In the Shadow of Statues Read online

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  Here is what I know about race. You can’t go over it. You can’t go under it. You can’t go around it. You have to go through it.

  I have been searching for my way through race for all of my conscious life and will keep doing so until God mercifully takes my last breath. The voices across the years, from childhood, through my education, and into public office, speak to me still.

  The most important things you learn as the mayor of a city, if you do the job well, are the dynamics of your people, regardless of whether you got their vote. You get to know them by name, by face; you know where they live, where their children go to school. You know their strengths and their weaknesses. You know how the city undulates. You can sense its rhythm and you can feel its backbeat. You know its currents. You know what’s spoken and what’s unspoken. You feel the city as a human presence in a daily, intimate way.

  I believe that the four Confederate monuments in New Orleans that became a dominating presence in my life for well more than two years never reflected what the true society of New Orleans, generations ago, actually felt when they were built. The structures reflected what the people who erected them, mostly ex-Confederate soldiers or sympathizers, believed because they had the power to build them and because they wanted to send a particular political message. They cast a dark and repressive shadow over my city and, in a way, held us back.

  It took most of my lifetime to see this. I listened to the words of people who had absorbed a different message from those statues than the one I did over the many years I passed by them with little thought about why they were there. A great part of the territory of governing is listening and learning from your people. And once you do learn the truth about the past, you have a responsibility to act, and so I did.

  CHAPTER 2

  Learning to See What’s in Front of Me

  On the many mornings I played tennis with my dad in City Park, we got there by driving down Napoleon Avenue, and after a few turns, followed South Jefferson Davis Parkway, an avenue with a grassy neutral ground, toward Canal Street, the thoroughfare that runs from one end of New Orleans to the other.

  In New Orleans, we don’t have medians but neutral grounds. Though I hadn’t known it growing up, the words come from the literal neutral territorial lines of the ethnically based nineteenth-century municipalities that used to divide New Orleans, the French Creoles and free people of color on one side and white Anglo-Americans on the other.

  Rarely, if ever, on those drives at sunrise did I pay attention to the statue of Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy, in a statesmanlike pose atop a granite pedestal facing Canal Street; I also ignored the name of the street, I guess.

  I had, of course, studied the Civil War in school, or so I thought. The real problem is I wasn’t taught much at all. My middle and high school history classes consisted of lessons about the various battles of the war. We learned that the War Between the States was as much about economics and states’ rights as anything, certainly more so than slavery. That fighting for your state was more important back then because the nation was relatively young. There was little to nothing on the morality of slavery, even at Jesuit. Barely a passing mention on Reconstruction. And then not much acknowledgment of Jim Crow before we swiftly moved on to World War I.

  I knew that Davis had died in New Orleans in 1889; but on those morning drives in the late 1970s, I had yet to learn that the United Daughters of the Confederacy raised funds to erect the statue, on land donated by the City of New Orleans, in 1911. The Jefferson Davis Memorial Association welcomed any “white person” of good moral character to its ranks, as I read many years later.

  I barely even saw the statue; Jefferson Davis was there-but-not-there as we drove by. In countless conversations with white friends and supporters, I’ve learned that most of them passed the Davis monument in the same mentally distant way. Davis’s life was so long ago that it had little bearing on the lives we led. And yet, as I discovered when Confederate monuments became such an explosive issue for me, city officials in 1911 had a strategy for those totemic pieces. They believed in white supremacy. As time passed and racial attitudes changed, their belief still stood there for others to see.

  The history we learned was a purposefully false history. Think about this fact: about a quarter of the people in New Orleans in 1911 were African American. They had no voice in the decision; few of them could vote, and even fewer were in any position of political power. As the decades went by, and whites passed the statue with scant interest, Jefferson Davis memorialized a living message for many African Americans.

  In 2010, when I was first elected mayor, New Orleans had a 60 percent black citizenry and a rich, flourishing African American culture, vital to our economy. But in the first few years of my term, I honestly didn’t think much about the presence of Confederate monuments. The big hurdle was to jump-start the rebuilding process after Hurricane Katrina had left my city on life support.

  In 2012, when Trayvon Martin was killed, protests sometimes began and ended at the statue of Jefferson Davis, or in Lee Circle, where Robert E. Lee stands on a huge pedestal at a major traffic juncture. It heated up as the country struggled with police violence from Ferguson to New York to Baltimore. The statues were often “tagged” with spray paint. “Black Lives Matter.” “RIP.” “BLM.” “No justice, no peace.” Our departments of property management or sanitation often had to go out to clean the graffiti. The connection did not seem as obvious to me at that point.

  Meanwhile, I had begun to talk extensively at home and nationally about the issue of the murders of and by young black men. I was frustrated that there was so much passion and attention being given to police brutality, which was real, and yet very little to something I knew was a sign of the indifference to black lives. The statues seemed like a fringe issue, brought up by a small group of activists from time to time, though they didn’t call them symbols of oppression or monuments to white supremacy. To be honest, I didn’t fully understand their connection to today’s protests. I didn’t know my own history.

