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Created page with "{{Infobox officeholder |name=Elliot d'Evereaux Coleman |nationality=American | office=Sheriff of Tensas Parish<br> Louisiana, USA..."
{{Infobox officeholder
|name=Elliot d'Evereaux Coleman
|nationality=[[United States|American]]
| office=[[Sheriff]] of Tensas Parish<br> [[Louisiana]], [[United States|USA]]
| party=[[Democratic Party|Democrat]]
| term_start=1936
| term_end=1960
| preceded=John Hughes
| succeeded=William M. "Max" Seaman
| birth_date=May 1, 1881
| death_date=May 26, 1963
| birth_place=Live Oak Plantation<br>Waterproof, Tensas Parish, Louisiana
| death_place=Ferriday, Concordia Parish, Louisiana
| occupation=Law-enforcement officer; cotton planter
| spouse Jane Young Coleman (married 1907-1963, his death)
| children=Louis Coleman<br>
Jane Coleman<br>
Elliot D. Coleman, II
| religion=
|footnotes='''Notes''':<br>
*Coleman, as a Tensas Parish deputy sheriff, married the daughter of the sheriff, W. C. Young, who vacated the office thirty-one years before Coleman himself became sheriff.
}}
'''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]], the smallest in population of the sixty-four parishes in the state.<ref name=list>{{cite web|url=http://files.usgwarchives.org/la/tensas/court/elec0001.txt|title= Public Elected Officials, Tensas Parish, Louisiana|publisher=usgwarchives.org|accessdate=December 30, 2009}}</ref> Earlier, he had been a state police bodyguard of [[U.S. Senator]] [[Huey Long|Huey Pierce Long, Jr.]], on September 8, 1935, the night of Long's [[assassination]].
==Background==
Coleman was born to Elliot D. Coleman and the former Lou Ellen Pollard on the Live Oak Plantation in [[rural]] Waterproof in southern Tensas Parish. He was educated in the Waterproof public schools.,<ref name=lahist/> which have since closed. Youngsters in Tensas Parish now attend school in the [[county seat|parish seat]] of [[St. Joseph, Louisiana|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<ref name=list/> 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 a county commission 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.<ref name=lahist/> and produced the Louisiana Constitution of 1974.
Coleman was wounded in a shootout in 1900.<ref>''Once Proud Princes'', p. 264.</ref> Three decades later in early September 1931, while still a deputy sheriff under Sheriff 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 whisky 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 for public intoxication. Roscoe surrendered, but Miller grabbed a shotgun and attempted to kill Hollis, who stood behind a bystander. Amid much confusion, Coleman fired his rifle and killed Miller. Coleman was cleared of any wrongdoing in the shooting.<ref name="Once Proud Princes pp. 119-120">''Once Proud Princes'', pp. 119-120</ref>
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.<ref name="Once Proud Princes pp. 119-120"/>
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,<ref name=lahist> Dictionary of Louisiana Biography - C - Louisiana Historical Association (lahistory.org), accessed April 29, 2021.</ref> though the Weiss family has long disputed the official version of events.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.nola.com/politics/index.ssf/2010/09/the_enduring_mystery_of_who_ki.html|author=Robert Travis Scott|title=The enduring mystery of who killed Huey P. Long|date=September 5, 2010|publisher=''The New Orleans Times-Picayune''|accessdate=July 20, 2013}}</ref>
==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 [[Ireland|Irish]] [[immigration|i[[mmigrants whose father had served in the [[Confederate States of America|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 Party|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.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://etd.lsu.edu/docs/available/etd-11082006-162523/unrestricted/jmreonasdiss.pdf|author=James Matthew Reonas|title=Once Proud Princes: Planters and Plantation Culture in Louisiana's Northeast Delta, From the First World War Through the Great Depression'|publisher=etd.lsu.edu ([[Louisiana State University]], [[dissertation]], 2006), pp. 214-215, 265)|accessdate=July 20, 2013}}</ref> 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.<ref>Exhibit, [[Herbert S. Ford Memorial Museum]], Homer, Louisiana.</ref>
