Documentary Provokes Discussion on Race and Politics in New Orleans

RACE, a documentary film by Katherine Cecil, is an important document of New Orleans' 2006 mayoral election. The film recently received the HBO Best Documentary Award at the 2010 Martha's Vineyard African-American Film Festival, and has been provoking discussion and debate wherever it has screened. The film will be screening this weekend and next week at the New Orleans Film Festival.

RACE - which explores race and politics post-disaster and the 2006 reelection of Mayor Nagin - is playing three times at the 2010 NOFF:

Sunday, October 17, 4:30pm
The Theatres at Canal Place, 333 Canal Street - 3rd Floor

Sunday, October 17, 7:00 p.m.
The Porch, 1362 St. Anthony Street

Wednesday, October 20, 5:30 p.m.
The Prytania Theatre, 5339 Prytania Street

From the film publicity:

The Saints have just won the Super Bowl, Lt. Gov. Mitch Landrieu is Mayor-elect of New Orleans, and a prominent local journalist has suggested that New Orleans could now be on the cusp of post-racial politics.

But while 45% of registered white voters turned out to vote in the 2010 election, only 28% of registered African-American voters cast ballots, a sharp contrast to the election of 2006 in which many more voters turned out despite unprecedented obstacles.

'RACE' is a documentary film about the first election held in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina. The film examines the intersection of race and politics post-disaster and explores how Ray Nagin was re-elected from a completely different base than had previously supported him in 2002. This Sneak Preview is generously hosted by the Dillard Political Science Department, and will be followed by a panel discussion. Please come and give your feedback!

For information about the documentary, visit the film's website: http://racethedocumentary.com.

Kalamu ya Salaam: "What To Do With The Negroes?"

As we approach the fifth anniversary of Katrina, we encourage you to read these reflections on race and recovery by brilliant poet, writer, organizer and educator Kalamu Ya Salaam. Please see Kalamu Ya Salaam's blog: wordup.posterous.com for this entire piece, as well as poetry, essays, and other writings.

There is a secret hidden in the heart of New Orleans, a secret hidden in plain sight but ignored by all but the secret citizens themselves. Before Bienville arrived in this area in 1718, Native American scouts informed the adventurous Frenchman that there were groups of Africans—they probably said “blacks”—living over there in their own communities and that these self-ruled women and men would not talk to whites.

Although how the Native Americans knew that the blacks would not talk to whites remains unexplained, the report seems accurate on the face of it. After all, close to three centuries later in post-Katrina New Orleans there remain a number of us who are reluctant to talk truthfully to outsiders—not out of fear of repercussions or because of an inability to speak English but rather we remain reticent on the general principle that there’s no future in such conversations.

Indeed, I am probably breaking ranks simply by writing this although what I have to say should be obvious. Whether considering our 18th century ancestors who inhabited the swamps of the North American southeast from Florida to Louisiana, or unsuccessfully trying to question a handful of staunch holdouts among the Mardi Gras Indians, there have always been blacks who were both proud of being black and determined to be self-determining—not just constitutionally free as any other 21st century U.S. citizen but independent of any higher authority whether that authority be legal, religious or cultural; whether that authority be other blacks, wealthy whites, politicians of any race or economic status, or whatever, none of that mattered. We recognized no higher earthly authority than ourselves.

Sometimes when it looks like we are doing nothing but waiting on the corners, sitting quietly on a well-worn kitchen chair sipping a beer in the early afternoon shade, sometimes those of us people pass by as we hold court on one of the many neutral grounds, i.e. medians, separating the lanes of major streets and avenues in Central City, sometimes those blank stares you see at a bus stop, sometimes what you are witnessing is not what you think it is.

We are not waiting for the arrival of a messiah or for a government handout. We expect nothing from our immediate future but more of the past.

Our talk will seem either fatalistic or farcical, and certainly will not make sense to you. The weary blues etched into our cheeks and coal-coloring the sagging flesh beneath our eyes; the mottled black, browns, greys and streaks of blond or red on our woolly heads and the aroma of anger clinging to our clothes has nothing to do with our failures or with failed expectations. We never anticipated that we would be understood or loved in this land ruled by men with guns, money and god complexes.

No, what you see when you look at us looking back at you is a resolve to keep on living until we die or until someone kills us.

* * *

The history of New Orleans is replete with the inexplicable in terms of how black people lived here. In the late 1700’s before the Americans arrived as a governing force in 1804, a nominally-enslaved black man could be seen walking to his home, which he owned, carrying a rifle, which he owned, with money of his own in his pockets—yes, I know it seems impossible but the impossible is one of the roots of New Orleans culture.

