Reflections on that Raid, Segregation, Oppression, in New Orleans by Hugh Murray
Although the Civil Rights Act had been passed in July 1964, I also knew that the raid on the Quorum Club was in part re race, so I figured it must have occurred before July 1964, but the article below makes it clear, the Fed. law was not going to change race law in New Orleans. I had never heard of the Quorum Club until the day after the raid, when all the names of the arrested were published beginning on p. 1 of the Times Picayune. The problem with the club - drugs, homosexuals, and race mixing. I knew only one of the arrested, showing how distant I was from the real NO bohemians. In summer 64 I got my first teaching job at a university, Dillard University, (a HBCU) teaching US and World History 5 days a week, 3 hours a day, but all the prep for first time teaching meant many hours to prepare for each class. But to defy the raiders, I was determined to go to that club the next weekend, probably Saturday night after some movie. I don't know whom I asked, but a young lady friend. I probably wore a suit jacket, which may have been out of place. No one spoke to us, and it was totally boring. I did go a few other times with a date, and same boring atmosphere. They may have thought I was working for the police, or not.
Strange, I knew one of those arrested, Chick Macinoni(spel). In summer of 1957 I was asked by a friend from high school, Ron Jacob who was also then also at Tulane, if I would join Delta Sigma Phi frat, and I said yes. That night I thought hard, and decided I was already going in a different direction from frats and "conformity." If I did join, I thought there would be problems down the line with my politics and attitudes. When they gave me the green light to pledge, I declined. I lost that high school friend, who had been among the Louisiana state chanp debaters (there were 4 of us). By contrast, I did not know Chick well at all but had met him s few times at the frat, and was most surprised some years later that a frat boy would be arrested in bohemia. Only in this article did I learn that Lanny Goldfinch was part of the Quorum Club, but he may have joined after the raid.
Despite his name, Lanny was not Jewish. He was from Tennessee, son of a Baptist missionary, and had lived at some point in Latin or South America. His Baptist connections may have led him to be interested in the integrated Quorum Club early, or after the raid. He was part of the anti-frat crowd, and an open integrationist on Tulane campus. He had informed me in summer of 1960 about the black boycott of the Dryades St stores, like A& P (once a very big super market chain). Both Lanny and I picketed there, we were the only whites to do so, with the Consumers League, some of whose members would become the first members of CORE when it moved to organize the Crescent City. Lanny and I were never that close, for our personalities were opposites. I was the quiet, shy type; he would raise issues to get people mad. On the other hand, I was in the first NO sit-in at Woolworths; he was at the 2nd at McCrory's. The reason - Tulane/Newcomb had a rule that any student arrested was suspended until proven innocent. We all knew, if arrested, the local courts would find us guilty, and we would not be found innocent until (mainly IF) the US Supreme Court ruled on our cases. So we would be kicked out of Tulane for several years, or forever. Despite that threat, I and an older grad student in sociology went ahead and with 5 blacks, were arrested. We soon became convicted felons., Lanny did not. Within a week of our arrests at the first sit-in, Tulane changed its policy. deeming these political crimes, ignoring the suspensions and then many more TU/Newcomb students joined CORE.
In November 1960 Lanny became active in another area - the courts finally ruled that schools in NO had to integrate. The authorities chose two elementary schools in poor neighborhoods near a parish border with St. Bernard, headed by staunch segregationist Leander Perez (Dem.) I think 4 black girls were chosen for the 2 schools, almost all the white children withdrew (some going to school in St. Bernard instead), and white mothers surrounded the integrated schools to taunt the blacks AND any why child who broke the boycott. Goldfinch was one of the few who went to the area to confront the segregationist moms.
About a decade ago I was at the Tulane Special Collection (Louisiana Div) where my papers are located. I was checking something on one of my NO trips. I chatted with a new librarian, someone who had been working at the UNO, about the JFK murder. He said he had encountered Oswald at the Ryder Club on Rampart St. When he told me this, I had never heard of that club, or how to spell it. He also had the impression that Oswald was gay. There was nothing in particular or overt, just a general impression. I had some suspicions about Oswald being gay, and put it in print in a gay newspaper in NYC in the 1980s. I did not say he was, but he had been to a gay bar in Japan, and might be. However, in the 1990s I telephoned Ruth Anne Kloepfer, who with her mom and sister had driven over to the home of the Oswald's on Magazine St. in NO in the fall of 1963 to help Marina. They were active in the tiny NO Quaker group, and a Texas Quakeress who had helped the Oswalds, had called the Kloepfers to see if the young mother might need help. In the 1990s, I called Ruth Anne (NOT the mother, Ruth) to ask about that meeting. I was shocked by her response. This was some 30 years after their visit. I guess a pent-up anger came out. We had gone to help Marina and her child (am unsure if she was then pregnant or already had child #2), and Oswald came on to me! She seemed to yell into the phone. His wife (in the other room?) and ...She gave me no details, but she was a very attractive young blond, and I am sure many guys came on to her. She was furious, decades later. I began to think - Oswald not so gay. I think it was after I returned to the US from Asia, so after 2008, I wanted more details on that incident. I tried to call Ruth Anne, but she had died the month prior. I called her sister, and something went wrong with our conversation. "My sister is not that kind of girl!" I didn't say Ruth had come on to Oswald. Karol denied anything like that happened. I called Bob Bullard, who was a good friend of Ruth when they were both at Tulane, and he simply thought maybe Karol was just jealous. Or maybe she was still upset by the recent death of her sister.
Unmentioned in the Quorum Club article is that there had been an anti-vice effort about that time in NO. Around 1962 the Democratic Party primary determined who was elected, for the South was a 1-party land (except now and then the GOP might win in a Presidential campaign and get the state's electoral votes. The one and only Republican Mayor of New Orleans served in the early 1870s. In the DA's race, the incumbent Dowling lost to a young former FBI guy Jim Garrison. His first crusade was against vice, especially in the French Quarter. Pictures out side the bars of skimpily clad strippers now had to be covered. Solved by covering them with dresses of hanging glass beads, and to see under the dress, use your hand to move the beads aside and see the near naked body beneath. I do not know if Garrison went after all the girls out ot cheat tourists, or if he let Marcello's girls alone (he was the Mafia boss). But Garrison did go after single men walking near the gay bars usually at the farther end of the Quarter, nearer Esplanade and away from Canal. Interestingly, prejudice can be used both ways. When Garrison went after alleged CIA business man, and head of the International Trade Mart when it built its new structure still at the foot of Canal and the Mississippi, Clay Shaw. When discussion the Garrison case with a friend, Annette, she said, "How could he be involved in something like the assassination? He's a homosexual." Though I was no fan of Garrison during the first years of his term, by investigating the Kennedy assassination and Oswald in New Orleans, Garrison did what almost no other elected official dared to do - take on the government conspiracy that resulted in the murder of Pres. Kennedy. Fighting for real info with CIA plants inside his office, and obstruction elsewhere, it is amazing what Garrison did uncover. I am proud to have sat in the court room for some of the trial against Shaw.
The Quorum makes no mention of another raid in the French Quarter, one during the first modern civil rights movement in the South. In 1949 fewer than 100 were arrested in a party thrown by the Henry Wallace Progressive Party, and it, like the PP, was integrated. Illegal in Louisiana. All arrested. The Progressive Party civil rights movement would have names that would be better known later, but it is never mentioned in history (most historians are Democrats). The civil rights movement of the Progressives was destroyed by Harry Truman and the Democrats, with some help by the NAACP. if it is not approved by the Democrats, it did not exist.
A link to the Quorum Club article
No comments:
Post a Comment