count, but I felt the conflict. Later I would learn that Florida led the country in lynchings and had a long history of whites torching black areas. I knew much less then, but I was still self-conscious when it came to my relationship with black people who served in white homes. I wanted warmth and attention, which I got from Bill and Lorraina, and hoped to keep that by signaling that I was their friend and, despite my preppy clothes, not on the way to becoming a white master.
The next morning I drove west toward the Gulf Coast and New Orleans. Alone, I started to feel apprehensive. I was in the Deep South, a young Jewish kid, driving a shiny new car with New York plates. Northern Jews weren’t exactly welcome down South, especially outside a few big cities. I could sense the hostility on those lonely roads, especially toward the likes of me with my curly black hair and my horn-rimmed glasses. I was hyperaware that I didn’t look like “them.” Whites down there were pretty sure the North was once again trying to impose its views on the South, but the first attempts at integration associated with the civil rights movement had not rippled out to the small towns I was driving through—gas stations still had their Whites Only signs on restrooms. Restaurants didn’t need any signs to let folks passing by know who was welcome and who was not. In fact it didn’t seem that signs were necessary anywhere. Looking in car windows in the towns I passed through, I saw only whites.
I remember wondering where the blacks were—where they lived, where they worked, and—more important to me—I wondered how Bill felt when he was down here. He had to be completely on edge if I felt the way I did. It was better when my father was in the car with me. “They” would be far less likely to hassle him. He seemed more like one of them. Alone, I kept the top up and drove carefully.
I stopped off in New Orleans, where a friend from Culver met me. I let him take the wheel of my snappy new car. Speeding through the center of town, we were stopped by the police. But my friend, who was related to former governor Huey Long, hardly blinked an eye. Like magic, the cops tipped their hats and let us go. It was quite different from the experience I would have a few months later at that integrated dance outside Fort Sam Houston, where I stupidly remarked on the size of a cop’s flashlight and he punched me in the face before dumping me in a paddy wagon and depositing me in the local lockup with an assortment of drunks and whoever else they picked up that night. With the traffic stop behind us, my Culver pal whisked me off to check out a nightclub featuring drag queens doing some crazy dance numbers. We listened to jazz on Bourbon Street, and we ate crabs on a pier on Lake Pontchartrain. That was New Orleans, my friend said. There was another New Orleans—the Ninth Ward and many other impoverished areas—but it was invisible to me.
Prior to Barbara telling me that I had to go down South sooner or later, these were my only experiences of that part of the world.
* * *
In 1964 Baton Rouge was under the thumb of a racial reactionary and a tough-talking backroom boss named Leander Perez. The local NAACP’s first target in its campaign to crack the policy of total segregation was the state capitol’s cafeteria. But the branch’s efforts had stalled under the watchful eyes and nightsticks of a thuggish ring of state troopers.
It was a time when public officials at all levels, from governor right down to local sheriffs, were in open defiance of the law of the land. The Supreme Court had ruled that the Constitution prohibited segregation in any public facility. The law was routinely being flouted. I was not going to Baton Rouge to push a new or complex legal theory. The legal precedent had already been set. Instead I was going there to show the Louisiana NAACP leadership that my boss, Robert Carter, had a growing legal staff that could help them.
Two black men dressed in business suits met me at the airport. They were officers from the local chapter of the NAACP. We shook hands and headed for the parking lot.