LAKE PROVIDENCE

Civil War

By the start of the American Civil War in 1861, the region consisted mostly of large cotton plantations along the river, which were worked by thousands of slave laborers.

The town of Lake Providence developed after the arrival of the Union Army in the spring of 1862. Under the direction of General Ulysses S. Grant, the area by Lake Providence was established as a supply depot and base of operations for the Vicksburg Campaign. The soldiers dug a canal between the Mississippi River and Lake Providence. The area was called "Soldiers' Rest". Grant subsequently moved his troops south for temporary residence at Winter Quarters south of Newellton in Tensas Parish. As slaves crowded into the camp at Lake Providence to gain freedom from surrounding plantations, the population quickly soared from a few hundred to several thousand. What began as a simple military supply camp quickly transformed into a city with a large population of African-American refugees.

By the time Vicksburg, Mississippi fell to the Union in 1863, most planters in the Lake Providence area had fled, and their plantations lay empty. The Union Army determined that they should be productive again.

20th century

After the Reconstruction Era, many black people worked as sharecroppers or tenant farmers in the region. In 1898, Louisiana, like other southern states, enacted a new constitution, designed to maintain Democratic Party dominance and forestall any alliances such as the Populist-Republican alliance that had won seats in the 1890s. They included provisions that raised barriers to voter registration and elections, effectively disenfranchising most blacks despite their constitutional 15th Amendment right to vote. Their exclusion from the political system made them second-class citizens.

The civil rights movement of the post-World War II period from the 1940s through the 1960s brought efforts of a new generation to make constitutional rights more equitable. Until 1962, no African Americans had been allowed to register to vote in Lake Providence or East Carroll Parish in forty years when U.S. District Judge Edwin Ford Hunter Jr., based in Lake Charles in the far southwestern corner of the state, personally registered twenty-eight African Americans in Lake Providence under a provision of the Civil Rights Act of 1960, which had been signed into law by U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Hunter was challenged by Louisiana 6th Judicial District Judge Frank Voelker Sr., who was based in Lake Providence, in a dispute over the powers of the national government. The case attracted national attention, as the civil rights movement highlighted the constitutional infringement of the rights of African Americans in the South.

Following national Democratic support for the passage of civil rights legislation in the mid-1960s, most African Americans allied with that party. With a majority African-American electorate, Lake Providence voters in the 21st century continue to support Democratic Party candidates. Conservative whites tended to leave the Democratic Party after the 1960s, and have overwhelmingly joined the Republican Party. In the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections, East Carroll Parish voted handily for Democrat Barack H. Obama of Illinois, rather than his Republican opponents, John McCain of Arizona and Mitt Romney of Massachusetts.