Just as cultures mingle in New Orleans, the effort to ensure equality for all has also taken on some distinctive characteristics. Here in over 90-degree heat and close to 90-percent humidity, in a park just across the street from City Hall, Clarence Barrow’s story illustrates the challenges people of color in Louisiana have faced over the years.

Barrow, 69, tells of the first time he encountered his father, a prominent white doctor named Tom Butler, in his childhood home of St. Francisville, Louisiana. “My mom had sent me to walk over to see him to ask for money, because I needed a new pair of pants,” Barrow says. “I saw him walking; he had lots of people working in the field.”

But when the 7-year-old boy called out to his father, he had a shock coming. “You can’t call me Daddy,” said Butler.

“Why?” Barrow asked.

“Because I’m a white man and you’re a nigger.”

Barrow went home and told his mother what had happened. His mother sadly said, “That’s because he’s white and you’re black.” But Barrow recalls running to the mirror; “I looked in the mirror and couldn’t see nothing black about me.”

What the small boy saw was blue eyes in a typical European-American face; the only feature that gives him away as a mixed-blood African American was a head of grizzled dark hair. Today, the hair is graying, but in any other American city, Barrow wouldn’t get a second look.

Now, fading blue eyes become glazed with tears as Barrow tells the rest of his story. “There was no schools for a black child, but I did go to St. Peter’s Baptist Church when I wasn’t working in the fields. Most time we was working.” As a result, Barrow has never learned to read or write, “but I got a good understanding of how things should be.”

One thing Barrow noticed that shouldn’t be was how black workers were treated in 1940s Louisiana. “I seen slaves in my life,” Barrow says. “People working and not free to take off when they want.” Barrow escaped the same fate only after his father died when he was 17. “My mother never was able to give me anything but the knowledge of right from wrong. ‘Son, always do the right thing,’ she said.”

So Barrow did the right thing: He left St. Francisville and its dismal prospects for a man of mixed blood and came to New Orleans, where he quickly found work.

“From October 1 to December 24, I made $764,” says Barrow. “I went home for Christmas and gave my mother $700. She never had electric power till then. I got it for her.” He also promised his mother to always take care of her, even after returning to New Orleans.

Barrow finally found the means to a good life when he found work on the docks, “working in the hole” as a longshoreman. “The next year, I got Mother and brought her here,” he proudly relates. He supported his mother even after marrying and raising four children. And despite his illiteracy, Barrow keeps current in civic affairs so he can make informed decisions at the ballot box.