Where the Alligators Roam Mike Stagg

John DeSantis is a reporter based in southeast Louisiana. He uncovered a story about the violent end of a sugar cane labor strike in the nearby town of Thibodaux that occurred in 1887. He wrote about what little he could find of the record of the events which, according to the official count, resulted in the deaths of eight people ” all of whom were black sugar cane workers.The story led to a book contract which pushed DeSantis to dig deeper into the story. With the help of an archivist at Nicholls State University in Thibodaux, he was able to locate the names of the eight people who were listed as those killed in the streets of the town on a single day ” November 23, 1887. That led to yet another discovery which enabled him to get to eyewitness accounts of the massacre.DeSantis believes the number of black workers killed that day in Thibodaux by white vigilantes was between 30 and 60. Most were involved with the Knights of Labor strikes that had originated in Terrebonne Parish the year before, but carried over into neighboring LaFourche Parish in 1887.The book is a slim volume that unveils a wealth of detail about labor and raced relations in post-Reconstruction Louisiana and the violent events of that day in Thibodaux that reverberate still today.We talk about the events, the writing of the book, and the key discoveries that unlocked this story that “nobody wanted told.”DeSantis is now engaged in the effort to locate the place where the victims of the massacre were buried.

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This show materialized when I could not find a guest to interview during the final week of 2017. So, I wrote up some notes and reminders and recorded a monologue about 2017 events that I thought were significant and had the potential to have an impact in the New Year which was just around the corner.Most of this was about public events, but there is a segment that deals with some personal losses I experienced in 2017. Those losses involved my mom and my friend Jim Simmon. Mom’s death was not unexpected, she had been in a slow, steady decline for about 10 months. Still, despite having time to prepare for it, I was taken aback by how hard it hit me.Jim Simmon and I had broken into journalism together at the Opelousas Daily World in about 1978. We did some work together interviewing candidates for governor in 1979. We also lived together in a drafty old farm house outside of Lawtell, LA, during a bitterly cold winter. Thankfully, Jim had a full-size Ford pickup truck and hundreds of trees had been cut along then-US 167 near Opelousas as it was being converted into I-49. We got a lot of free wood as a result and occasionally managed to get the house warm during that winter. We certainly chopped a lot of wood!Anyway, this podcast was the final show of 2017. Sorry for the delay in posting it.

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