Under the Spanish there were different laws and customs. We had been offered freedom in exchange for joining the Spanish in fighting the English. Join the army and get emancipated—all you had to do was shoot white men… and avoid getting shot.

The Black Codes guaranteed Sundays were ours. All the food, handicrafts, services or whatever we could sell, we could keep all the proceeds. If you study the colonial administrative records you will notice that our economy was so rich that the city merchants petitioned the governor to be able to sell on Sundays (like the slaves did).

Prior to the Civil War the Louisiana Supreme Court ruled that one man had to pay back money he borrowed from a slave. Not to mention, a shocked Mrs. Latrobe, the wife of the architect who designed and built New Orleans waterworks—imagine “…how shocked I was to see three Mulatto children and their mother call upon me and say they were the children of Henry.” Henry was the dearly departed son of Mrs. Latrobe. He died of yellow fever and was buried in New Orleans in 1817, three years before his father who also died of yellow fever and was buried next to his son in St. Louis Cemetery. Much like many, many people today, Mrs. Latrobe had no idea about what was really going on in New Orleans.

You can read the papers all day and sit in front the TV all night and never get the news about a significant and shocking subculture in New Orleans. A subculture that not only is unknown to you but a subculture that really does not care to be known by most of you.

Our independently produced subculture is responsible for the roux that flavors New Orleans music, New Orleans cuisine, New Orleans speech idioms, New Orleans architecture, the way we walk down here and especially how we celebrate life even in the face of death. From the African retentions of VooDoo spiritual observances to the musical extensions from Congo Square, this subculture has made New Orleans world renown.

I don’t remember the black sufferers ever receiving a thank you or a blessing. Instead of recognizing our contributions, the black poor and those who identify with them have been demonized. When the waters came, those who were largely affected and eventually washed away were overwhelmingly black. Our saviors gave us one way tickets out of town. Four years later there have been no provisions to bring blacks “back here”—I say back here instead of back home because “back here” is no longer “back home.” Post Katrina New Orleans is not even a ghost of what our beloved city was.

What is gone is not just houses or pictures on the wall, not just the little neighborhood store we used to frequent, or the tavern where we hung out on warm nights; not just the small church in the middle of the block or even the flower bed alongside the house; not just the old landmarks or some of the schools we used to attend, not just the jumble of overcrowded habitations or the storied stacks of bricks we called the ‘jects (aka projects), housing schemes we knew by name and reputation. No, it is not just brick and wood that is missing from the landscape. What is gone, what we miss most of all is us.

We the people are not here. What is left is an amputated city ignoring its stumps. Moreover, even if it were possible, our city does not desire to re-grow or replace what was “disappeared.” Good riddance is what many of the new majority says.

“Good riddance” is sometimes proclaimed using the coded language of “a smaller footprint” (reductively, smaller footprint means fewer black butts). At other times, “good riddance” is spewed forth as the uncut racist cant of “lock all those savages up.”

* * *

Although poor blacks controlled none of the city’s major resources, we were blamed for everything that was wrong—from a failing school system to rising crime; from ineffective and corrupt political leadership to an “immoral” street culture of drugs, sagging pants and loud music; from a rise in sexually transmitted diseases to deteriorating neighborhoods. When responsible citizens wrote to the Times Picayune daily newspaper suggesting what ought be done do address these concerns, high on the list of panaceas was our incarceration, as if so many—indeed, far, far too many of us—were not already in prison.

How convenient to ignore the glaring statistic: the largest concentration of black women in New Orleans is located at Xavier University and the largest concentration of their age-compatible, male counterparts exists across the expressway in the city jail—dorms for the women, cells for the men. The truth is disorienting to most: what has been tried thus far, whether education or jail, has not worked.

The people who complain the most about crime in the city, or should I say the voices that we most often hear in the media complaining about crime are from the people who are the least affected.

However, worse than the name-calling is the fact that New Orleans is now a city that forgot to care. In the aftermath of the greatest flood trauma ever suffered by a major American city, New Orleans is devoid of public health in general and mental health care in particular.

In the entire Gulf South area that was directly affected by Katrina, only in New Orleans were 7,000 educators fired. The Federal Government guaranteed the salaries of teachers in all other areas and guaranteed the same for New Orleans teachers but the state of Louisiana made a decision to decimate the largest block of college educated blacks, the largest block of regular voters, the largest block of black home owners.

