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A couple of rulings in the St. Mary school desegregation case by U.S. District Judge Robert Summerhayes of the Western District of Louisiana this summer may have demonstrated that jurists, like teachers, take off points for tardiness.

Now in its sixth decade, the St. Mary desegregation case continues to wind its way through U.S. District Court.

The goal since the case was reopened in 2012 is to resolve the case with a designation that St. Mary Parish schools have achieved “unitary status.” That status would mean the School Board would be free, in fact and theory, from direct federal oversight for the first time since 1965.

The court handled two motions, one by the state of Louisiana and the other from the School Board, in a single order in July.

In one, attorneys for the state government had sought designation as amicus curiae, or a friend of the court.

“In other words,” Summerhayes wrote, “the State requests the ability to file responsive briefs and position statements with the Court, and to participate in formal and informal discovery, including site visits.

“The State grounds its request on its ‘interests in guarding against federal overreach and in maintaining federalism’s proper balance between state and federal powers [which] are already at play.’”

Summerhayes ruled that the state is allowed to file friend of the court briefs and to participate in oral arguments on “motions and matters arising in this case.” The state’s perspective could be helpful, the judge said.

But the ruling denied what the judge says the state seems to suggest: a role equivalent to the U.S. Justice Department, or even more far-reaching participation under rules allowing an “intervention of right.”

Those rules can allow intervention by people who may be affected by a court case but are not parties to the case itself.

Summerhayes ruled against that expanded role for the state, stating that federal authorities have been involved in the case since 1969. The intervention of right rules require timely action, and the state made its claim long after the case was certified as a class action lawsuit and after discovery was closed in
February 2022.

He also said that the School Board has been represented by attorneys experienced in desegregation cases.

The other motion dealt with who has access to the identities of people who come forward to offer with information about the case.

The parties had agreed to a protective order designed to allow the sharing of information among the attorneys. To obey laws prohibiting the release of identities or identifying information, the order limits information about certain people mostly to the attorneys in the case and to the court itself.

The protected information includes “the names of educators, class members, and community members who have reached out to counsel for the plaintiff class or the United States seeking assistance or providing information in connection with this Litigation,” according to Summerhayes’ summary of the motion.

The School Board later moved to allow the information to be shared with School Board members and top central office administrators. The attorneys argued that they can’t adequately represent the School Board against allegations without the help of the school personnel.

Summerhayes upheld a magistrate’s ruling denying the School Board’s motion, saying it was filed more than a year after the protective order was in place. He also argued that the School Board’s need for the expanded “eyes only” list was foreseeable when the order was negotiated.

Summerhayes wrote: “Now, at the close of discovery, the School Board essentially seeks to rewrite these provisions and expose the identities of School Board employees, teachers, and community members who provided information to the Plaintiffs and the United States with the expectation that the Protective
Order would shield their identities from supervisors and School Board administrators.”

The rulings represent two more steps on a road that began in August 1965, when the lawsuit was filed on behalf of five Black children who were sent to what was then St. Mary’s segregated school system.

Two months later, the federal court ruled that the School Board must present two reports each year, which the board filed until 1983.

Court documents indicate that the Western District appeared ready to grant unitary status, but the matter faded away for reasons that aren’t clear from the record.

Unitary status generally requires that school system must show that it has eliminated segregation in key areas, known as “Green factors” after the case in which they were articulated. Those factors are student assignment to schools, facilities, extracurricular activities, teacher and principal assignments, and, more recently, discipline policies and access to academic programs.

The desegregation lawsuit is captioned Claude Boudreaux et al vs. the St. Mary Parish School Board et al.

Annie Lee James Gant, 64, of Patterson, LA, passed away at 4a.m on September 12, 2023 at Victoria Gardens of Frisco, TX. 

She leaves behind three daughters, one son, son-in-law, and one step-son: LeDena (Dray) Williams, Annique Gant, Yakira Gant, Anthony Gant, and Richard L. Gant Jr., 13 grandchildren, and four sisters (Geraldine James, Elizabeth Griffin, Carolyn James, and Bessie James).

Annie is preceded in death by her parents, Warren and Myrtle James Sr., her brother and sister (Warren James Jr. and Donna Gail James). She is survived by her husband Richard L. Gant Sr.; her sisters; her children, and her grandchildren.

To honor her wishes, the family will not be having a funeral service, and would like to thank everyone who has reached out to send their condolences.

