George W. D'Artois
George Wendell D'Artois, Sr. (December 25, 1925 – June 11, 1977), was a law-enforcement officer and politician in Shreveport, Louisiana. He served from 1962 to 1976 as public safety commissioner of the city, which was an elected position. Solid achievements were attributed to him.
George Wendell D'Artois, Sr. | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Public safety commissioner in Shreveport, Louisiana | |
| In office November 1962 – August 6, 1976 | |
| Preceded by | J. Earl Downs |
| Personal details | |
| Born | December 25, 1925 Shreveport, Caddo Parish Louisiana, USA |
| Died | June 11, 1977 (aged 51) San Antonio, Texas |
| Cause of death | Complications from heart surgery |
| Resting place | Forest Park Cemetery East in Shreveport |
| Political party | Democratic |
| Spouse(s) | Billie Claire Best D'Artois |
| Children | George Wendell D'Artois, Jr. Mary Cecile D'Artois Murray
Elaine Claire D'Artois |
| Parents | William Francis D'Artois, Sr. Mary Holmes D'Artois |
| Residence | Shreveport, Louisiana |
| Alma mater | C. E. Byrd High School Louisiana State University |
| Occupation | Law-enforcement officer |
| Military service | |
| Branch/service | United States Marine Corps |
| Rank | Sergeant |
| Battles/wars | Bougainville in Pacific Theater of Operations of World War II |
He was investigated more than once for misuse of city funds. D'Artois was arrested on August 6, 1976, for allegedly being implicated in the shooting death in July 1976 of Jim Leslie, an advertising executive in Shreveport who had managed his 1974 campaign. He was released for lack of evidence. A trial on charges of theft of city funds and intimidation of witnesses was postponed several times because of D'Artois's poor health.
Arrested again in April 1977 for Leslie's murder, D'Artois died the next month during heart surgery at the age of fifty-one, and never went to trial. Histories published in the 21st century say that D'Artois was involved with crime families in the city and had contracted for the murders of both Leslie and his killer, to prevent their testimony before a grand jury.
Background
D'Artois was one of two sons of William Francis D'Artois, Sr., and the former Mary Holmes. He graduated from C. E. Byrd High School, the original public high school for white students in Shreveport.
During World War II, he served for three years in the United States Marine Corps in the Pacific Theater of Operations, with action beginning in November 1943 in the Battle of Bougainville. He attained the rank of sergeant.
After the war, D'Artois studied Business Administration at Centenary College in Shreveport and Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. He married the former Billie Claire Best, and the couple had a son, George, Jr., known as Wendell (born c. 1955), and two daughters, Mary Cecile and Elaine Claire.[1]
During D'Artois's tenure, Shreveport had a commission form of government. Commissioners were elected at-large and exercised both legislative and executive duties, both on the city council and as a department head. There were relatively few commissioner seats on the council. This kept power in the hands of those who could gain a majority of voters. African Americans were still mostly disenfranchised and were not yet being elected to local office. Soon the civil rights movement raised legal challenges to the city commission governments, charging that they prevented minorities from being able to elect candidates of their choice.
Political career
For a time, D'Artois served as director of the Shreveport junior athletics program. In 1952, he became a deputy for the Caddo Parish Sheriff's Department under J. Howell Flournoy.
He joined the Democratic Party, which still dominated politics in the state and South during the decades when most African Americans were disenfranchised under the 1898 constitution. It had raised barriers to voter registration, as did the common Jim Crow discriminatory practices in most jurisdictions.
After nine years as deputy sheriff, D'Artois resigned to run in 1962 for public safety commissioner in Shreveport. The city commission was a five-member body that exercised combined executive and legislative functions. All position were elected at-large and each had a specific departmental responsibility. This structure preserved power in the hands of the majority of voters. The public service commissioner was sometimes seen as a step toward higher office: Governor Jimmie Davis had served in that position in Shreveport from 1938 to 1942.
