A symbol of Modern White Supremacy: Shreveport's confederate Statues
There is a problem that activist are overlooking in respect to Shreveport's confederate monuments. They being a problem to begin with. It shows who really has power in this City.
The confederate statue downtown has been the center of agitation in Shreveport last summer, May 2020. It was put there in 1907 by the Daughters of the Confederacy during the “First Period of the Cult of the Lost Cause”, the period almost immediately after reconstruction. The statue itself sits in the political and literal center of Shreveport in front of the Caddo Parish Court House, near the government plaza and near the largest library in Shreveport, the downtown Shreve Memorial Library. The statue is surrounded by the financial institutions that dominate Shreveport’s economy. It sees a lot of traffic as many highways, both state and federal, intersect there, giving it a constant audience. The statue dominates downtown in the perfect location. It is the physical manifestation of a long history, and living iteration, of white supremacy in the Shreveport area. The statue's primary message, the celebration of those who fought to keep Africans in chains, is just one of its problems. Its existence is more important than the message, which is that white Shreveport, specifically white sensibilities, rule Shreveport. It’s is an understanding that white Shreveport dominates the politics, the academics and economy of black Shreveport. The statue shows that black Shreveport is subjugated to the ideas and politics of a white minority and does not have the intellectual, political nor economic independence necessary to push for our interests. This statue is a blatant flaunting of the internal colonial conditions that we African find ourselves in.
How is it that we are so helpless to the point of insult? That this affront can still stand without serious consequences? To answer this question, we need to do some historical and material analysis.
Shreveport is a fifty seven percent black and thirty eight percent white city, while Caddo Parish is forty eight percent black and forty five percent white. Medium individual income is twenty-two thousand while household income is thirty-nine thousand, both of which well below the national average of thirty-five thousand and sixty-eight thousand (for 2019 and 2018 respectively). The black poverty rate is thirty three percent in Caddo parish compared to the white poverty rate of twelve percent. In terms of education, the African population has a critical lacking of higher education. Only fourteen percent of the African population has a bachelor’s degree or higher in Caddo parish, compared to thirty percent of whites. Double the number of Africans do not have a high school diploma compared to nine percent of white. This number highlights a clear problem on its own but it does not even consider quality disparities. The lowest preforming schools in Shreveport are predominantly African, these schools being Woodlawn (98 percent black) and Southwood (being 74 percent black) while the highest performing schools are Caddo Magnet (18 percent Black) and C.E Byrd being (54 percent Black). All of this is to say that there is both a large qualitative and quantitative disparity in education within Caddo Parish. The lack of education and material wealth are due to the inability of the African population to project power. We cannot, as Karl Marx states, become a class for itself. There are historical reasons conditions are poor and continue to deteriorate, there is a reason why we cannot project power for even the most basic of provisions, like the removal of the provocation that dominates downtown. It is a very bloody and destructive history that needs understanding.
The black population of this country has historically been able to gain power and fight for our interests, but these attempts are met with bloody retaliation. This is ever apparent in Louisiana and even more apparent in Caddo parish, also known as “Bloody Caddo,” during reconstruction. W.E.B Dubois provides a vivid look into the terrorism in Louisiana and Caddo Parish that Africans faced during reconstruction, a time when Africans held the closest to institutional power in the South. Dubois also gives insight into the conditions that lead black political power in Black Reconstruction: “Yet one wonders what was expected. Since the great majority of the white people of the state (Carolina) had been kept in ignorance and poverty, and practically all the Negroes were slaves, whose education was a penal offense, one would hardly expect universal suffrage to put rich men (plantation oligarchy) in the legislator. It was singularly to the credit of these voters that poverty was represented so well; it showed certain tendencies of a dictatorship of the proletariat”. Of course, this was simultaneous with federal military backing of new black citizens and a disenfranchised, poverty-stricken plantation oligarchy (suffering economic losses in the wake of emancipation and war). It was under this dictatorship in Carolina and in other southern states like Louisiana and Mississippi that the first public schools where open and more equally funded. Dueling was outlawed, women's right where enhanced, property qualifications for voting where, in some states, done away with. The south was dragged from a backward-feudal slave society into some semblance of a modern one. It can be said that “the proportion of Negros was so large (in Louisiana, Mississippi and South Carolina), there leaders of sufficient power, and the federal control so effective, that for the years 1868-1874 the will of the black labor was powerful; insofar it was intelligently led, and had definitive goals, it took steps toward public education, confiscation of large incomes, betterment of labor conditions, universal suffrage and, in some cases, distribution of land to the peasants”.
To summarize, the black working class, as so much it was in power, fought for policies that where in its collective interest. This, of course, wouldn’t last forever. These revolutionary efforts were undermined by a wave of reactionary terrorism during reconstruction and during the period of revisionism dubbed the initial “Cult of the lost cause”. This time period was the one in which downtown Shreveport’s ‘victorious’ statue was placed.
