In the Shadow of Statues

by Mitch Landrieu

  “The most important thing to remember is that no one can take away from you anything that you learn,” Norman Francis told me when I was just a boy. Dr. Francis served forty-seven years as president of Xavier, the historically black Catholic university in New Orleans. He was one of the first two African American students at Loyola University New Orleans law school in the 1950s, where he and my father met and forged their lifelong friendship. Dr. Francis received a Presidential Medal of Freedom from President George W. Bush for his work in rebuilding Xavier after Hurricane Katrina. “The future belongs to those who are educated,” Norman often said in his calm, comforting way.

  Other voices echoed that woman’s on the steps of the Jesuit gym.

  “Moon the Coon!” barked a man when I picked up the phone as a kid, long before caller ID. The man hung up. I have no clear memory of my father talking about the hate calls we got; maybe I’ve blotted it all out, because the more vivid, lasting memory of my adolescence is jumping into the car with my dad on Saturdays as he drove around the city, visiting playgrounds, police stations, fire stations, and city work sites. The city was in his bloodstream, as it is in mine.

  Maurice Edwin Landrieu was born in 1930, the younger of two brothers. They grew up on Adams Street, a working-class neighborhood in the Uptown area. The house was twelve feet wide and fifty feet deep and faced a graveyard. Dad slept with his brother, Joe, in the storage room of a storefront grocery run by my grandma, Loretta Landrieu. My grandpa, Joseph Geoffrey Landrieu, had a third-grade education and worked for the public utility company, then called NOPSI, in one of the power stations. I remember him tenderly; Grandpa Landrieu died when I was seven.

  The nickname “Moon” was apparently given to Dad from Uncle Joe early on, that’s all we know. Everyone called him Moon, even in college, law school, and after he established his law practice and got into politics; in 1969 he had his first name legally changed to Moon.

  My father, Uncle Joe, and their parents would by any definition have been classified as working-class poor, but from everything Dad has told me, his childhood was happy. He never knew or felt that he was poor. Miraculously, my grandparents steered both sons to Jesuit, the leading Catholic high school for boys. Dad entered Loyola University in 1948 on a baseball scholarship, where he met Father Louis J. Twomey, S.J., an important mentor. Father Twomey was an adviser to labor unions, and in lectures on ethics at the law school, insisted that racial segregation was morally wrong. This was the earliest stirring of the civil rights movement in New Orleans. Father Twomey hosted organizational meetings for early civil rights activists. In the 1950s he published a mimeographed newsletter, “Christ’s Blueprint for the South,” which was years ahead of Southern elected officials in advocating for greater social justice for African Americans.

  The other pivotal person from those years in Dad’s life was the woman he would marry. My mother, born Verna Satterlee, met my father in the 1950s when they were undergraduates at Loyola. Verna was one of seven children born to Kent Satterlee and Olga Macheca. Unlike my dad’s family, the Satterlees were comfortably middle class; my mother was born on the corner of South Prieur Street and General Pershing, just across the street from the house where she would live most of her life. She had uncommon energy, nerves of steel, and a heart filled with a servant’s spirit. She had gone to Loyola after high school at Ursuline Academy, the same high school all five of my sisters and both of my daughters would attend through middle school.

  When people ask me where my father got his progressive views on race, it takes a while to explain how the convergence of these people—Father Twomey, Verna Satterlee, and Norman Francis—changed Dad’s idea of race relations. My parents were both serious young Catholics. In 1956 Archbishop Joseph Rummel announced that New Orleans parochial schools would enroll black children—a controversial move that brought white protesters outside the Church offices (it took till 1962 to desegregate the schools). Committed to Rummel’s policy no matter how long it took, Twomey was a driven Jesuit on the right side of history. And Norman Francis, with his polite tenacity, opened my father’s heart and mind; their friendship sealed Dad’s conviction that segregation laws were morally unjust and economically unfair. He knew that Norman was every bit as good as himself, but because of his color he had been denied the benefits that Dad had had every step of the way. They were tough, courageous, honest, and fair-minded men. But above all else, they were just friends.