The other commissioners led such departments as public works, utilities, and finance. The mayor, also elected at-large, was technically the "commissioner of administration." D'Artois was first elected commissioner in 1962, when he upset the two-term incumbent J. Earl Downs. (His brother, C. H. "Sammy" Downs, an attorney in Alexandria, was a close associate of governors Earl Kemp Long and John McKeithen.) D'Artois was re-elected in 1966, 1970, and 1974.
As the public safety commissioner, D'Artois headed the Shreveport Fire Department in addition to law enforcement.
Racial matters
In the early 1960s, D'Artois was accused of using intimidation to suppress civil rights activities by African Americans in Shreveport. Efforts were building to end segregation and support voter registration. Many consider 1963 to be the height of racial tensions in the city.
In September 1963, D'Artois denied a permit to a group wanting to march a short distance to the Little Union Baptist Church, where a service was to be held by Reverend Harry Blake, a civil rights advocate and pastor.[2] They were meeting to honor the families of and the four black girls who had been killed that month in the notorious church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama. (Blake later was called to the Mt. Canaan Baptist Church in Shreveport and has served as general secretary of the National Baptist Convention, USA, Inc.,[2] which freedmen and free blacks formed as an independent black association in the nineteenth century after emancipation.)
D'Artois ordered his riot squad against what observers said was a peaceful demonstration.[1] He rode on horseback into the church sanctuary, interrupting a service and violating sacred space. He dragged Reverend Blake away from the congregation and beat him severely.[3][4] Rev. Blake was hospitalized for weeks.[5]
As D'Artois continued to seek office in a changing political climate, when African Americans could vote freely, he maintained his popularity with whites and cultivated it with blacks. Early in his tenure, the segregationist White Citizens Council was active in Caddo Parish. He continued to appeal to conservative whites.
In the general election for state offices held on February 6, 1968, Republican State Representative Taylor W. O'Hearn of Shreveport was seeking a second term. Many more African Americans were voting since passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and they widely supported Democratic candidates. O'Hearn notified D'Artois and Caddo Parish Sheriff James M. Goslin that election laws had been violated at three predominately African-American voting precincts in Shreveport. O'Hearn told them that Democrats passed out campaign literature at the door of one polling place, and were fewer than the required 200 feet minimum from the entrance of the two other precincts. O'Hearn said that D'Artois and Goslin both told him that the matter was out of their jurisdiction.[6]
In 1971, D'Artois commandeered a drug bust at Columbia Park in the South Highlands neighborhood of Shreveport. The police blocked exits and arrested youths using marijuana. A class action suit by civil rights activists prevented such police sweeps of city parks thereafter.
At a 1975 meeting of a Rotary International club at the old Captain Shreve Hotel in downtown Shreveport, D'Artois told the mostly white businessmen that he had set up a special police unit to monitor crime-plagued nightclubs in the black community. He reported that the unit had seized concealed handguns and made arrests, which he expected to calm fears about crime in Shreveport.[1]
At the same time, D'Artois allowed black bars and establishments with gambling to remain open past legal closing time, purged out-of-town gamblers from Shreveport, and protected black business owners from the criminal element. In both cases, he was cementing his diverse political support.[1]
Investigations of D'Artois
D'Artois's administration was repeatedly investigated on allegations of mismanagement and corruption. He was investigated by journalist Bill Keith of the Shreveport Times, who was later elected as a Louisiana State Senator. Several hundred thousand dollars went missing from a 1968 bond issue, which was earmarked to D'Artois's department and intended to finance the synchronized traffic system. None of the Shreveport City Council members could ever account for these funds. Mayor Calhoun Allen speculated that the funds went to other "needed projects".