The denouement was that the entire middle class black strata was disenfranchised. Black professionals, the majority of whom lived in flooded areas in New Orleans East, whether government employees or independent professionals (doctors, lawyers, dentists, accountants and the like), black professionals no longer had a client base. Most professionals could not re-establish themselves in New Orleans. What was left of the black New Orleans social infrastructure was nothing nice.

* * *

How does anyone explain why in post-racial America economic inequality gaps are widening, not closing?

In a city that prior to Katrina had one of the highest rates of native residents, why are so many young adults leaving rather than staying?

Why is spending nearly twice as much per pupil to service half the pre-storm population called a success in education innovation, especially when the current status quo is economically unsustainable, not to mention that comparable pre-storm health care and retirement benefits are no longer offered to teachers?

I don’t even know how to identify what is happening to us without sounding like a cliché of class warfare, without sounding bitter about racial reconciliation or ungrateful for all the charitable assistance New Orleans has received.

I know that my voice is a minority voice. I know I don’t represent all blacks, nor most blacks, nor educated blacks, nor your black friend, nor Malia and Sasha, nor… I know it’s just plain “stupid” to talk like I’m talking…

I know. I know we blacks are not blameless. Indeed, we are often a co-conspirator in our own debasement. Too often we act out in ways for which there is no sensible justification. Yes, I know about corrupt politicians and a seeming endless line of street level drug dealers, about rampant gun violence and an always for pleasure, 24/7 party attitude.

But amidst all our acknowledged shortcomings, I ask one simple question: who else in this city has contributed so much for so long to this unique gumbo we call New Orleans culture?

Like the state of Texas finally admitting that “abstinence only” sex education has led to higher, not lower, rates of teen pregnancy, unless we materially address the realities of our social situation, we may find that the short-sighted solutions we have put in place will, in the long run, worsen rather than solve our problems.

* * *

Most days I am resolved to soldier on, to suck it up and keep on keeping on, but sometimes, sometimes I feel like Che Guevara facing a summary execution squad of counter-insurgency soldiers.

Sometimes after working all day in the public schools or after hearing Recovery School District administrators refusing to allow us to teach an Advanced Placement English Class because “we don’t have any students capable of that kind of work”; or sometimes after finding out that a teacher we worked with last year is no longer employed not because she was not a great teacher but rather because (as they told her without a note of shame or chagrin in their voices): you are being surplused (i.e. terminated) because we can get two, young, straight-out-of-college, Teach-For-America instructors for the same price we paid your old, experienced ass; sometimes when the city accidentally on purpose bulldozes a house that the same city issued a building permit to the couple that is struggling to rehabilitate that property and this happens while this insane city administration that, four years after the flood, has yet to come up with a coherent plan to address the 40,000 or so blighted properties that dominant the Ninth Ward (Upper Nine, Lower Nine and New Orleans East) landscape; sometimes, I just want to calmly recite Che’s command: go ahead, shoot!

Just kill us and get it over with.

* * *
But until then: a luta continua (the struggle continues)!

Photo above by Peter Nakhid.

Local Outrage at New Orleans Music Magazine Over Racially Insensitive Cover

Local music magazine OffBeat has stirred anger and outrage with it's new cover, which features a photo of members of a white rock band hanging in the air, next to the headline Strange Fruit.

OffBeat has pulled the picture from their website and issued the following statement today:

We’ve heard from many of you about our cover text for the March issue, and if we had the chance to do it again, we’d go in a different direction. In retrospect, it was ill-chosen and we apologize to those who are offended by it...We didn’t realize the phrase “strange fruit” has the same power in 2010 that it did when lynching was a more contemporary threat...

We profoundly regret our thoughtlessness and insensitivity, but we believe our history of coverage demonstrates our concern for race-related issues and we are saddened by those who would extrapolate this to speak to our character. The context of the cover text next to an indie rock band suggests that we’re not using the phrase in a threatening way, and we believe our mission covering music borne out of slavery suggests that we don’t take the issues connected with it—including hate crimes—lightly. We believed that in 2010, the phrase “strange fruit” could be used without automatically evoking the Billie Holiday song and its subject matter. This was an error in judgment for which we apologize.

Many community members have said that the apology doesn't go far enough. Takema Robinson, commenting on OffBeat's facebook page, writes,

The cover was Racist not insensitive. There is no way that a Southern Music magazine does not understand the history of lynching and Billie Holiday's lyrics. This does not make this magazine racist, but calling this cover anything less is an offense in and of itself. It's just hard to believe that this magazine cover passed so many eyes on its way to print and that no one on the Offbeat staff pulled the emergency break! Given that this is the case, I recommend immediate anti-racism training for all involved including the editor-in-chief. The pain this inflicts is way to deep for just an apology. A lesson needs to be learned.

