VIKING
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Copyright © 2018 by Mitch Landrieu
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ISBN 9780525559443 (hardcover)
ISBN 9780525559450 (ebook)
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CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
PROLOGUE
Can Someone Get Me a Crane?
CHAPTER 1
Broadmoor
CHAPTER 2
Learning to See What’s in Front of Me
CHAPTER 3
David Duke and Donald Trump, a Nightmare Loop
CHAPTER 4
Politics in Disaster Time
CHAPTER 5
Rebuilding and Mourning in NOLA
CHAPTER 6
The Shadow of Robert E. Lee
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Further Reading
Truth: Remarks on the Removal of Confederate Monuments in New Orleans
About the Author
For my incredible wife, Cheryl, and our wonderful children:
Grace, Emily, Matt, Ben, and Will
Thank you. I love you all so much.
PROLOGUE
Can Someone Get Me a Crane?
Here I was, mayor of a major American city in the midst of a building boom like no other, filled with million-dollar construction jobs, and I couldn’t find anyone in town who would rent me a crane. Are you kidding me?!
For the last eight years, we’d experienced the most aggressive rebuilding phase in our city’s history. We’d benefited from nearly $8 billion in public and private-sector investments, from housing to hospitals to new retail stores to streets. We’d awarded billions of dollars of construction work to private contractors to actually do the rebuilding, and there are cranes across the skyline. Many of the construction companies, large and small, have made record profits during my time in City Hall.
The people of the city of New Orleans, through their elected government, had made the decision to take down four Confederate monuments, and it wasn’t sitting well with some of the powerful business interests in the state. When I put out a bid for contractors to take them down, a few responded. But they were immediately attacked on social media, got threatening calls at work and at home, and were, in general, harassed. This kind of thing normally never happens. Afraid, most naturally backed away. One contractor stayed with us. And then his car was firebombed. From that moment on, I couldn’t find anyone willing to take the statues down.
I tried aggressive, personal appeals. I did whatever I could. I personally drove around the city and took pictures of the countless cranes and crane companies working on dozens of active construction projects across New Orleans. My staff called every construction company and every project foreman. We were blacklisted. Opponents sent a strong message that any company that dared step forward to help the city would pay a price economically and even personally.
Can you imagine? In the second decade of the twenty-first century, tactics as old as burning crosses or social exclusion, just dressed up a little bit, were being used to stop what was now an official act authorized by the government in the legislative, judicial, and executive branches.
This is the very definition of institutionalized racism. You may have the law on your side, but if someone else controls the money, the machines, or the hardware you need to make your new law work, you are screwed. I learned more and more that this is exactly what has happened to African Americans over the last three centuries. This is the difference between de jure and de facto discrimination in today’s world. You can finally win legally, but still be completely unable to get the job done. The picture painted by African Americans of institutional racism is real and was acting itself out on the streets of New Orleans during this process in real time.
In the end, we got a crane. Even then, opponents at one point had found their way to one of our machines and poured sand in the gas tank. Other protesters flew drones at the contractors to thwart their work. But we kept plodding through. We were successful, but only because we took extraordinary security measures to safeguard equipment and workers, and we agreed to conceal their identities. It shouldn’t have to be that way.
What follows is my account of the tumultuous events that led to the crisis over taking down the figures of Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, and Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard and a monument honoring the White League, a Reconstruction-era organization of racial militants.
Learning the story of these structures, why they were built and by whom, made clear to me, probably for the first time in my life, the lens through which many, though certainly not all, Southerners have seen our regional identity since the Civil War. The statues were not honoring history, or heroes. They were created as political weapons, part of an effort to hide the truth, which is that the Confederacy was on the wrong side of humanity. They helped distort history, putting forth a myth of Southern chivalry, the gallant “Lost Cause,” to distract from the terror tactics that deprived African Americans of fundamental rights from the Reconstruction years through Jim Crow until the civil rights movement and the federal court decisions of the 1960s. Institutional inequities in the economic, education, criminal justice, and housing systems exist to this very day.
I am well aware of the emotional investment of many Southerners whose ancestors fought in the Civil War, of the popular interest in historical events, of how families lost loved ones, came through, and coped. I do not mean dishonor to these people. My concern is with the political meaning of the monuments in New Orleans, who put them there, and why: the perversion of history.
The statues were symbols. Symbols matter. We use them in telling the stories of our past and who we are, and we choose them carefully. Once I learned the real history of these statues, I knew there was only one path forward, and that meant making straight what was crooked, making right what was wrong. It starts with telling the truth about the past.
