Bogalusa and the Banality of Evil
Matthew Crowe, “Bogalusa and the Banality of Evil,” The Vital Center 1, no. 1 (Fall 2023): 59–63.
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Just as Arendt observed that Nazis like Eichman were motivated by the banal rather than phenomenal, it appears that those who fought to preserve segregation in Bogalusa were also not especially ideological.
My paternal family can trace its roots to Washington Parish, Louisiana, dating as far back as the 1820s, shortly after the Louisiana Purchase. The county seat and only major settlement of Washington Parish is Bogalusa, named after the Choctaw word for “dark water.” Bogalusa provides a powerful yet challenging lesson to adherents of the liberal tradition, especially those who identify deeply with the idea of localism and subsidiarity. Bogalusa’s history of segregation and White supremacy, however, and the violence and terrorism used to maintain these systems, provides a window into how societies devolve to accept as an everyday facet of life what I will call “banal evil.” For indeed, the ease with which evil unfolded with a relatively slight push and series of threats from the federal government is simply astounding and difficult to square with some elements of the liberal tradition.
Bogalusa was founded in 1914 as a company town for the Great Southern Lumber Company. The town grew up as a virtual dictatorship under William H. Sullivan, who was also the manager for Great Southern Sawmill. Sullivan, a northern transplant, explicitly portrayed himself in the paternalistic tradition of the southern gentlemen hosting elaborate ceremonies and events for ordinary workers, creating racially segregated parks and places of recreation, and holding racially segregated competitions for the beautification of homes and streets. Deep racism permeated Bogalusa from the beginning, with Great Southern only hiring Black workers for the lowest-paid jobs and only allowing them to work as subcontractors for White contractors. A history of the town written in 1950 takes great pride in “six fine new grammar schools, accommodating 2200 white pupils and having 52 white teachers” and at no point even mentions if there was a school for Black pupils.
As early as 1919, tensions in Bogalusa over race and corporate control erupted when sawmill workers attempted to unionize. Tensions increased after a Black veteran and union man, Lucius McCarthy, was lynched by a White mob who proceeded to shoot his body with bullets over one thousand times. To the terror of Great Southern, several White union men rallied behind the leadership of Black organizer Sol Dacus, who marched into town protected by several (armed) White union men after a warrant for his arrest was issued. In what one historian has called “the most dramatic display of interracial labor solidarity in the Deep South in the first half of the twentieth century,” the White strikers provided cover from a mob attack, and four of them died while Dacus escaped.
By 1964, Bogalusa, which was approximately 35 to 40 percent Black, was known as “Klantown USA” because it had one of the largest populations of White male adults who were members of the Ku Klux Klan. After the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, not a single business in Bogalusa integrated, due to threats and intimidation from the Klan. In early 1965, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) began direct organizing after the failure of talks over integration between Crown Zellerbach (which had acquired the sawmill and turned it into a paper mill), Mayor Jesse Cutrer, and the Black leaders. Crown Zellerbach reluctantly integrated the paper mill on orders from headquarters in San Francisco. The city attorney was a known Klansman, and the police chief was a known sympathizer. Over five hundred employees had been laid off at the paper mill by 1965 due to increased mechanization, creating a large mass of angry unemployed citizens.
Two White CORE organizers, Bill Yates and Steve Miller, began to mobilize Black youth in Bogalusa in January 1965. Black chapters of labor unions, which were required to be racially segregated by Louisiana law, provided a physical space to organize in the union hall and played a vital role in organizing local Black workers. On February 3rd, a mob of Klansmen attempted to lynch Yates and Miller, who were staying at the home of Black organizer Robert Hicks. Fifteen armed Black men appeared to defend the house after police refused to intervene, and the Klansmen retreated. The Klan began a campaign of intimidation and cross-burnings in the front yards of Black organizers, known White sympathizers, and Jewish residents of the town. Every single business that had begun to integrate in January reversed course.
National media outlets then began to cover Bogalusa as “Klantown USA.” A CBS report noted that “The Mayor and the police seem to feel that the way to avoid violence and maintain law and order is for the Negro citizens not to seek to exercise their constitutional rights.” On February 21, a chapter of the Deacons for Defense & Justice was created in Bogalusa after Yates reached out to their Jonesboro chapter. The Deacons had in their fundamental mission to fight back against the Klan’s terrorism—with lethal self-defense if necessary. Mayor Cutrer banned all pickets and demonstrations as an excuse to arrest pro-civil rights protestors. By April, there were gun battles between the Klan and the Deacons. In April, five hundred mostly Black protestors marched to city hall and were savagely beaten by the Klansmen while the police looked on; many White doctors refused to treat Black victims because they were afraid of retaliation. A group of Berkeley students volunteering with CORE over spring break described the Police presence during the march:
“Protected us? They terrorize us!” They explain to him that the police yell insults and hurl as much obscene language at picketers as the hecklers; they feel free to swing their billy clubs at youthful picketers; and it pleases them to stand by and laugh while rocks, lighted cigarettes, insecticide, and snakes are thrown into the picket lines and marches. An effort was made to get badge numbers of these police officers; however, the effort was frustrated when both State Troopers and City Police began covering their badges with metallic tape to hide the numbers.
While protest and violence consumed Bogalusa, Washington Parish Sheriff Dorman Crowe, under heavy pressure, agreed to hire the parish’s first Black deputies O’Neil Moore and David “Creed” Rogers. Moore was shot while on patrol on June 2nd. Ray McEleveen, a local Klansman was arrested but never brought to trial. Decades later the FBI concludes it was a targeted hit by the Klan. The state ruled Moore’s widow ineligible for a pension on a technicality.
