Many feared Naomi Drake and powerful racial whim

In a society in which few white people could imagine anything worse than being called black, Naomi Drake wielded the weapon of racism with the ardor of an armed knight defending her king.

During 16 years as the head of the Bureau of Vital Statistics for New Orleans, Drake made it clear that there was nothing worse in the world than to allow a person to live as white who did not deserve to do so. She lorded over the birth and death records of generations of New Orleanians, and unilaterally changed the race of thousands of them from white to black - almost never the other way around.

When she was finally fired in 1965, Drake was feared and reviled - by parents who could not get birth certificates to put their children in public schools, by lawyers who could not do research or complete wills, by adoption agencies and funeral homes.

But the source of her power and reputation says more about racism in New Orleans than it did about her peculiar habits of mind. She was able to wield such power because of racism's sway. No matter what they looked like, who they were or how they had lived, white people knew that to be touched by any hint of blackness was to be tainted, stigmatized by the sting of their own racial prejudices. That is what made people fear Naomi Drake.

The Civil Service Commission agreed to delete the names of any witnesses from its final decision upholding Drake's firing. That was to save the witnesses the embarrassment of having been suspected as being black, however inaccurately.

If Drake thought there was the slightest hint that someone who lived as a white person might have any African ancestry, she would not issue a birth or death certificate.

At the time of her firing for her refusal to issue certificates, the backlog of birth certificates had mounted to 4,700. Almost 1,200 death certificates had been held up.

And if she could prove African ancestry, however distant, she would change a person's race in the official records of the City of New Orleans, usually without notifying the person affected or any of the person's family members.

According to testimony at her hearing, she once reportedly said, "All the people in White Castle are half-breeds."

She would ferret out signs of African ancestry in children of unmarried mothers, call them in to her office and inform them that their children were "adulterous bastards," testimony showed.

Drake, who died in 1987, ordered her employees to pull every certificate in the office designated by race with the letter "c" - which usually meant mixed race, or 'colored,' but also sometimes meant Chinese or something else - and change the race on such documents to Negro.

She kept a list of "flagged names," that she believed were suspect, and should be checked for signs of African ancestry. Any request for a certificate of a person with a flagged name had to be held up for further research. The list included such names as Adams, Charles, Landry and Olsen.

She explained how she could tell when someone's birth certificate was wrong at her dismissal hearing before the Civil Service Commission: "Very often we are acquainted with the name," Drake testified. "We know them to be the names of Negro families."

She had her workers scour the obituaries of people who had died, looking for any clues that a dead person identified as white had black relatives or survivors, such as services at a traditionally black funeral home, relatives with traditionally black names or burial at traditionally black cemeteries.

Her research was instrumental in a decision by the Orleans Parish district attorney's office in 1956 to obtain an indictment against a Plaquemines Parish woman on charges of filing a false document. The woman's crime: She considered herself white and had recorded that on the birth certificate for her child.

The woman was eventually acquitted, but only after being asked a series of questions designed to attach to her any blackness at all, including whether her doctor treated her as a black person or a white person, and where her husband's sister's children attended school.

When Drake was fired, few people were happier to see her go than Peter Huhner, father of five.

Huhner had tried to get birth certificates for his children. But Drake suspected Huhner's wife had African ancestry, and so refused to release the certificates. After months of battling Drake unsuccessfully, Huhner finally put his children in parochial school.

But what Huhner was most concerned about, according to his letter to city officials after Drake's dismissal, was not the burden of private school tuition or the denial of a public education, but that his family had been besmirched.

"We find it difficult to understand how my wife's parents were registered as being white as were their parents," Huhner wrote. "And after being brought up that way, after all these years, someone that does not even know the family at all has reason to believe differently and would cause this much embarrassment."