by Gary Rivlin
Bill Hines, a prominent attorney in town, recalled the night that Nagin announced he was running for mayor. A year earlier, Hines, who is white, helped to inaugurate what participants tended to call the “black-white dinner”: ten black business leaders and ten white had a standing invitation to a monthly dinner that was ostensibly about improving race relations in New Orleans. At one of their regular dinners in the fall of 2001, Hines said, “Ray Nagin clinks his glass and says, ‘I have something to tell everybody.’ We ask what’s that, and he says, ‘I’m going to run for mayor.’ We all started laughing.” If Nagin harbored any political ambition, he had done a good job of concealing it. Even his wife confessed bafflement over her forty-five-year-old husband’s sudden interest in local politics. “My initial reaction,” Seletha Nagin wrote in an e-mail exchange with Sally Forman, “was that of shock.”
Nagin made it official in December 2001, on the final day of candidate registration. Two months before election day, he was joining an already crowded field of fourteen, nearly all of them black. Polls showed him drawing less than 3 percent of the vote. He fashioned himself as a crusading outsider vowing to take the “for sale” sign off City Hall, but others were also claiming the reformer’s mantle. “Had Ray Nagin started this eight months ago, it would have been very interesting,” said Stan “Pampy” Barre, a local businessman and political fixer. “I gave him money. . . . [But] I just don’t see this happening.”
FOUNDED IN 1718, NEW ORLEANS is one of the older US metropolises. In the early nineteenth century, it was the country’s third-most-populous city. Its port opened the city to a cosmopolitan assortment of characters, but it also made New Orleans the center of the slave trade. The city was home to the largest slave market in North America at the same time more free black people walked its streets than anywhere else in the Deep South. The country’s largest slave revolt took place just north of New Orleans, in 1811.
A former French colony, New Orleans lived by the infamous “code noir,” which spelled out the rules for slave ownership. If a slave struck his or her owner or anyone else in his master’s family, the law dictated that the slave be executed. An escapee should have his or her ears cut off (and their hamstrings severed if gone for two months). But slaves in New Orleans also had the right to earn money and, during Spanish rule, they secured the right to buy their freedom. Both French and Spanish law recognized that freed slaves—“free people of color,” they were called—and those who had never been enslaved had the same rights as any other colonial subject. In time, many free people of color settled the Faubourg Tremé, or simply Tremé (pronounced “truh-may”), just across Rampart Street from the French Quarter. Tremé has been described as the “oldest black neighborhood in America.” Its cultural center was Congo Square, which some music historians point to as the birthplace of jazz.
The country’s first black-owned daily newspaper was founded near the end of the Civil War—the New Orleans Tribune. This paper, begun as a bilingual broadsheet, had a mixed-race staff that sought to help shape the new, post–Civil War South. The Tribune called on government to divide the southern plantations and grant plots to former slaves and advocated equality under the law. Closer to home, the paper also demanded the integration of the city’s streetcars, which occurred in 1867. That was during Reconstruction, when the federal government exerted its might to guarantee that newly enfranchised blacks could vote. One-fifth of the city’s schools were integrated; Louisiana could even boast of the country’s first black governor (the country’s next would not be elected until 1990).
The federal government withdrew its troops from the South in 1877—twelve years after the Civil War ended. The schools in New Orleans resegregated. Congo Square was renamed Beauregard Square in honor of a Confederate general who had lived in New Orleans.I A statue of Confederate hero Robert E. Lee was erected near the bottom of St. Charles Avenue, and in 1884 Tivoli Circle was renamed Lee Circle. Taking direct aim at New Orleans, the state legislature, in 1890, passed the Separate Car Act, which reinstated segregation on public transportation.