Shortly after the aftermath of the march in April, Mayor Cutrer agreed to technically integrate local parks. A group of Klansmen attacked the first Black children with clubs and leather belts found at a newly integrated playground. When the police arrived, they set dogs on a Black teenager, who was injured. The mayor then ordered all parks closed until further notice. Throughout June and July “Bloody Bogalusa” saw constant violence. President Johnson was briefed on events in Bogalusa and deployed one hundred FBI agents to the town. The DOJ began to pursue charges against local businesses for violation of civil rights. A federal judge found the chief of police and commissioner of public safety in contempt of court, and 35 Klansmen were ordered to stand down from violence by federal courts. Almost overnight, the Klan ceased its campaign of terror, and the town began to integrate. My father was in first grade in 1966 as the first in his family to attend an integrated school. Robert Hicks recalls how sudden the events were: “Overnight, Washington crushed the White supremacist coup in Bogalusa and forced local authorities to uphold the law. In retrospect, what is remarkable was how little was required to destroy the Klan and force local authorities to protect citizens’ rights and liberties. The federal government did nothing more than threaten city officials with modest fines and light jail sentences.”
“The era of the civil rights movement in the Deep South is almost more like the Troubles in Northern Ireland in terms of violence, paramilitary activity, and terrorism than the more peaceful perception most Americans today have of this period.”
The Klan never fully left Bogalusa. In 1976, the mayor insisted on attending the opening ceremony of a new physical chapter for the Klan, which included a cross-burning. In 2008, a mentally ill twenty-year-old woman was killed in what appeared to be a Klan hazing ritual. Due to changes in the global economy and the downsizing of the papermill, Bogalusa entered a period of rapid demographic decline starting in the 1970s. From a height of around twenty-one thousand in 1960, the town today has only around ten thousand residents.
A few general considerations stand out to me. First, Bogalusa is an interesting case study of the history of a southern town in the era of Jim Crow. Both the extent of White supremacist violence and the extent of real interracial collaboration for a more just future stand out. I also think the history of Bogalusa shows the extent to which popular perceptions of segregation and the civil rights movement have been whitewashed. Today’s portrayal of both does not account for the level of overt and usually state-backed violence and terror used to enforce and maintain segregation in the South. In many ways, the era of the civil rights movement in the Deep South is almost more like the Troubles in Northern Ireland in terms of violence, paramilitary activity, and terrorism than the more peaceful perception most Americans today have of this period.
Second, worth mentioning are the dangers of corporate control and the importance of allowing voluntary associations for labor and other causes. Bogalusa has always been economically dominated by a single firm and then declined with that firm. More importantly, the over-dominating influence of a single employer hampered the individual liberties of all citizens and helped create an atmosphere of racial hatred that was rare even in the segregated south. The ability to unionize after the New Deal, with Louisiana being far more friendly to labor than most of the rest of the Jim Crow South, created a vital social structure for Black citizens to organize for their broader political and social rights. Although many right liberals are skeptical of organized labor writ large, its ability to often create positive and deeply needed reform at various periods is a phenomenon worthy of reflection. Indeed, the ability to engage in voluntary organization generally is vital to creating a society in which progress can be pursued.
Third, the need for intervention by higher or even the highest authority in the land stands out. As Robert Hicks noted, the Federal Government was able to do with very little effort what a great amount of the blood, sweat, and tears of activists and the decent people of Bogalusa had failed to do. Proponents of the liberal tradition are rightly often skeptical of centralized power and authority, but I think the lesson of both Bogalusa and Jim Crow more broadly is that we should not accept devolution on the most fundamental questions of individual liberty or human dignity.
Finally, and most profoundly in my opinion, the ease with which the forces of evil unfolded is another demonstration of the banality of evil observed by Hannah Arendt. Arendt coined the term “the banality of evil” while in Jerusalem for the trial of Adolf Eichmann, a primary organizer of the Holocaust. Arendt observed that to Eichmann, his profoundly evil actions were justified and muddled in an endless soup of jargon and cliché. In the end she concluded that Eichmann was no fanatic or sociopath but rather motivated by surprisingly banal reasons of seeking promotion and personal success. The Klansmen were willing to beat up children on a playground with clubs and leather belts. They were willing to threaten doctors who treated an injured Black youth. That is when they had the protection of the local police and the de facto if not de jure support of the force of the law. Yet the instant it became clear they had lost the implicit support of legal authorities, they simply retreated and allowed integration. Just like Eichmann in Jerusalem, the forces motivating the evils of the Klan in Bogalusa seem surprisingly banal when the mere threats of a fine or imprisonment were enough to send them back into the shadows.
Just as Arendt observed that Nazis like Eichman were motivated by the banal rather than phenomenal, it appears that those who fought to preserve segregation in Bogalusa were also not especially ideological. Take for instance Altman Crowe, a local 26-year-old man who punched a Black protestor as part of mob attacking protesters during the events of “Bloody Bogalusa.” Deacon Henry Austan shot Crowe in self-defense. Crowe was taken to the hospital and upon recovery, and years later, he would note that he had no hard feelings towards Austan: “We are in a different day and time now than we were back then, and I don't think the same way I thought back then, so things are a lot different now.” What motivated Crowe, a married father of five children, to be willing to engage in violence one day and then years later see his own actions as simply a “product of the time”? Further investigation of the towns and characters of the Jim Crow South, as well as other societies that have fallen into patterns of “banal evil,” will hopefully help fortify the liberal tradition against these dangers.
