Dreams really die hard. After the 2006 defeat I went back to the lieutenant governor’s office. The post-Katrina racial divisions were like gaping wounds, and though Nagin struck me as in way over his head, the voters had spoken. I was determined to help the city as best I could.
In 2007 I ran for reelection as lieutenant governor. Despite a continuing shift of Louisiana voters to Republican candidates, I won in a landslide. GOP congressman Bobby Jindal, who had lost a close race to Blanco four years earlier, coasted to victory as governor.
I doubled down on strengthening tourism and the cultural economy, investing in historic preservation, and supporting service organizations and nonprofits doing such work. We developed a master plan to revitalize the New Orleans economy. I was comfortable as lieutenant governor, an office I had turbocharged. I liked being a catalyst for the tourism and hospitality industries, and in traveling the state learned more of the history and mix of rich cultures. I intended to run for governor in 2015. After all, I had twice been elected statewide without a runoff. My sister had just won a third senatorial term in a convincing fashion. My polling numbers were good statewide. I could help New Orleans from Baton Rouge, after all.
The recovery had flatlined under Nagin, which did not surprise me in light of his personality issues; but four and a half years after Katrina, the city’s dismal condition kept gnawing at me. As the mayoral election in 2010 came into view, I wasn’t impressed with the field lining up for the mayor’s race, which included several wealthy businessmen. No disrespect to men and women of commerce, but government is not a business and the idea of “running government as a business,” while a great line for TV spots, does not work as a political reality. Businesses function to earn profit; cities are governed to deliver public services, maintain infrastructure, and help businesses; they operate with revenue from taxation and grant support from state and federal government, as well as foundations. You can employ “best practices” to weed out rot or improve delivery of services; but you don’t run a police department or any public works department to make a profit. My phone was ringing, with several state legislators urging me to run. Then I heard from James Carville.
James, Bill Clinton’s great strategist, and his wife, Mary Matalin, who served in both Bush White Houses, had lucrative careers in political media when they left the Washington, D.C., area in 2008 and moved to New Orleans. They plunged into the life of the city, hosting events for civic causes—model public citizens. We became friends.
“You can not only win, but win in the primary,” James told me. In New Orleans, all parties compete in one “open” primary, and if anyone wins over 50 percent, there is no need for further voting. Otherwise, the top two candidates go into a runoff, which becomes the general election.
As part of his professorship at Tulane University, Carville had conducted a survey on the mayor’s race that sampled the views of a thousand people, a large number compared with normal surveys. The poll found voters frustrated with the sluggish recovery and racial divisions; more than two thirds thought the city was moving in the wrong direction. They wanted someone who could unite people and jump-start the rebuilding—not another outsider businessman like Ray Nagin, but a politician with governing experience. That suggested a case of buyers’ remorse in voters who had rejected me the last time. In politics you never take support for granted—you have to earn the base every time, as I knew from my own recent outings. I was sure I could restore a city in severe disrepair, but would I get blindsided and lose again?
I made a late entry into the 2010 mayor’s race, so late as to surprise close friends and family. I announced at an open event for Café Reconcile, the teaching restaurant founded by, among others, the late Father Harry Tompson, my mentor at Jesuit. Café Reconcile takes youth off the street, mostly out of school and in trouble, puts them through training in cooking, in front-of-the-house work, and in the kitchen—a full immersion for getting a job. The restaurant is on Oretha Castle Haley Boulevard, a street in the middle of town that had fallen into blight, named for a prominent civil rights leader of the 1960s. Resurrection and redemption come from unlikely places.
I won a majority in the primary going away, defeating African American business consultant Troy Henry and local businessman John Georges. They never gained traction in large part because they were perceived to be too much like Nagin. And now, years removed from the traumatic event itself, voters of all races were looking for steady leadership. More important to me than winning was how I won, gaining 66 percent of the overall vote and a majority of both African American and white votes. I lost only one out of the nearly four hundred precincts in New Orleans, and that one by just a single vote. I am still questioning our get-out-the-vote effort in that precinct. My election happened to come on the weekend when the New Orleans Saints won their first Super Bowl; the air was charged with optimism. For me it felt like a fresh start.