Local Blogger Emilie Staat writes,

“Strange Fruit” is a famous song that immediately invokes a powerful, horrifying image of lynched black bodies hanging from trees–strange fruit. An image that your cover visual seems to mock, with the six white guys smilingly hanging from monkey bars/jungle gym. I can see no reason or intention for the title to be paired with this article except to incite response. Yet, it seems you expect to get off the hook (off the tree, offBeat?) with nothing more than a limp Twitter apology. Back to business as usual? If your audience knows what “Strange Fruit” refers to (and what serious Southern musician or listener wouldn’t?), the juxtaposed image can only offend. If your audience doesn’t know the song or its context, the headline wouldn’t grab their attention or make any sense, in which case, it simply fails.

Responding to Staat, one of many bloggers that have carried this story, OffBeat’s publisher and editor Jan Ramsey writes:

Being accused of being racist is blowing this faux pas so out of proportion, it’s ridiculous. I resent OffBeat being labeled as racist by anyone. It’s obvious to me that you’re getting a big kick our of keeping this bullshit going. Ah, the venality of our public. For 23 years, I’ve busted my butt trying to create someting positive about local music in OffBeat…dismissing what we’ve done with a quickie label of racism is taking a lot for granted and is just plain stupid when you consider 23 years of work...Our “black eye” (oops, was that racist?) is certainly generating more traffic for your blog, now isn’t it? Why don’t you let us apologize and get on with your blog?

This controversy over OffBeat's cover comes during the same week that students in California held mass protests over racist incidents at University of California, San Diego, including a "Compton Cookout," mocking Black history month. Clearly, the argument over what is racist and what is an "unfortunate mistake" is not over. We believe OffBeat needs to do some more thinking about their response to this controversy.

Analysis of Race in the 2006 Mayoral Elections, Part Five, By Katherine Cecil

As we enter the final days before New Orleans' historic municipal elections, Louisiana Justice Institute presents excerpts from Race, Representation, and Recovery: Documenting the 2006 New Orleans Mayoral Elections, by Katherine Cecil. We believe her analysis of the 2006 elections forms an important basis for understanding the current election.

Dubbed “Ray Reagan” for his conservative views and largely unpopular with the majority of black voters prior to Katrina, Nagin campaign strategists believed that African-Americans would vote for him, especially within the uncertain post-Katrina political climate. During this time it is possible to observe a significant shift in Nagin’s electoral rhetoric as well as his stance on policies that had begun to be interpreted by the black and white communities along racial lines. The most publicized shift was Nagin’s “Chocolate City” speech, given on Martin Luther King Day, in which Nagin attempted to reach out to African-American displaced citizens by calling for New Orleans to remain a majority-black town.

Audubon Nature Institute Chief Executive Ron Forman came to replace Ray Nagin as the conservatives’ candidate of choice shortly after the unveiling of the Bring New Orleans Back Commission plan and before the 2006 mayoral election period began. Forman was another Republican turned Democrat but also white and from Uptown. Alluding to the old-line and almost exclusively white carnival krewes drawing members from this area of the city, white Tulane political scientist Dr. Thomas Langston noted a correlation between the “flags of Mardi Gras royalty” alongside the “Vote for Ron Forman” signs.

Like Nagin, Forman had not previously held political office, which his supporters saw as a strength. He had exhibited business and organizational skills in the private sector that they wished to see applied to the running of city government, and significantly, with the racial demographic shifts post-hurricane, his campaign managers disregarded the prior necessity of coalition building that had been essential to ensure victory within recent history. Also like Nagin, through his social and business connections, Forman had ties to the white economic powerbrokers within the business community, and he was to promote a platform that highlighted economic development over equity and downplayed social justice issues.

Lieutenant Governor Mitch Landrieu, a more progressive Democrat and son of the last white mayor, was the incumbent’s main viable opponent, and he emerged to Nagin’s political left. Appearing more capable of garnering significant support from the center, Landrieu entered into the race as the candidate with stronger Democratic credentials than either Forman or Nagin, which was an advantage in a hitherto distinctly Democratic city.

But as New Orleans looked whiter in 2006 than it had since Moon had been in office, it became a prevailing undercurrent to this mayoral election that City Hall could “go white” for the first time since Moon Landrieu had left office nearly thirty years earlier. It was speculated that without the pre-storm African-American population levels, the city might have lost its majority black population of all socio-economic groups for the foreseeable future, and that a racial group that had not produced a winning mayoral candidate for many decades might now have an occasion to do so.

