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.
“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.
We didn’t get off easy, though. If we got out of line, we caught the belt. My dad would sometimes get upset at us for fighting over petty things, grabbing your sister’s or brother’s seat at the table, taking something that didn’t belong to you, arguing over who sat where watching TV, particularly on Sunday nights when we watched Walt Disney and Bonanza—silly stuff that flared into wails and squabbles. He would say, “If you want me to work this out, none of y’all are gonna like it,” and in the pluralism of our sprawling household, those words carried weight. It was a really bad situation when Dad said, “Meet me in my room.” You really did not want to hear that. Today he claims he doesn’t remember ever spanking any of us; but he did, though not badly. My father was anything but harsh. He and my mother have always been there when I needed them, and they both still are today.
In the fullness of time, I have come to realize what extraordinary hearts my parents have, how much they gave us, and others, without making a show of it, how genuinely they respected and enjoyed each other, their children, and other people, whatever they looked like or believed. One time, my oldest sister, Mary, was walking on Broad Street by St. Matthias and saw an African American boy, seemingly cast off. She brought him home. She was fourteen, I was nine. I remember my mother gave him a couch to sleep on and a place at our table until he could be reunited with his family. In a house with nine kids, it was an extraordinary gesture. But that was what we came to expect from our parents, and they expected the same from us.
In 1965, when I enrolled in kindergarten at St. Matthias, the school was all white. On the way to school we walked past Wilson Elementary, the recently desegregated public school, which was nearly all black. New Orleans has historically had a healthy population of African American Catholics. Over the next few years, the first black students arrived at St. Matthias. This was, indirectly, of some consequence to me. On my first day in second grade, a girl I really liked in first grade was gone. When I asked where she was, I learned that her large family had moved to Holy Name of Jesus Parish a couple of miles away, near Audubon Park. Her father didn’t want his children going to an integrated school. Holy Name was in an affluent white neighborhood. My heart was broken. I was mad and didn’t understand. Our school was great, the kids were great. Her family had lived right around the corner from us. Her father had played on the same high school baseball team as my dad. They had known each other for most of their lives. Her dad stopped talking to my father for some time because my parents kept us at St. Matthias.
As more African American kids came to St. Matthias, more white kids left. The same thing was happening in our neighborhood: white families moving out, black families moving in. “Why aren’t we going to Holy Name?” I asked my father. “Because this is where we live,” he replied. “This is our neighborhood, and if we leave, the neighborhood’s going to be the worse for it. And so would we. We’re staying.” And so they have, to this day. It is not quite an empty nest; three grandchildren are living with them today.
In 1970, after my father’s inauguration as mayor, more people started coming over, to talk, to eat—black people, white people. I met multitudes of people. I was ten years old and I remember leaping into his car on Sunday mornings as he set out to visit churches. One of the most magical moments of my life came at St. Francis de Sales, a Catholic parish on Second Street in Central City, another neighborhood. It was the first time I had heard an African American choir; the sounds were glorious—“Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” “Amazing Grace,” “Just a Closer Walk with Thee”—the choral lines swelling up and bouncing off the rafters. I was transported by the way they prayed and praised God in those rolling songs. I remember thinking that their relationship with God was so much more joyous than in the churches where we went to Mass and the people sat in the pews looking bored and couldn’t wait to leave after Communion.
I would sometimes hear acquaintances of my parents, or some of our white neighbors, complain about black people as weak, stupid, lazy, criminal, unfaithful, or unpatriotic, often using the N-word, plural. The words rang false to me; they never matched the smart, strong, kind, empathetic, faithful, patriotic, and soulful African Americans I kept meeting. And because certain white friends of the family knew how we felt, they began to look at us in a different way, as if we were weird, or worse. This was when I realized that some grown-ups were flat wrong. I wasn’t comfortable challenging them—my parents raised us to be polite, and though my father’s politics were on the leading edge of social change, he did not confront or browbeat people in social settings. But if someone gave it to Moon Landrieu, he stood his ground and gave it right back.
The guys I hung with in high school knew where I stood on race; few of them pressed me on it. Our minds were on other things, like the discovery of girls. After I was out of college, though, a friend from Jesuit told me that in high school he was afraid to come to my house because we lived in a black neighborhood. That was strange to me. We lived in a mixed neighborhood, I thought. To some, just like with Homer Plessy, if it was just a little black, a little makes you all black. But I did wonder why white people were afraid of my black friends.
One evening, my father came home from City Hall in a bad mood. Sometimes he came home with a big bag of Lee’s Hamburgers (with cooked onions you could smell a block away) and a big smile. But when he got mad, his left eye would twitch, and this night that twitch was in overdrive. It was baseball tryouts. He told us that he had gotten a call from the recreation park supervisor who was in charge of the Carrollton Boosters playground. Each one of us siblings played baseball and volleyball at Carrollton Boosters, a local booster club that sponsored kids’ sports. The supervisor had called and told him that some black family was trying to sign up to play ball and the father said he knew us. “Who is the man?” my father asked.
“Some guy named Norman Francis.”