  Jeff Davis—as locals call the parkway—crosses Canal Street and ends a few blocks later at Bayou St. John. That long narrow body of water, which runs several miles out to the city’s northern edge at Lake Pontchartrain, got its name from Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne, Sieur de Bienville, the French Canadian aristocrat who founded New Orleans in 1718. Bayou St. John was a vital artery for the native people before the city came to be. The point where Jeff Davis ends at the bayou marks the beginning of Moss Street, which curls along the waterway toward City Park, which borders on a lovely neighborhood of shotgun houses and raised cottages with balconies that offer a view of people canoeing, fishing from the banks of the bayou, flying kites, or jogging on the grassy strip adjacent to the asphalt. I adore Moss Street. A few blocks later, you exit Moss with a left-hand turn and cross the bridge at Esplanade Avenue to enter City Park.

  Outside the park entrance loomed the imposing equestrian statue of General P. G. T. Beauregard. He led the 1861 attack by Confederate soldiers on Fort Sumter, which began the Civil War. He came from a family with deep local roots, and his full name has a real New Orleans ring: Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard. He died in 1893. The statue was erected in 1915 by an association dedicated to memorializing his military career, with funds again from the city and state.

  Ironically, the postwar Beauregard had been an enlightened voice on race, arguing that “the natural relation between the white and colored people is that of friendship”—a view that earned him little white support and cost him some friends. He became a wealthy railroad executive and lobbyist for the state lottery.

  But the meaning of the Beauregard statue erected by the monument association had nothing to do with his postwar advocacy of civil rights. The uniformed general on horseback, the pedestal raised in a small circular garden with flowers, was an absolutely political symbol. Per
haps that is a measure of how a statue succeeds, when it draws your mind from the driver’s seat, waiting in traffic, to a signal from the past. In those fleeting moments at the red light where Esplanade Avenue ends at the entrance to City Park, I saw the aesthetic quality of the structure and thought Confederate leader. Then as the green light sent us onto the road into the park, Beauregard receded from sight and my thoughts turned to the tennis courts just ahead.

  Terence Blanchard also passed the Beauregard statue on his way to school. Two years younger than I, Blanchard, the celebrated jazz trumpeter and composer of Spike Lee film scores, had attended John F. Kennedy High School several miles down, past the northern end of City Park. We wouldn’t meet and become friends for many years. Kennedy, as it was called, was a public school with an African American majority student body. In the afternoons, Terence studied jazz under Ellis Marsalis at NOCCA, along with Ellis’s son Wynton. He went on to study music at Rutgers, and performed with the Lionel Hampton Orchestra. His breakout came with Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers. Terence became a young lion of jazz in the 1980s with an international career. Cheryl and I became friends with Terence and his wife, Robin Burgess, who is also his manager, when we were adults.

  Terence’s encounter as a teenager with that Beauregard statue, on the same route I traveled, left a hard feeling in his gut. To him, it was a monument that denied his humanity; it saluted the war to keep us slaves. He told me, “It made me feel less than,” and left him bearing down to get through the day. Whereas I didn’t feel much beyond the beauty of a statue memorializing a war that ended a century ago, and a vague pride that the monument gave New Orleans a European feel.

  Terence Blanchard felt the weight of history. Long before I began reading and relearning about New Orleans’s booming antebellum economy as the nation’s largest slave market, Terence knew that every day, to get to his high school, named for the president who championed civil rights in the early 1960s, he had to pass by a mounted white warrior, a symbol of the war to preserve slavery. Terence got the message promoted by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, politicians, and city officials associated with the Lost Cause all those decades ago. In their telling, the South had fought a noble war, for honor and independence, and it would rise from defeat to rule by white supremacy. Terence got it, he swallowed it, and he hated it.

  That message went right over my head when I was young. I have often heard it said by elders that you can’t know how a man feels until you walk in his shoes. It has taken me the better part of forty years to find those shoes. This is what I have come to call transformative awareness. We are all capable of it; but we come kicking and screaming to a sudden shift in thinking about the past. To get there we have to acknowledge that we were inattentive, insensitive, myopic, or God forbid, hateful in our earlier view. This is one of the hardest things for human beings to do, especially when someone calls us on a belief. It is much easier to make the change when you know that the person to whom you offer an apology will readily forgive you, but hard as nails if you think condemnation will follow.

  The shift to a transformative awareness is what John Newton had in mind when he composed “Amazing Grace” in 1779. Newton was an English slave trader who became so repulsed by the horror and the brutalities he had witnessed that he turned into an antislavery campaigner and wrote the beautiful song as atonement, bequeathing lyrics that are sung today in white and black churches everywhere.

  I once was lost, but now I’m found, was blind, but now I see.

  People sing this many a Sunday—in black Southern Baptist churches and white Southern Baptist churches, probably at the same moment. Does anyone ever think about the words, or what they mean, or what they are calling us toward? You see, we sing the same song with the same words but don’t always derive the same truth. Was I the only one confused by this?