Race—the word, its many meanings, the constellation of “issues” that the word connotes—does something to the human eye. Sometimes, it’s hot and uncomfortable when you are around people who can only see color. People of color become objects, or problems, not humans. It’s often these same people who, when asked about history, insist to themselves and us that they are not at fault, that history happened before them, that it’s time to move on—in fact, it was all so far back it might as well never have happened. Or they grasp one convenient piece of history, say, the rightful place of Confederate statues, a reminder of why Southern soldiers fought and died. But that is not the whole story of what these statues mean and why they were erected.
And the misuse of history is inflamed by the anger burning through demonstrations today, anger fueled by white supremacists and neo-Nazis who have stolen the meaning of Southern heritage from many whites who abhor their ideology but still hold hard to a rose-colored nostalgia f
or the past. It is a view of history that I, respectfully, do not share; but I understand where they are coming from, and why many people feel as they do. Faulkner famously wrote, “The past is never dead; it’s not even past.” We live those words today, all too painfully.
Race is America’s most traumatic issue, one that we have not nearly worked through. The true measure of a great country is the quality of justice it affords to all. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., insisted, “True peace . . . is the presence of justice.” It is a long, rugged road for all people to find that peace, and our job is to stay on that path, even as we make progress.
This book also follows my personal story. As I look back at key passages in my life, I think about the racial realities that shadowed me from an early age and the remarkable influence of my parents, Moon and Verna Landrieu, in fostering an ethos of honesty and fair play toward all people in my eight siblings and me. Race percolates through so many of the major events in New Orleans, including most recently the career of David Duke and the path of Hurricane Katrina through our city, and so those episodes are part of this story, too.
These last eight years have given me the wonderful privilege of serving as mayor of the city where I was born and raised. New Orleans is a town with a song in its heart and a swing in its step. We also have a history of racial injustice that we must never stop confronting in order to build a stronger and more equitable city for all who call it home. Everyone alive today has inherited this country’s difficult history. Although in recent years we celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the March on Washington and elected an African American president twice, the big message we should hear from the streets of Baltimore and Ferguson and Charlottesville and New Orleans is that we are not done; we have more work to do.
A house divided against itself cannot stand, but to heal our divisions we must be able to hear one another, see one another, understand one another and feel one another. Once we start to listen rather than speak, see rather than look away, we will realize a simple truth: we are all the same. We all want the same thing—peace, prosperity, and economic opportunity. And for our kids to have a better life than we do. There are many who are cynical and believe we cannot change, that our divisions are somehow part of the natural order of things. This is the moment to prove them wrong.
This has been a long and personal story for me. I hope that this book meets each reader wherever they are in their own journey on race, and that my own story gives each reader the courage to continue to move forward. I hope that this book helps create hope for a limitless future. Now is the time to actually make this city and country the way they always should have been. Now is the time for choosing our path forward.
CHAPTER 1
Broadmoor
Your daddy ruined the city.”
I was thirteen when the woman yelled those words at me, a newly minted eighth grader at Jesuit High School, where my father had been a star athlete a quarter century before. Earlier that day, Father Harry Tompson, the principal, a jovial man but quite the disciplinarian, summoned me to his office. “There has been a threat made against your life,” he said gravely. Someone had called the switchboard with an alarming message. With a wary eye, Father Tompson escorted me across Banks Street to the gym, letting me go in for basketball practice early.
It was 1973, and three years since my father, Moon Landrieu, was inaugurated as mayor of New Orleans. He had spent those years fulfilling campaign promises to give African Americans access to public contracts and jobs in city government, while prodding hotels and restaurants to do more than simply welcome black customers—that is, to hire black people above the level of dishwashers, maids, and bellhops. Segregation practices were eroding after federal court decisions, which angered and frightened many whites, who feared the political power of newly registered African American voters in a city that was still at that point 65 percent white. New Orleans might have been among the crown jewels of the South, but with white flight to the suburbs, the demographics, power structures, and economy were changing quickly. Today the city is 60 percent black.
My father was a pragmatist, and a pro-business New Deal–style Democrat. He was also morally grounded. The credo he stressed to my siblings and me was simple, if profound: “Be honest, and be fair.”
Growing up, I was vaguely aware of my dad taking heat over politics, but when he sat down for dinner with us, which he did nearly every night, he didn’t mention rabble-rousers who jeered at City Council meetings. We had free-flowing conversations, warm with humor, as he asked about us, our lives, what we did that day. We often had guests in those years, too. But a backlash was building, and about to catch me.
