Family of slain Black man gets justice 70 years later
7th May 2018 · 0 Comments
By Ryan Whirty
Contributing Writer
U.S. Sen. Glen Taylor of Idaho approached the podium during a Senate session on March 16, 1948, to address a subject no Congressional representatives from Louisiana, apparently, would broach.
“[I]t has come to my attention that Mr. Roy C. Brooks, of Louisiana,” Taylor told the august body, “was shot and killed by a police officer in Gretna, La., on February 27 last. If the circumstances were as they have come to my attention, it would seem that a Federal investigation of this incident would be in order.”
That it took an official from Idaho to bring the Feb. 27, 1948, killing of 44-year-old Royal Cyril Brooks Sr., an unarmed Black man, by white Gretna Police Patrolman Alvin Bladsacker after a misunderstanding and scuffle on a public bus to the attention of federal officials speaks, in historical hindsight, to the virulent, suffocating system of Jim Crow laws and oppressive societal mores that wracked Louisiana and the rest of the South for much of the nation’s history.
Taylor might never have known about the case had it not been for the reporting of The Louisiana Weekly, which included a shocking photo of Brooks’ son and namesake sitting next to his father’s body as it lay on the ground.
The image was snapped by influential photojournalist Marion Porter.
The March 6, 1948 article that accompanied the photo read in part, “Flying shots from the frenzied gun of Patrolman Alvin Bladsacker of the Gretna police force snuffed out the life of Roy Cyril Brooks, Jr. …”
Official reports called it self-defense.
Brooks’ death certificate called the killing “homicide (justified)” that occurred in a “public street.”
Decades later, research by the Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project from Northeastern University in Boston and further historical digging — much of it pinned on subsequent contemporary reporting by The Weekly — has revealed that, in actuality, Brooks had offered to pay the fare of a woman ahead of him, who had boarded the wrong bus and mistakenly dropped her nickel in the slot register, in return for using her nickel for his fare.
The bus driver refused the offer and quickly summoned a nearby traffic cop, who cracked Brooks in the head with a billy club when the latter asserted his innocence, questioned his arrest, and tried to explain the situation. The traffic cop then marched Brooks at gunpoint to the courthouse and, after Brooks reportedly turned around and threw up his hands, shot him at close range with a .38 revolver.
More than a year after the incident, as a result of the Senator from Idaho calling attention to the incident, Officer Alvin Bladsacker was swiftly acquitted of manslaughter by an all-white jury.
Roy L. Brooks Jr., a Gretna resident and Royal’s grandson, said the memory of the tragedy was passed down through the successive generations of the family, but only in fragments and fractured sadness.
“When we talked about it, it was only in bits and pieces,” Roy said. “We got a little bit from our aunts and uncles or my dad, but we got most of it from our cousins or other relatives or other people who knew [Royal] or knew what happened.
“I heard it so many times and told I had to hold onto the information and pass it on future generations, and here it is.”
Now, 70 years after the event that, upon reflection, could be categorized as a murder has been recognized by members of the Gretna community — including surviving family members and descendants of Royal Cyril Brooks Sr. — as a miscarriage of justice and repudiated by Gretna city officials.
In an April 28 ceremony at Mt. Pilgrim Baptist Church in Harvey led by the congregation’s pastor — and the slain man’s grand nephew — the Rev. Louis Brooks Harrison and attended by family members, community leaders, church members and local residents, Royal’s life was celebrated, his death commemorated, and the lingering, tragic legacy of segregation protested.
During the ceremony, current Gretna Mayor Belinda Constant read a resolution that was passed by the City Council and signed by her stating that city officials “would like to recognize the injustice bestowed upon Royal Cyril Brooks in 1948. Today … we join the Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project … in this endeavor to honor Mr. Brooks and recognize his life and legacy.”
The Brooks case reflects the ongoing research efforts of the CRRJP, the group of academics, attorneys and law students works to preserve the history of the Civil Rights Movement and bring to light tragic events that marred the country’s attempts to reckon with the sins of its past.