I began reaching out to hundreds of New Orleanians to serve on transition and planning task forces. I also contacted other mayors for advice: Michael Bloomberg of New York, Richard M. Daley of Chicago, Tom Menino of Boston, Michael Nutter of Philadelphia, Antonio Villaraigosa of Los Angeles, Anthony Williams of Washington, D.C., among others. Every city has its own unique concerns, but many issues overlap and I wanted to see how other mayors handled them.
Mayor Bloomberg, who became a mentor and a friend, told me two simple things I have never forgotten: “Hire a great scheduler because your time is your most valuable asset. And do all of the tough things first.” His advice was superb, though I did not foresee how everything we faced would be tough—all the way to the end. Mike Bloomberg also introduced me to the deputy mayor system, which required hiring professionals with management skills to oversee the government. Having deputy mayors provides a boundary for the mayor’s office, so that you’re not at the beck and call of people who can be helped by high-level staff. This was a management system designed for better and faster results; it has worked.
Mayor Daley of Chicago advised on how to consolidate various departments to make the bureaucracy work better across silos. Mayor Joseph P. Riley of Charleston, South Carolina, the dean of U.S. mayors, talked about how important city design, architecture, and planning was, which was particularly relevant to our recovery. Mayor Menino showed off his 311 and other technology systems, much of which we would later adopt, to help reform the way New Orleans government worked. Mayor Nutter took me into the daily battle for criminal justice reform.
My sister Mary, Louisiana’s senior senator, was leading the recovery effort in Washington, D.C., and the whole Louisiana congressional delegation fought hard for our fair share of funding to rebuild schools, housing stock, hospitals, and more. Mary has never been given her due credit for the major work she did in helping the city recover. It took an army to get it done, but there would have been no resurgence without her strong leadership.
My term would open in the middle of another disaster, with nightly news footage of oil spewing out beneath the Gulf of Mexico at a broken well site. Several weeks before I took office, the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded offshore, killing eleven men. As oil gushed into the Gulf of Mexico unabated, the world again watched south Louisiana take another hit. The city’s economy and well-being are utterly dependent on tourism, and everyone worried about the fishing industry as a major supplier of seafood to New Orleans restaurants. Would people still come here if they were afraid to eat our food after this? The economy took a hit.
I cannot overstate how broken our city government was at my inauguration in May 2010. The disarray was numbing; not only was the recovery stalled, but the city was at the brink of bankruptcy and NOPD was under federal investigation, not to mention four other major city agencies under federal consent judgments or management oversight due to poor performance and in some cases abuse.
I brought in consultants from the Public Strategies Group to conduct a forensic assessment of the city organization across the board. David Osborne told us that we had inherited “the least competent city government” and “the most corrupt—a really tough experience.” He said plainly, “The city faces more challenges than we have ever seen in an American city.”
The workforce had taken deep cuts, with many functions outsourced to contractors; payroll staff was down to about 4,000, well below the pre-Katrina 6,300. To save money, Mayor Nagin had moved City Hall to a four-day workweek. During the transition, I was told that the city had a $35 million deficit. When my team got into City Hall, we opened the books and after a thorough audit found that the budget deficit was actually $62 million, then $67 million, before finally settling on a $97-million gap. With only six months left in the year, and zero reserves, with no one-time Katrina funding or borrowing capacity, we had to close the city’s budget gap— more than one fifth of the total general fund. We did so by reducing boards and commissions, reorganizing departments, and changing the delivery of core services. Even in the shrunken government, there was a lot of overlap and waste. We continued privatizing where we could. Instead of providing direct health care, we shut down our city clinics and transitioned the patients to primary-care health clinics with nonprofit operators, which were spread throughout the city. We were able to place nearly all of our employees with those private facilities. We also cut contracts large and small—the most controversial of which were three garbage collection contracts, two of which were the largest public contracts held by African American businesses in the state. It was painful and controversial because it was viewed racially in political circles, but nothing could be sacrosanct, and this was about fiscal waste, not race. I was also forced, reluctantly, to furlough city employees 10 percent of their time, a big hit for an already beleaguered group of public servants. This was a painful task, forcing good people to take personal losses.