That day at practice, I joked about the death threat as guys came into the locker room; everyone thought it was cool. A few minutes later, one of my friends ran in and said, “There’s some lady outside calling your name, cursing you, saying she wants to kill you.” We did the only thing that teenage boys would do—go outside and see the threat. From the cement platform above the field-house steps, I recognized her right away, an older woman who had a fiery presence in local politics. I had seen her on TV news in the late sixties, protesting when my father was a councilman-at-large and they took down the Confederate flag in the City Council chambers. She kept on protesting after that. As I stood there, she began yelling profanities. “You got black blood!” she finally snarled. “That explains it all!”
My friends were riveted. She stuck a hand into her purse. Someone yelled, “She has a gun!” They all scattered, leaving me to face what was to come. I had a shaky sense that she wouldn’t shoot an unarmed Jesuit prefreshman in cold blood. She pulled out a business card with her name, wrote on it “Your father is a nigger lover,” and threw it at me. “He is sending this city to hell!” she shouted. Then she bolted off.
I was in a churn of confusion, but what I felt more than anything was pity. I didn’t think that she would hurt me; I could tell that she was challenged, not in full control—that in some awful way she was crippled by her beliefs. That night I told my father what had happened. “She’s harmless,” he said. I knew he had been dealing with people like her for some time; his optimism and upbeat politics registered on me in a calm, steady way. That encounter at school marked the first time I felt the hater’s pain, the frustration and fury spilling out at things beyond her control. I have seen this expression of spirit throughout my life since then. Art and music engage the human heart and transcend time; sadly, so does hatred. I learned this one early.
* * *
—
When I announced in 2015 that we were going to take down four icons of the Confederate past, the front desk at City Hall logged a flood of calls from people burning with anger. The familiar hate was back.
“He’s ruining this city, just like his father. He’s gonna pay!”
“He better watch out!”
And yet, other voices from the past came back to comfort me.
“Say, baby, how’s your daddy? Best mayor we had.”
“Hey, young man! Tell your momma hello! Love that woman.”
I cannot remember a time when the issue of race was not part of my life or our family’s. It’s like a song that you cannot get out of your head; it keeps playing over and over. Race is a soundtrack that stays with me. New voices roll in: hostility at one side; a benevolent approval—love, if you will—at the other; and a swirl of voices in the middle range, hashing out what it means to be American, our common identity as citizens. I take heart that many white people have traveled far in their views on race. Many young people embrace diversity as a natural order of things, with no memory of a South governed by segregationists and white supremacists. And yet, today’s public square teems with hatred of an intensity we haven’t seen since the 1960s. The violence by white nationalists in Charlottesville, Virginia, shows that hatred will grow if we do not shine the light of God’s love and human reason on the darkness and chart a path of
healing for the country as a whole.
New Orleans mirrors a map of the world, a city where people of many countries have settled, shaping a beloved culture that has been enriched with jazz, Creole and Cajun cuisine, and so much more. We’ve shared culture across racial lines, but we also have played a seminal role in some of the saddest chapters in American history. More humans were sold into slavery in New Orleans than anywhere else in the country. Hundreds of thousands of souls were sold here, then shipped up the Mississippi River to lives of forced labor, of misery, of rape, of torture. As we entertain visitors from around the world along our beautiful riverfront, it is hard to fathom that at this very spot, ships emptied their human cargo from Senegal, marching their captives down the street to what is now one of our famous hotels, but there are no historical markers on that path. No monuments or flags to the lives destroyed.
New Orleans is where black Creoles launched a legal challenge to segregated public transportation, a case that led to the 1896 Supreme Court decision Plessy v. Ferguson, which enshrined Jim Crow’s “separate but equal” into law. In 1892 a mixed-race man named Homer Plessy attempted to board a whites-only train car but was arrested because he was one-eighth black. Sixty years later, Freedom Riders coming to New Orleans were beaten to a bloody pulp. Today, though, even as white identity politics rage, I take comfort that my city understands that diversity is our strength, greeting visitors with warmth and a cultural effervescence, even as we resolve to work hard to evolve and heal. We all have so far to go.
I’m struck by how often people describe others first by the color of their skin—black people, African Americans, people of color. When I think about the people I love and have learned from, I don’t think about their color; I remember their words. My family set me on a path, but many others helped guide me.
In the Shadow of Statues Page 1