My father was livid. He called and eventually fired the supervisor then enrolled his best friend’s kids. Michael, David, Timmy, Cathy, Patrick, and Christina Francis were superb athletes who won many an MVP award. But Norman reminded my dad of a sobering truth: “Moon, this cannot just be about my kids.”
Under my father’s administration, the New Orleans Recreation Department playgrounds welcomed African American kids and dismantled the color barriers for sports teams. The best-selling author Michael Lewis and future NFL star quarterbacks Peyton and Eli Manning all played at Carrollton Boosters.
My wife, Cheryl, grew up in a quiet neighborhood in Metairie, the largely white suburb across the city line in Jefferson Parish. When we met in law school at Loyola in the mideighties, she didn’t know Carrollton Boosters existed. After we got married I moved this sweet girl from the suburbs into a mixed New Orleans neighborhood, and I’d brag about Carrollton Boosters. And then literally for the next twenty years, we kept bumping into people who’d tell me, “I remember playing with you at Carrollton Boosters!” Or, “I played with your sister Mary (or your brother Mark) at Carrollton Boosters!” Finally Cheryl said, “Do you know anybody who didn’t play at Carrollton Boosters?” So when our children were growing up, Cheryl was all in when they started to play at Carrollton Boosters. I coached them all in soccer, baseball, and basketball, getting to relive my childhood. It was a blast.
In my seventh grade and final year at St. Matthias, New Orleans was hit by a wrenching tragedy. On Sunday, January 7, 1973, my father was having a retreat for his top staff at a monastery across Lake Pontchartrain outside the town of Covington. Reports came over the wire that there was a sniper on top of a building in the Central Business District. My father rushed back to the house, and by then TV had reports of a shooter ensconced on top of the Howard Johnson’s hotel, just across Loyola Avenue from City Hall. “I’ve got to go downtown,” said Dad. He had a driver by then. I dove in the backseat. I was excited and wanted to be close to the action. My father didn’t know I was there until we got to City Hall; he took me immediately to the back of the mayor’s office and ordered me not to leave, but I watched it all from his office window. And though I didn’t know it then, it was a foreshadowing of some of the domestic terrorism and violence we are seeing today from Fort Hood to Dallas to Baton Rouge.
The shooter, later identified as Mark Essex, was a twenty-three-year-old Black Panther sympathizer who had been dismissed from the navy for “character and behavior disorders.” He was on the hotel rooftop, firing at police officers. As the Times-Picayune would report, Essex had been on the run since killing a police cadet and wounding a veteran officer a week earlier in Gert Town, an inner-city neighborhood. In the hotel, in front of room 1829, he shot and killed a Dr. Robert Steagall and his wife, Betty, who were guests.
He soaked telephone books with lighter fluid and set them ablaze under the curtains of the Steagalls’ room. On the 11th floor, Essex shot his way into rooms and set more fires. He killed Frank Schneider, the hotel’s assistant manager, and shot Walter Collins, the hotel’s general manager.
As dusk approached, Essex was trapped in a block house on the hotel roof. The U.S. Marines volunteered a helicopter to get to him. During passes over the roof, officers poured gunfire at the block house while Essex popped out sporadically to fire back.
For hours after they killed him, police searched vainly for a second sniper who they erroneously believed was on the loose. In the days before SWAT squads, the police response was chaotic.
During that tumultuous day, my father had Joe Noto, a big burly police officer with an M16, take me home. When I reached the house, I was struck by the NOPD presence outside. We went downstairs into the basement apartment, where my grandmother was watching TV. She kept asking Mr. Joe how her son was and he kept saying, “He’s doing fine, ma’am.” The stations were running live news coverage, and just then showed my father running across Loyola Avenue, jumping a barricade, and going into the Howard Johnson’s. The lobby had become a command center. In later years he told me it was about the worst day of his two terms as mayor.
Before it was over, Essex killed seven and wounded another eight. Three were police officers. Two other officers had been killed earlier, including one of the great leaders of the police department, Louis Sirgo. To this day, an award in Sirgo’s honor is given to the most valuable cadet in the NOPD graduating class. Guns—and therefore mass killings—were a lot less common in 1973, but the troubling thing is that, just like so often with mass shootings and politically motivated violence today, there were warnings. Essex had written a threat letter targeting police that arrived the day before the rampage.
My parents didn’t talk much about the death threats that came to the house, but every couple of months police would visit because of threatening calls or a letter. My mother would make sandwiches that I sometimes delivered to the officers, thanking them for watching over us. In 1971, after a police shootout with Black Panthers in the Desire Housing Project, African American protesters had gathered in the street in front of our house on Thanksgiving Day. We had no police protection then. I remember sitting outside at the top of the front steps with several of my siblings, while Dad had talked to some of the protesters down below. It hadn’t exactly been friendly, but he hadn’t called in a security force. I later read in a thesis on my dad that he’d called the violent wing of the Black Panther Party “a small group of self-styled revolutionaries.” The author, Frank L. Straughan, Jr., said my dad was in a bind. “They were not interested in promises of upward mobility in a capitalist society and rejected compromise, distrusted all authority, and demanded immediate resolution to longstanding problems. Worse yet, they were willing to die for their objective.”
