OPELOUSAS — In October 1951, John Lester Mitchell, a World War II veteran and a founder of the local NAACP chapter, went with two other men to sign up to vote. 

No African American had succeeded in registering to vote in St. Landry Parish in decades, as local officials across the South placed hurdles like poll taxes and literacy tests in front of Black men or simply rejected their applications.

Just 16 months earlier, five Black men in the parish had been beaten badly while attempting to register.

Mitchell and his friends also had no luck. The registrar claimed they failed to correctly interpret the U.S. Constitution, and a week later they filed a federal voting rights lawsuit, a move that attracted headlines in the local paper.

As the court hearing approached, Mitchell, who was then 33, was drinking late into the night at the Chicken Shack, a Black nightclub with a bar, a dance hall and a gambling room on the outskirts of Opelousas.

At about 3:30 a.m., Mitchell accidentally knocked one or more glasses off a table. Thinking he’d had too much, special sheriff’s deputy David Lanclos, who worked as a bouncer for the club, said he would take him home.

Mitchell did not want to go, other patrons said later, and Lanclos guided him to the door and pushed him outside.

There, the two “started tussling,” according to testimony from King Black Jr., an African American musician who worked and lived at the club.

Lanclos had a pistol in his hand, Black said, as he witnessed this exchange:

“Go home,” Lanclos said. “I don’t want to shoot you.” 

“Go ahead on and shoot then,” Mitchell replied.

“OK, you asked for it, so here it is,” Lanclos said.

With his .38 Colt pistol, Lanclos shot Mitchell from three feet away. 

Mitchell died within half an hour. Lanclos testified at a local inquest that he had acted in self-defense, fearing that Mitchell was trying to grab his gun, and no charges were brought against him.

Local and national Black leaders, including Thurgood Marshall, the future U.S. Supreme Court justice, were outraged and insisted that the U.S. Department of Justice investigate whether the shooting could have been related to Mitchell’s voting rights suit.

Recently released records show that some attorneys at the department raised questions about other possible violations of Mitchell’s civil rights that still resonate in high-profile cases involving law-enforcement officers, like the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020. 

Did Lanclos, who had been given authority to carry a gun and arrest people, use excessive force in shooting Mitchell? 

And what kind of evidence is needed to prosecute law enforcement officers for violating the federal civil rights of someone they kill?

A sundown town

Mitchell had served as a private in the 316th wing of the Army Air Force for three years during World War II. It is not clear if he was sent overseas. After the war, he sold insurance and was a carpenter, building a white wooden house where he lived with his wife and daughter.

Like other Black veterans, he hoped to see the victory in the war translate into a victory over racism in the U.S. and especially in his hometown of Opelousas. 

To suppress the votes of former enslaved people in 1868, the Knights of the White Camelia, a white group, led two weeks of attacks that killed at least 200 Black people in what became known as the “Opelousas Massacre.” 

That also led to Opelousas, 30 minutes north of Lafayette, becoming a “sundown town,” with Blacks avoiding the main parts of the city at night. 

“If you were Black, you could not be in the city limits unless you were escorted by a white,” said Larry Caillier II, parish archivist and anthropologist for the St. Landry Parish Clerk of Court.

When the five Black men tried to break through obstacles to voting in 1950, the St. Landry Parish registrar and sheriff’s deputies attacked them in the registrar’s office, leaving them with cuts and bruises and one with a fractured bone.

So when Mitchell and two others tried to register the next year and filed their suit against the registrar, “it must have taken a whole lot of courage to step up the way he did,” said Damon Hewitt, a New Orleans native who is now the executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, a nonprofit based in Washington, D.C. 

That’s why, even though Mitchell was killed in an argument at a bar, Marshall, who was then the NAACP’s top lawyer, pressed the Justice Department and the FBI to investigate, according to the records released by the federal Civil Rights Cold Case Records Review Board. 

Was there specific intent?

Once FBI agents started interviewing people, however, they could not find any link between Mitchell’s voting rights lawsuit and his killing.

Lanclos, also 33, gave the FBI a written statement saying he had not met Mitchell before that night and did not know Mitchell was part of a voting rights suit.

Lanclos was a volunteer deputy, and the sheriff had given him arrest powers to keep the peace at several nightclubs where he was a paid bouncer. He said he knew some Black men had tried to register to vote in Opelousas but that he did not know Mitchell was among them.

Richard B. Millspaugh, an attorney for the NAACP chapter who had represented Mitchell's widow at the inquest, also told agents that he did not know if there was any connection between the lawsuit and Mitchell's death, and that he had no reason to believe there was one.

