In 1966 a young Black man, Gary Duncan, was arrested for touching a white teenager—on the elbow. It was just another episode in the chronicle of injustice faced by African Americans and would have passed into history unremarked except for the determination of Duncan and his attorney, Richard Sobol. Because of their dogged pursuit of justice in a time of progress for civil rights, the case climbed through the judiciary until reaching the U.S. Supreme Court. The high court’s 1969 ruling in Duncan vs. Louisiana finally established the right to a jury trial in state courts.
The Duncan case is reviewed in a new documentary, A Crime on the Bayou. Director Nancy Buirski interviewed Duncan and Sobol and assembled a patchwork of archival footage and stills, some directly pertinent to the story and others more contextual. Included is film of the 1960 white riot that confronted school desegregation in New Orleans. Desegregation took six more years to reach Duncan’s Louisiana backwater, Plaquemines Parish, and cameras weren’t on hand to record the local response.
Wet and mossy, Plaquemines Parish straddles the Mississippi River in bayou country. From 1924 through his death in 1969, Judge Leander Perez ran Plaquemines like an especially nasty Persian Gulf emir, his tyranny financed by ample oil reserves. Perez became nationally notorious in the ‘60s for his undisguised racism, asserting that Blacks were inherently immoral and unintelligent. Desegregation, he added, was a “Communist conspiracy.” And he didn’t like Jews, either.
Duncan’s cousin and nephew were the first Black students in a Plaquemines school where the “touching” incident occurred. Intervening in a threatening situation against his kin, Duncan’s mild words and light touch led to charges of assault and battery. Perez wanted to remind Blacks that refusing to submit to whites had consequences. Only few years earlier, Duncan might have been sentenced to time on the chain gang but by 1966, civil rights lawyers from up north were looking for cases to defend. Duncan was fortunate in Sobol who persevered even after Perez had him arrested. One observation is inescapable: the Supreme Court justices who finally heard Duncan’s plea were considerably more liberal than the tribunal occupying that bench nowadays.
Although messy at the edges like many recent documentaries, A Crime on the Bayou tells a courtroom story from the civil rights era that has been overlooked, eclipsed by Miranda, desegregation and other rulings by federal courts that ventured into places where elected politicians dared not go.
A Crime on the Bayou will be available on all major digital and on demand platforms on August 3, 2021 from Shout! Studios.