Indeed, the large number of white candidates entering into the field seemed to have the joint effect of simultaneously confirming black candidates’ reservations about white voter support in the absence of a black majority, while also testing this racial voting balance of coalition-building that had guided New Orleans politics since the federal safeguards of the modern Civil Rights era had begun to take effect. Furthermore, the dearth of viable black candidates as alternative challengers to the incumbent’s re-election bid compounded an emerging fear amongst African-American communities of losing political representation.

(You can read the complete essay online here.)

Born in the UK, and living in New Orleans since 2001, Katherine Cecil began her film career as a researcher and field producer. She formed her small company CecilFilm Productions shortly after Hurricane Katrina, and is currently working as a co-producer on a documentary looking into recent changes to the New Orleans public school system.

Analysis of Race in the 2006 Mayoral Election, Part Four, By Katherine Cecil

In these final days before New Orleans' historic municipal elections, Louisiana Justice Institute presents excerpts from Race, Representation, and Recovery: Documenting the 2006 New Orleans Mayoral Elections, by Katherine Cecil. We believe her analysis of the 2006 elections forms an important basis for understanding the current election.

In the months following Hurricane Katrina, there had been enough evidence coming from within New Orleans for many exiled and returned African-Americans to sense a narrow re-assertion of racial interests from amongst the white community, and many feared the rolling back of the recent few decades of political progress and representation.

Following the devastation wrought by the failure of the federal levees, talk of a geographical and demographic “shrunken footprint” entered into the public discourse of those who had returned as well as within rebuilding plans such as the one espoused by the Bring New Orleans Back Commission, which provided little inclusion for the return of flooded neighborhoods that had been predominantly African-American.

This term – along with others such as the “right to return,” which referred to every citizens right to come home – became key components of a 2006 New Orleans electoral glossary. As it became apparent that many socially and economically-disadvantaged evacuees lacked the means to return – or neighborhoods to return to – a white minority become cognizant of itself as a determining and political force that had not been possible since African-Americans had attained a voting majority. It is significant that the rhetoric that reflected this realization, regardless of the degrees in which it was expressed, conspicuously bypassed the earlier paradigm of coalition building that had been either necessary – or politically expedient – between the races while New Orleans had been a majority African-American city.

As Ray Nagin’s first term drew to a close the recovery discourses continued, and New Orleans headed towards a contentious election. White conservatives’ sentiments concerning a “new” New Orleans, where rebuilding efforts might make use of a now desolate and largely de-populated landscape to pursue opportunities of changing the city, were then amalgamated by more white liberal interests, but still remained exclusionary in nature and were hardly focused on re-populating the city exactly as it had been pre-Katrina. When used in the context of rebuilding efforts, phrases such as a “new New Orleans” and words such as “opportunity” became racially charged in a manner not seen before the storm, and many displaced citizens felt somewhat justifiably that at their root lay ulterior motives for reconstructing a city that would exclude them.

White conservatives and white liberals had both rallied behind Nagin as a political newcomer in 2002, and the composition of the BNOBC, which was formed in the months following Katrina, largely reflected the interests of the more business-oriented amongst this support. Dr. Lance Hill of the Southern Institute for Education and Research spoke of the nature of the BNOBC in relation to Nagin’s original political base, “Nagin appointed the BNOBC when I think that he was politically identified with and beholden to the wealthy white elite, and I think it was reflected by and large in the leadership of the Commission, and the Commission was not a democratic institution.” Nagin’s shifting relationship with the BNOBC plan, and his equivocation on the rebuilding permit moratorium subsequent to the plan’s unveiling was to prove significant in his ability to hold onto his white conservative electoral base.

Chaired by the Republican Real Estate developer Joe Canizaro, and supported by 2002 Nagin backer James Reiss, the BNOBC unveiled its first plan in early 2006. The plan advocated a reduction of the city’s footprint, and questioned the viability of restoring the most flooded neighborhoods, the majority of which had been predominantly African-American. The plan also promoted a moratorium on the issuing of building permits within these neighborhoods for the next four months during which time, still-displaced citizens were asked to gather together to prove the viability of their neighborhoods returning, also factoring in the long-awaited publication of FEMA flood-maps to gauge the necessity of raising the height of their homes.