The city’s technology system was on the verge of collapse. Many critical systems—payroll, finance, revenue—all had single points of failure, which means that if one thing went wrong, the entire system stopped working. The city’s Web server for e-mails kept going down. The most visible signs of systemic trouble were the many streets badly in need of repair. Nagin’s recovery czar, Edward Blakely, had promised “cranes in the sky” within a year of his 2007 appointment. Not only had that building boom not materialized, the streets were still completely torn up from flooding.
Nagin had also outsourced much of the city’s management; highly paid subcontractors were providing basic services like reception and administrative work. Why pay $70 an hour for a clerical staffer performing basic duties at City Hall? Meanwhile, under Nagin, some 655 capital projects had been designed, representing an estimated $1.5 billion in costs. There was only one problem. The city had $1.2 billion to pay for those projects from allotted FEMA funds. This shortfall meant that other important projects could not launch, because the last administration overspent on design without a real budget or bottom line. We had to go back to the drawing board.
We found waste everywhere—the Nagin administration had paid more than fifty thousand dollars to store seventy thousand dollars’ worth of unused furniture, still in boxes! The city had spent more than a hundred thousand dollars in grant funds on a recovery website that no one knew existed.
My theory was that by cutting with a scalpel and not a hatchet, as they often do in Washington, we could be positioned to better deliver services when the finances got better. It would also take constant reorganization, looking at what is and is not working to deliver services. At the same time, you have to invest in the things that will help you grow or produce long-term results, like retail stores that generate sales tax and auditors who improve collections. So much had ground to a halt after the storm.
From my role as lieutenant governor, I knew that Mayor Nagin and his team had failed to access money available in the federal pipeline. We started right away to rebuild the city’s relationship with FEMA and began negotiating for funding streams. President Obama, FEMA administrator Craig Fugate, and HUD secretary and later OMB director Shaun Donovan were nothing short of remarkable. As we began the transition, I asked President Obama if he would lend us some people to help. This was a great benefit, as it allowed us in the transition to put in process what I call “horizontal and vertical integration,” which simply means that the city works cooperatively with state and federal offices on a given dimension of rebuilding. Anything I wanted to do with federal money—whether it be through FEMA, HUD, or the Department of Agriculture—turned on having people from each agency in the room, from start to finish.
I asked the president to insist his FEMA directors at the regional level meet with me personally once a month; the initial sessions laid the foundation for more funding streams ahead. Beyond those top-level meetings, our teams met as often as necessary. The city of New Orleans owes a lasting debt of gratitude to President Obama for putting the White House behind our rebuilding agenda. FEMA promised to approve anything to which the law said we were entitled, provided we proved it was caused by the flood damage. On one hand, that was no problem: it had been documented quickly that the city flooded on such an epic scale because of man-made error by the Army Corps of Engineers in its design and management of the levee system. On the other hand, because many of the city’s records flooded, it was often hard to prove exactly what was caused by prior neglect and what was caused by the levee failure. After some 750 meetings over eight years, we secured billions more in federal funding for schools, hospitals, parks, playgrounds, and critical infrastructure, particularly streets and drainage.
I was determined not just to build back the city that was, but to rebuild a stronger, more resilient city for the future. That meant improving all public structures, not just the Old World architecture of the French Quarter, the Greek Revival architecture of the Garden District and Uptown, or the quilt of shotgun and Victorian cottages that give many neighborhoods their character and that visitors think of as “real New Orleans.” There’s more reality beyond that. One example here will suffice.
The blandly named Youth Study Center was a prison for juvenile offenders, and had become a nightmare of scandals before the 2005 flood. The facility was beaten to death in Katrina. The juvenile court judge wanted to rebuild it as it had been. I said, “No. We’re not building back something that the city did not get right the first time.” I insisted that the detention facility—our new Juvenile Justice Center—have a wraparound service center so that the juvenile inmates would meet judges, prosecutors, and police, demonstrating to them that the adults who incarcerated them were not abandoning them, but offering their time to try to help them restructure their lives. We put in space to bring the public school system inside, behind the gates. An initial $7 million budget ballooned to $42 million through a series of negotiations with FEMA.
