Hidden history: Clarence A. Laws and civil rights in the Deep South

SHREVEPORT, La. ( KTAL/KMSS ) – Clarence Alvert Laws is among the many unsung forces for justice in Texas and Louisiana during the tumultuous civil rights era.

The most vocal figures of the Civil Rights movement are more widely known, but it’s important to recognize and appreciate the contributions and sacrifices of less-known activists. That’s how we tell the whole story of the movement.

Clarence Alvert Laws’s triumphant tale is one of many that the Caddo Parish Civil Rights Trail aims to tell.

This is his story.

Background information about Law

Born in Opelousas, Louisiana, Laws earned his Bachelor’s degree from Dillard University in 1932. After serving in World War II and the Korean War, Laws joined the New Orleans branch of the Urban League, and after that stint he became the field director of the NAACP’s Southwestern region. During that time, Laws became a central yet virtually uncovered civil figure within the Civil Rights Movement.

Laws was a prominent NAACP activist in Dallas, alongside later icons that include Thurgood Marshall during the wake of the Brown v. Board of Education ruling that school segregation was unconstitutional. Laws was the Southwestern regional director in Louisiana and Texas, respectively.

Laws was a central force in Little Rock, Arkansas, in the wake of the “Little Rock Nine” fervor. And into the 1960s Laws stayed consistent with his activism, working as the parade marshal for the March on Washington in 1963. He was also present for the Selma to Montgomery Marches in 1965.

Post-1965, Laws became the director of the civil rights department at the Dallas regional office of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) and the first black administrator of the Dallas Office.

While Laws is commonly known for his activism in the Lone Star State, his impact on New Orleans and Shreveport cannot go unrecognized.

An unsung man of the movement, Laws was a present and active force for some of the most pivotal moments for African Americans in this nation’s history. His time as field director and Southwestern regional director for the NAACP kept the movement in places like Shreveport, New Orleans, Dallas, and many other cities throughout the South afloat when hope for racial progress seemed little more than a fantasy.

Laws and Emmett Till

One of the moments when it was hard to keep hope afloat was connected to the brutal lynching of Emmett Till. At 14 years old, Till, a young, vibrant African American child, was murdered by Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam for whistling and making advances at Carolyn Bryant – advances she later admitted to lying about.

The gruesome murder captured the nation’s attention and spurred many African Americans to exhaust every resource available to prevent such a fate from happening to anyone else. Clarence Laws was one of thousands to answer the call to justice after Till’s murder.

At a memorial in Bogalusa, Louisiana, and later in Natchitoches, Louisiana, Laws left listeners and later readers with messages that set the tone for the future movement.

Laws vs. Rainach

Clarence Laws took his own advice and decided not to give in to the fear, and he stood his ground against some of the South’s most ardent segregationists. He went head-to-head with staunch segregationists such as William “Willie” Rainach, out of Claiborne Parish, then Bruce Bennett, out of Little Rock, Arkansas.

The mid-1950s was a stressful year for the NAACP, as a crusade across the American South began to purge the group from existence. And the anti-NAACP crusade was led in Homer, a small town in Claiborne Parish in Northern Louisiana, by the infamous Willie Rainach.

Laws heavily refuted Rainach’s use of Louisiana state funds to prevent school integration.

According to Baton Rouge’s News Leader, in July of 1955 the Louisiana State Board of Liquidation approved $100,000 at Rainach’s request. The funds went to Rainach’s Joint Legislative Committee on Segregation and were used to fight integration efforts.

The Louisiana NAACP and Laws decided to fight back against Rainach and the Joint Legislative Committee on Segregation.

“We of the NAACP Louisiana believe that the $100,000 granted by the Board of Liquidation of State Debt to aid parish boards to defy the Supreme Court decision to desegregate public schools is as unconstitutional as it is immoral,” declared Clarence Laws, Field Secretary of the NAACP. “We doubt that a state can use taxpayers’ money to break the law and to deny a segment of those same taxpayers their constitutional rights. In light of this clear declaration, it appears that the board of liquidation would be pursuing the wiser course by granting funds to implement the court decision rather than fight it,’ Laws asserted.

Laws helps form NAACP Branch in Claiborne Parish

In October of 1955, Laws oversaw the formation of an NAACP Branch in Claiborne Parish, Rainach’s hometown. The meeting to establish the chapter was held at the Center Springs Methodist Church and more than 300 people attended.

At the meeting in Claiborne Parish, Laws commented, “I know of no place in Louisiana where there is greater need for NAACP efforts than here. You all must be commended for this wonderful show of good faith in yourselves and democracy,”’

Laws speaks in Shreveport

In December 1955, Clarence Laws visited Shreveport, Louisiana to speak at the Branch’s annual election meeting. During the meeting, he spoke of African Americans collectively pooling resources in the battle for racial equality.

“In this fight, educators, laborers, businesses and professional people and others must pool their collective resources; they must forget about class and position and work toward the common goal of citizenship,” he said.

