Leander Perez - Segregationist To The Core

Segregationist To The Core

In the 1950s and 1960s, Perez gained attention as a nationally prominent opponent of desegregation, taking a leadership role in the opposition to desegregation, along with nationally recognized figures such as Strom Thurmond, George Wallace, and Ross Barnett of Mississippi. He was a member of the White Citizens Council and an organizer of the white supremacist Citizens Council of Greater New Orleans. Thereafter, Perez wrote and researched much of the legislation sponsored by Louisiana's Joint Legislative Committee on Segregation.

In defending segregation, Perez said: "Do you know what the Negro is? Animal right out of the jungle. Passion. Welfare. Easy life. That's the Negro."

The American Civil Rights Movement, according to Perez, was the work of "all those Jews who were supposed to have been cremated at Buchenwald and Dachau but weren't, and Roosevelt allowed two million of them illegal entry into our country."

Perez controlled the activities of civil rights workers by prohibiting outsiders from entering Plaquemines Parish through his direction of the bayou ferries that were the only way to enter the jurisdiction.

In 1960, while opposing desegregation of local public schools at a New Orleans rally, Perez said: "Don't wait for your daughter to be raped by these Congolese. Don't wait until the burrheads are forced into your schools. Do something about it now." Perez's speech inspired an assault on the school administration building by some two thousand segregationists, who were fought off by police and fire hoses. The mob then went loose in the city, attacking blacks in the streets. When the schools were opened, Perez organized a boycott by white residents, which included threats to whites who allowed their children to attend the desegregated schools. Perez arranged for poor whites to attend without charge a segregated private school, and he helped to establish a whites-only private school in New Orleans.

His legislative ally, E. W. Gravolet of Pointe à la Hache, tried to pass grants-in-aid bills to provide state assistance to private schools sprung into existence by desegregation.