Reelection campaigns
In the 1970 election, D'Artois received 59.8 percent of the vote in a contest with the Republican nominee William Kimball, who carried the Southern Hills section of south Shreveport. This was a lower percentage than in previous elections.[7] Concerned about growing Republican strength in the state, in 1974 D'Artois hired James S. "Jim" Leslie (1937–1976), a former Shreveport Times journalist who had become an advertising executive, to manage communications for his campaign for a fourth term as commissioner.[8]
After D'Artois won, he gave Leslie a check for his services that was drawn on city funds. Leslie returned the check and asked that it be reissued on D'Artois's campaign account. According to Leslie, D'Artois gave him another check from city funds. Leslie did not cash either of them.[8]
During the mid-1970s, the Shreveport Times published a series on its investigation of D'Artois. It identified what totaled as a $30,00O felony theft of city funds, allegedly by D'Artois. One of newspaper's lines of investigation led to Leslie, who told its reporter about the two uncancelled city checks from D'Artois.
On July 9, 1976, Leslie was in Baton Rouge; he had created an ad campaign in support of passage of a right-to-work bill, which was strongly opposed by labor unions. After its narrow passage that night in the Senate, he had celebrated with supporters and colleagues. The victory has often been attributed to the lobbying from the newly organized Louisiana Association of Business and Industry, founded by Edward J. Steimel. Afterward Leslie returned to his hotel, the Prince Murat Inn, before returning home to Shreveport the next day. Leslie parked in one of the few available spaces, which was near the edge of the parking lot. He was shot and killed instantly by shotgun pellets, by an unknown assailant from behind a fence at the edge of the lot. Because of the lack of evidence at the scene, Baton Rouge police describe the homicide as a "professional hit." [9]
Rusty Griffith, who had ties to D'Artois, was suspected of being the hit man in Leslie's shotgun murder. It was thought that Leslie was being kept from testifying about information about D'Artois's administration learned while working on his campaign, or for the alleged attempt to pay him for campaign expense from city funds.[10] Not long after Leslie's death, Griffith was shot and killed in 1976 in Concordia Parish.[1]
On August 6, 1976, D'Artois was charged for his alleged involvement with the shotgun slaying of advertising executive Jim Leslie, on an arrest warrant by East Baton Rouge Parish, signed by 19th Judicial District Judge Douglas Gonzales.[1] He was released for lack of evidence but was forced to resign from office.[1]
Judge John F. Fant, son of the late Mayor Clyde Fant of Shreveport, ordered D'Artois to appear in court on October 13, 1976, to face charges on the $300,000 theft of city funds and the intimidation of witnesses before the grand jury. D'Artois's attorney informed the judge that the former commissioner was too ill to appear.[11]
Prosecution
D'Artois was arrested again in the Leslie case on April 19, 1977, on a warrant signed by Judge Gonzales. He barricaded himself from police in the attic of his house, and said he would never agree to go to the Caddo Parish jail. At the time, he demanded the use of a typewriter and wrote a statement, which was held by police.[12] D'Artois died on June 11, 1977, before any trial, during heart surgery in San Antonio, Texas. His death meant that the charges against him were never tried or resolved.
In 1976 and 1977, D'Artois's attorney had gotten his trial postponed several times. But in April 1977, Judge William J. Fleniken of the Louisiana 1st Judicial District Court ruled that D'Artois had to stand trial for the felony theft of $300,000 in municipal funds, which had been recorded as paid to police informers. D'Artois's attorney again questioned how his client could be tried, because of his health. Judge Fleniken said prosecutors had to provide doctors and medical equipment at the courthouse during the trial. D'Artois's attorney appealed and the Louisiana Supreme Court ruled that judges had to consider the defendant's overall health in deciding whether a person is too ill for trial.[13]
D'Artois died on June 11, 1977, during surgery in San Antonio, Texas, for his heart. After the former commissioner's death, Elliott Stonecipher, a Shreveport consultant and political analyst described D'Artois as "the most powerful ever public official [in Shreveport] ... who dragged the citizenry through the deep ditch of a corruption scandal which forever stained our city." On July 3, 1977, Dr. William E. Hull (1930–2013), the pastor of the First Baptist Church of Shreveport from 1975 to 1987, delivered the sermon "Shreveport at the Crossroads", a condemnation of the scandal engulfing D'Artois, who had died the previous month. Hull discussed the long-range prospects for the recovery of quality of life in the city.