Anti-Black retaliation during Reconstruction was swift and bloody. The Black codes were passed, and African people were forced back into slavery with the rise to convict leasing and chain gangs, a system not so different from our current incarceration state. The death rate in some mines, in which prisoners where leased out to, reached 40 percent according to Douglas A. Blackmon in “Slavery by Another Name”. In Caddo a wave of lynching and death swept the parish in renewed efforts to uphold white supremacy. Dubois captures this in “Black Reconstruction”, telling of an account from a United States Army officer stationed there: “A United States Army officer on duty in this place (Shreveport) saw two or three men shot down in the streets, in front of a store he sat. He picked up the bodies of eight men who had been killed in one night. Never had he heard of anyone being punished for murder in that county”. A similar but even more harrowing account is recorded of Bossier, “One hundred and twenty corpses were found in the woods or were taken out of Red River after a ‘Negro Hunt’ in Bossier Parish. This was largely taken up by the “innocent”, a Sicilian death squad that hunted Africans in the streets, broke into homes and “shot them like rabbits as they ran”.
Of course, this genocide and white terrorism was not specific to these areas; the Colfax massacre of 1873, in which Africans were butchered with a “blood-thirstiness and barbarity is hardly to surpassed by any acts of savage warfare”, killed some 150 people. This is the level of violence that displaced Africans from power and forced us into a virtually permanent underclass maintained by a system of terror and disenfranchisement.
Of course, there where periods where black political power was reasserted, with the Civil Rights movement and the following Black Power movement. These gains were ultimately destroyed with the War on Drugs and mass incarceration along with COINTELPRO, the mass killing of Black leaders and the infiltration of our organizations. It has been admitted outright by Nixon staffers, “You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities,” Ehrlichman said. “We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.” (John Ehrlichman 1994).
Large swaths of the black electorate where barred from voting due to simple drug possession and forced into the underground-economy. Louisiana’s incarceration rate is one thousand fifty-two per hundred thousand; this is counting federal prisons, jails, state prisons and pretrial detention. Being a system largely designed to attack Africans, disparities exist of course. The African incarceration rate is two thousand seven hundred forty-nine per one hundred thousand while the white incarceration rate is six hundred eighty-five per hundred thousand in Louisiana as of 2018. Africans in prisons cannot vote, Africans with felony convictions are barred from much employment and are thus forced into the illegal economy. It was recently that trends in incarceration has shown a decrease while more states have overturn Richardson vs. Ramirez but why is it that incarceration remains high? Why is it that there is not an organized push-back against mass incarceration from every black political official? Why is it that material conditions have gotten arguably worse since the 1960’s yet a Black political class continues to become more visual? This is because the African working class, which is most of the black population in Shreveport, Caddo, Louisiana, and the United States, does not have political power. There continues to be the domination of Africans by the white population, by the white power structure, insofar as that we are unable to develop an effective political base to push our interests. We have not developed a black political party, unlike every other organized “minority” the world over. We continue to allow our politicians to be subservient to capital, specifically white capital, and white interests. Just look at the Kongressional Koon Kaucus (congressional black caucus) and their support for Joe Biden’s 1994 Omnibus Crime bill. Look at our Mayor and his refusal to even fight against the confederate statue nor for black Shreveport. No black councilperson nor any black official has done remotely what is needed to fight for the interest of the black population. There is no developed black intellectual class in this state, let alone in this parish that is actively teaching black history and offering an analysis.
Instead, several streams of propaganda float the idea that Black disenfranchisement is a consequence of individual character deficiency. Black people are baptized into the idea that our generational terror is over while the state, the media and the capitalist continue to terrorize us in increasingly insidious ways. Through incarceration, school militerization and economic sacking. Therefore, conditions persist as they are. We are not a people for ourselves as we were during the early-to mid-phases of reconstruction. Impoverished, underhanded and disconnected we are unable to remove an insult situated in the heart of our city. We continue to allow the white population to have supremacy over us.
Sources:
https://datausa.io/profile/geo/shreveport-la/
https://www.towncharts.com/Louisiana/Education/Caddo-Parish-LA-Education-data.html4
https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/caddoparishlouisiana
https://www.publicschoolreview.com/c-e-byrd-high-school-profile
https://www.schooldigger.com/go/LA/schools/0030001551/school.aspx
https://www.schooldigger.com/go/LA/schools/0030000197/school.aspx
https://www.prisonpolicy.org/profiles/LA.html
B., DU BOIS W E. W.E.B. DU BOIS: Black Reconstruction. LIBRARY OF AMERICA, 2021.