This most controversial aspect of the BNOBC plan was the now infamous “green space map,” which appeared to propose that the most flooded residential areas return to swampland. Political observer and pollster Dr. Silas Lee noted the divisive nature of the proposed rebuilding strategy, “green space means elimination, because you’re replacing spaces and communities where people live which gave this city some unique character, with some open areas.” Others more involved in the BNOBC plan also expressed their reservations; Paul Rookwood, a principal of Wallace Roberts & Todd, the Philadelphia-based consulting firm charged with creating the BNOBC action plan for rebuilding the city of New Orleans, was quoted in an online interview:

We heard lots of ideas that didn't stand up to scrutiny. For example: that the deeply flooded areas should be transformed into wetlands. That doesn't make sense. The soil is compacted and contaminated, and you'd have to remove all the infrastructure — roads, buildings, and so on — and then attempt to recreate wetlands below sea level.

Combined with the BNOBC’s advocation of a moratorium on issuing rebuilding permits in the most devastated areas, both of these issues created an enormous amount of fear and distrust between the communities that were already back, and those that were still attempting to return home.

To add to this, Nagin’s white supporters had begun to abandon him between one of the closed-door meetings in Dallas shortly after the storm, and his January equivocation over those BNOBC recommendations that were unfriendly towards the African-American communities most devastated by the flood. This timing suggests that Nagin’s equivocation sent a final signal to those in the white New Orleans community who were advocating for a “smaller footprint” that he would no longer be representative of their newfound interests. The Mayor’s decision not to endorse wholeheartedly these more controversial recommendations of his own commission, while also advocating rebuilding “smartly,” reflected his uncertain position in the upcoming election, and this prevarication was further evidence of the political tightrope that he walked post-Katrina.

(You can read the complete essay online here.)

Born in the UK, and living in New Orleans since 2001, Katherine Cecil began her film career as a researcher and field producer. She formed her small company CecilFilm Productions shortly after Hurricane Katrina, and is currently working as a co-producer on a documentary looking into recent changes to the New Orleans public school system.

Analysis of Race in the 2006 Mayoral Election, Part Two, By Katherine Cecil

As we enter the final week before New Orleans' historic municipal elections, Louisiana Justice Institute presents excerpts from Race, Representation, and Recovery: Documenting the 2006 New Orleans Mayoral Elections, by Katherine Cecil. We believe her analysis of the 2006 elections forms an important basis for understanding the current election.

Suffering fierce criticism over his less-than-admirable leadership skills during the aftermath of the storm as well as for the city’s lack of hurricane evacuation preparation, Mayor Ray Nagin had become politically vulnerable. New Orleanians, returned and still displaced, were to witness a close election in which Nagin’s top four challengers were white. One of the challengers was Louisiana Lieutenant Governor Mitch Landrieu, the son of the last white mayor who had left office nearly thirty years earlier. Times-Picayune staff writer Frank Donze wrote, “Six months ago, incumbent Ray Nagin appeared headed for a problem-free re-election. But the city’s struggle to recover from the catastrophic storm – along with critics attacking Nagin’s performance – has turned conventional wisdom on its ear, leaving him in a fight for his political life.” However, history was on Nagin’s side, and as John Mercurio pointed out on NPR Weekend, “no mayor in New Orleans in the past sixty years has been turned out of office and no first term mayor in the past eighty years has lost office.”

Moon Landrieu’s 1977 departure from City Hall signaled the beginning of the period in which African-Americans would attain a voting majority within New Orleans, and since the early 1980s, elections have involved a variety of cross-racial voting reflecting variations upon the same theme: New Orleans voters have formed trans-racial political coalitions in the election of alternating progressive and reactionary mayors that reflected the mood and tenor of the times. In 2002, Ray Nagin fit within this moderate to conservative continuum.

In elections where black and white voting population levels were not at parity, mayoral victories largely constituted a merging of different black and white interests where policy and platform were more in the foreground than race, where white voters co-opted candidates of color in whom they could find representation to their benefit, where distinctive socio-economic and racial groups made compromises to promote their respective agendas, and at times, merely representation without specific agendas. As political scientists Baodong Liu and James Vanderleeuw found in their research, “whites may develop a strategic approach to maximize their own political power while their ideology may or may not remain the same.” Indeed, if politics is the art of strategically applied comprise within the public sphere, then politics involving significant minority populations, in both senses of the word, would need to be more pronounced in the art and application of concession.