After his victory in 1936, Coleman was reelected in 1940, 1944, 1948, 1952, and 1956. In 1960, however, he was unseated<ref name=lahist/> by his fellow Democrat William M. "Max" Seaman, the younger brother of 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.<ref>''[[Monroe News Star|Monroe Morning World]],'' April 17, 1960.</ref> 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.<ref name=tgazette>"Tensas Parish Centennial Given Gala Observance!, ''The Natchez Democrat,'' April 7, 1943, reprinted in ''The Tensas Gazette,'' May 1, 1993.</ref> 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 [[Nile River|Valley of the Nile River]]. It was a hunter's paradise."<ref name=tgazette/>
While serving as sheriff, Coleman was a delegate to the 1948 [[Democratic National Convention]] in [[Philadelphia]], [[Pennsylvania]], which nominated the [[Harry S Truman|Truman]]/[[Alben Barkley|Barkley]] ticket.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://politicalgraveyard.com/bio/colebank-coleman.html#0KT1CTYC5|title=Index to Politicians Cole - Coleman|publisher=politicalgraveyard.com|accessdate=April 29, 2021}}</ref>
==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.<ref name=lahist/> 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.<ref>'The New Orleans Times-Picayune,'' May 27, 1963.</ref>
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.<ref>{
Elliot D'Evereaux Coleman, IV, obituary, ''The Natchez Democrat,'' October 3, 2009.</ref>
In 2005, Ferriday publisher] [[Sam Hanna|Sam Hanna, Sr.]], filed one of his "One Man's Opinion" columns about Coleman's historical legacy.<ref>{{cite web|url= http://www.ouachitacitizen.com/news.php?id=73|title=Press Association honors the late Sam Hanna, Sr.|date=May 18, 2006|publisher=''The Ouachia Citizen'' (West Monroe, Louisiana), accessed December 29, 2009.</ref>
==References==
{{reflist}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Coleman, Elliot D.}}
[[Category:Louisiana People]]
[[Category:Farmers]]
[[Category:Politicians]]
[[Category:Sheriffs]]
[[Category:Democrats]]
|name=Elliot d'Evereaux Coleman
|nationality=[[United States|American]]
| office=[[Sheriff]] of Tensas Parish<br> [[Louisiana]], [[United States|USA]]
| party=[[Democratic Party|Democrat]]
| term_start=1936
| term_end=1960
| preceded=John Hughes
| succeeded=William M. "Max" Seaman
| birth_date=May 1, 1881
| death_date=May 26, 1963
| birth_place=Live Oak Plantation<br>Waterproof, Tensas Parish, Louisiana
| death_place=Ferriday, Concordia Parish, Louisiana
| occupation=Law-enforcement officer; cotton planter
| spouse Jane Young Coleman (married 1907-1963, his death)
| children=Louis Coleman<br>
Jane Coleman<br>
Elliot D. Coleman, II
| religion=
|footnotes='''Notes''':<br>
*Coleman, as a Tensas Parish deputy sheriff, married the daughter of the sheriff, W. C. Young, who vacated the office thirty-one years before Coleman himself became sheriff.
}}
'''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]], the smallest in population of the sixty-four parishes in the state.<ref name=list>{{cite web|url=http://files.usgwarchives.org/la/tensas/court/elec0001.txt|title= Public Elected Officials, Tensas Parish, Louisiana|publisher=usgwarchives.org|accessdate=December 30, 2009}}</ref> Earlier, he had been a state police bodyguard of [[U.S. Senator]] [[Huey Long|Huey Pierce Long, Jr.]], on September 8, 1935, the night of Long's [[assassination]].
==Background==
Coleman was born to Elliot D. Coleman and the former Lou Ellen Pollard on the Live Oak Plantation in [[rural]] Waterproof in southern Tensas Parish. He was educated in the Waterproof public schools.,<ref name=lahist/> which have since closed. Youngsters in Tensas Parish now attend school in the [[county seat|parish seat]] of [[St. Joseph, Louisiana|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<ref name=list/> 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 a county commission 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.<ref name=lahist/> and produced the Louisiana Constitution of 1974.
