If a Tree Falls in the Forest and No One Takes a Picture, Did it Happen?

I realize that I have about four or five regular followers and it might be easier to just send e-mails, but this is a situation where spreading the word can't hurt. For a long time I've been intrigued by an event I remember from my childhood, the march on Minden City Hall on August 6, 1965 for Civil Rights prior to a brief strike of garbage workers. The most intriguing thing has always been the presence of James Farmer, President of CORE, appearing and making a speech here in Minden on the Friday night after he was at the White House with LBJ for the signing of the Voting Rights Act. Farmer had been invited to Minden by the United Christian Freedom Movement a local group filling the role now held by the NAACP. (Beginning in 1956 in Louisiana and continuing for more than a decade, membership in the NAACP could be a major problem for area residents. The NAACP was on a watch list and each month membership rolls had to be submitted to the Louisiana Secretary of State. In turn the Secretary's office sent lists of members to each parish Sheriff to share with members of the community. NAACP membership was often the trigger to a member losing their job, so local towns created their own independent organizations, too small to merit statewide attention.) After speaking at the 14th District Building on Friday night, Farmer led the march the next morning and then returned to Washington.

I've written about that event before and have long searched for more documented information about that day. J. D. Hampton, head of the UCFM and who would become the first African-American candidate for Mayor of Minden in 1966, spoke to me a few years ago and asked me to help him search for a significant piece of information. Mr. Hampton was certain that on Saturday night, August 7, 1965, the nightly national news on NBC covered the story. We searched but I was never able to locate such footage if it existed.

Today, as I was driving home from Bossier, I got a phone call that reopened my interest. The call came from Billy Wright of Shreveport. Mr. Wright's grandmother lived in Minden on Bailey Street, near the 14th District Building. During that summer of 1965 as a young teenager he was staying with his grandmother as the local protest unfolded. He heard the speech by Farmer on Friday night at the 14th District Building and participated in the march the next day. He had come across one of my articles discussing that story and basically had the same question Mr. Hampton had asked me, but Mr. Wright had an even more personal reason for being aware of television news footage. He vividly remembered getting a call on that Saturday night from a relative in Chicago, calling to tell him that his Chicago family had just seem him on the national news participating in the march. Mr. Wright said that he and a few of his friends had tied white shirts around their heads (the march was interrupted by a downpour) and clearly stood out in the crowd. Mr. Wright wanted to know if I was aware of the footage and I told him what I had learned. But then he asked me a question I had sort of left out of my research. He wondered if perhaps there were existing newspaper photos of the March. He reiterated that he and his friends would be easily visible (there were only about 220 marchers so five young men wearing what might appear to be turbans would be easy to spot. I had to tell him I didn't know. Local news coverage, the Minden Press, the Minden Herald, the Shreveport Times and the Shreveport Journal gave scant mention to the event and certainly no pictures. I had also used source material from the Baton Rouge Morning Advocate, the New Orleans Times Picayune, the Washington Post and the New York Times, but none of those papers included images. But I did not check leading African-American newspapers such as the Pittsburgh  Courier or even (I feel really dumb about this one) the Shreveport Sun. I also had not checked the archives at CORE or Mr. Farmer's papers.

So, this afternoon I have sent an inquiry to CORE and am in the process of tracking down Mr. Farmer's papers (his papers from 1980 forward are at the University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee, but I've not yet found the papers prior to 1980). I'm not hopeful Mr. Farmer's collection will be helpful -- his visit to Minden isn't even mentioned in his autobiography (which is understandable, a march of 200 people for a cause that largely failed pales when compared to a Rose Garden ceremony signing transformational legislation the same day as our event), but I find it much more likely that if there were wire service photos, CORE has copies in their files. So, perhaps we will be able to add a visual image of the Civil Rights Era in Minden to our legacy and I hope for our Dorcheat Museum. I'll keep anyone interested updated on any progress

(The picture with this post shows the NAACP's Roy Wilkins, Mr Farmer from CORE, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. of the SCLC, and Whitney Young of the Urban League meeting in the Oval Office with President Johnson.)

Minden and Mt. Lebanon -- The Ties that Bind

Yesterday, I had the opportunity to speak about stagecoach travel on the Old Wire Road across North Louisiana at the Jonquil Jubilee in Gibsland/Mt. Lebanon. My program was one of several held at the old Stagecoach Inn in Mt. Lebanon. While there I was reminded again of an old axiom I have found to be true over the years, "you never learn anything while your mouth is open." So, while I enjoyed making the presentation, I learned some very interesting information from one of the later speakers, Mary Claire Kettler of Gibsland. Her topic was a history of the Stagecoach Inn itself and the Mt. Lebanon community in general. For years I have been aware of the many ties between Mt. Lebanon and Minden, including many common families and the fact that the Rehoboth Baptist Church is not only the founding church of the Louisiana Baptist Convention, but also the mother church of the Minden (later First Baptist) Baptist Church.

But it was only yesterday I learned a tidbit that is going to drive me back to the research files. Two of the key founders of Mt. Lebanon were Martin Canfield, who came to Louisiana from South Carolina to pick the site for the community, and his brother-in-law, Reuben Drake, who actually made the first land purchase to facilitate that mass migration of an entire community from the Edgefield District of South Carolina to Claiborne Parish, Louisiana. As mentioned, I already knew about the family ties. Drake's brother Abner settled in Minden and became one of the most prominent citizens of our town. That branch of the Drake family provided the land for the Methodist and Presbyterian churches in Minden, along with the Minden Male Academy. In addition, Reuben Drake also owned land in what is today's Minden and was part of the "land squabble" between our founder Charles Veeder and Adam Stewart. On the Canfield side, a brother of Martin Canfield, was a prominent member of the Minden Baptist Church and provided the material and supervised the construction of the first church home of the Minden Baptist Church, located on the present corner of Broadway and Miller Streets where the Christian Church at Minden's building is today. So, the ties were clear.

However, during Ms Kettler's program she produced a map of the original settlement of Mt. Lebanon and discussed how the town was planned and laid out along a parallelogram, which served as a central greenspace for the community. Immediately I recognized that Minden was also founded along the same pattern, a central parallelogram that served as a greenspace and was unoccupied by structures for many years. Today that parallelogram is the area between Main and Broadway (Front and Back Street for oldtimers like me). From Minden's founding until 1872 when the first Webster Parish Courthouse was constructed, the only part of that greenspace that contained structures was the area between today's Fogle and Union Streets. This pattern is not common in the South, as most towns are like Homer and have a traditional town square as the center.

Finding this commonality between Minden and Mt. Lebanon has raised some questions in my mind. Traditionally we have given credit to Veeder for Minden's layout, but now I want to explore a bit more. It seems entirely plausible to me that the parallelogram layout came not from Veeder but from the Drakes. I want to study a bit about community patterns in the Edgefield District and also in New York and Indiana were Veeder lived before coming South. But we may need to update out town history a bit and shift some credit away from Veeder to the place it truly belongs.