The 1969 and 1973 elections in which Moon Landrieu was voted into office involved concessions of this kind, and in the 1969 runoff, he was elected as a progressive Democrat from a coalition of 90 percent of the black vote and 39 percent of the white vote. Moon Landrieu’s legacy came to be defined by his active promotion of African-Americans within his Administration, as department heads and as prominent political participants. After two terms in office, Moon Landrieu was followed by another progressive Democrat and the first African-American mayor of New Orleans, Ernest Nathan “Dutch” Morial in 1977 and again, in 1982. During his first term, Morial had garnered 19 percent of the white vote and 95 percent of the black vote, which saw a union between progressive white voters and African-American voters, and his rise to power signified a new time in city politics, allowing for unprecedented levels of black representation within local political power structures.

Greatly contrasting to his rival and predecessor, the more reactionary Sidney Barthelemy pioneered his own brand of racial politics, and in 1986, he pushed a pro-business agenda that appealed to white conservatives, and he was brought to office receiving most of his support from the white community, while Bill Jefferson, his principal opponent in the election, had garnered a much larger majority of the African-American vote. In his first election, Barthelemy had merged conservative middle-income white and black voters, and through this coalition conservative interests again found representation in City Hall. This coalition didn’t necessarily include a program for the betterment of all New Orleanians, and as the historian Arnold Hirsch writes of the Barthelemy election, “Morial’s progressive biracial coalition had been transformed into a conservative one that knit together whites and a patronage-oriented black leadership that had no agenda beyond its own perpetuation.”

However, when the white candidate Donald Mintz entered the race in 1990, thinking the incumbent sufficiently unpopular to allow for more crossover voting, Barthelemy switched from being the candidate to receive the most white votes to become the candidate to receive the most black votes, and the contrast of these two elections illustrated the mutability of the candidate’s race as a factor depending upon his or her agenda, his or her primary base of support, and the competition of the opponent in the runoff. Indeed, “Four years later, facing white challenger Donald Mintz, Barthelemy depended on near-universal black support and scant white backing to win.” Intriguingly, it is said that Dutch Morial died before a much-anticipated endorsement of Mintz, and that had he done so, this might have significantly altered Barthelemy’s ability to garner black votes during his re-election bid. When Marc Morial followed in his father’s political footsteps, and entered City Hall in 1994 and again in 1998, the Mayor’s office was led back to a more progressive coalition, which saw a union of white progressives and African-American voters.

The pendulum of moderate progressives to conservative coalitions swung again when Ray Nagin entered into politics in 2002. Nagin had not previously held elected office and came from the private sector. As Vice President of the New Orleans cable company, Cox Communications, he had been a member of the New Orleans Business Council, a majority white organization that represented the top sixty-five businesses in Greater New Orleans. Like Barthelemy, the Republican turned Democrat Ray Nagin came from a pro-business platform and had no agenda for ameliorating the economic opportunities for the majority of African-Americans within Orleans Parish. Nagin was funded largely by a white conservative business elite, and was elected Mayor of New Orleans with 86 percent of the white vote and 40 percent of the black vote, winning against the popular New Orleans Police Department Superintendent Chief Richard Pennington, whose ties to Marc Morial were seen by the majority of white conservative voters as antithetical to their interests, despite his success in reducing crime rates.

As a light-skinned and Catholic person of color, Nagin’s “Downtown” and often-debated “Creole” credentials drew other interesting parallels to the conservative Barthelemy, a mayor viewed by local black media outlets as having enough links to the “Uptown white power structure” to be controlled by it. Like Barthelemy, Nagin was seen as a candidate whose interests intersected largely with those of the white community of most socio-economic levels, and although his first Administration was marked by some effort to oust local corruption, Nagin’s aim was mainly targeted towards African-Americans and the working-class, most notably tax evaders and unlicensed New Orleans cab drivers. But although the majority of black support went to Pennington, Nagin was also elected to office by middle-income African-American and white voters, and like each of the recent mayors before him, Nagin built a coalition in order to win. Had Hurricane Katrina not devastated the city of New Orleans, Nagin would have maintained his more conservative alliance between black and white voters and would have been re-elected to a second term without significant opposition. However, as the 2006 election was to reveal, the city is to a large extent still redefining the nature of these coalitions, and the deterioration of inter-group trust within race relations post-disaster played a prominent role in the election and early recovery period.

(You can read the complete essay online here.)

Born in the UK, and living in New Orleans since 2001, Katherine Cecil began her film career as a researcher and field producer. She formed her small company CecilFilm Productions shortly after Hurricane Katrina, and is currently working as a co-producer on a documentary looking into recent changes to the New Orleans public school system.

LJI Presents Guest Writer Lance Hill: "The Most Racist City in the US?"