The black population fought back. In 1892, a half century before the 1955 arrest of Rosa Parks helped to spark the modern civil rights movement, a black man from New Orleans named Homer Plessy took a seat in a train carriage reserved for whites. The resulting legal case made it to the US Supreme Court, which, in 1896, used Plessy v. Ferguson to establish the doctrine of separate but equal. Plessy remained the law for six decades, until it was overturned in 1954 by Brown v. Board of Education. Plessy was a cruel blow to all African Americans, but the loss was more deeply felt in New Orleans, where the dream of equality had seemed closer at hand. Following Plessy, Louisiana purged 95 percent of the state’s blacks from its voter rolls, and the city stopped offering schooling past the fifth grade to black children. The Klan took hold in the area and lynchings in the city became more commonplace.
The integration of the schools—more accurately their reintegration—proved the bitterest, most hard-fought battle. In 1956, two years after Brown v. Board of Education and the year Ray Nagin was born, a federal judge ordered the Orleans Parish school board to adopt a blueprint for desegregating its schools. Four years later, the Orleans Parish school board finally unveiled its plan—limited to a single grade in two of the city’s hundred-plus schools. The governor, an avowed segregationist named Jimmie Davis, called an emergency legislative session to forestall the implementation. The state even tried to have November 14—the date the board’s plan was to take effect—declared a school holiday.
The names of the affected schools were kept secret until the morning of the fourteenth, but that just added to the spectacle. Four black girls were chosen to enter the first grade in a pair of whites-only schools in a working-class section of New Orleans. (Could anyone be surprised that the board was choosing to integrate first in the neighborhoods where the city’s laborers and factory workers lived?) As news spread, white parents descended on the schools. By day’s end, every white child but one had been removed from the two schools. That white girl, Pam Foreman, whose father was a minister, would complete the year at her assigned school—but in a classroom by herself.
“Don’t wait for your daughter to be raped by these Congolese,” Judge Leander Perez, an organizer of the Citizens’ Council of Greater New Orleans, a local white-supremacist group, said at a rally held the day after the schools were integrated. “Don’t wait until the burrheads are forced into your schools. Do something about it now.” The Times-Picayune declared integration a “tragedy,” and the school board president left it no secret what he believed: “As an elected official, I feel it is my duty to provide public education, if possible on a segregated basis, but, if not, on an integrated basis.” He was only following the law, but people shunned him and his business.
IN RACE RELATIONS AND in other ways, New Orleans has always been a city apart from the rest of America. This port city that served as a gateway to the rest of the Americas has always had a strong Caribbean flavor. Creole culture defines New Orleans—its food, its music, its dance—and its African traditions date to even before the Revolutionary War. Over the centuries, control of the city shifted from the French to the Spanish to Anglo Americans, and all of them left their imprint on the city’s culture. The city was famous for an annual Mardi Gras celebration, which stretched for weeks and featured seemingly endless parades. Black? White? Who cared in this laid-back, good-time city where the phrase laissez les bons temps rouler, “let the good times roll,” is seen and heard so often it might as well be the city’s motto.
Yet the white community’s reaction to school desegregation showed that attitudes toward race in New Orleans were no different from in other American cities. Seventy thousand whites fled the city in the first ten years after school integration. Another ninety thousand moved out during the 1970s. Those who could afford it found a place in Jefferson Parish, west or south of the city, or they bought a home on the other side of Lake Pontchartrain, in St. Tammany Parish. Th
ose of more modest means chose to start over in St. Bernard Parish, just south and east of New Orleans, where a major thoroughfare was named in honor of the judge warning about “burrheads” in the schools. At the same time, tens of thousands of blacks moved into the city. In 1960, New Orleans had a population of just over six hundred thousand people, nearly two-thirds of whom—63 percent—were white. By the time Katrina hit, in 2005, the city’s population had shrunk to under five hundred thousand and a full two-thirds—67 percent—of its people were black. The suburban parishes saw a corresponding explosion as the population of the metro area remained steady. White flight reshaped the New Orleans metropolitan area as profoundly as any in the United States.
