The Reform Governor Who Fought the Klan
John M. Parker was one of the most powerful men in New Orleans long before he became governor. He was president of the New Orleans Cotton Exchange. President of the Board of Trade. A wealthy planter's son from Mississippi who had come to Louisiana and made himself king of the city's business establishment. When he decided to clean up Louisiana politics, he had the money and the connections to make it happen. But the story of John Parker is also a story about the limits of reform — about a man who could fight corruption and the Ku Klux Klan while carrying his own moral failures like stones in his pocket.
Parker was born in 1863 in Washington, Mississippi, into a family of wealthy planters. He was educated at academies in Mississippi and Virginia before attending Eastman Business College in New York. He came to New Orleans as a young man and built a career in the cotton trade, rising through the ranks of the city's commercial elite until he was running the institutions that made New Orleans the South's most important port city.
His entry into politics came through Theodore Roosevelt. Parker admired the president's Progressive movement, and when Roosevelt ran as the Bull Moose candidate in 1912, Parker was one of his most prominent Southern supporters. He ran for governor himself in 1916 as the Progressive Party nominee and got thirty-eight percent of the vote — a remarkable showing for a third-party candidate in a state where the Democratic primary was the only election that mattered. He switched his registration to Democrat and tried again in 1920, this time winning the primary and the general election with ninety-eight percent of the vote.
As governor from 1920 to 1924, Parker earned his reputation as a reformer. He improved the state's roads and infrastructure, established free employment bureaus, and — most dramatically — took on the Ku Klux Klan. By 1922, the Klan had grown so powerful in Louisiana that it controlled much of the northern half of the state. Klansmen had kidnapped, tortured, and killed two people in Morehouse Parish in what became known as the Mer Rouge murders. Parker went to the FBI for help, making Louisiana one of the first states where a governor actively fought the Klan with federal assistance. It was a genuinely courageous stand at a time when many Southern politicians either supported the Klan or pretended it didn't exist.
But Parker's moral courage had a boundary, and that boundary was race. In 1891, as a young man in New Orleans, Parker had participated in one of the darkest chapters in the city's history — the mass lynching of eleven Italian immigrants at the Parish Prison. The murders followed the assassination of Police Chief David Hennessy and the acquittal of the Italian suspects. A mob, which included some of the city's most prominent citizens, stormed the jail and killed the prisoners. Parker was part of that mob, and he never apologized. He believed the lynching was justified, and he said so publicly for the rest of his life.
This is the contradiction at the heart of John Parker's legacy. He fought the Klan when it was terrorizing Black people and Catholics in northern Louisiana. He pushed for reforms that benefited ordinary people. He stood up to the political machine that had controlled the state for decades. But he also participated in a mass murder and saw nothing wrong with it. He could extend his sense of justice to some people and not others, and he never seemed troubled by the inconsistency.
Parker died in 1939 in Pass Christian, Mississippi. His governorship is remembered as a bright spot between the corruption of the Old Regulars and the demagoguery of Huey Long. But his participation in the 1891 lynching is also part of the record, and it serves as a reminder that reform and prejudice are not mutually exclusive — that a man can fight some injustices while perpetrating others, and that the history of New Orleans is full of people whose legacies refuse to fit into neat categories.
Leave a comment
All comments are moderated before being published.
This site is protected by hCaptcha and the hCaptcha Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.