Living in the South as I have for a few decades; there’s a remarkable forgetful nature to many people who want to act like the Civil Rights struggle was centuries ago. My public junior high was the former black-only high school. Certain teachers wanted us to think things changed in right after World War II. They’d mention an elderly janitor working the halls who had attended the school during that era. Nobody wanted to say it had been barely a decade since integration had arrived at the school system. Over the years, I’ve heard people moan about how bad school have gotten. When you try to pinpoint a year as to when they felt it went bad, it’s normally when the Federal government declared White Only schools were illegal. A Crime On the Bayou is what happened when a white political boss wanted to keep his sacred public school for only the white kids.
The movie starts with a title card declaring, “In 1966, in Plaquemines Parish Louisiana, a 19-year-old-Black teenager named Gary Duncan was arrested for touching a white boy’s arm. This is his story.” We are introduced to Gary Duncan now. He tells his tale of growing up in this part of the Bayou that’s on the Gulf of Mexico. He brings us through what it took for him to survive Hurricane Betsy in 1965. His family trawling for shrimps They’d sleep on their boat out of fear that white fisherman would set the ship on fire. He knew the law wouldn’t care to find the person that did this to a black man. “We didn’t’ have no right,” Duncan declared about the time. And he would get that proven during an ordeal that took years including a visit to the Supreme Court.
His Parish was ruled by political boss Leander Perez from 1924 – 1969. Perez maintained racial segregation in the area. In the Fall of 1966, Louisiana had to integrate their schools under federal orders. On October 18, 1966, Duncan was driving by the public school when he saw his younger cousin and nephew being surrounded by four white boys. His relatives were the first two children to integrate the Parish’s only public school. The cousin and nephew didn’t want to fight. Duncan got between the two groups and questioned what the white boys were planning to do. The white boys swore they weren’t going to fight. Herman “Bud” Landry said they only wanted to know their names. Duncan gave his and touched Bud on the elbow in a polite way to let him know the conversation was over. He put his cousin and nephew in the car and off they drove. That night he found out there was a warrant for his arrest for “cruelty to a juvenile.” A white parent of one the four boys reported it and Perez ran with this way to put another black man in his place. The charge would be upped to Simple Battery.
Through archival footage, Perez presents himself as proud of his bigotry. He goes on William F. Buckley’s Firing Line TV Show to tell America that the negros he know are immoral. Buckley called him a bigot. “I’m not a bigot. I’m just a good American,” Perez responded. Of course since he believed in only white men in control of America, Perez is true to himself. There’s footage of him claiming to know about the development of a black child’s brain being stopped by their skull size. The whites loved the man since in addition to being their kind of bigot, he also got them a good deal on the oil that was drilled out of the area. You get the idea that Perez wasn’t going to let Duncan get away with simply touching a white boy that was just doing his best to get the blacks out of his school.
Duncan needed legal help, but that was rare. Nobody in that area wanted to go against Perez. Local white lawyers didn’t want to defend black clients. He ends up with Richard Sobol as his legal defense. Sobol left a rather high level legal firm in Washington D.C. where the main partner had just become a Supreme Court Justice. He took Duncan’s case not knowing how far a simple case of an elbow touch would go. There was a plea bargain offered that would result in a small fine and no prison time. Duncan and his mother wouldn’t do it. He wouldn’t give Perez a chance to convict him on a bogus charge. Sobol did his best to prove that nothing illegal happened when Duncan intervened in what could have been a fight. His relatives testified that earlier in the day, two of the boys had punched them in the bathroom. Even with a strong defense, they lost the first case because the presiding judge was part of Perez’s machine. While he fought Duncan’s case on appeals, Perez had Sobol arrested and booked for practicing law as an out-of-state lawyer. Perez didn’t want anyone messing with his America. But Sobol and Duncan weren’t going to give up.
Director Nancy Buirski and her crew have dug deep into the case to remind us of the racial injustices that were sanctified by Southern states. State of Louisiana allowed Perez to rule his Parish. There’s footage of when Perez build a remote jail on an island that he was going to stash all the civil rights agitators he expected to show up and protest his existence. He’s all law and order during the interview with the reporter except everything he’s talking about is against the Federal laws. There’s lots of archival pictures and footage of white people attacking black protestors during the Civil Rights struggles and using the local police to haul them away. These people are not from that distant of a time. Not surprisingly in this violent footage is an ever present Confederate battle flag. If you live down South, you’ve had it with the “it’s heritage – not hate” excuse. The heritage is hate when you watch Perez do what he can to put Dunan and Sobol in his Southern style death camp. A Crime On the Bayou shows how hard it is to overcome institutionalized racism.
A Crime On the Bayou will be available on all major digital and on demand platforms on August 3, 2021.
Shout Studios presents A Crime On the Bayou. Directed by Nancy Buirski. Written by Nancy Buirski. Featuring: Gary Duncan, Richard Sobol, Lolis Eric Elie, Robert A. Collins and Armand Derfner. Running Time: 90 minutes. Released on August 3, 2021.