In 1962, white business leaders in New Orleans pressured the eateries on Canal Street to desegregate—a kind of preemptive strike against the sit-ins just starting to take place in the city. In 1963, the city’s white mayor removed the WHITE and COLORED signs from the restrooms in all city-owned buildings. In 1970, the city elected Moon Landrieu, a white liberal, as mayor. Landrieu, who had been the only legislator to oppose the state’s attempts to thwart the integration of the Orleans Parish public schools, captured 90 percent of the black vote in a city then equally divided between black and white. Landrieu appointed a black man to serve as his number two and filled a vacancy on the City Council with an outspoken pastor who had called for a boycott of any store that didn’t hire black clerks. Landrieu’s eight years in office won him the enduring love of the city’s black community and turned the Landrieu name into a curse word inside more conservative circles.
Ernest “Dutch” Morial followed Landrieu into office. Morial’s life was a series of firsts: first African American to receive a law degree from LSU, first African American since Reconstruction to be elected to the Louisiana legislature, the state’s first black juvenile-court judge and the first elected to an appellate-court judgeship. In 1978, Morial became the city’s first black mayor by capturing 95 percent of the black vote and 20 percent support among whites. An astonishing 76 percent of the black electorate turned out to vote, as did 75 percent of the parish’s registered whites. Four years later, Morial easily won reelection against a white challenger, though he received only 13 percent of the white vote the second time. A majority of the city’s workforce was black by the end of Morial’s second and final term (mayors in New Orleans are limited to two terms in office). Black-owned business accounted for $17,000 in contracts at the start of Morial’s tenure, but $11 million by the time he left office in 1986. That figure was paltry but worrisome to all those construction barons and bond underwriters and lawyers who had for years feasted on City Hall contracts.
White New Orleans wasn’t without influence. Much of the city’s white populace had disappeared to the suburbs, but not its gentry—those upper-class burghers who traced their New Orleans bloodlines back at least to the nineteenth century and awaited their turn as king of Mardi Gras. They lived on St. Charles and the side streets around Audubon Park in the same sturdy, two-story manses as their ancestors. They still ate and drank at the same private clubs. “I’ll give people Uptown credit,” said Paul Beaulieu, the programming director for WBOK, a black-oriented talk-radio station. “Just a few blocks from these nice, stately homes you’ve got all these little shotgun singles and doubles. There’s a lot of people of modest means in those small houses, black people, but the old-money white people stayed.”II (A shotgun home is one without hallways, where one room leads to another.) It helped that those with enough money could send their children to private school, thereby sidestepping the integration issue.
Uptown still retained its economic clout despite the shift in majority from white to black. Its people were still the city’s CEOs, top lawyers, bankers, and real estate developers. Whites controlled the business community and dominated philanthropic circles. One member of their club, Ashton Phelps Jr., owned the Times-Picayune (the fourth generation of his family to run the paper). They had deep reservoirs of cash and other means of political influence. If they couldn’t elect one of their own, they’d elect someone willing to do their bidding.
After Morial, the white elite backed Sidney Barthelemy for mayor. Barthelemy was a black member of the City Council more moderate in both his politics and demeanor. Barthelemy was elected with 88 percent of the white vote and only 25 percent of the black vote, but disappointed his white backers by supporting the affirmative action policies of his predecessors. Two terms of Barthelemy were followed by his predecessor’s eldest son, Marc Morial, who won only 7 percent of the white vote in his first run for mayor. Marc Morial, too, would serve for eight years, leaving the city in 2002 with no incumbent in the race and also no favorite for mayor.
DESPITE HIS INEXPERIENCE, NAGIN proved an appealing candidate. He had been born at the city’s public hospital and was a graduate of its public schools. He lacked experience—“Like most citizens,” Nagin would say when it was revealed during the campaign that he had only sporadically bothered to vote, “I was basically making the best of my time while consciously ignoring the declining state of my city”—but his outsider status proved an asset in a city more than a little fed up with the drumbeat of news stories about politicians in the pockets of wealthy contributors. (“We don’t tolerate corruption in Louisiana,” the homegrown James Carville once quipped. “We demand it!”) Nagin was a good-looking candidate whose plainspoken manner had its own charm. “Man, I think we need to sell that sucker”—that’s how he had described his idea during one debate for putting the city’s airport on the auction block to pay to fix the city’s crumbling infrastructure.
