The NAACP is calling on the Department of Justice to take the necessary steps to protect African American mayors in Louisiana and to fully investigate a number of recent violent incidents and threats.
Westlake Mayor-elect Gerald Washington's body was found by authorities Dec. 30 near his pickup truck at the old Mossville High School west of town. He was to have taken office two days later. The Calcasieu Parish Sheriff's Office and Calcasieu Coroner's Office ruled Washington's death a suicide. State police took over the investigation after Washington's family questioned the findings, claiming Washington was murdered. He won the election by a wide margin last year.
Two shotgun rounds were fired into the home of Greenwood Mayor Ernest Lampkins on Monday. No one was injured, but the shooting is under investigation by Greenwood Police and the Caddo Parish Sheriff's Office. Leslie Thompson, who just took office as Jonesboro's first black mayor, has been receiving death threats at his home by telephone.
Louisiana NAACP President Earnest L. Johnson has caught the tone of recent events quite succinctly. He questions
why local governments have not set up information/tip lines or offered rewards to develop leads in the shootings. He describes the terrorist acts as outright voter intimidation and compares their impact on the community to that felt during the deadly spate of church burnings and bombings experienced in the 1960s and 1990s.
Johnson thinks the incidents are intended as voter intimidation after Black electoral successes, just like in the old days. Also, the shooting into Ernest Lampkins' home was not the first incident that has occurred there:
In December, he found a “for sale” sign in his front yard.
The violent incidents and threats hearken back to the days of night riders and an unfettered Ku Klux Klan---and so does the utter silence of state and federal law enforcement officials.
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