Two years later, as the Mark Essex tragedy played out, the police detail was a larger sign to me of how much times had changed.
Those episodes, etched into my memory, informed for better or for worse some of my views on the police versus community violence of this century. We have to confront the issues of police behavior, racial profiling, and bias head-on. But despite the injustice, there is no place for violence against law enforcement.
In the spring of 1973 we had to take the entrance test for high school. You were supposed to take it in the school where you wanted to go. I wanted to go to De La Salle, a Catholic high school run by the Christian Brothers, because my older brother, Mark, had gone there. One weekday, my mother attended Mass at St. Matthias. I had this paper to fill out for the high school test. As Mass ended, I told her I needed three dollars. “What do you need it for?” she said.
“This is for my high school thing.”
“Let me see that. Mmm. Where you going?”
“I’m gonna go to De La Salle.”
“I’ll give you three dollars, but put Jesuit down there.”
“But I don’t want to go to Jesuit.”
“Just take the test at Jesuit. And if you get in, you don’t have to go.”
I took the test at Jesuit, and several weeks later received the letter of admission. “Well,” I told my mother, “I’m going to De La Salle.”
“No, young man, you are going to Jesuit.”
I argued; she would have none of it. Finally, I said, “Mom, you lied to me! And we were in church.” After a long pause, she said: “Yes. I lied. God’s going to forgive me, but you’re going to Jesuit.” At least she admitted that she lied. She knew the Jesuit teachings would suit my personality and passions.
When I began high school my father’s staff was complaining that he had become too irritable, so to ease the pressure, he decided to take up tennis, which meant getting to the courts at City Park in the early morning before work. I went with him, we played together, and he dropped me at Jesuit before the bell. I got to be a pretty good tennis player, and since it had been suggested to me by certain coaches that my future did not lie in basketball, the tennis team seemed promising. But I had a competing interest by then, and it prevented me from taking up varsity tennis. Since the day I saw Oliver at a movie theater, I had been captivated by musicals and had a growing interest in acting. I joined the Jesuit Philelectic Society to perform in stage plays. My parents paid for voice and dance lessons, and by the time I was a senior, I had played Don Quixote in Man of La Mancha, Demetrius in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Scapino in Scapino, and the title role in Jesus Christ Superstar. Once you’ve been Jesus, it’s all downhill.
I also performed at the Beverly Dinner Playhouse in Jefferson Parish and got my Actors’ Equity card at age sixteen. I was a real professional and landed paid roles in Fiddler on the Roof and Guys and Dolls, among others. Okay, it might have been local dinner theater, but I had dreams of acting on Broadway, of getting into movies. I occasionally crossed paths with another high schooler, Wynton Marsalis, who was going to Benjamin Franklin, the magnet public high school with a sterling academic record, and taking music lessons in the afternoons at New Orleans Center for Creative Arts, where his dad, the pianist and composer Ellis Marsalis, directed jazz studies. We met when he was in Shenandoah, at Le Petit Theatre in the French Quarter, one of the oldest community theaters in the country.
Toward the end of my junior year, I was summoned to the principal’s office. Father Harry Tompson and Father Paul Schott were waiting. “Qualifying is about to open for student council president,” said Father Tompson. “We think that you have the leadership skills and that you should lead the school. We want you to sign up.” I had my hands full doing plays, and not a lot of political aspirations, I told them.
“But you have a responsibility to the school,” said Father Tompson.
There was another problem, I explained. One of my closest friends wanted to run for president; his parents had just gotten divorced, and I knew it would help him if he won. “We want you to run,” said Father Tompson. “You need to think about it.”
“Okay.”
Despite the weight of what a Jesuit meant by saying We—the priests were custodians of the legacy of a school renowned for its academic and athletic achievements, and its distinguished alumni—I went into a teenager’s denial mode, which is to say I ignored it. On the Friday afternoon when qualifying closed, I was rehearsing a play downstairs and the door swung open. Father Tompson came over, stuck his finger in my chest, and said, “It is your responsibility to do the thing that helps the most people in the shortest period of time. You have evaded your responsibility to the students of this school and you should be ashamed of yourself!” He walked out. I was humiliated. I thought, “God, I thought I was doing the right thing, trying to help my friend”—who, by the way, lost the election.
To this day, in every major decision that I have to make, I remember Father Tompson saying You have a responsibility—even if you don’t want to do something, even if you didn’t create the problem. When you’re elected to office, responsibility is an ever-widening territory, often far beyond the political turf you thought was yours.
Father Tompson congratulated me—no hint of a grudge—when I was accepted to Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., which had a renowned acting program. He left Jesuit to become the director of Manresa House of Retreats outside New Orleans, where I spoke with him many times, and at length, on the retreats I made. We became the closest of friends. In the last years of his life, he became pastor of a church downtown and began a ministry to the poor. Out of that came the Good Shepherd School, a tuition-free school for poor African American students, and, with others, Café Reconcile, which today is the city’s best developmental institute for troubled youth, teaching them skills and putting them on a productive path in life. His efforts were focused on the poorest of the poor; and in New Orleans, you can’t separate poverty from race.
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.