Stonecipher said that friends told him later that there was
"a remarkable silence in the huge sanctuary as the sermon was preached. Many of those to whom Dr. Hull would impersonally refer were, in fact, sitting and listening, saving their reactions for other days and times. We might well imagine how sons and daughters of Shreveport's multi-generational leadership elite felt as they heard such remarks ..."[14]
A special election was held on October 2, 1977, to choose a successor public service commissioner for the year remaining in D'Artois's term.
D'Artois was interred at Forest Park Cemetery East in Shreveport. Jim Leslie had been interred there the year before.
Aftermath
Some analysts said that the corruption under D'Artois and in other departments occurred because of the commission form of government. Given executive and legislative authority, the commissioners were not adequately checked by their colleagues on the city council. In this form of government, each of the commissioners "sort of had their own little fiefdoms", explained Lynn Stewart, a former reporter for The Shreveport Times.
By 1978, the city replaced the commission form of government with the current mayor–council format. Council members are elected from single-member districts, enabling broader representation of residents on the council and the expression of minority viewpoints.[2]
Representation in other media
- Bill Keith, a former journalist and state senator, published The Commissioner: A True Story of Deceit, Dishonor, and Death (2009).[15]
- Jere Joiner, a former Shreveport police officer, published Badge of Dishonor (2013), exploring D'Artois's administration and issues of racism, corruption, and alleged murders of Leslie and Griffiths.
- Beyond Galilee: Shreveport and the Struggle for Civil Rights (2012) is a documentary film written by John Kent and T. D. Antoine (as Ted Dewayne), and directed by DeWayne. It covers D'Artois's early resistance to civil rights activists, including his attack of Rev. Harry Blake.
References
- Bill Keith (2009). The Commissioner: A True Story of Deceit, Dishonor, and Death. Gretna: Pelican Publishing Company. pp. 80–89, 183–184. ISBN 9781-58980-655-9. Retrieved June 10, 2014.
- "Badge of Dishonor: George D'Artois and his alleged murder plot against Jim Leslie". KTBS-TV. Retrieved July 26, 2014.
- Keristen Holmes, "Local Civil Rights Leaders Look Back 50 Years", KTBS-TV, 18 September 2013; accessed 21 March 2019
- "Beyond Galilee: Shreveport and the Struggle for Civil Rights". Joey Kent & Tim DeWayne. December 2012. Archived from the original on 20 August 2018. Retrieved 21 March 2019.
- "Confrontation with police injured pastor". Shreveport Times. September 17, 1985. Retrieved September 3, 2017.
- Shreveport Journal, February 7, 1968, p. 1
- Louisiana Secretary of State, Caddo Parish election returns, November 3, 1970
- "Badge of Dishonor: George D'Artois and His Alleged Murder Plot against Jim Leslie". KTBS-TV. Retrieved July 26, 2014.
- AP, Monroe News-Star, 19 April 1977; accessed 17 March 2019
- "Jim Leslie's Murder – Thirty years ago in Baton Rouge". James H. "Jim" Brown, July 2006. Retrieved June 10, 2014.
- "D'Artois ordered by Fant to appear in court Oct. 13", Minden Press-Herald, October 4, 1976, p. 6
- "D'Artois Trial Ordered". The Monroe News-Star. April 5, 1977. p. 3. Retrieved February 24, 2015.
- "Dr. William E. Hull, A Remarkable Man, December 13, 2013". theind.com. Retrieved June 10, 2014.
- Bill Keith, The Commissioner: A True Story of Deceit, Dishonor, and Death, Pelican Publishing, 2009