For nearly five decades, Leander Perez ran Plaquemines Parish like a private country. As district attorney and later district judge and political boss, he controlled the oil and gas leases that funded the parish government, dispensed patronage through a network of loyalists, and maintained power through a combination of legal maneuvering and racial intimidation that was extreme even by Louisiana standards.
Perez's national influence peaked in 1948 when he organized Dixiecrat support across Louisiana. Plaquemines swung hard against the national Democratic Party and stayed there — in 1952, the parish gave the most Republican vote of any county-equivalent in the entire United States. No Democratic presidential nominee would carry Plaquemines again until Bill Clinton in 1996.
But it was his war against school integration that defined his legacy. When Archbishop Joseph Rummel ordered the integration of Catholic schools in the New Orleans archdiocese in 1962, Perez organized a boycott and led a campaign of threats and intimidation against clergy and parents who complied. Rummel excommunicated Perez — an almost unprecedented act by the American Catholic Church, and one of the most dramatic confrontations between church authority and racial politics in the civil rights era.
Perez also threatened to convert Fort St. Philip — the colonial-era fort on the east bank of the Mississippi — into a prison for civil rights workers who entered the parish. The threat was taken seriously enough to deter some organizers.
Perez died in 1969. His sons continued the machine for another generation, but the Voting Rights Act of 1965 had already begun to break its grip. Today, the NRHP-listed Promised Land mansion in Braithwaite is privately held and viewable only from the road. The story it tells is not comfortable, but Portage doesn't look away from uncomfortable stories.