  Dad graduated from Loyola two years ahead of Mom. He entered Loyola law school on an army scholarship that committed him to service as a military lawyer after graduation. Mom took another route. She entered an Ursuline convent to train for the life of a nun. But God had other plans for her. She left the convent; they married in 1954, at just about the time Dad’s friend Norman married Blanche Macdonald. The Francises had six children; we all grew up together, the Francis kids a daily reminder that the racist things some of our white friends said about black people were untrue according to what my eyes had seen and my ears had heard. The ties we had with the Francis family—and other black families as my dad got deeper into politics—shaped my family’s rejection of the racial mentality of the Old South. My dad today also insists he was being somewhat selfish— because Norman was and is his best friend, the stances he took were often to benefit himself.

  After Dad finished law school, my parents moved to Arlington, Virginia, where the young lawyer worked in the Judge Advocate General’s Corps at the Pentagon. Their first child, Mary Loretta, was born there in 1955. They moved back to New Orleans in the late fifties; Dad began practicing law and raising kids. The idea of electoral office was quite a leap for an attorney approaching thirty, with four young children and a fifth (yours truly) on the way; he won a seat in the legislature in 1959 with the support of the reform mayor deLesseps Story “Chep” Morrison.

  Louisiana’s governor at the time was Jimmie Davis, a country-western entertainer famous for his song “You Are My Sunshine.” He had served a term as governor in the 1940s and made a comeback as an avowed segregationist in 1959, at a time when the Louisiana legislature was purging African Americans from the voting rolls. Southern white resistance was growing against the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling that racial segregation in schools was unconstitutional. In Baton Rouge, the legislature in 1960 pushed laws to thwart desegregation of the schools, which under federal law would soon begin in New Orleans. Governors like Orval Faubus in Arkansas, Ross Barnett in Mississippi, and George Wallace in Alabama all used ruses like this along with fearmongering tactics to keep African Americans out of white schools and colleges. The racial demagoguery triggered violent behavior; two men died in the 1962 riot at the University of Mississippi sparked by the registration of James Meredith, the first African American student to attend the school.

  My father voted against twenty-nine Jim Crow laws in the legislature in 1960. He was serving his black and white constituents, and in such a volatile environment the stance he took showed real courage, as one of only two dissenting white votes. One evening, my father got on the elevator in the hotel where he was staying in Baton Rouge, only to confront State Senator Willie Rainach, a hard-edged racist, and Leander Perez, the district attorney of Plaquemines Parish, an area of plantations, citrus groves, fisheries, and marshland south of New Orleans. Demagogue is too soft a term to describe Perez, a long-standing member of the state’s all-white Citizens Council, a buttoned-down version of the Ku Klux Klan. He was Louisiana’s George Wallace and ran his political fiefdom with a prison stay waiting for any demonstrators. Though no one knew it at the time, he was also swindling the parish government out of a fortune in mineral leases on public land he controlled. Several years after Perez died, the parish government filed suit and forced the Perez heirs to relinquish sixty thousand acres of land and pay $10 million in back royalties.

  Perez and Willie Rainach surrounded my father in the elevator.

  “We know your kind,�
�� said Rainach, jabbing a forefinger in Dad’s chest. “We’re going to get you! You’re done!”

  I was in my mother’s womb at that moment when my father’s life was threatened, and was born later that summer, on August 16, 1960. The fifth of nine children. Right in the middle. I have been in the middle of a journey on race ever since. There has not been a moment in my life when we haven’t been tackling these issues personally or politically.

  My father was a marked man to the racist right; but in standing up for his values, he earned the respect of black people in his district, as well as a good measure of whites, who though unsure about desegregation, saw him as a leader willing to make hard decisions and with the courage to speak the truth. A few years later he won a City Council seat even though New Orleans had a strong white voting majority. There he and Council members Philip Ciaccio and Eddie Sapir spearheaded the removal of the Confederate flag that was still on display in public chambers.

