James A. Joseph is Professor Emeritus of the Practice of Public Policy at Duke University. Joseph served as the United States Ambassador to South Africa from 1996 to 2000, and as the Under Secretary of the United States Department of the Interior from 1977 to 1981. He was the President and CEO of the Council on Foundations, Vice President of the Cummins Engine Company, and served as Chaplain of the Claremont Colleges. He is the recipient of numerous honorary degrees and awards, including the Order of Good Hope, South Africa’s highest award to a citizen of a foreign country. Joseph is also the author of
Growing Up Black in Cajun Country
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Published:August 2015
This chapter describes the challenge of growing up black in Louisiana’s Cajun country in the 1950s. Few places were more ethnically mixed than southwestern Louisiana, but St. Landry Parish was rigidly segregated and served as the seat of the state’s Ku Klux Klan. The deferential poses blacks had to strike in public in order to keep a job or physically survive sometimes masked an alternative culture of self-assertion that could be found in the black church, pool halls, and barber shops, and on street corners.
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