enroll - I was able to give my age. One was required to write your age in years, months, and days, and if wrong you had to try again at a later date. Think it's easy? Find your age now! My cousin Merle had graduated from university and got her photo in the local newspaper, when she failed the test. The Democratic Party which dominated all the southern states had little interest in expanding the vote. The last Republican mayor of New Orleans was in the late 1860s or early 1870s, and they probably had as much power as the foreign occupation rifles could shoot. The foreign power was the Yanks. The South in 1865 was somewhat like Eastern Europe in 1945. And after some outrageous murders of blacks and white Republicans in New Orleans and Memphis, it seemed as if the North would prepare a Reconstruction in the South akin to Stalin's in Eastern Europe.
Because the national law had counted slaves as only 3/5ths of a person, with abolition, blacks were now counted the same as whites, so in the House of Representatives, the South would gain more seats, even though it lost the war. When Georgia elected to Congress the former Vice President of the CSA, there was outrage in the USA north, and demands for Radical Reconstruction, as did occur in Eastern Europe. But the North was not as determined as Stalin. When whites complained that many elected blacks were too ignorant to enact good laws, they did not mention that under slavery it was a crime to teach a slave to read and write. As in 1940s Poland and Ukraine, there were battles, minor civil wars between the radical new regime, and the defeated Johnny Rebs in the south and anti-Coms in Europe, against the Radical new orders.
by Hugh Murray, More to Come