White Citizens Council strikes again

1956 brought its unique challenges outside of conventional Jim Crow segregation, as officials like Rainach and Leander Perez in South Louisiana, along with several other states in the American South, successfully banned the NAACP from operating. In a twist of irony, the ban came from an injunction from 1924 in Baton Rouge aimed at curbing Ku Klux Klan membership, now only enforced on the NAACP to require membership lists.

The sudden and clearly racist move by officials in Louisiana and other Southern States did not surprise Laws or anyone else in NAACP leadership. The revival of the law was actually the culmination of efforts by the White Citizen’s Council, an organization founded to maintain white supremacy and segregation at all costs. Segregationists knew that requiring the NAACP to turn membership lists over to the state would undoubtedly lead to harassment, violence, and firing of NAACP members from their jobs due to their involvement in the movement.

Laws and the Little Rock Nine

1957 presented Laws with a new, yet familiar, hurdle—school desegregation.

September 3, 1957, saw nine African American Students, Melba Pattillo, Ernest Green, Elizabeth Eckford, Minnijean Brown, Terrence Roberts, Carlotta Walls, Jefferson Thomas, Gloria Ray, and Thelma Mothershed. This group of brave souls is now known as “The Little Rock Nine,” and together they integrated Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas.

Here’s how it happened.

Governor Orval Faubus ordered the Arkansas National Guard to prevent Black students from entering the school when the U.S. government forced the issue of integration. Two days later, when the children returned to school, they were harassed by a mob.

After two weeks of the situation remaining at a fever pitch, President Eisenhower federalized the National Guard and sent in personnel from the U.S. Army’s 101st Airborne Division, also known as the “Screaming Eagles,” to escort the children into the school safely. The National Guard’s presence and incidents of overt racism were filmed and broadcast on national television.

The NAACP’s official newspaper, The Crisis, reported on the difficulty of integration in Little Rock.

“The NAACP in Arkansas played a prominent part throughout the Little Rock crisis. The president of the State Conference, Mrs. Daisy Bates, gave continued leadership to the students, parents, and the community.

Clarence Laws was already the NAACP field secretary, and he was assigned to the Little Rock area indefinitely to assist in handling public relations and other tasks.

Laws later delivered a powerful address, later known as “Nine Courageous Students,” at a Colorado State Conference meeting. The address was later published in The Crisis . In the article, Laws plead with listeners and readers. He asked them to put themselves in the perspective of the Little Rock Nine. Major political forces had become involved in the sitution, but Laws kept the perspective that these were children. He recognized that these children were simply attempting to attend one of the nation’s highest-ranked schools. He also understood that the children had to deal with an extraordinary amount of pressure. They had to intentionally choose to not retaliate against racism that was pointed toward them, while simultaneously maintaining high academic standards.

Laws’ connection to Ruby Bridges

Laws was also a pivotal point in a different school desegregation case, which he dubbed the “Second Battle of New Orleans” in a column he authored for The Crisis.

On November 14, 1960, four little girls (Leona Tate, Gail Etienne, Tessie Prevost, and Ruby Bridges) became the first children to integrate elementary schools in the American South.

They were only six years old.

Tate, Etienne, and Prevost attended McDonogh, while Bridges attended William-Frantz Elementary. At the time of Laws’s writing of the story for The Crisis , the parents of Tate, Etienne, and Prevost wanted to maintain their anonymity due to fears of receiving further death threats, so he focused on the story of Bridges.

Bridges was a cute little girl, and while reporting on Bridge’s well-being and progression in her new environment Laws represented the NAACP in supporting her.

“These little girls, fortunately, seem completely oblivious to the storm which their presence has set in motion,” he wrote. “This cannot be said of the parents who, in two cases in particular, have been the object of harassment, threats, and intimidation. The father of one of the children lost his job as a service station attendant the first week of school integration. The New Orleans branch of the NAACP not only came to his rescue, but assisted him in locating employment at a Negro owned and operated service station. Religious, labor, professional, and social groups also contributed to this man’s welfare during his brief unemployment.”

While the transition was undoubtedly arduous, with Bridges being escorted by four U.S. Marshalls every day in her first year for her protection from vitriolic mobs, Laws was still able to leave readers with hope. In his article, he mentioned some of the encouraging messages the families of the New Orleans Four received.

“Mrs. B . . . (Anonymous name), like the other three mothers, has been heartened by the flow of warm letters and telegrams which she has received from all over the country. Many of these letters are from white mothers who want to assure the Negro mothers that not all white people harbor ill will against Negroes. To the mothers of the little girls, a mother from Santa Rosa, California, wrote: “Tomorrow morning as these brave little girls start again to school their sisters out here in California will be cheering them on and praying for their hearts to be strong and their minds to be opened to the education ready for them within the school. We hope this will help, if only a little, to erase the impressions they may receive on their way.”’

