A Crime on the Bayou
It was the 1940s. My father, who was around 11 or 12, would walk along the railroad tracks between Elon, North Carolina and the neighboring town, Gibsonville, to catch a movie. He was returning home one afternoon when, from a ramshackle porch set back from the tracks, a white boy around his age shouted at him, “Hey, lookee there! It’s Niggerdemus! How you doing, Niggerdemus?” My father was furious. He stooped to pick up a rock to throw at the kid but hesitated, then dropped it. “If I had thrown that rock, we wouldn’t be here talking today,” he told me recently. He’s 85.
Another film “A Crime in the Bayou” tells of an incident down in Louisiana in 1966 when young white boys leaving a recently desegregated school taunted their black peers. A relative of two of the black boys tried to defuse the situation and ended up on trial for assault simply by patting one of the white boys on the shoulder. The legal saga that ensued eventually put longstanding wrongs of Southern justice on trial.
Nancy Buirski has an elegant way about her with facts; she takes not just the political temperature of moments (boiling) but finely sketches character and minds having made two other landmark civil rights cases into acclaimed films (“The Loving Story,” “The Rape of Recy Taylor”), she knows: people and relationships are paramount and sometimes rival outcome.
So Duncan and Sobol’s friendship becomes its own profound legacy. Sobol could have settled into a comfortable career at prestigious D.C. “cause work” firm Arnold Fortis & Porter but when Fortis turned out to prioritize money over cause while Fortis proved racist and Porter drank himself out of usefulness he went looking for mentorship within civil rights proper. The Lawyers Constitutional Defense Committee (LCDC) sent him to Louisiana to handle various cases, Duncan’s among them; his commitment was as rare as Duncan’s decision.
“He could have done a year in jail,” Solis says of Duncan who had been offered plea deals that would spare him the 13 years he wound up serving “but he chose not to. I don’t think there’s one in a hundred people who would make that choice. The guy is of steel about his rights.”
“I thank god I had the parents that I had,” Duncan tells us. “Because me, I probably would have just went up there and pled guilty, figured I’d pay a fine and go on about my business.”
Both young men did their jail time, but neither bowed down.
The opponent is as vividly represented. Leander Perez, the District Attorney of Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana and kingmaker who fought Duncan’s right to justice at every corner, comes off not just as a segregationist megalomaniac but a corrupt one at that; his graft knows no bounds from election fraud to embezzlement to illegal land deals.
Footage of Perez in his white suits and Stetsons, taking a fat cigar out of his mouth only to passionately defend segregation or denounce Jews, plays like something from a Stanley Kramer message film of the era. Perez’s “scientific” theories on black inferiority are tragic comedy Boss Hogg with a thesaurus. My laughter stopped when I thought about James Baldwin’s warning regarding such figures in 1967’s “In the Heat of the Night”: The blinkered racists of that film “can be considered moving and pathetic only if one has the luxury of the assurance that one will never be at their mercy.”
My father got out of Elon in 1955 at age 20 one year older than Duncan was in ’66 when he found himself stuck behind bars on a phony battery rap down in Plaquemines Parish. The difference between the mid-’50s South my old man fled and what Duncan encountered there ten years later came down to some federal court decisions and new laws: By time Duncan was on trial, the country outside Plaquemines had been made to change.
Brown v. Board of Education had come down; two civil rights acts were on the books along with a voting rights act; Rosa Parks sat down so that Emmet Till could stand up so that Little Rock Nine could walk in order for Ruby Bridges to march so Greensboro Four could sit in so March on Washington might take place so Birmingham church could go boom on Bloody Sunday while Jimmie Lee Jackson went into eternity; but still George Wallace ally Perez was not going to let apartheid go gentle into that good night (and is still kicking against the pricks in pockets of the South today).
Buirski is careful not to race past the moments of moral self-inventory Duncan and his lawyers faced at crucial junctures. Sobol hooked up with local law firm Lolis Elie and stayed on longer than his assignment called for, unlike many of his peers attorneys who were just “passing through” on their way to career and virtue laurels. Elie, a black attorney who always made a point of noting that he grew up in a neighborhood known as Niggertown, realized that they would need to bring in a skilled white lawyer for battle within these essentially white supremacy clearinghouses dressed as courthouses.
But beyond Duncan’s fate, the legal fight mounts to a referendum on Louisiana’s legal system, which did not grant jury trials for cases involving sentences of less than two years. This left Duncan at the mercy of a judge appointed by Perez. After Sobol gets put away for practicing law without a license (another false charge), here comes Donald Juneau powerhouse LCDC ally to raise some hell.
Following numerous appeals, imprisonments and a confrontation at the Supreme Court, Sobol sets his sights on Perez in a lawsuit designed to bring national attention to the Plaquemines fiefdom. This is where the documentary becomes “about the systems of pretend law that were prevailing in the Southern states,” as described by LCDC lawyer Armand Derfner. (Elie’s son, writer Lolis Eric Elie, offers some of the most searing commentary here.) Everything comes together: Just as the white boys used passive-aggressive taunts to threaten the black boys Duncan defended, so does the legal system set traps for all Black people. Lynching by myriad means.
It’s amazing that almost all of these key participants were alive to tell their stories when this film was made. Sobol says he asked Juneau to check under his car for bombs before driving him away from Plaquemines jail. Juneau remembers riding in armed caravans a standard civil rights lawyer practice of the day in case of ambushes. But Sobol and Duncan survived and stayed close until Sobol died last year.
“I look back now and I can’t believe we lived like that,” says my father, an ordinary citizen who is no civil rights hero but was raised under Jim Crow tyranny in North Carolina. He’s not talking about bombs or fire hoses; just “Niggerdemus” style indignities. “I tell you, white people were crazy.” I wonder what he will make of this film at a moment when basic ideas like voting rights are being contested half a century later contested in the South he swore he’d return to only to visit?
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