For some residents, racial tensions invoke reminders of a segregation-era Baton Rouge

As Baton Rouge struggles over race, 23-year-old Christopher Morgan says he just wants to be safe.

By Molly Hennessy-Fiske

July 19, 2016 3:30 AM PT

Reporting from Baton Rouge, La. — The railroad tracks used to divide north and south Baton Rouge, black and white, but over the years what locals call their Mason-Dixon line shifted about a mile south to Florida Boulevard.

To the north are predominantly black neighborhoods — and the convenience store where police recently shot and killed a 37-year-old black man, Alton Sterling.

“Will they do the same thing to me and say I provoked it?” asked 23-year-old Christopher Morgan, sitting outside a hair braiding shop across the street Monday.

To the south are wealthier, mostly white areas — and the gas station where a black gunman from Kansas City shot and killed three police officers Sunday.

A white family was there Monday to pay their respects at a makeshift memorial, planting a small U.S. flag in the grass among blue balloons, bouquets and cards saying “All Lives Matter.”

The family had just come from visiting the grave of Ralph Dwayne Wilder, a sheriff’s deputy shot and killed during a 1972 civil rights demonstration that turned into a riot. It seemed history was replaying itself.

“You don’t feel safe anymore,” said 70-year-old John Wilder, who lives in the Baton Rouge suburbs, eyes tearing as he recalled his brother’s death. “It could happen anywhere.”

Black and white residents on both sides of the dividing line described a city on edge in the wake of the shootings. While some still planned to demonstrate this week for police reforms, others considered it disrespectful to police.

“The powder keg is greater right now than it was in the ’60s,” said Patrick Fontenot, 70, a graduate of Southern University and A&M College, a historically black school on the north side. “I feel more apprehensive now.”

He recalled living in segregated Baton Rouge: “Colored to the rear, sit in the back of the bus, don’t look too close at the white lady.”

In 1953, local black leaders staged a bus boycott. Martin Luther King Jr. traveled to meet with them at Wesley United Methodist Church before organizing the more famous boycott in Montgomery, Ala., three years later.

Fontenot said the discrimination black residents face at the hands of police now is more difficult to fight. “You don’t know what you’re facing,” he said, adding that “I’ve just seen a turn back to hatred.”

Rev. Joe D. Connelly at Wesley United Methodist joined the protests following Sterling’s death. He said the shooting of police officers “will make our task of pulling people together harder, but not impossible.”

Connelly lives in the Tara subdivision on the south side, so close to the killings that he and his neighbors were ordered to stay inside Sunday. The 500 or so members of his church are the black intelligentsia, business owners and professors at Louisiana State University on the south side of town, active in the civil rights struggle.

“They’re tired of the talk,” he said. “They want some action.”

He had planned a silent, all-male march from his church to a rally at the capital next Sunday but was consulting police Monday about whether to postpone it.

Safety concerns have already led to the postponement of a unity march of black and white residents down Florida Boulevard, said City Councilwoman Tara Wicker.

Wicker, 46, is black and grew up on the north side, where she still lives and pastors a church with her husband. “It’s an area that has suffered a decline,” she said, noting that hospitals and schools had closed. “Property values have plummeted.”

A decade ago, the city and surrounding East Baton Rouge parish — with a population of about 400,000 — was tested when Hurricane Katrina brought tens of thousands of new residents, many of them black. Her church alone housed 1,700, many of whom stayed.

“That was a real trying time for Baton Rouge because overnight, Baton Rouge became a big city,” Wicker recalled. “Infrastructure-wise, emotion-wise, I don’t think Baton Rouge was prepared for big city living. Overnight we woke up and we had to grow up.”

On the north side where she lives, liquor stores abound. But the nearest grocery store is more than a mile and a half away. Youths in the neighborhood take the bus to work at fast food restaurants in white suburbs. Last year, Wicker tried and failed to lure a Dollar Store to the area.

“Our neighborhoods are very segregated,” she said. “It’s not surprising to any of us that we had a racial divide in the city of Baton Rouge. We have been working methodically to close that gap, but progress has been slow.

“Baton Rouge is having to look itself in the mirror and say ‘We thought we were OK, but we’re not,’” she said.

Woody Jenkins, 69, a white Baton Rouge native, disagreed.

“I’ve read so many headlines saying Baton Rouge is a divided city,” he said. “But I’ve lived here all my life, and I don’t find it to be that way at all. Everywhere I go people are hugging each other, talking,” he said. “They have said this is not going to be Ferguson or Baltimore.”

A longtime Republican state lawmaker and editor of the Capital City News, Jenkins blamed outsiders for disrupting some protests after Sterling’s death.

Ronald Smith, a 50-year-old restaurant manager, straddles the racial divide in Baton Rouge.

Smith is black and serves up barbecue at Remi Restaurant Express on Florida Boulevard to residents from north and south of the divide, as well as police, black and white.

He attended LSU on a football scholarship, saw the disparity between how he was treated by those who knew he was an athlete versus those who saw him as just another young black man. “The racial profiling is always going to be there,” he said as he packed dinners Monday.

But Smith also counts on police, who last year chased and caught a man who tried to rob him at his restaurant at gunpoint.

“If they had not had police in the area, I might have got killed,” Smith said. “You got to have police on your side.”

He worries simmering racial tensions could boil over, especially if police are not charged in connection with Sterling’s death.

A few blocks north, sitting on the hair salon stoop, Morgan agreed. His mother told his about the riots in 1972. “That’s what we don’t want here,” he said.

But he also hopes protests can continue without a backlash from police. Not all of those arrested during last week’s protests were outsiders: He met a 17-year-old black girl, a local, who told him that she had been beaten and jailed by officers, who confronted the crowd in riot gear.

Every day now, Morgan — who sold CDs alongside Sterling — worries about what he should do if he is stopped by police. Should he raise his hands, or keep them down? Speak up, or obey?

“I just want to be safe,” he said.

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