Jesse Bankston

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Jesse Homer Bankston, Sr. (born October 7, 1907), is the president of Louisiana Public Broadcasting and a longtime activist within the Democratic Party. Bankston is best known for a dispute in 1959 which led to his dismissal by then Governor Earl Kemp Long as the director of the Louisiana Department of Hospitals. Long had been committed by his estranged wife, Blanche R. Long, to the Southeast Louisiana (Mental) Hospital in Mandeville. Long ordered Bankston, an otherwise loyal supporter, to discharge him from the hospital, but Bankston refused to do so because he believed that Long needed treatment because of recent erratic behavior.^[1] Long, with the affirmation of Lieutenant Governor Lether Frazar, Attorney General Jack P.F. Gremillion, and the Senate President Pro Tempore, then fired Bankston and replaced him with a pliable supporter, who immediately took steps to release Long from the hospital. During this confrontation, Bankston also clashed with his philosophical ally, State Senator Sixty Rayburn of Bogalusa in Washington Parish, who remained steadfast to Long.^[2]

In June 2007, the Louisiana State Legislature in a joint resolution congratulated Bankston on his upcoming 100th birthday. The legislators described Bankston as a "political icon" and a "mover and shaker with nearly seventy years of experience in the public arena."."^[3]

Originally from Washington Parish, Bankston began government service in 1940 under then Governor Sam Houston Jones, a staunch anti-Long, as the assistant director of the Department of Revenue. Bankston is the longest-serving elected member of the state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education — twenty-seven years from 1968 to 1995. He represented the district based about Baton Rouge. He has been a member of the powerful Louisiana Democratic State Central Committee, a party administrative body, since 1960, when James Houston "Jimmie" Davis began his second nonconsecutive term as governor.^[4]

Later, Bankston served as assistant director and then director of the Department of Institutions, an agency that encompassed both corrections and hospitals. He wanted employees to have access to loans, and thereby established the Department of Hospitals Credit Union, which thereafter became Pelican State Credit Union.."^[5]

It was after his dismissal by Long that Bankston began his work for Democratic candidates and causes, having worked to deliver Louisiana's then ten electoral votes for the Kennedy-Johnson ticket. He thereafter joined the boards of the newly-established Board of Elementary and Secondary Education and LPB. Public Broadcasting President Beth Courtney told the Baton Rouge Morning Advocate that Bankston never misses a board meeting: "He asks good questions, built on a lifetime of public service. He’s got good advice. He's got experience."^[6]

In the 1979 gubernatorial general election campaign, Bankston obtained a censure resolution against two failed Democratic candidates E.L. "Bubba" Henry and Edgar G. "Sonny" Mouton, Jr., both of whom openly endorsed the successful Republican candidate David C. Treen. Bankston warned Mouton, then an outgoing state senator from Lafayette and one generally considered to have been a liberal lawmaker, that "if he thinks he is going to get all those people who voted for him in the primary to vote for a Republican, I think he's looking through rose-colored glasses." Bankston also questioned whether Treen had agreed to assist in the retirement of Mouton's campaign debts.^[7] Bankston blamed confusing over the certification of Democratic candidate Louis Lambert over the competition between the Associated Press and United Press International in attempting to be the first to report the ballot tabulations. The Democratic committee did not censure two other Democratic gubernatorial candidates who backed Treen, outgoing Secretary of State Paul J. Hardy and outgoing Lieutenant Governor Jimmy Fitzmorris because their support for Treen came after the committee had met.

Bankston was married to the former Ruth Paine (1918-1997), a daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Walter R. Paine, Sr. Mrs. Bankston was a member of the East Baton Rouge Parish Democratic Executive Committee and was a delegate to two Democratic National Conventions. The Bankstons had a daughter, Shirley Newsham, and three sons, Dale Leon Bankston (born 1944), Larry Stephen Bankston (born 1952), and Jesse Bankston, Jr. (born 1957).^[8] Larry Bankston is an attorney and a former Democratic member of the Baton Rouge City-Parish Commission and the Louisiana State Senate. He represented East Baton Rouge Parish in the state Senate from 1988-1996.

In 2002, Bankston was inducted into the Louisiana Political Museum and Hall of Fame in Winnfield, the seat of Winn Parish and the traditional home of the Longs, along with three other Baton Rouge personalities, the late Lieutenant Governor and Education Superintendent William J. "Bill" Dodd, former Republican U.S. Representative W. Henson Moore, III, and former State Representative Lillian Walker.^[9]

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