Elliot D. Coleman

Elliot d'Evereaux Coleman I (May 1, 1881 – May 26, 1963), was a cotton planter and law-enforcement officer who served from 1936 to 1960 as the sheriff of Tensas Parish in northeastern Louisiana.^[1] Earlier, he had been a state police bodyguard of U.S. Senator Huey P. Long, Jr., on September 8, 1935, the night of Long's assassination.

Early life

Coleman was born to Elliot D. Coleman and the Lou Ellen Pollard on the Live Oak Plantation in Waterproof in southern Tensas Parish. He was educated in the Waterproof public schools,^[2] which have since closed. Youngsters in Tensas Parish now attend school in the parish seat of St. Joseph.

Career in law enforcement

At the age of seventeen, Coleman became a deputy sheriff under W. C. Young, the sheriff from 1880 to 1905^[1] and Coleman's future father-in-law. Coleman served as a justice of the peace and was a member of the Tensas Parish Police Jury, the parish governing body akin to county commissions in other states. He was a delegate to the 1921 Louisiana Constitutional Convention, subsequently superseded by the conclave that met in Baton Rouge in 1973.^[2]

Coleman was wounded in a shootout in 1900.^[3] Three decades later in early September 1931, while still a deputy sheriff under John Hughes and also a parish prohibition agent, Coleman killed Marshall Miller, a white tenant farmer on the Franklin Plantation near Newellton in northern Tensas Parish. Two Miller brothers, Roscoe and Marshall, were suspected of operating an illegal still and had been drinking when Coleman arrived with a constable and an informant named Avery Hollis. Coleman was attempting to take the men into custody of public intoxication. Roscoe surrendered, but Marshall Miller grabbed a shotgun and attempted to kill Hollis, who stood behind a bystander. Amid much confusion, Coleman fired his rifle and killed Marshall Miller. Coleman was cleared of any wrongdoing in the shooting.^[4]

In 1933, Coleman's junior deputy, Blanton Evans, who had witnessed the shooting of Marshall Miller less than two years earlier, shot another man on liquor charges. While in Newellton, Coleman and Evans had arrested two white men from outside Tensas Parish and began transporting the men to the parish jail in St. Joseph. The two detainees attempted to overpower Evans, who pulled his pistol, fired, and killed one of the men. The shootings in 1931 and 1933 caused some in Tensas Parish to question whether the sheriff's department served at the call of the merchant-planter class and was selectively enforcing the law against low-income whites.^[4]

As one of the bodyguards of Huey Long, Coleman testified that he twice shot Carl Weiss, the young Baton Rouge physician considered to have been Long's assassin,^[2] though the Weiss family has long disputed the official version of events.^[5]

Service as sheriff

Coleman was still a prohibition agent when he was elected sheriff in 1936. He defeated his boss, the 30-year incumbent, John Hughes, a son of Irish immigrants whose father had served in the Confederate Army. Hughes was orphaned in 1870 at the age of five and reared by an uncle on a plantation in Tensas Parish. He attended Jefferson College near his birthplace of Natchez, Mississippi, and became a planter and merchant. In 1904, he helped to organize the Bank of Newellton and the next year was elected as sheriff of Tensas Parish to succeed Coleman's father-in-law. The election was complicated by the presence of a third Democratic primary candidate named Dan Morris of Newellton, who made a strong showing and cut into Hughes' base in northern Tensas Parish. Coleman won the position when Hughes declined to pursue a runoff election; Hughes reasoned that much of Morris' votes would likely have switched to Coleman in a second race. Closely identified with the planter aristocracy, Hughes lost support from both political factions when he was trapped during the campaign into denying that he was an opponent of the late Huey Long.^[6] While Coleman eas elected sheriff in Tensas Parish 1936, one of his fellow bodyguards at the Long assassination, Larry Sale, was elected that same year sheriff in Claiborne Parish in North Louisiana.^[7]

After his victory in 1936, Coleman was reelected in 1940, 1944, 1948, 1952, and 1956. In 1960, however, he was unseated^[2] by his fellow Democrat William M. "Max" Seaman, the younger brother of Louisiana State Representative J.C. Seaman, also from Waterproof. At the time of his retirement, Coleman was at seventy-nine the oldest serving sheriff in Louisiana.^[8] Max Seaman was elected sheriff again in 1964 and 1968 but died in office in October 1968.

During his long tenure as sheriff, Coleman directed several attempts to hold the Mississippi River within its levees. At the Tensas Parish centennial ceremony on April 6, 1943, Coleman delivered a speech "High Lights of High Waters", which recounted several occasions during which the river tore through the levees to inundate the alluviual farming area of Tensas and adjoining parishes.^[9] On that occasion, then District Attorney Jefferson B. Snyder of Tallulah in neighboring Madison Parish, echoed Coleman's observances, saying that he could recall the time when there were "no levees, no bridges, ferries nor roads, but the richest soil in the world, more fertile than the Valley of the Nile River. It was a hunter's paradise."^[9]

While serving as sheriff, Coleman was a delegate to the 1948 Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, which nominated the Truman/Barkley ticket.^[10]

Family

In 1907, Coleman married the former Jane Young, and the couple had three children, Jane Birdie Coleman (born 1908), Louis Coleman, and Elliot D. Coleman, II.^[2] Coleman died in Ferriday in Concordia Parish, from which Tensas Parish was carved in 1843. He is interred at the Natchez City Cemetery in Natchez, Mississippi.^[11]

Some Coleman descendants still reside in Tensas Parish. His great-grandson, Elliot Coleman, IV, who was born some four years after Coleman’s passing, died in 2009 at the age of forty-two.^[12]

In 2005, Ferriday newspaper publisher Sam Hanna, Sr., filed one of his "One Man's Opinion" columns about Coleman's historical legacy.^[13]

References