Hellraisers Journal – Tuesday October 5, 1920 Bogalusa, Louisiana – Widows of Four Murdered Trade Unionists Demand Justice
From the Duluth Labor World of October 2, 1920:
WIDOWS OF FOUR DEAD UNION MEN DEMAND JUSTICE ——- Murderers of Timber Workers, Although Known, Have Not Been Arrested. ——-
The New York Times November 23, 1919
BOGALUSA, La., Sept. 30.-Widows of four trade unionists who were murdered by a mob last November have asked Governor Parker to order the state attorney general to prosecute the murderers.
The petition states that the men were slain “without just cause or excuse by employes of the Great Southern Lumber company,” and that two grand juries have considered the killings without taking action, and that the district attorney has admitted under oath that he did not summon a state witness but did summon witnesses for the defendants, including the defendants themselves.
The murders, were the [result?] of attempts by the lumber company to destroy trade unionism. After failing to divide the workers on racial lines a lynching party started for the home of an estimable negro [Sol Dacus] who was influential among his fellows. The negro hid in the swamps and escaped. The mob then came to the headquarters of the trade unionists and demanded the negro. They were told that the man was not there, and they were invited to search the building. The lynchers replied with a volley from shotguns and revolvers, killing several workers .
[Note: four trade unionists were murdered by the mob: L. E. (Lum) Williams, President of Bogalusa Trades Council, and Carpenters Thomas Gaines, J. P. Bouchillon, and S. J. (Stanley) O’Rourke.]
Hellraisers Journal – Tuesday January 20, 1920
Bogalusa, Louisiana – Union Men Massacred by Loyalty Leaguers
From The Liberator of January 1920:
Bogalusa
By Mary White Ovington
The New York Times November 23, 1919
ON Saturday morning, November 22, in the town of Bogalusa, in the state of Louisiana, three men marched down the street. One was black; the other two, armed, walking on either side, were white. A negro criminal, one says at once, guarded by two officers of the law. No, there was no look of criminal or of policeman on anyone of the three faces. Those men, marching abreast, one black, the others white, were brothers, comrades-in-arms in the interminable battle of the worker for the product of his toil. The black man had dared to organize in a district where organization meant at the least exile, at the most, a death by lynching. On either side of him two white union men, carpenters by trade, risked by their espousal of the black man’s cause, not only their lives, but, if they were permitted to live, their reputations. They knew every vile taunt the cheap type of southerner, whom Dixie has made familiar to the world, would cast upon them. Yet together the three men marched down the broad highway of the Southern lumber town.
Unionism is far from popular in Bogalusa. The town is controlled by the Great Southern Lumber Company which this autumn ordered 2500 union men to destroy their union cards. Those refusing were thrown out of work. The Lumber Company has at its command the Loyalty League, a state organization formed during the war, not of soldiers but of men at home, part of whose business it was to see that every able-bodied man (Negro understood) should work at any task, at any wage, and for any hours that the employer might desire. They had back of them the State “work or fight law,” and might put to work men temporarily unemployed, save that the provision of the act did not apply to “persons temporarily unemployed by reasons of differences with their employers such as strikes or lockouts.”
Under this legislation it was small wonder that unionism was forbidden by the Lumber Company; or that, though the war was ended, the Loyalty League continued its work. Returning soldiers joined it, and the night before the three men marched down the city street five hundred armed Leaguers held up a train half-a-mile from the railroad station and searched it for undesirables. Failing to get anyone on the train, they turned back into town and proceeded to chase undesirables there. A number of union negroes were beaten up, but their chief quarry, Saul Dechus [Dacus], president of the local timberman’s union, they could not find. They wanted the “nigger” to be handed to them to be lynched, and failing to get him, they went discontented to their homes.
Hellraisers Journal – Wednesday November 26, 1919
Bogalusa, Louisiana – White Union Men Shot Down Defending Black Labor Leader
From The Shreveport Times of November 23, 1919:
Bogalusa, La., Nov. 22.-Three white men were shot to death and two wounded in a fight at a garage here today in which several men attempted to prevent special police [company gunthugs] from arresting a negro labor leader, suspected of inciting negroes, and two white men who had carried shotguns to protect him while parading him down the main street of the city.
The dead are:
L. E. Williams, president of the allied trades council of Bogalusa and owner of the garage.
J. P. Bouchillon and Thomas Gaines, carpenters. They were shot by the officers.
[The wounded are:]
S. J. O’Rourke, carpenter and one of the men for whom a warrant for arrest had been sworn, and Jules Leblanc, a special policeman and a former captain in the United States army.
Saul Dechus [Sol Dacus], the negro, is president of the Negro Union. He escaped from the garage with four white men during the shooting.
James Williams, brother of the slain leader, was arrested, charged with assault with intent to kill.
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