SHREVEPORT, La. (AP) - In 1951, a 41-year-old father of three became the first black student admitted to Louisiana State University who was allowed to attend.
Lutrill Payne Amos Sr.’s stellar academic and personal credentials initially led the university to send him a letter of acceptance to its school of agriculture. However, when he sent in the required photograph of himself, the school rescinded its offer and denied him admission.
He filed a federal lawsuit against LSU and its policy of segregation and won. He entered the graduate school of agriculture under court order in the summer of 1951. There had been previous attempts to integrate LSU. Roy S. Wilson was accepted into LSU’s law school in 1950. However, he was expelled before he entered on the pretext he “had been expelled from a black university” and was therefore of questionable character.
But Payne was the first to integrate a LSU classroom.
He was posthumously awarded the LSU’s highest academic honor - the LSU University Medal - at the agriculture department’s winter commencement in December 18, 2015.
“It was a very proud moment for the Payne family, and I believe the university,” said his daughter, Carolyn White.
In a time when we’re begging some young men to stop “sagging” and pull up their pants, I wondered how an African-American generation that was subjected to the harshest of treatment garnered the audacity to challenge segregation. And they did so at great risk to their lives and livelihoods.
As teachers with the Natchitoches Parish School Board, Payne and his wife, Pearl, could have been fired for their efforts at integration. There were not so subtle threats such as cross-burnings to remind “troublemakers” to stay in their places. Lutrill did not let that stop him.
It was one of many hurdles he overcame to break racial barriers throughout his life.
Lutrill Payne’s widow, Pearl, said her husband was “always daring.”
Pearl Payne, 98, lives in Natchitoches Parish where she and her husband met in the 1930s.
She still remembers vividly the history-making events of their lives. She said her husband’s independent spirit was fostered when he left home to attend the boarding school in Grambling because there was no high school for “colored” children in his hometown of Lillie in Union Parish. He was from a large family - one of 9 children - and jockeying for position usually comes with the territory.
After graduating from the North Louisiana Agricultural and Industrial School in Grambling, Payne made his way to Prairie View, Texas with a friend and worked his way through freshman year.
When money for out-of-state students ran out, Payne returned home to Louisiana and enrolled in Southern University in Baton Rouge, graduating with a bachelor’s degree in agriculture. He and Pearl married in 1939. He was then principal and she was a teacher at Creston Jr. High School near Black Lake in Natchitoches Parish.
They had been acquainted for several years, but didn’t begin a courtship until then. After they were married, Payne was drafted into the Army, serving for three years during World War II. Because he was a college graduate, 18 of those months were overseas with the chemical warfare unit as chief meteorologist.
“… He wasn’t afraid of nothing!” Pearl Payne said.
Many African-American WWII veterans returned home after 1945 believing they had earned the right to fully participate in American life.
The Jim Crow laws that had segregated the races since the late 1800s seemed unusually cruel in light of their wartime contributions and sacrifices. They brought home their battlefield bravery and that, coupled with burgeoning activism by civil rights organizations, meant the battle for equal treatment under the law was on.
Pearl Payne said her husband “wanted to do whatever it was he thought blacks were not being allowed to do.”
So it was he who volunteered when a candidate was being sought to integrate LSU.
Pearl Payne said she doesn’t remember this as a particularly fearful time, because as she puts it, “he didn’t act like he was afraid, so I wasn’t either.”
Family friend Edward Ward, Jr., - whose mother, Odile Cage Ward, was among the second wave of African-Americans admitted into LSU grad schools - said Lutrill Payne continued to break down racial barriers when he returned to teach in and become the principal of schools in and around Natchitoches Parish.
Ward said Payne was the first black person to successfully register to vote and the first to run for public office in Natchitoches, seeking to become the commissioner of public safety in the 1970s. Payne was the first African-American to sit on the board of a local bank and the first black person appointed to the Natchitoches Parish Civil Service Board, serving for 26 years. He did all of this while supervising on-farm training for fellow veterans and operating a 400-acre farm on Spanish Lake.
Payne wasn’t the only pioneer in the family.
Pearl Payne, along with several other African-American teachers, spent five years driving to and from Baton Rouge on Saturdays and Tuesday nights to attend classes at LSU. Leaving their two young boys and one daughter in the care of their father and her mother, Pearl Payne doggedly pursued a master’s degree, earning hers in the field of elementary education in 1956. No one can argue that the Paynes didn’t earn their place in what broadcast journalist Tom Brokaw has labeled the “Greatest Generation.”
Lutrill Amos Payne died in 1999 at the age of 89. He left behind his wife of nearly 60 years, three children and their families and some awfully big shoes to fill.
His widow remembers that “he always carried himself in a dignified way.”
That day in July 1951 when the judge ruled in his favor was the last day to register for fall classes at LSU. Payne raced to campus, registered just in time. He then sent his wife a telegram which read in capital letters , “REGISTRATION COMPLETED ALL IS WELL.”
It was the “first” of Lutrill Payne’s innumerable “firsts.”
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Information from: The Times, https://www.shreveporttimes.com
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