  It came to me slowly, in stages, over many years, through encounters that forced me to take a different view of the past. Today, after nearly thirty years of public service, I realize that time and God’s grace have helped me appreciate the guides who shared the wisdom of their life episodes to move my thinking along.

  Antoine Barriere is pastor of one of the largest African American congregations in New Orleans, Household of Faith Family Worship Church International, which has three locations. Antoine is smart, charismatic, and committed in his ministry’s outreach work to those in need. We first met at Jesuit High School; he was a few years behind me, one of the few African American students at the time. As a kid, he was skinny and small. We were friendly, but seniors generally ignored underclassmen. I got to know him well when I became mayor.

  A couple of years ago we fell into a conversation about our days at Jesuit. I asked if he had experienced racism. “Not really,” he said. He knew some boys who hated blacks; he learned to avoid them. What really pained him was not overt racism. He thought most of the kids were okay, but he said, “In my entire five years at Jesuit, I never once got invited to anyone’s house, or to birthday parties, or to just hang out.” In other words, he was left alone. Now, I never got left alone. Tons of friends, lots of sleepovers, and I always went to parties. Not Antoine. We were students at the same school. Different color, different outcomes.

  When he told me this, I saw pain in the face of a fifty-year-old man, a religious leader and vital community presence; my heart hurt to think of him as a boy back in high school, shunned. He managed to stuff it, just as Terence Blanchard did when passing the Beauregard statue, but it stuck with him. Walk in their shoes, and you begin to feel the far-reaching implications of all the big and little ways that some of us had it better than others, and how that played out. Race is a powerful force in how our minds respond to the past, and a key to America’s splintered politics today.

  Like it or not, we all carry the past of our country. The unresolved conflicts of race and class lay coiled, ready to erupt, unless we set our minds to an honest reckoning with that past and a search for solutions grounded in genuine truth and justice. Unlike the cursing anonymous voice on a telephone, or the menacing face, or the billy club that split John Lewis’s head in Selma, Alabama, at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in 1965, implicit bias is hard to see; implicit bias is a silent snake that slinks around in ways we don’t notice.

  Questions gather at the threshold of transformative awareness. Whom do we sit with at lunch? Who are the kids we invite to our children’s parties? Or look at for honors programs at school? Who do we think of as smart, with good moral fiber, God-loving and patriotic? To whom do we give the benefit of the doubt, and why? Who are the people we condemn most quickly? As questions multiply about the consequences of race, it forces you to look in the mirror and see yourself as you really are, not who you’ve been told you are, not who society has made you to be, and not the image you want others to perceive. That’s when you start noticing things about yourself you never thought about before. The sight is not always pretty.

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  The big question for me as high school drew to a close was where to apply for college. I really had no idea. My older siblings had gone to in-state universities. With four siblings behind me, I knew my parents would be pressed to provide tuitions and college living expenses. The mayor’s salary in 1978 was $25,000, which converts to a value of about $97,000 today. (The salary today is $163,000.) As his term was ending, though, Dad had been offered a job with a downtown real estate developer and a corporate salary that would make a huge difference for the family—and college for me.

  My decision came in the winter of 1978 through a comic epiphany during Mardi Gras season. As a high school senior, I accompanied my parents to the ball for Bacchus, a Mardi Gras parade “krewe,” in local parlance, which had begun just nine years before. Founded by, among others, Owen Brennan of the Brennan restaurant family, Bacchus recruited businessmen, many of whom lacked the social ties for admission to the patrician men’s clubs that sponsored the parades an
d balls. For as much as everything is about race, it can also be about class. For the old-line krewes, your lineage mattered. Upstart Bacchus invited the comedian Danny Kaye to ride as its first king, inaugurating a practice of “celebrity kings” that caught on with several other parades. Raymond Burr, Bob Hope, Jackie Gleason, Glen Campbell, and Henry Winkler soon followed Danny Kaye in that monarchy. In 1978, the Bacchus king was Ed McMahon, the rollicking sidekick to Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show. At the ball that followed the parade, I ended up sitting at the same table with Ed McMahon. To the best of my recollection, McMahon said, “So, what’s your game plan, fellow?” I said I was graduating in the spring from Jesuit and hoped to study acting.

  “Acting!” said the television comedian. “You should go to Catholic University in Washington, D.C. Great acting program! That’s where I went!” He went on about his college days, riffing about the drama program and dropping names of other alums like Susan Sarandon and Jon Voight, reminding me with a wink that he had risen from CU to the throne of Bacchus, and then with a hint of mischief said, “The archbishop is on the board.”

  Philip M. Hannan, archbishop of New Orleans, had come to town from Washington, D.C., in the midsixties. As a military chaplain in World War II he had parachuted into Germany. He was a friend of the Kennedy family and spoke at President Kennedy’s funeral Mass. A liberal leader on issues of race and social justice, he was a New Dealer of sorts, building a network of homes for the elderly, expanding the work of Associated Catholic Charities. A popular figure in New Orleans, Hannan had a low-key personality and Irish amiability in one-on-one conversations, and was a good friend of my parents’.