Local Southern Segregation

The following article is the first half of a historical piece written by Jacyln Tripp and Dr. Gary Joiner about the history of Willie Rainach, a conservative, segregationaliist politician from Claiborne Parish.

When recording Civil Rights history, historians and journalists often focus on those who fought for civil rights. And the stories of civil rights heroes are crucially important to our heritage of freedom in the United States.
But learning about those who fought to keep segregation in place is also important, too—otherwise only one side of the story is told and civil rights activists appear to be working against an invisible foe.
That’s why the Caddo Parish Civil Rights Project is digging even deeper into the past and recording local opposition to the civil rights movement. 
The first story we will tell is that of a politician from Summerfield, a small town located in Northwest Louisiana (NWLA), named Willie Rainach who rose to national prominence because of his strong views against integration. 
This is the tale of how Rainach rose from an early childhood spent in a Baptist orphanage to become a three-time Louisiana senator, a Louisiana congressman, a gubernatorial candidate, and one of the biggest opponents of integration in United States history.
Willie Rainach’s early childhood
William Allen Hampton Odom was born in Tangipahoa Parish on July 31, 1913, in Kentwood, Louisiana.
(Kentwood would later become the childhood home of modern-era pop musician Brittany Spears.)
When young Willie was four years old his mother died of the Spanish Flu Epidemic that killed around 50 million people worldwide. Willie’s father decided not to raise him as a single father and turned him over to a local orphanage, where Willie was later adopted by Albert and Hanna Shirey Rainach of Summerfield, Louisiana. The couple lived just shy of the Arkansas state line, and soon William Allen Hampton Odom became known as William “Willie” Monroe Rainach. People often called him “Billy.”
When Willie was 13 years old, he was hit in the head by a baseball and went blind in one eye. Two years later, when Willie was 15, he graduated from Summerfield High early and enrolled in Southern State in Magnolia, Arkansas, just across the state line from Summerfield. Southern State is now known as Southern Arkansas University. Willie transferred to several other colleges throughout his educational career but did not earn a college diploma.
Willie’s adoptive father, A.M. Rainach, died when Willie was 20 years old.
Willie left Summerfield to work for the United States General Accounting Office in Washington, D.C., where he lived behind the Supreme Court building. After he returned home to Summerfield, the Claiborne Parish Police Jury asked him to organize a rural electric cooperative for the parish. At the time, rural electrification was considered too expensive and corporations preferred to place electrical infrastructure in cities where they got a better return on their investment.
Claiborne Electric Cooperative became the first electric cooperative organized in Northern Louisiana. It was also one of the first electric cooperatives in the nation. 
Willie’s success in organizing the Coop and electrifying homes and businesses in rural Claiborne Parish made politicians and local citizens adore him, so when Willie ran for State Representative, he was a shoe-in. 
Rainach was in his late twenties when he began his career in politics in 1939.
(Claiborne Electric Cooperative is still operating today.)
Claiborne Parish culture in the early 1900s
To understand Rainach’s career in politics, we first need to understand the culture where he rose to power.
Claiborne Parish once produced more cotton than any other parish in the state of Louisiana. The parish, and those parishes around it, were part of a rural, society where citizens owned property, farmed, and the culture’s collective morals were used to cultivate “the character” of citizens. In typical agrarian societies, nature/creation is revered and traditions are respected. Science and technology are viewed with skepticism, and there is a love for both the countryside and farming. 
Agrarianism gained immense popularity in the ancient Greek and Roman worlds. 
In 1908, famed agriculturalist George Washington Carver visited Claiborne Parish from Tuskegee University to show poverty-stricken sharecroppers (who were not thriving in the agrarian society) in Claiborne and Webster Parishes how to revitalize cotton-stripped soil and how to start farmers’ unions where they could share seeds, wisdom, and get better prices for their commodities at market. Carver was invited to return to Claiborne Parish again the following year.
In his doctoral dissertation for Texas Christian University, (Dr.) William McFerrin Stowe, Jr. wrote that when Booker T. Washington died in 1915, a new attitude emerged in the South and people of color began seriously questioning the status quo.
By 1919, six years after Booker T’s death, Black sharecroppers formed a farmers’ union in Elaine, Arkansas and were met with extreme violence. Hundreds of people of color were murdered, and the message the massacre sent across the Deep South caused many poverty-stricken farmers to set aside their dreams of starting, or being a part of, farmers’ cooperatives.
George Washington Carver helped a Shreveport man attend Tuskegee University | KTALnews.com
In the 1920s, Claiborne Parish farmers experienced the most drastic price collapse in the history of cotton production. Banks foreclosed on farm loans, farmers’ unions scrambled to form, and race riots began to sweep across the country. And as cotton fell from the throne in Claiborne Parish, and the agrarian society began to collapse, it affected the economy, the culture, and (more specifically) the faith of citizens.
In Willie Rainach and the defense of segregation in Louisiana, 1959-1959, we learn that the Ku Klux Klan, which had been defunct in NWLA since just after Reconstruction, made a strong reemergence in the 1920s. 
By 1922 there was a reign of Klan terror in Morehouse Parish, which was only one parish away from Claiborne. Things became so violent that Louisiana’s governor at the time, John M. Parker, Jr., tried to have a law passed that would require the KKK to submit their membership rolls to the state. Governor Parker did not get his wish.
Stowe explained that in Morehouse Parish, the Klan was made up of a group of religious extremists who raided whiskey stills, drove moonshiners out of the area, rid the region of “undesirable women” and threatened anyone who got in their way. They felt they were doing God’s work by judging and punishing others as they saw fit. The KKK also took an anti-immigrant stance.
The resulting militant fundamentalism spread across large swaths of rural NWLA in the 1920s, 30s, and 40s.
Then in May of 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional. 
“One of the most adamant opponents of the Court’s ruling was William Monroe Rainach of Louisiana, who represented the views of many Southerners. As a segregationist leader, his life provides a point of departure for future scholarship on the Southern response to Brown and the subsequent civil rights movement,” wrote Stowe. 
And that is precisely why William Monroe Rainach’s career in politics took off after the Brown ruling. 

The Gazette will run the remainder of this article next week addressing the political ascent and death of Willie Rainach.