A Legal Lynching in Louisiana: Gary Tyler and The Criminalization of Black Students during Desegregation

FAIN: FT-291830-23

Walter C. Stern
University of Wisconsin, Madison (Madison, WI 53715-1218)

Research and writing of two chapters of a book about the criminalization of Black students in Louisiana during desegregation (1960s and 1970s).

African American southerners premised their post-World War II campaigns against segregated schooling on the idea that the state had an obligation to safeguard their children’s safety. Yet in Louisiana, as in much of the region, Black children’s vulnerability increased as school districts implemented desegregation during the 1960s and 1970s. Black students experienced exclusion from activities, attacks, and discriminatory discipline. By the mid-1970s, researchers identified significant disparities in the suspension and school-based arrest of Black students. This book project seeks to understand how and why this merger between the state’s educational and carceral functions occurred and its consequences for Black youth. It explores these questions through the case of Gary Tyler, a Black teenager whom an all-white jury wrongfully convicted of first-degree murder following the 1974 fatal shooting of a white student during a racial brawl at their desegregating high school in Louisiana.