61

New Orleans, Louisiana

April 11th, 1935

"Me and the Devil was walking side by side,

Me and the Devil was walking side by side,

I'm gonna beat my woman until I get satisfied."

Robert Johnson, "Me and the Devil Blues"

You must have been naive. You had no idea organizing a guest lecture could lead to this.

Dr. Cleopatra Stone sits next to you, in the passenger seat of your dark blue Chevrolet AD Universal. She is looking out at the scene through the windshield with cold, hard fury. You're parked up on the curb on St. Charles Avenue in front of the Gothic monstrosity of Gibson Hall, where tonight's event will take place. And the semicircle of grass in front of the hall is bustling.

About a hundred protesters mill about on the lawn, some holding flaming torches aloft; a few wear tall, pointed white hoods, and others clutch signs saying Keep Louisiana Segregated, Pure Americanism, America First, Jews Will Not Replace Us, and other such delightful slogans of the far right. A thin crescent of nervous police officers try to keep the protesters corralled on the grass and away from the tweed-clad academics and grad students who scurry anxiously past, heading up into the building.

The crowd hasn't spotted you yet; most of the people here have their backs to you. They are listening intently to an orator standing on a soapbox, addressing the assembly in a booming, theatrical voice. The man is middle-aged, his tufty gray hair framing his bald dome. He is very overweight, squeezed into a sweat-stained white suit with a too-tight red bow tie digging deeply into his corpulent neck. He mops his sopping brow incessantly with a delicate, lace-fringed handkerchief as he addresses his adoring public.

"The universities of the state of Louisiana are held accountable to the same laws as the rest of us," he is saying, gesticulating wildly with his hands as he speaks. "And in this great state, we live in a rational and necessary condition of segregation. The white man and the Negro are educated separately, in separate institutions, as it should be. In this city, the white scholar attends Tulane, while his black counterpart attends Xavier or Dillard. And so everybody is reminded of their place in our society, and we keep our community free from the chaos of miscegenation. But now a Xavier scholar is coming to speak at Tulane.

"This is a flagrant violation, ladies and gentlemen, a flagrant violation of the spirit, if not the letter, of our laws, of our system, and of our heritage. And we are here today, in unity and strength, to say that no, the good folks of Louisiana do not support this, we do not want it, and we will not stand for it! This event shames this fine institution, and it ought to shame tonight's speaker, Cleopatra Stone, and the bleeding-heart anti-American liberal elitist responsible for it, Dr. Namen Oberhelm Spillane."

Next