Willie Rainach attacks Laws and the NAACP again

In 1959, Willie Rainach was behind a court order that restrained the NAACP from holding its state convention in Shreveport. The implications of blocking this convention altered the movement’s potential progress.

W.M. Shaw, general counsel for the Joint Legislative Committee of Louisiana, praised the court order and claimed that William Rainach had exposed a plan that included strong support from the NAACP in Shreveport.

The Shreveport Journal reported Shaw’s statement.

“The citizens of Shreveport should be congratulated for blocking the NAACP meeting. The attorney general’s office should also be congratulated for acting promptly after this illegal meeting was exposed by Sen. William Rainach and the Joint Legislative Committee.”

The meeting was called to lay plans to implement the public announcement by Daisy Bates that Shreveport would be the next target of the NAACP because it was “soft” on integration. “Daisy Bates is the notorious Little Rock Agitator whose previous public record was confined to files of the Monroe, La., Police Department. A guest speaker was one Clarence A. Laws.”

The negative press did not discourage Law’s zeal for Shreveport’s racial progress.

On September 16, 1963, there was a memorial march for the victims of the 16th Street Church Bombing in Birmingham, in which the Ku Klux Klan took the lives of four children. The following week, on September 22, Black ministers in Shreveport planned a memorial march and service.

The night before the memorial, Laws was arrested by Caddo Parish deputies for driving a car with a Texas License Plate with a Louisiana license plate. The authorities were well aware of Laws’s intention to speak at Little Union Baptist Church on the “General Condition of Shreveport.”

While this was a likely attempt by Caddo Parish deputies to deter Laws from speaking at Little Union, the dark plan did not work.

But the memorial march didn’t quite work, either.

Here’s what happened.

The march turned violent when police began attacking marchers with Billy clubs and tear-gassing marchers, eventually pulling Rev. Harry Blake from Little Union and beating him on the steps of the church.

After this saga, Alexandria’s The Town Talk reported Laws’ words when they wrote, “Clarence Laws of Dallas, regional director for the NAACP, said he would report the police action to the Justice Department.”

They also quoted Laws directly.

“Shreveport today in my view, is the most reactionary community in the United States,” said Laws “and we won’t rest until it is brought back into the union.”

The Daily World in Opelousas reported that in a return to Shreveport in 1965, Laws, in collaboration with NAACP Shreveport Branch leadership, called for Federal Examiners to visit Shreveport to assess discriminatory voter registration processes.

Laws’s investigation into the Caddo Parish Registrar concluded that only 115 people were being registered per day. That was a quarter of the rate of the Federal examiners in Ouachita Parish, only a few parishes away.

Discriminatory practices, including alleged “irrelevant” questions, led Laws to estimate that less than 33% of African Americans in the city of Shreveport would be registered to vote within the year.

Freedom Summer

The winds of change swept Clarence Laws from Shreveport, Louisiana, to Jackson, Mississippi during the “Freedom Summer” of 1964.

“Freedom Summer” of 1964 featured activism across the state in a massive, grassroots effort by African Americans that was meant to defeat all forms of racial oppression through the combined efforts of several Civil Rights organizations, including the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO).

When the disappearance of James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman, three Civil Rights workers in Neshoba County, Mississippi, caught the nation’s attention, Laws and other prominent NAACP leadership decided to visit to test local compliance with rights laws in public spaces

Laws in Dallas

The summer of 1964 was filled with a heavy travel schedule and even heavier responsibilities. While continuing his role as the NAACP’s Southwestern regional director, he began to head the Committee for Racial Harmony in Dallas, Texas. The committee addressed equal-opportunity employment, voter registration, integration of police departments, and school integration.

While this was pivotal in the movement’s success, it was not Laws’s first rodeo in Dallas. Five years previously, in 1959, Laws and Thurgood Marshall, then chief counsel for the NAACP, later the first black U.S. Supreme Court Justice, tackled the legal battle ordering desegregation in the city.

Laws built an astounding legacy in Dallas throughout his life after the movement. In 1965, he transitioned from his role in the NAACP to deputy director of the Civil Rights Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. He became the first African American Administrator of the Dallas office and, in 1969, received the Father John La-Farge Award from the Dallas chapter of the National Conference for Interracial Justice.

Following Laws’ work in the movement, he sold real estate and lived out his final years with his wife, fellow activist Ann Louis German Laws.

The unsung members of the movement deserve recognition of the highest order for their often thankless efforts. The results of their work did not always involve the spotlight. Instead of the spotlight, men and women like Laws worked tirelessly behind the scenes and moved from city to city in the fight for racial progress that was not always linear.

Little-known civil rights activists understood the toll of disrupting the status quo of white supremacy in the struggle for Civil Rights and human dignity. But it is evident through actions of men and women like Clarence Laws that struggle did not hinder their hopeful nature when the well of optimism for so many ran dry.

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