In Louisiana, African Americans Need Not Apply For Statewide Office
A far right Republican trump supporter has been elected governor of Louisiana, leaving the state with the dubious distinction of having the longest period of any state in the U.S. without an African American serving in an elected statewide position.
The last African American elected to such a post in the Pelican State was P.B.S. Pinchback, but that was during the reconstruction period of the Civil War, 250 years ago. After reconstruction, electoral freedom came to a screeching halt and it’s been downhill ever since for African Americans seeking statewide offices in a redder than red state with more than 3 million registered voters, including nearly 943,000 Black voters.
More than 1,500 African Americans were elected during the Reconstruction era (1865–1877) and in the years after Reconstruction before white supremacy, disenfranchisement, and the Democratic Party reasserted its vise grip over Southern states.
While Louisiana has stood its racist ground, last year, Maryland elected its first Black governor and its first Black attorney general. Massachusetts elected its first Black woman as attorney general. Connecticut chose its first Black woman to be secretary of state and as state treasurer, elected its first Black and out LGBTQ candidate
Democrat John Bel Edwards was Louisiana’s governor for eight years but state term limits forced him to retire. That brought on Republican Attorney General Jeff Landry who was on the executive committee of right wing, Rule of Law Defense Fund, an affiliate of the Republican Attorneys General Association, that issued robocalls for Trump supporters to attend the rally that precluded the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol by trump supporters.
No friend of African Americans, then-attorney general Landry blocked police reforms, supported bills to release the records of juvenile offenders in areas with the highest Black populations and has sued to roll back protections for minority communities living in Louisiana’s Cancer Alley and deny clemency to death row inmates.
Landry collected 52 percent of the votes, burying Shawn Wilson, the major Democratic opponent who came in second with 26 percent of the vote.
Landry has been attorney general of Louisiana since 2016 and previously served as a member of Congress from 2011 to 2013. With his victory in the governor’s race, Landry will take office on Jan. 1, 2024.
Landry is a former St. Martin Parish sheriff’s deputy and a former police officer in Parks, La. While running for attorney general in 2014, Landry was criticized after the primary election when he was endorsed by the losing Democratic candidate, Geri Broussard Baloney, owner of Baloney Funeral Home. After he assumed office, Landry named Baloney’s daughter, Quendi Baloney, to a position in the office’s fraud section at a salary of $53,000 a year. The appointment came despite Quendi Baloney’s criminal record which include 11 felony counts of credit card fraud and theft in 1999. She pleaded guilty to three counts and received a six-year, suspended prison sentence.
As attorney general, Landry opposed access to abortion, and argued in favor of Louisiana’s abortion ban which makes no exception for rape or incest or age. He recommended that anyone who disagrees with the policy should move to another state.
In 2021, Landry sued the federal government for requiring that health care workers be vaccinated against COVID-19. He also joined in a 2021 lawsuit aimed at overturning President Joe Biden’s victory and returning trump to the White House.
Landry was endorsed for governor by the Louisiana Republican Party, trump and Rep. Steve Scalise, R-La., who has consistently refused to accept trump’s 2020 defeat. Scalise was a speaker at a convention for the European-American Unity and Rights Organization (EURO), a group which was founded by David Duke ,a white supremacist and former grand wizard of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.
In 2018, Louisiana was ranked as the least healthy state in the country, with high levels of drug-related deaths. It also has had the highest homicide rate in the United States since at least the 1990s.
In 2015, Louisiana’s murder rate of 10.3 per 100,000 was the highest in the nation. Ranked according to corruption convictions per capita from 1998–2007, Louisiana is third in the nation, behind only Washington, D.C., and North Dakota, where the results were skewed because of its extremely small population.
By 1840, New Orleans had the biggest slave market in the United States, leading the city to become one of the wealthiest cities, and the third largest city, in the nation.
According to the 1860 census, 331,726 people were enslaved, nearly 47 percent of the state’s total population of 708,002. The state population in 1900 was 47 percent African American, for a total of 652,013 citizens.