  Leander Perez, meanwhile, had orchestrated Governor Jimmie Davis’s attempt at a states’-rights scheme to blunt the federal court’s desegregation orders, which failed. In 1962, two public elementary schools in the blue-collar Lower Ninth Ward admitted African American children with U.S. marshals providing security.

  Perez had whipped up fervor at rallies, railing against “burrheads.” White protesters outside City Hall shouted opposition to desegregated schools. White parents pulled children from schools in neighborhoods where blacks and whites had lived in close proximity. White crowds cursed at the three girls who attended McDonogh No. 19 school in the Lower Ninth Ward. In one of Norman Rockwell’s famous paintings, a little black girl named Ruby Bridges walks with big federal marshals to the William Frantz Elementary School door, not far away in the Upper Ninth Ward.

  Archbishop Rummel excommunicated Leander Perez from the Catholic Church for his outsized bigotry; the Church later rescinded his expulsion so he could be buried with a Catholic funeral. I was too young to remember those events. But from reading the history, watching news footage of the time, and talking with my father and his friends—particularly Pascal Calogero, his former law partner, who went on to become chief justice of the Louisiana Supreme Court—I came to believe that if we had had enlightened leadership, that embraced the proposition that children of different colors can learn together in the same classrooms, the New Orleans public schools might have been saved, or at least had a chance at success. Instead, we entered the era of white flight to the suburbs. The decades from the 1960s through the ’80s changed the demographics of the city and, with it, the schools; the city became poorer and mostly black, and too many people stopped caring about and investing in the public schools.

  * * *

  —

  My mom and dad had nine children in eleven years, starting with Mary (a future U.S. senator) and followed by Mark, Melanie, Michelle, myself, Madeleine (a future judge, now dean of the law school at Loyola New Orleans), Martin, Melinda, and Maurice, Jr. (a future assistant U.S. attorney in New Orleans). We have a run of lawyers—my wife, Cheryl Quirk, is one, as am I. We have been blessed with five children. My parents have thirty-eight grandchildren. My mother can name each one, lickety-split.

  The house where I grew up, and where my parents still live, is a raised duplex in the neighborhood called Broadmoor. Broadmoor borders Uptown, which is more middle class and quite prosperous in certain areas, particularly near the Mississippi River and Audubon Park with its beautiful oak trees, and the streets surrounding the campuses of Tulane and Loyola universities, directly across from the park. It took about fifteen minutes by bike for me to reach Audubon Park. Our house had originally been built for two families; as the family grew and my parents knocked down walls to create more bedrooms, they also turned the basement into an apartment for my dad’s parents, who joined us in 1966. The family next door had eight kids—their name, confusingly, was Andrieu. Around the corner lived the Osigians; they had fourteen. And around the other corner, the Hennessey family had nine children. That was just two square blocks. In an area of four square blocks, right down the street from where Walter Isaacson grew up, lived the Shirers. They had seven kids. We didn’t have to go far to field a team for anything.

  Working-class African American families lived the next block over. You have to understand that while New Orleans schools and institutions were segregated, much of the city was geographically a racial patchwork, with black and white families living around the block from each other. Ann Duplessis, who later became a state senator and then came to work with me in City Hall, lived two doors away from us; my dad gave her rides to the Wilson Elementary public school (where most of the black kids went) when he was mayor. Across the street from Ann’s home lived the family of Mike Roussell, whose uncle became the first African American provost of Loyola. The Catholic parishes, black and white, were vibrant in those days. I rode my bike to our school, St. Matthias. St. Rita was a five-minute car ride; so was Our Lady of Lourdes on Napoleon Avenue, on the nearer fringes of Uptown, and St. Stephen’s, farther down on Napoleon in old Uptown. Holy Name of Jesus, a large church next to Loyola University, stood across St. Charles Avenue from Audubon Park.

