High School Student Activism, a Legal Lynching, and the New Jim Crow

On October 7, 1974, a teenage race riot erupted at the desegregated Destrehan High School in St. Charles Parish, Louisiana, resulting in the shooting death of a white freshman.  The following year, an all-white jury convicted a black student named Gary Tyler for the murder.  While the case against Tyler fell apart almost immediately, he remains in prison today due to St. Charles Parish’s refusal to reconsider his conviction.  This paper argues that the Parish’s stance reflects a broader history of white opposition to racial equality that was particularly pronounced in relation to public high schools.  The parish’s Civil Rights Movement coalesced around demands for secondary education, and black students carried the Movement’s activism into formerly white high schools.  White resistance to black students’ insistence upon equal treatment also created the powder-keg-like atmosphere that exploded in 1974, and it drove the parish’s unwillingness to treat Tyler fairly in its aftermath.