By Lance Hill, Ph.D.
Executive Director, Southern Institute for Education and Research, Tulane University

This week's comments by Ed Blakely, the former New Orleans recovery czar, caused quite a controversy in New Orleans. His criticism that New Orleanians were "lazy" was not new, but his observation about the white community's efforts to "recapture the political apparatus" and "put their foot back on Black people's throats" was the first time a high-ranking recovery official said in public what is a widespread sentiment in the local African American community. It is likely that this perception of a "power grab" will influence voting in the February 2010 city election. The tendency in the white community to ignore or dismiss this Black sentiment is reflected in the Times-Picayune's editorial response that completely omits Blakely's comments on the "blood in the water."

Transcribed from the YouTube interview:

"Everyone's a racist. It's part of something we have in this country, but it's deeper, more viral, and more visible and more entrenched in New Orleans than any place I've ever seen...There is a sense, now, in the white community, [that] there's blood in the water, and they can recapture the political apparatus and kind of put their foot back on Black people's throats. And that will be explosive and very dangerous. And I think unless the next mayor is very clever, it's going to explode and there are going to be race riots in New Orleans."
-Ed Blakely, Former New Orleans "Recovery Czar"

Click here to see the Blakely Interview.

Click here to see the Times-Picayune Editorial on Blakely - which omits the "Blood in the water" reference.

Geneva Crenshaw's Musings In Full Effect

Leon, Leon, Leon. What will we do with Leon?

My frustration with New Orleans District Attorney Leon Cannizzaro led me to write this letter to Professor Derrick Bell, renowned legal scholar and professor at New York University School of Law. Is the Racial Preference Licensing Act the answer for NOLA? Food for thought...

Professor Bell:

We’ve never met, but I have been a fan of yours for many years. After Hurricane Katrina and deciding to return to New Orleans – with the not-so-gentle nudging of Bill Quigley – I began a full time civil rights practice. I was reminded this weekend of your writings in Faces at the Bottom of the Well, and thought I’d share with you a bit of 2009 New Orleans.

Last year, on the evening of February 5, 2008, several off duty employees of the New Orleans Regional Transit Authority (RTA) were assaulted and beaten by off-duty New Orleans police officers assigned to the Special Operations Division of the New Orleans Police Department. Before the assault began, the victims, who are all African American, were subjected to racial slurs and epithets. Just after the RTA employees decided to leave the Beach Corner Bar and Grill, the police officers then beat and kicked the RTA employees. On duty New Orleans police officers arrived on the scene to investigate; because the off duty officers responsible for the assault were actively interfering with the investigation, the investigating officers had to remove the victims from the scene of the crime and take them to the Third District station to interview them. Police officers searched the vehicles of the victims without probable cause and after claiming to find a firearm, charged one of the victims with carrying a concealed weapon, charges that were later dismissed. The current Orleans Parish District Attorney, Leon Cannizzaro, has confirmed the allegedly concealed firearm was ‘planted’ by one of the off-duty police officers. At least three of the victims required medical attention. Among the witnesses to the violent assault were Capt. Jeff Winn, who at the time was the commander of the Special Operations Division of the New Orleans Police Department, and the supervisor of the police officers responsible for the assault. Also present at the time of the racially motivated assault was Laura Cannizzaro, an Assistant Orleans Parish District Attorney, and the daughter of the current Orleans Parish District Attorney, Leon Cannizzaro, and Ms. Cannizzaro’s boyfriend, also a NOPD Officer. Neither the New Orleans Police Department nor the Orleans Parish District Attorney charged any of the officers responsible for the assault with any crime. The Public Integrity Division of the New Orleans Police Department conducted a separate investigation which more than fourteen months after the incident resulted in the termination of one of the officers responsible for the assault, Joey Lapene. Just two months ago, D.A. Cannizzaro hired Joey Lapene to serve as one of his Lead Investigators, to canvass New Orleans’ cold case files, interview witnesses (in this 65% African-American populated city), and ride along with the police at crime scenes.

My father and I were discussing this incident yesterday, and I indicated to him that on today, LJI would write to Attorney General Eric Holder and request his office to intervene and investigate. The current U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Louisiana, in his six year tenure, has not yet ‘found’ a civil rights violation in his 10 parish jurisdiction, and he has refused to investigate this incident.

My dad (age 71) just chuckled. He said to me, at least in the 50s you knew where you could go. “For the sake of my grandson, maybe these devils could just start posting signs,” he said. “Blacks Not Welcomed.”

Fifty years later, and what was old is new again. Racial Preference Licensing Act, indeed!

I sent the letter to Mr. Holder, but I’m wondering whether a 10% tax (adjusted for inflation from Ms. Crenshaw’s suggested 3%) might just be better.