By 1900, two years after the state adopted a new constitution, only 5,320 black voters were registered. Because of a system of organized disfranchisement, by 1910 there were only 730 black voters. Blacks were excluded from the political system and also unable to serve on juries.
Louisiana is the third-least educated state, as of 2023, behind Mississippi and West Virginia.
African Americans had a brief fling with freedom and elected offices in Louisiana and much of the south, with more than 1,500 African American officeholders serving during the period after the Civil War and until Reconstruction ended in 1877.
During Reconstruction, formerly enslaved people were granted citizenship and African-American men were granted the franchise to vote by the 14th and 15th Amendments. Almost immediately, freedmen registered overwhelmingly as Republicans,
But with the demise of Reconstruction, came a surge in deadly violent, white supremacy, a series of laws leading to disenfranchisement of African Americans and a reinvigorated Democratic Party.
It has been 150 years since Louisiana elected Pinckney Benton Stewart (PBS) Pinchback as governor. A publisher and Union Army officer, Pinchback was the 24th governor of Louisiana, serving from Dec. 9, 1872 to Jan. 13, 1873. He was the second African American after Oscar Dunn to serve as governor and lieutenant governor of a U.S. state.
Pinchback worked with other leading African Americans to challenge the segregation of Louisiana’s public transportation system, leading to the Supreme Court case of Plessy v. Ferguson. The landmark ruling noted that racial segregation laws did not violate the Constitution as long as the facilities for each race were equal in quality, a doctrine that came to be known as “separate but equal.”
After the start of the Civil War, in 1862, Pinchback moved to New Orleans, which had just been captured by the Union Army, and decided to fight on the side of the Union. After the war, Stewart and his family moved to New Orleans.
In 1867, Congress had passed the Reconstruction Act and Pinchback got involved in politics, first organizing the Fourth Ward Republican Club in New Orleans. In 1868 Pinchback was elected as a State Senator. Seven of 36 seats in the Senate were held by men of color. The House had 42 representatives of African-American descent, comprising half the seats. At the time, the populations of African Americans, including former free people of color, and whites in the state were nearly equal.
As Senate president pro tempore, in 1871, Pinchback succeeded to the position of acting lieutenant governor upon the death of Oscar Dunn, the first elected African-American lieutenant governor of a U.S. state.
In 1872, the legislature filed impeachment charges against incumbent Republican governor, Henry Clay Warmoth, over disputes over certifying returns of the disputed gubernatorial election. Pinchback rose to acting governor because of article 53 of the Louisiana Constitution of 1868, which held that the lieutenant governor would assume the duties of the governor “in case of impeachment of the Governor, his removal from office, death . . . resignation or absence from the state.”
To escape increasing racial oppression, Pinchback moved with his family to Washington, D.C. in 1892, where he died in 1921.
During the Reconstruction period, slavery was abolished, Confederate secession was annulled, and the 13th, 14th, and 15th Reconstruction Amendments were added to the Constitution to grant equal civil rights to the newly freed slaves. The laws failed to protect formerly enslaved people from Klan violence. The laws also offered reparations to former slave owners but not to formerly enslaved people.
Reconstruction came to a sudden end with the national Compromise of 1877. With the compromise, Rutherford B. Hayes won southern Democrat support and was elected president by one vote in the electoral college. His win came after he agreed that federal troops would no longer interfere in Southern politics. Southern states indicated that they would protect the lives of African Americans but the promise was largely not fulfilled.
In 1890 Mississippi’s Democratic legislature passed a new constitution which effectively disenfranchised and disarmed most African Americans by erecting barriers to firearms ownership and voter registration, by a method of poll taxes, subjective literacy tests, and more restrictive residency requirements. African Americans were effectively excluded from participating in the political system of the South until the late 1960s, when federal legislation passed, supporting and defending the constitutional right to vote.
Southern states did not quietly go along with the new politics brought on by Reconstruction. The Mississippi Plan of 1874 was developed by white Southern Democrats to overthrow the state’s Republican Party through organized threats of violence and suppression or purchase of the black vote. The success of the Mississippi Plan led to similar movements by white Democrats in South Carolina and other majority-black states.
