Segregationist part two -last week’s continued-

The following article is the second part 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.

Rainach’s political skyrocket
Willie Rainach was a member of the Louisiana House of Representatives (1940-1948) and the Louisiana State Senate (1948-1959.) During his time in office, he brought a Louisiana State University Agricultural Experiment Station to Claiborne Parish. His influence helped change the agricultural culture of the region from row crops into timber and cattle farms. And the “Hill Farm,” as the experiment station is called by locals, completely changed the dairy industry when Dr. Nelson Philpot and other scientists at the Hill Farm learned how to drastically reduce the occurrences of bovine mastitis. 
But Rainach’s largest impact on NWLA wasn’t his ability to get roads paved, help scientists revolutionize the dairy industry, or electrify rural regions. He became famous nationwide because of his stance on segregation.
(Source: The Town Talk, Alexandria, Louisiana, Mon., June 9, 1958)
Rainach believed that without Northern support segregation in the South was doomed, and he made it his job to unite whites nationwide. He was determined to overturn the Supreme Court’s decision in the Brown v. Board of Education.
Rainach assumed that the average white American, if presented with what he called the ‘facts,’ would adopt a pro-segregation stance.
Rainach’s role in the formation of White Citizens’ Councils
By the late 1950s, Willie Rainach had become a formidable force amongst Northern Louisiana segregationists. But down in Southern Louisiana, a man named Leander Perez had become the kingpin of discrimination. Perez controlled Plaquemines Parish for five decades, beginning in the 1920s. He was a segregationist who backed other segregationists like George Wallace, Strom Thurmond, and Lester Maddox.
And Perez was powerful.
From the 1940s on, Perez worked against integration. He helped fund Strom Thurmond’s campaign for U.S. President in 1948, and Thurmond was able to win big in Louisiana.
Perez believed that integration was a communist idea. And he joined forces with Willie Rainach to organize Citizens’ Councils in Louisiana.
“Are you going to wait until Congolese rape your daughters! Are you going to let these burr-heads into your schools! Do something about it now!” Perez cried.
Leander Perez was eventually excommunicated by the Archdiocese of New Orleans for being opposed to integration in Catholic Schools, but that didn’t stop him. 
The first White Citizens’ Council was formed in Indianola near Yazoo City in Mississippi in July of 1954. The organization was a response to a Judge Tom Brady speech that asked White Southerners to organize some form of resistance to the Brown case. 
The organization spread quickly through the White “elites” in the Deep South, and they swore up and down that they were against violence. The group had more than 300000 members and produced propaganda that was designed to stop integration. 
“The councils said that if we buried our heads in the sand long enough, the problem would go away. It was the technique of the big lie, like Hitler: tell it often enough and everybody will believe it. It finally got to the point where bank presidents and leading physicians were afraid to speak their honest opinions, because of this monster among us,” wrote Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Hazel Brannon Smith. 
In the late 1950s and 60s, it was rare to find a Southern journalist who wrote from her heart like Smith. Rainach and Perez were more accustomed to being supported by press outlets, who helped the segregationist pair take White Citizens Councils to a whole new level. Perez mobilized more than 50000 members in the New Orleans area alone, and Rainach became the chairman of Citizens’ Councils in Louisiana.
Then Rainach became the chairman of the Citizens Councils of America. 
By 1960, 34 out of 64 Louisiana parishes had councils. In May of 1968, The Citizens’ Councils of America’s monthly publication asked “Did you ever see anything like it? Within a couple hours (after MLK’s assassination on Apr. 4) the nation’s Liberal Establishment, official and unofficial, (had) donned sackcloth and ashes and plunged into an orgy of public-breastbeating. Can you imagine any other time in history when a man with the record of MLK could be transformed by the alchemy of propaganda from a real instigator of violence into instant sainthood?”
In her paper “Citizens’ Councils, conservatism and White Supremacy in Louisiana, 1964-1972,” published in a March 2019 special issue of the European Journal of American Studies, Rebecca Bruckmann wrote that “In their comments on King’s assassination in 1968 as well as during their Massive Resistance campaign throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, segregationist politicians, grassroots activists, and their media outlets attacked the civil rights movement from a variety of hostile positions, including denouncing civil rights activists as communist agents, condemning what they perceived as a liberal conspiracy against states’ rights, and portraying integrationists as outside agitators or lawless rabble rousers.”
“When we remember the names, actions, faces, and words of segregationist leaders, we better understand their nationwide campaign to reject racial equality and maintain white supremacy, and recognize the power and influence they wielded–then and now,” we read on the segregation in America website. Willie Rainach is the first segregationist biography that is featured on the website, and the organization calls Rainach one of the most virulent opponents of civil rights in the Louisiana State Legislature. 
They also explain that when he was the chair of the Joint Legislative Committee to Maintain Segregation, the legislature directed the state board of education to nullify graduation certificates from any integrated public school. 
Rainach said that a vote against his segregation bills “is an open invitation to the carpetbaggers, scalawags, and National Association for the Advancement of Colored People to integrate our schools.”
But some Louisiana citizens did not want Rainach’s bills to pass. 
“One of the most reprehensible pieces of Legislation ever offered in Baton Rouge was House Bill Number 222,” wrote Alton J. Hebert in a letter to the editor of The Ville Platte Gazette on June 19, 1963. “If this bill would have passed it would have meant, among other things, that the people of our state would have been denied and deprived of the right and privilege of voting for the President of the United States on election in Nov. 1964… Leander Perez, Willie Rainach, and others of their political leanings who supported the bill take the position that the citizens of Louisiana cannot be trusted to vote for the best interests of this State in a Presidential election, therefore, they would substitute their plan for the free election or expression by the people… It seems Rainach and company simply couldn’t stand the beating the people gave them so they want to rig the election to suit themselves… Thank God there were enough men with courage and backbone like Senator Fruge who stood up against the merchants of hate and placed the interest of the people ahead of the interest of the politicians who want to take over and control our government.”
Rainach was determined to prevent Black people from voting in the state of Louisiana. He wanted them purged from the electoral rolls, and he worked hard to keep their votes out of the ballot box. 
It was Rainach’s idea to use Literacy Tests to prevent people of color from voting in the South. He insisted that at least a hundred thousand Black voters couldn’t even interpret the Constitution of the United States. 
He even went so far as to disenfranchise Earl Long’s maid. 
(Earl Long was Rainach’s political opposition.) 
In just one-year Rainach was able to purge more than 15000 Black voters from the rolls, which lowered the chances for Earl Long to be reelected Governor. And after Rainach removed as many Black voters from the rolls as he could remove, he mounted an anti-integration campaign and ran for governor of the state of Louisiana.
In the race for governor, Rainach carried the fourth district and half of the fifth district. He won in 38 of Shreveport’s 46 districts. He also carried the vote for Caddo Parish. He also ran first in Lincoln, Madison, Richland, Union, East Carroll, and Concordia parishes. There wasn’t even a close second in Natchitoches Parish. But when all parish figures were tabulated, Rainach lost his bid for governor.
He was, however, a delegate in the 1960 Democratic National Convention when John F. Kennedy was nominated as the party’s presidential candidate. And after JFK triumphed Rainach announced that the Republican Party might be a better home for segregationists, somehow anticipating the coming shift in political affiliations.

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