Coleman was wounded in a shootout in 1900.<ref>''Once Proud Princes'', p. 264.</ref> Three decades later in early September 1931, while still a deputy sheriff under Sheriff 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 whisky 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 for public intoxication. Roscoe surrendered, but Miller grabbed a shotgun and attempted to kill Hollis, who stood behind a bystander. Amid much confusion, Coleman fired his rifle and killed Miller. Coleman was cleared of any wrongdoing in the shooting.<ref name="Once Proud Princes pp. 119-120">''Once Proud Princes'', pp. 119-120</ref>
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.<ref name="Once Proud Princes pp. 119-120"/>
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,<ref name=lahist> Dictionary of Louisiana Biography - C - Louisiana Historical Association (lahistory.org), accessed April 29, 2021.</ref> though the Weiss family has long disputed the official version of events.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.nola.com/politics/index.ssf/2010/09/the_enduring_mystery_of_who_ki.html|author=Robert Travis Scott|title=The enduring mystery of who killed Huey P. Long|date=September 5, 2010|publisher=''The New Orleans Times-Picayune''|accessdate=July 20, 2013}}</ref>
==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 [[Ireland|Irish]] [[immigration|i[[mmigrants whose father had served in the [[Confederate States of America|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 Party|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.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://etd.lsu.edu/docs/available/etd-11082006-162523/unrestricted/jmreonasdiss.pdf|author=James Matthew Reonas|title=Once Proud Princes: Planters and Plantation Culture in Louisiana's Northeast Delta, From the First World War Through the Great Depression'|publisher=etd.lsu.edu ([[Louisiana State University]], [[dissertation]], 2006), pp. 214-215, 265)|accessdate=July 20, 2013}}</ref> 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.<ref>Exhibit, [[Herbert S. Ford Memorial Museum]], Homer, Louisiana.</ref>
After his victory in 1936, Coleman was reelected in 1940, 1944, 1948, 1952, and 1956. In 1960, however, he was unseated<ref name=lahist/> by his fellow Democrat William M. "Max" Seaman, the younger brother of 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.<ref>''[[Monroe News Star|Monroe Morning World]],'' April 17, 1960.</ref> 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.<ref name=tgazette>"Tensas Parish Centennial Given Gala Observance!, ''The Natchez Democrat,'' April 7, 1943, reprinted in ''The Tensas Gazette,'' May 1, 1993.</ref> 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 [[Nile River|Valley of the Nile River]]. It was a hunter's paradise."<ref name=tgazette/>
While serving as sheriff, Coleman was a delegate to the 1948 [[Democratic National Convention]] in [[Philadelphia]], [[Pennsylvania]], which nominated the [[Harry S Truman|Truman]]/[[Alben Barkley|Barkley]] ticket.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://politicalgraveyard.com/bio/colebank-coleman.html#0KT1CTYC5|title=Index to Politicians Cole - Coleman|publisher=politicalgraveyard.com|accessdate=April 29, 2021}}</ref>
==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.<ref name=lahist/> 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.<ref>'The New Orleans Times-Picayune,'' May 27, 1963.</ref>
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.<ref>{
Elliot D'Evereaux Coleman, IV, obituary, ''The Natchez Democrat,'' October 3, 2009.</ref>
In 2005, Ferriday publisher] [[Sam Hanna|Sam Hanna, Sr.]], filed one of his "One Man's Opinion" columns about Coleman's historical legacy.<ref>{{cite web|url= http://www.ouachitacitizen.com/news.php?id=73|title=Press Association honors the late Sam Hanna, Sr.|date=May 18, 2006|publisher=''The Ouachia Citizen'' (West Monroe, Louisiana), accessed December 29, 2009.</ref>
==References==
{{reflist}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Coleman, Elliot D.}}
[[Category:Louisiana People]]
[[Category:Farmers]]
[[Category:Politicians]]
[[Category:Sheriffs]]
[[Category:Democrats]]