As we drew up the plan to rebuild the many schools trashed in the flood, we went back to FEMA over and over, basically saying, Look, you cannot give us just a little bit of money. We have to build smarter for the future, with building codes that afford resilience in the event of future flooding. This is an issue that many cities within coastal zones are facing in the age of sea rise. We also pointed out that the United States of America itself needs a coherent, forward-thinking national policy, and we were part of that process. In 2015, ten years after the storm, we secured $2.4 billion just to cover the most extensive street and water system repair in the city’s history; unfortunately, the funding cannot always get to the ground soon enough. In the summer of 2017, we experienced major disruptions to our water, sewerage, and drainage systems’ power plant, causing flooding and a boil water advisory. The long timeline of the Katrina funding and repairs had caught up with us. Nonetheless, I knew that this funding was something that would make a material difference in everyone’s life every day.
Early on, I instituted the deputy mayor system, with lines of authority and a more manageable organizational chart that allowed us to rebuild the work force with a $1 billion total budget. I began recruiting professionals in fields of expertise that cities require to thrive. I also ensured that we had a diverse team, led by women and African Americans, young and experienced. Many of the brightest minds in urban planning were attracted to the idea of helping rebuild a major American city. We worked on integrating data and technology in our policy decision making. Our data analytics unit and performance management team put New Orleans on the map for government innovation. We also wanted to have a bottom-up and not a top-down government, so we created a team of neighborhood engagement officers who were assigned to work with neighborhood leaders and associations across the city, many of whom were leading the recovery in their neighborhoods in absence of the formal government.
My primary challenge was to rebuild public trust, to restore credibility, and to heal a city that was broken—economically, spiritually, racially. To clean up corruption and restore trust, I signed a series of executive orders to change the city’s system of awarding contracts by creating a chief procurement officer and a new contracting process in which selection committees would meet in public. Contracts with the city of New Orleans would now be awarded based on proven expertise in the field, rather than on knowing the right people in government. We also opened doors of opportunity with the Disadvantaged Business Enterprises initiative, giving dozens more local and minority-owned companies a level playing field by requiring some subcontractor participation of small and minority firms on contracts. Many groups had pushed for these reforms for years. We instituted them in the first thirty days.
Heartbreakingly, many of the city’s recreation facilities were in shambles—empty swimming pools, broken restrooms and lighting, flood-damaged ball fields. No one could even tell which playgrounds and camps were open; there was no list. NORD—the New Orleans Recreation Department—with its baseball parks and Carrollton Boosters games—was fundamental to my coming of age. I made an absolute priority of bringing that system back.
The condition of one playground and camp was particularly dispiriting. Raised in the Seventh Ward neighborhood of Tremé (now famous from the HBO television series), Jerome Smith was a legendary civil rights activist and Freedom Rider in the 1960s in Mississippi. When he moved back to the Tremé neighborhood, he founded the Tambourine and Fan Club, an education and recreation program for youngsters with a summer camp at a place called Hunter’s Field. A commanding role model with a gentle touch, Jerome Smith created a safe haven for kids who needed one—a place to laugh and learn, a respite from the unforgiving streets. Jerome Smith was a frontline leader in the battle for the soul of our city. Addicts and pushers learned to avoid Hunter’s Field.
After Katrina, Mr. Smith had bad dealings with the Nagin people and some members of the City Council; the bureaucracy botched his request for basic supplies for the summer camp—no board games, no crayons, no Hula-Hoops. He still didn’t close his doors or turn kids away. The heat index exceeded 100 degrees many days, and Mr. Smith’s building did not have air-conditioning. So he brought in fans and kept the doors open; the kids kept coming. There was a raggedy bus to take the kids to a rundown old pool. For many kids, that was the only ride they’d take to someplace else, that pool their only escape from hot summer streets. The camp gave them a choice—and more than that, it gave them hope. Despite the city’s many challenges, we committed early on to rebuilding NORD by doubling the funds even as we worked through hard deficits. We made sure Tambourine and Fan received the supplies and funding it needed. We also rebuilt the Tremé Center, which now stands as a beacon of hope and a place of safe-haven in this historic neighborhood.
The good news I seized on, five years after Katrina, was that people kept coming back. Three areas hardest hit in the flood—New Orleans East, Gentilly, and the Ninth Ward—now had about eighty thousand residents. The bad news was that they faced a thirty-minute drive to an emergency room. It took several years for us to build a $140 million, eighty-bed hospital in New Orleans East as a neighborhood anchor.