Northeastern law professor and project founder Margaret Burnham said several factors drew the project to the Brooks case. First, she said, “Gretna has attracted so much news for its criminal justice policies” over the decades. “We’ve been very interested in police enforcement practices with African Americans in the city.”
Second, she said, cases that involve segregation police involving buses are of particular interest to the CRRJP because so many cases involving public transportation resulted in fatalities. She noted that at the time, bus drivers in the South often doubled as law enforcement officers and worked with police or sheriff’s departments to enforce Jim Crow laws on buses.
And, she added, “they took these dictates very seriously.”
Finally, she said, the grim, graphic photo that ran in The Louisiana Weekly — as well as the articles, editorial coverage in the newspaper and the community activism — compelled justice advocates to do something to right this historical wrong…
“This was a case that not only illustrated the racist terror and arbitrary enforcement [of Jim Crow mores], but also the community resistance,” Burnham said. “There was an organization [of local activists] that protested the incident.”
That coordinated, multi-racial outcry and dissent included tenacious work by Roy Brooks Sr.’s labor union, Local 309 of the Food, Tobacco, Agricultural, and Allied Workers which was allied with the Congress of Industrial Organizations and led by a red-headed white man, A.A. O’Brien (Brooks was employed at the Swift Fertilizer Works in Harvey); and the West Bank branch of the NAACP, led by secretary Louis Brown.
Other individuals involved in the protests included white writer and Dillard University professor Oakley Johnson; Theodore R. Means, a white organizer of the CIO Furriers Union; and Andrew Nelson, a Black man heading of the local Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union.
Burnham said that at the time, The Weekly functioned not just as New Orleans’ African-American newspaper, but also the paper of record for issues of racial justice and civil rights activism throughout all of Louisiana and into Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas and other surrounding states.
Burnham said the work of The Louisiana Weekly represents the way the Black Press has historically shined a light on the Civil Rights Movement and the often-violent forces of segregation that resisted the march of racial equality. Along with other regional “Negro” publications — as well as influential national African-American publications like The Chicago Defender, Pittsburgh Courier and Baltimore African-American — The Weekly represented a crucial piece of the Civil Rights Movement in Louisiana and beyond.
“Without the effort of African-American journalists or other reporters for African-American newspapers during the 1930s and ’40s,” Burnham said, “we never would have been able to recreate these stories. These cases were not very covered by the white press, who didn’t give the full story.
“The Weekly is underrated as a member of the press,” she added. “It wasn’t very known nationally, but is was the critical regional African-American newspaper. In Mississippi or Arkansas, there was no tradition of African-American protest journalism. Most of the cases [in Louisiana] that we investigate were covered by The Weekly.”
As a result, organizers of the April 28 singled out the work of The Louisiana Weekly in the case and honored the newspaper, which was represented by publisher Renette Dejoie Hall.
Hall said that while the recognition was gratifying, she added that the paper was simply pursuing its mission.
“The Louisiana Weekly has always been the conscience of the media for all the citizens of the Metropolitan area,” Hall said. “Yes, we were the only media on the scene of Mr. Brooks’ murder in 1948. We were doing our job. We started doing it in 1925, we were doing it in 1948, and we continue to do it in 2018.”
Roy Brooks, Royal Brooks’ grandson, said The Weekly’s coverage of the incident, including Porter’s heart-rending photo, was the key to unraveling the mystery of what truly happened that day in 1948.
“That had to be the most important thing,” he said. “Having that picture and the story printed with it, that was super, man. That photographer was phenomenal.”
Now, Brooks hopes that incident so long ago, despite the trauma it’s caused, can help light the way for modern activists and their resistance efforts. Employing historical hindsight, he said, current generations can continue to seek justice.
“This is something they can use for what’s going on today,” he said. “There’s so much injustice going on, and if [the Brooks case] can help anybody, I’m OK with it.”
This article originally published in the May 7, 2018 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
