Competing Narratives of Jim Crow Injustice: The Unsettling Case of Edgar Labat and Alton Clifton Poret

In 1950 New Orleans authorities accused Edgar Labat and Clifton Alton Poret of raping a white woman and robbing her male companion. Labat was arrested immediately while Poret fled the city, only to be found two years later in a Tennessee penal farm serving time for armed robbery. Both men denied knowing each other. After receiving the death penalty in 1953, Labat and Poret undertook a seventeen-year effort to challenge their conviction, survived nine stays of execution, unexpectedly broke the record on death row set by Caryl Chessman in California. As their case bounced back and forth between the Louisiana Supreme Court, various federal appeals courts, and the United States Supreme Court, the NAACP and the Civil Rights Congress declined to come to Labat and Poret’s defense because they considered their guilt indeterminate.

Instead, the men began an extensive letter writing campaign that propelled the case into a national and international sensation, spawning multiple narratives which frequently centered Edgar Labat. The men’s defenders included a Los Angeles butcher, a Hollywood con artist, a married woman in Sweden, a poet and mother from western Massachusetts, Look Magazine and Pittsburg Courier journalists, an advice columnist and wife of a New Orleans reporter, Black nationalist Audley, “Queen Mother” Moore, and Alton’s mother, Azalie Poret. In addition, Labat crafted his own biography of the case through poetry, documentation of his torture by police, and lengthy letters, some of which were published in foreign newspapers. This paper will explore how various storytellers sought to craft their own competing narratives about the case and the meaning of police brutality, solitary confinement, and death row, as well as the nature of innocence, in the waning years of Jim Crow Louisiana.