Nagin had a few big names in his corner, including Ashton Phelps of the Times-Picayune and Jimmy Reiss. Yet barely a month before the election, he was already out of money and polling at an anemic 5 percent. “Ray was basically running his own campaign at that point,” said his friend David White, a local black businessman who served as campaign treasurer. “There was a group of us who made all the strategic decisions, but there wasn’t what you’d call a campaign manager.” What began as a campaign against waste and fraud broadened into a run against the black establishment. Rather than seeking the endorsements of the existing black political organizations, Nagin openly mocked them. He came out against a living-wage ordinance and signaled his intention to eliminate the city’s set-aside program for minority- and women-owned businesses.
Uptown money poured into his campaign, turning an also-ran into an unlikely front-runner. The slick, new brochures and radio and TV ads the campaign could now afford cast him as a fresh-faced, reform-minded businessman who would turn around New Orleans. The Times-Picayune endorsed him. (“He thinks on his feet,” the paper’s editorial board wrote. “He is focused and innovative.”) So, too, would the Gambit, the city’s alternative weekly. Nagin proved the top vote getter in February and then glided to victory in the runoff one month later, when an 86 percent share of the white vote was more than enough to make up for only 40 percent of the black vote.
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I. The city would officially restore the Congo Square name in 2011.
II. Beaulieu continued, “That’s New Orleans at its best. Shotguns next to big houses, and black people next to white people, somebody making five hundred thousand dollars a year and somebody making fifty thousand dollars a year, but they’re taking care of their fifty-thousand-dollar shit just like you’re taking care of your five hundred. The gumbo that is New Orleans.”
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LOOKING THE PART
Nagin’s first summer as mayor was about spectacle. To show he was serious about snuffing out under-the-table payoffs and other forms of graft, the new mayor had initiated a sting operation. In a single day, arrest warrants were issued for eighty-four people. “The biggest crackdown on municipal corruption in the modern history of the city,” the Times-Picayune enthused, and even the national news picked up on the story. Most of those arrested were cabdrivers who felt obliged to make payoffs to stay in business. The local district att
orney dropped two-thirds of the cases, citing weak evidence. Yet Nagin was the new mayor who even had a cousin among those who had been indicted. His approval ratings soared to 80 percent.
Nagin’s self-assuredness and confidence—what Jed Horne, then city editor of the Times-Picayune, described as the mayor’s “loose-limbed affability”—served him well in his first few years of office. His communications director, Sally Forman, spoke of the shift she felt when the mayor walked into a room. Her boss, she said, would “captivate onlookers with his polished style, muscular build, and trademark shaved head.” Once a month, Nagin got into a Rambo-looking black SUV he nicknamed Big Daddy, and the two of them would tape a show on his old cable-access channel. He always looked great, Forman said, dressed in a crisp white shirt, silver cuff links, and a dark pinstripe suit.
Yet governing meant more than looking and sounding a part. Nagin’s decision to make a radical break, seeking out top people who had little or no government experience to help him run City Hall, was principled, maybe even admirable. But he was also on his third chief of staff when Katrina hit, and she had been on the job for less than a month. Sally Forman, who had started as the city’s chief of protocol before being promoted to communications director a year into Nagin’s tenure, was one of the more seasoned members of his team.
Nagin had big ambitions for New Orleans that could be summed up by a story he repeated often when he was still a candidate. He was sitting at the kitchen table talking about the future with his two sons and a few of their friends. They all loved New Orleans—its music and food and the good-time vibe that gave the city its big-easy pace and “indolent charms,” as Newsweek once put it. But all assumed they would need to leave New Orleans to build the career and life they had in mind for themselves. The city had fallen behind other southern cities such as Atlanta and Houston, and even Birmingham and Mobile were perceived as offering more economic opportunities. Reversing this “brain drain,” the mayor would say, meant doing something about a horrifically high murder rate, the city’s failing schools, and other social ills. “Someone once said a small band of revolutionaries can change the world,” the mayor wrote in an early e-mail to Sally Forman. “Let’s change New Orleans for the better.” As usual, he signed the e-mail MN, for “Mayor Nagin.”
