Jerry Sanson
Louisiana Maneuvers and Military Museum
January 2026
It is possible to find many stories about military figures who visited Louisiana during the years of World War II and who later became prominent and famous because of their roles in the conflict. Dwight Eisenhower and George Patton come to mind for many people. Did you know that another effort, early stirrings of the Civil Rights Movement, brought a lawyer to Louisiana who later earned fame as an Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court?
Black southerners endured decades of discrimination and second-class citizenship after Bourbon Democrats established segregation and disfranchisement laws during the 1890s, seemingly mired in social and legal systems that were impervious to change. As Richard Dalfiume wrote in a 1968 article in the Journal of American History, however, “The dominant attitude in World War II came to be that the Negro [original word usage in the article] must fight for democracy on two fronts—at home as well as abroad.”
The “Double V Campaign,” as it was called, became an effort to attain equality in American society that helped spawn change during the post-World War II years. Changes accomplished during the war years were the first breezes of the Civil Rights Movement that sent the winds of change through post-War America.
Black teachers in Louisiana were part of this fledgling Civil Rights Movement during the early 1940s as they tried to convince Louisiana political leaders to remove an obvious inequality that affected their profession. Louisiana had maintained two pay scales for black and white teachers for decades even though they might teach in the same parish and possess the same credentials. Black teachers during the war years used the federal courts to argue their case when political leaders ignored their requests.
The first of the suits, McKelpin v. New Orleans School Board, was filed in June 1941, claiming that black teachers and principals in
the New Orleans school system received uniformly lower wages than white educators possessing equal qualifications. The board lost a motion to dismiss the case in 1942 and consented to eliminate salary inequality based on race rather than fighting it through court.
Wiley Burton McMillon and two other black Iberville Parish teachers filed suit in November 1944 claiming that the parish school board violated their equal protection rights under the 14th Amendment to the U. S. Constitution by maintaining separate pay scales for black and white teachers. Thurgood Marshall of New York, special counsel for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and future Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, came to Iberville Parish and introduced school board minutes showing the use of color classification in granting raises and documents revealing that the word race was not omitted from salary schedules until late 1944 as part of his case. He also showed the court that white teachers received an average salary of $1,749 for a nine-month school year (just over $194 per month) while black teachers received an average of $637 for a seven- or eight- month school year ($94 per month for a 7-month academic year). The Iberville Parish School Board dropped race as a factor in pay and instituted a new salary schedule based on experience, merit, and responsibilities of the job as a result of the suit.
While they prevailed in parish-by-parish claims, black educators failed to persuade either courts or the education establishment to equalize salaries statewide despite their efforts to do so. Black teachers’ salaries increased by more than 50 percent between 1940 and 1944, but that increase occurred mainly when Orleans Parish raised black teacher salaries because of the McKelpin case, and it employed about 12 per cent of black teachers statewide. Black educators waited until 1948 for equalized salaries statewide when Governor Earl Long included that provision in an ambitious proposal to the legislature.
The picture accompanying this post shows Associate Justice Thurgood Marshall in his later years, long after he had won a measure of equality in Louisiana for Wiley McMillon.