One hundred years after the battle at Milliken’s Bend, black veterans again found themselves fighting for basic rights of citizenship. We often think of the Civil Rights Movement as a youth-led movement. But in the case of Madison Parish, a small group of men in their 50s and 60s formed the core of the Madison Parish Voters League. Many of them were veterans of World War II, and undoubtedly this experience must have played a role in their decision to found the League in 1947, shortly after they had returned home.

Not until 1962 did they secure the right to vote for their people, and historian Adam Fairclough finds that Madison Parish “was a textbook example of how the civil rights struggle persisted at the local level.” For the longest time, the Voters League stood alone. Not even the NAACP had a chapter there, despite Madison Parish being majority black.

A couple of years after the victory of the vote, members of CORE (Congress of Racial Equality) came to Tallulah to protest segregation, in conjunction with the Voters League. Cafes and restaurants, grocery stores, retailers, schools and school buses were met with sit-ins, boycotts, and other types of formal and informal protests.  Some shops closed their doors; others, like the local A&P, fiercely endured the boycott, only conceding after several months. The spirit of protest and activism spread throughout the black community – sixteen ministers signed on to support the movement by offering their churches as meeting spaces.

But the white power structure was fighting for its very life. A number of black leaders had their homes and businesses burned. Worried about the increasing voter registration among blacks, the white elections clerk managed to gather over 500 absentee ballots for a suddenly-popular white write-in candidate for school board. When a judge ordered that a new election be held, the sheriff conveniently discovered that nearly 500 blacks had felony records, and he provided this list to the registrar, so that these individuals could be dropped from the rolls, giving a similar result.

Yet another incredulous machination on the part of the registrar occurred in 1967, when long-time black activist Zelma Wyche sought the post of town marshal. Wyche encouraged his supporters to vote the straight Democratic ticket, something they could do by pulling a single lever on the machine. On the morning of the election, however, Wyche discovered that a separate lever had to be selected in the marshal’s race. Voting the straight ticket would mean that no vote was recorded for marshal. The white candidate for the office won handily. Again, Judge Ben C. Dawkins ordered a new election. Wyche won. But local white authorities were still defiant, and refused to seat Wyche. He had to file yet another lawsuit before he could perform the duties he had been elected to serve.

Today, many of us are familiar with the larger stories of the Civil Rights Movement at Selma, Birmingham, Nashville and Greensboro. But we often lose the stories of countless truly unsung heroes who risked life, family, occupation and property to fight for their rights as American citizens in our own local communities. Madison Parish today remains a predominently rural, agricultural area, with a small population. But heroes walked here, too, and fought as valiantly in 1963 as they did in 1863.

Source: Adam Fairclough, Race and Democracy: The Civil Rights Struggle in Louisiana, 1915-1972 (Athens, GA: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1995; second ed. 2008) pp. 394-398.