All told, the FBI agents interviewed 30 people, including Black employees and patrons of the Chicken Shack, documents released by the records review board show.

After reviewing interview memos, civil rights lawyers at the Justice Department focused on a different aspect of federal laws: whether Lanclos had deprived Mitchell of his civil rights by using excessive force in shooting him.

The law was passed in 1866 to prosecute law-enforcement officers who were working with vigilante groups to terrorize formerly enslaved people and was later revised to add a requirement that a law-enforcement officer had to have “willfully” deprived someone of his or her civil rights to be convicted. In 1945, the U.S. Supreme Court made the willfulness standard even more stringent by requiring prosecutors to show that an officer had a “specific intent” to deprive a victim of civil rights.

Still, the law remained the main option for federal prosecutors to use in cases of possible police misconduct. And in March 1952, the chief of the civil rights section recommended that the Justice Department assign one of its trial attorneys to present a case against Lanclos to a federal grand jury in Louisiana.

“The Civil Rights Section recognizes that the evidence is not conclusive and that a jury could find a reasonable doubt as to the requisite willfulness,” the chief, A.B. Caldwell, wrote. “It is our view, however, that the facts should be presented to a grand jury so that an impartial body could render the decision as to the prosecution.”

Five weeks later, Victor Woerheide, one of the department’s most prominent trial attorneys, wrote an analysis saying that Lanclos “may have used more force than was reasonably necessary to defend himself when he shot at the victim in such a way as to kill him outright.”

However, Woerheide added that it was unlikely that the evidence the FBI had collected “will prove sufficient to establish beyond a reasonable doubt that subject willfully injured victim by using more force than was reasonably necessary to defend himself.”

Given the tendency of white jurors to side with white suspects at the time, Woerheide also saw “no prospect of a true bill being returned if presented to a Louisiana grand jury.”

Additional memos followed between the civil rights and trial lawyers, with Caldwell acknowledging that if the killing “was done in hot temper,” it could be hard to prove Lanclos had acted willfully. 

He still believed a grand jury should decide. But given the potential problems with white jurors, he “reluctantly” agreed with the trial section to close the inquiry.

Legal experts say that the debate within the department over the Mitchell case shows how difficult it is, even now, for prosecutors investigating police officers to meet the standard of willful intent.

“Few adjectives have done as much work as ‘willful’ in preventing the possibility of justice and therefore deterrence,” said David D. Troutt, a professor at Rutgers Law School in Newark, New Jersey. 

In 1999, for instance, the Justice Department announced that it lacked proof of specific intent and could not bring federal charges against New York City police officers who had shot Amadou Diallo, a 23-year-old immigrant, 41 times. 

However, the civil rights law was used in convicting Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, who held his foot on George Floyd’s neck for more than nine minutes in May 2020. Chauvin admitted in a plea agreement that his failure to halt the pressure and render medical aid had deprived Floyd of his civil rights and led to his death.

Kristen Clarke, who was the assistant attorney general for civil rights from 2021 to early 2025, said the intent standard “has proven to be a prohibitively high burden in many cases involving law enforcement misconduct and law enforcement violence.” 

She said her office prosecuted more than 150 officials who committed violations but also “declined to prosecute many cases that did not meet the high intent standard.” 

Mitchell’s Legacy

Mitchell’s niece Brenda Artwell said that their family was severely traumatized by his death.

Her father, Mitchell’s youngest sibling, "would never talk about it,” she said. 

Artwell said her mother told her that Mitchell’s widow, Mary Ella, stayed at a family member’s house for weeks before she could go back home to the home her husband had built for them. 

“She never wanted him to go there,” Pamela Scott, Mitchell’s granddaughter, said, referring to the Chicken Shack.

Mitchell’s widow moved to New Orleans with her daughter, Waver Mitchell, who was then 7, and worked as a nurse. She later encouraged Waver to attend Southern University.

It is not clear what happened with the lawsuit that Mitchell and the other two men had filed. But in 1952, three Black people were registered to vote in St. Landry Parish, and by 1955, 11,500 Blacks were registered to vote there.

Louisiana Gov. Buddy Roemer presented Mary Ella Mitchell with a Governor’s Award in 1989, honoring Mitchell as a founding member of the local NAACP chapter. 

She threw the award in a drawer, Scott recalled, because she did not want any memory of what had happened to him. Scott said she later framed the award to preserve the importance of her grandfather. 

“I feel like he kind of fell out of history because he was killed before he could complete the voting rights case,” Scott said. With the recent records release, she added: “I’m really, really happy that this is giving him his place.”