The Mississippi Plan was part of an organized campaign of terror and violence used by the Democratic Party and Ku Klux Klan to disenfranchise African Americans in Mississippi, block them from holding office, end Reconstruction, and restore white supremacy.
In 1874 in Vicksburg, Miss., white armed patrols prevented blacks from voting. The emboldened Democratic party forced the county sheriff, Peter Crosby, an African American, to flee to the state capital. Over the next few days, armed white gangs lynched up to 300 blacks in the city and its vicinity, in what became known as the Vicksburg riots.
President Ulysses S. Grant sent a company of troops to Vicksburg in January 1875 to quell the violence and allow the sheriff’s safe return. The sheriff, however, was assassinated by his white deputy, A. Gilmer on June 7, 1875.
The N.Y. Times reported on June 8, 1875, that “Crosby, the negro sheriff, while in a saloon on Chestty Street drinking with A. Gilmer, a white man, who is Crosby’s Deputy Sheriff and Tax Collector, was shot under the left eye, the ball lodging in the back part of his head. Probing to the depth of four inches has failed to discover the ball. He has made affidavit against Gilmer, who is not yet arrested, but will give himself up in the morning. The affair seems shrouded in mystery. It is not yet known if the injuries are mortal, but it is supposed they are.”
Crosby survived but he never recovered and served the balance of his term through a representative white citizen. Gilmer, the deputy who shot Crosby, was never prosecuted.
Through 1900, 24 African Americans served in the Louisiana Senate during Reconstruction; more than 100 served in the Louisiana House of Representatives. In addition, six African American men held statewide offices in Louisiana, including the nation’s first African American acting governors.
A review of southern states showed that North Carolina had 198 African Americans who served in various elected offices until Reconstruction ended.
During Reconstruction, South Carolina was the only state where African Americans were a majority in the Legislature. There were a total of at 311 African Americans in all elected offices.
Virginia had 137 African Americans in elected office. In 2012, the Virginia Senate enacted Joint Resolution №89, recognizing that Reconstruction in Virginia lasted from 1869 to 1890 because of Jim Crow laws; federal Reconstruction ended in 1877.
In Alabama, between 1868 and 1878, more than 100 African Americans served in the Alabama Legislature. In Arkansas, between 1868 and 1893, 85 men noted as “colored” or “mulatto” were elected to the state legislature. After 1893, the next time an African American served as an Arkansas state legislator was in 1973.
In Florida, the Reconstruction period saw 134 African Americans chosen for elected office.
Mississippi was the only state that elected African American candidates to the U.S. Senate during the Reconstruction era; a total of 37 African Americans served in the Senate and 117 served in the House.
In California, Edward P. Duplex was elected mayor of Wheatland in 1888. In Colorado, three African Americans were elected to the legislature from 1881 to 1895.
In Georgia, 69 African Americans served in the state legislature or as delegates to the state’s constitutional convention between 1867 and 1872.
During the Reconstruction era, four African Americans won election to the Texas Senate and 32 to the Texas House of Representatives
In Oklahoma, there were 18 African Americans in elected office until Reconstruction was nullified. A half century later, in 1921, Tulsa, Okla., was the scene of one of the nation’s worst race riots as white supremacists killed hundred of residents and burned most of the African American section .
Only one African American served in the Tennessee Legislature during the 1870s, but more than a dozen followed in the 1880s as Republicans retook the governorship. They advocated for schools for African Americans, spoke against segregated public facilities, and advocated for voting rights protections.
In Illinois, six African Americans were elected to the state House of Representatives during Reconstruction.
Idaho had one African American who served as postmaster of Delta from 1890 to 1894. Kentucky also had one elected African America, also as postmaster. In Maryland, two African American postmasters were elected.
In Missouri, one African American served in elected office. That was James Milton Turner, consul general to Liberia from March 1, 1871 to May 7, 1877. Nebraska saw one elected African American, Matthew Oliver Ricketts, serving from 1893 to 1897.
Indiana, Kansas, Minnesota and West Virginia had no African American legislators until after the Reconstruction era.