CANCER
Breast and colorectal cancer screenings 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 25, (appointment required) at Walmart, 973 U.S. 90 East, Bayou Vista. For appointment call 985-239-5739. Screenings free if you have not been screened within the last 12 months. Insurance will be billed for mammograms. For those without insurance, there will be no charge. Colorectal cancer screenings consist of distribution of a take-home colorectal kit which requires a stool sample to be submitted for testing via mail. Free screening made possible by donations made to Mary Bird Perkins Cancer Center.

Today you would have to dig through more than ten feet of silt to find any remnant of the Bayou Chene community that once flourished in the middle of the Atchafalaya Basin. That makes it only a little harder to find than when it was a reasonably prosperous settlement.

It was always an isolated place. It was surrounded by swamp and the only way in or out was by boat. But that didn’t bother its hardy residents, who found small plots to raise crops and cattle and to build a little town. About 500 people lived there in the early 1920s, most of them descendants of the first settlers who got there in the 1830s. A post office was established in 1858. A church, school, and store were there at least in the early 1920s, probably earlier.

Bayou Chene families made a living as farmers, fishermen, trappers, lumberjacks, moss pickers, and by doing whatever else they could to use the resources of the Basin. (It has been alleged, with pretty good foundation, that Prohibition was a particular boon to the community, both as a place where moonshine could be made and where booze from outside could be distributed.)

We know from census data that at least sixteen planters had homesteads in the area by 1841. The first land claims were registered with the U.S. government in June 1848, and nearly all the useable land in the vicinity was claimed by the end of that year. The 1850 census counted 184 people in 41 households. By the 1860 census, the total Bayou Chene population had increased to about 675.

Swampers and lumberjacks moved into the community after 1876, when the federal Timber Act allowed sale of huge swaths of cypress swamp to raise money to build a levee system. That attracted the eye of northern investors who could afford the manpower and technology to cut even the biggest trees and haul them to sawmills at the edge of the Basin.

Lafayette industrialist Dailey Berard, the son of a swamper, reminisced about growing up in the Basin in his autobiography, “This Cajun Ain’t Bashful,” (Lafayette: 1986).

“Cutting the great cypress trees for crude saw mills provided the meager wages to purchase the necessities of life. The loggers leveled axes and saws that seemed ludicrously inadequate to the task. … The huge bases of the cypress trees made it necessary to use elevated perches of planks driven into slits cut in the cypress trunks. Some of the large red cypress measured more than ten feet across the base. Some were so large they took many days to fell, trim, and cut into manageable lengths. The felled trees were pulled to centralized locations by wire cables hooked to steam-powered engines.”

J. M. Ramel, priest in Loreauville, was in charge of the Bayou Chene mission in 1925, when he wrote about it in a letter to a friend in France. He said it was 20 miles from the mother church, six miles by car, the rest by boat.

 “At Bayou Chene there is neither road, cars or horses. There is no chapel to celebrate Mass or preach. I do everything in the middle of the prairies — Mass, preaching, confessions, marriages, baptisms, etc. If it rains, we have no Mass. For this reason, we are about to build a chapel at Bayou,” he wrote.

A Catholic chapel was built before 1838, and, like every building there, was affected by more-or-less regular flooding, according to a memoir (“High Water, Low Water,” Lake Charles, c. 1960) by Father R.J. Gobeil, who came after Father Ramel.

“The chapel had been well silted by 1938,” he wrote. “About a foot of the fence rose above the silted ground. The steps leading to the entrance had completely disappeared under the sand, nor were they needed to enter the building, for the floor was below ground level. In the interior, the oak floor, because of repeated flooding, resembled the rippling waves of a lake stirred by a light breeze.”

Those rippled floors, and the floods that caused them, were harbingers of the community’s demise. The Flood of 1927 submerged the community and convinced the Army Corps of Engineers that a spillway had to be built to divert Mississippi River floodwater away from New Orleans. Bayou Chene was in the middle of that spillway, and, even though it took years to get it completed, the community’s days were numbered.

The school was moved to higher ground in 1945 and closed a decade later, about the same time as the post office.

A few residents moved onto houseboats and stayed as long as they could, but most of them dismantled their houses, loaded the lumber and their belongings onto barges and moved to Plaquemine or St. Martinville or New Iberia, or some other town where floods, silt, and wavy floors were not a perennial problem.

You can contact Jim Bradshaw at jimbradshaw4321@gmail.com or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589.