In the 1950s a wave of labour unrest shook a small town in southwestern Louisiana, leading to the racialisation of workers who had previously been considered white, as ‘mixed race’ or, in local terms, ‘Redbone’. This article considers why certain individuals were marked as mixed race in relation to strike violence and their opposition to capitalist expansion. Utilising a variety of methodological approaches, including archival research, historiography and oral testimony, this article seeks to examine how an instance of labour unrest was reinterpreted by local law enforcement, an interstate capitalist class and the national press as calling into question the racial integrity of a group of workers who had been formerly marked as white. This explosive and largely unstudied strike provides an opportunity to better understand how racialisation operates as a technology of control, even over individuals who appear phenotypically white. The strike at Elizabeth allows a glimpse at the tactics of representatives of white supremacy when white workers do not fully embrace the ‘wages of whiteness’.
Interview conducted by the author on 15 November 2020. The names of interviewees have been changed. I am grateful to all those who were willing to share their stories and memories. Special thanks to Bruce Craft of Southeastern Louisiana University who was especially helpful in filling in missing information.
‘Proceedings of the 41st Annual Convention of Louisiana State Federation of Labor’, 1953, p. 43.
4.
BeeneW., ‘Tavern dynamited at Elizabeth’, Alexandria Daily Town Talk, 10March1953, p. 21.
5.
NorsworthyB., ‘Meet at Elizabeth seeks labor peace’, Alexandria Daily Town Talk, 26February1953, p. 29.
6.
‘“Redbones” and dynamite’, Newsweek (New York: Newsweek Publishing LLC), 30March1953, p. 28.
7.
‘“Redbones” and dynamite’, p. 28.
8.
CrawfordW., Redbones in the Neutral Strip, Or No Man’s Land, Between the Calcasieu and Sabine Rivers in Louisiana and Texas Respectfully: and the Westport fight between whites and Redbones for possession of this strip on Christmas eve, 1882 (Dr. J.A. Crawford, 1984 [1955]), n.p.
9.
MillsC., The Racial Contract (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014), p. 42.
‘Desperate battle at a Calcasieu logging camp’, The Times-Democrat, 7August1891, p. 3.
13.
‘War in Calcasieu’, St. Landry Clarion, 8August1891, p. 2.
14.
CaricoA., Black Market: the slave’s value in national culture after 1865 (North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press, 2020), p. 198.
15.
‘Kelley reviews efforts to stop strike violence’, Alexandria Daily Town Talk, 12May1953, p. 21.
16.
‘“Booby-Trap” goes off in Elizabeth’, Alexandria Daily Town Talk, 8May1953, p. 1.
17.
WebbB., ‘Company town: Louisiana style’, Louisiana History: the journal of the Louisiana historical association9, no. 4 (1968), pp. 325–39.
18.
Bruce Craft in conversation with the author, 16November2020.
19.
‘Kelley reviews efforts’, p. 21.
20.
Interview conducted on 17 November 2020.
21.
‘“Civil War” is near in Elizabeth’, The Monroe News-Star, 8May1953, p. 1.
22.
EasterlyDon, ‘Central Louisiana dispute has been violence-marked’, Alexandria Daily Town Talk, 9December1953, p. 42.
23.
Easterly, ‘Central Louisiana dispute’, p. 42.
24.
‘Kelley reviews efforts’, p. 21.
25.
‘“Redbones” and dynamite’, p. 28.
26.
Du BoisW. E. B., Black Reconstruction in America: toward a history of the part which black folk played in the attempt to reconstruct democracy in America, 1860-1880 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017 [1935]), p. 700.
27.
RoedigerDavid R., The Wages of Whiteness: race and the making of the American working class (New York: Verso, 1999).
28.
JacobsonM., Whiteness of a Different Color: European immigrants and the alchemy of race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999); N. Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York: Routledge, 2012 [1995]).
29.
Mills, The Racial Contract.
30.
Willoughby-HerardT., Waste of a White Skin: the Carnegie corporation and the racial logic of white vulnerability (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2015), p. xviii.
31.
AhmedS., ‘A phenomenology of Whiteness’, Feminist Theory8, no. 2 (2007), p. 153.
32.
For an example of the acceptability of Native American ancestry in legal definitions of white identity, see Kevin Noble Maillard, ‘The Pocahontas exception: the exemption of American Indian Ancestry from racial purity law’, SSRN Scholarly Paper (Rochester, NY: Social Science Research Network, 2005).
33.
HallStuart, ‘Race: the floating signifier’, lecture, Goldsmiths’ College London, 1996.
34.
‘Calcasieu Paper Co.’, Pub. L. No. 99 NLRB 794, National Labor Relations Board (1952), p. 92.
35.
LaBordeA., ‘Talk of the town’, Alexandria Daily Town Talk, 1April1953, p. 6.
36.
One of the first ways the company responded to the strike was by evicting striking workers from company housing. See Easterly, ‘Central Louisiana dispute’, p. 42.
37.
‘Calcasieu Paper Co.’, NLRB, p. 805.
38.
‘Calcasieu Paper Co.’, p. 807.
39.
‘Peavy v. Calcasieu Paper Co.’, Pub. L. No. 70 So. 2d 755 (1954), n.p.
40.
‘Proceedings of the 41st Annual Convention’.
41.
‘Proceedings of the 41st Annual Convention’, p. 234.
42.
SeeE. Obadele-Starks, Black Unionism in the Industrial South (Texas A&M University Press, 2001). According to Tami Friedman, ‘How can Greenville get new industry to come here if we get the label of a C.I.O. town? Capital migration and the limits of unionism in the postwar south’, in Robert H. Zieger, ed., Life and Labor in the New New South (Florida: University Press of Florida, 2012), pp. 16–44, the AFL in the 1950s was staunchly opposed to interracial organising, especially in the South. Friedman even goes so far as to write that, in Mississippi, ‘AFL representatives were closely allied with the state’s white supremacist elite’, p. 29.
43.
Interview conducted on 17 November2020.
44.
NorsworthyBill, ‘Armed Truce Marks Strike at Elizabeth’, Alexandria Daily Town Talk, 13December1952, p. 18.
45.
Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color, p. 110.
46.
Lee v. New Orleans Great Northern Railroad, 125 La. 236 (1910). Although de facto ‘one-drop’ rules had existed previously, first Tennessee and then Louisiana did away with legal exceptions that allowed for some percentage of non-white ancestry in 1910, followed in the coming decades by Texas, Arkansas, Mississippi, North Carolina, Virginia, Alabama and Georgia.
47.
VirginiaR. Domínguez, ‘Social classification in Creole Louisiana’, American Ethnologist4, no. 4 (1977), p. 594.
48.
Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color, p. 110.
49.
Bruce Craft in conversation with author, 16November2020.
50.
Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color, p. 110.
51.
Bruce Craft in conversation with author, 16November2020.