  That neighborhood in Broadmoor was my window to the world. We played pickup basketball on a goal in our backyard, and touch football on the corner. We played at one another’s houses. This is where we were formed—black kids and white kids, in a life that was normal and routine to us. We called one another nicknames—Frog, Carpethead, Big, Turtlehead, Fat, and Rabbit. Today it is hard for me to go anywhere in the city and not run into someone who played ball in our yard or with me on the streets near the house back then. Just kids, just friends, paying no attention to the differences or the color of our skin. Perhaps it was because the black kids I knew were in a similar economic situation. Perhaps it was the seeds my father and mother had planted in all those family conversations.

  My mother focused more on us than on things like brand-name clothes or fancy silverware. As I think of it, with nine children she probably had little time for such concerns. We never ate on fine china. We’d drink out of jelly jars that we had emptied when she made peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for us to take to school at St. Matthias, where all nine of us went to lower school. Dad was on the City Council at the time; I remember the blue Pontiac station wagon he drove, with a hole in the floorboard where we used to get our kicks, seeing if we could touch the ground. I look back and realize that even with his law practice and whatever he was pulling in from the part-time city salary, my father had a large family with all the expenses of keeping kids in clothes, food, and school, and that hole in the station wagon floorboard was there because other things came ahead in his list of priorities. Romping around with our friends, devouring the hamburgers and potato salad on picnics at Lake Pontchartrain as the breeze blew in from the lake, were episodes as idyllic as a boy can have.

  But during that idyllic time, the world outside my neighborhood was splintering. Today, I look back and doubt the black kids I knew had the same rosy view of the world. As I moved through high school and into college, I pieced together a story of the events that haunted American society before I was old enough to process them—civil rights demonstrations; bitter court battles over segregation; the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy (when I was three), Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Bobby Kennedy, whose funeral on television I vaguely recall my parents watching; the mounting opposition to the Vietnam war; the streets outside the 1968 Democratic Convention, and Chicago police pounding antiwar protesters; the election of Richard Nixon, and then the Watergate scandal. But back then, largely oblivious, I was a happy kid. I had a lot to learn.

  My father wasn’t the domineering sort who said, “Kids should be quiet.” He expected us to engage in conversation. I remember one time at dinner, the phone rang, my sister Melanie answered it, then announced: “There’s some idiot on the phone who says he’s Governor McKeithen.” And my father said, “Oh, my God.
” It was indeed Governor John McKeithen, a colorful populist, calling from the mansion in Baton Rouge. This was in the early 1970s, when Dad was mayor and they were working together to get the Louisiana Superdome built. “Governor,” he said, grabbing the phone, “I’m really sorry, but you know, my kids are pretty unsophisticated.”

  The governor had a booming laugh. “Moon, we all have kids!”

  When I was growing up, my father and I never talked directly about race. I picked up things by osmosis, watching how my parents acted, how they spoke to and treated people. Our house was never closed to anybody. Black children we played with in the neighborhood would come inside with us. One day I was riding in the car with my mother; we were going down Broad Street, near my father’s law office, and she stopped the car short. There was a woman lying in the street, and cars were passing her by. She was an African American woman, who was either drunk or incapacitated; she was disheveled and sticking out of her clothes. I remember my mother getting out and helping her get over onto the sidewalk.

  The message that the priests at Jesuit High stressed was “men for others.” My parents lived that message every day. I remember a day when I was young and got into a fight with an African American friend who lived down the block. His name was Reggie. His parents called my house; my mother came outside. Now, what would you expect your mother to do if you got into a fight with somebody? Take your side! When they told her what happened, my mother said to me: “You were wrong. You need to go tell that little boy you’re sorry.” I gritted my teeth and I did. I learned at an early age that the entire sense of the household was “Our doors are open. We always help people.” And if everybody’s welcome, then you’re not always the boss. That was the philosophy my mother and father lived by: Be honest, be fair, and everybody’s welcome. They never lectured or sat us down and said, “Look, these are the rules.” They lived that way; we learned by example.