With great foundation support, we started building infrastructure aimed at attracting private-sector investment and jobs. Resilient New Orleans, the country’s first comprehensive resilience strategy, included innovative ways for how we can better live with water, such as investing in green infrastructure like rain gardens and bioswales. It covered actions to combat climate change, including increasing the use of cleaner modes of transportation and mobility, such as bicycles. But the strategy also included connecting vulnerable populations with the workforce skills needed to compete for the jobs created by our investments. We began tackling issues of violence reduction and racial equity, and connecting those who need work with the skills needed to service the private sector.
By 2015, ten years after the storm, New Orleans had the reputation as a cutting-edge leader in how to rebuild stronger and smarter. The city was growing. We’d turned around the city finances. We had been a declining city before the storm, we now had a future that was brighter.
In the final months of my second term, the New Orleans economy has thrived, adding more than twenty thousand new jobs since 2010. We had recruited GE Capital Technology Center to the city with former governor Bobby Jindal, adding six hundred high-paying tech jobs, along with game developers and software creators. That, and aggressive digital and software development tax credits, provided groundwork for the single largest economic development announcement in New Orleans history, in November 2017, when DXC Technology, a Fortune 150 company, announced the arrival of a digital transformation center with two thousand jobs. A key factor was the infrastructure of colleges in the area with science and technology courses germane to DXC’s hiring stream.
Today, spending from tourism has surpassed pre-Katrina highs. The Wall Street Journal’s MarketWatch named New Orleans one of the “most improved cities for business.” New retail is booming, and in many areas surpassing pre-Katrina levels. The city has become a hub of entrepreneurship activity, outpacing the national per capita average by 56 percent. We have seen more than $8 billion in private development since May 2010. As a result of growth and confidence in the market, property values are up 50 percent. We’ve begun construction on a new, nearly $1 billion airport terminal, which will add major international flights and improve global business opportunities in the region.
Cities hold together by the quality of their people. New Orleanians by their nature are a hopeful, resilient people. In the last twelve years, we have been through hell and high water in this city, not just with Katrina, but Hurricanes Rita, Ike, Gustav, Isaac, the BP oil spill, and the national recession. But as the Mardi Gras Indian chant goes, “We won’t bow down.” After everything that we’ve been through, a poll of New Orleans residents on the tenth anniversary of Katrina done by the Kaiser Family Foundation with NPR found that a whopping 78 percent of residents are optimistic about the city’s future. New Orleans rebounded after 80 percent of the city was underwater in 2005, much of it for several weeks, to become one of the fastest-growing major cities in America, with thousands of new jobs, new industries, rapidly improving schools, rising property values, and a new, stronger flood protection system that will reduce the risk from hurricanes.
This is not to say New Orleans does not have problems. We still rank too high on the income inequality list. The local criminal justice system still disproportionately impacts African Americans. Unemployment among African Americans has been three times that of whites. Gentrification and the lack of affordable housing is a real issue in far too many of our neighborhoods. And African Americans are more likely to live in poverty and to attend poor schools than whites.
Let’s be honest: before Katrina, the public school system was a disgrace. White flight from integration sparked decades of disinterest, decline, and disinvestment. By and large they were schools where the poorest and, frankly, mostly black students were left to try to scrape out an education. Corruption and gross mismanagement by the local school board only made it worse.
Katrina destroyed 110 of 127 schools, and when we went to rebuild, we felt there was almost nothing in them worth saving. The charter school movement that arose after Hurricane Katrina has brought a great improvement for youngsters. With $1.8 billion in federal funds invested to rebuild, renovate, or refurbish nearly every school in the city, we have outstanding learning spaces to help our kids thrive and realize their huge God-given potential. People argue about whether the charter school movement is the right way to approach education reform. Many vested schoolteachers lost their jobs and benefits after the legislature mandated a takeover of the school system following the 2005 disaster. A class action suit by 7,500 public-school teachers, mostly African American and women, won a large judgment from the state, only to be overturned by the State Supreme Court. Because of the way it was resolved, there remains some racial tension about this adult issue.
Nevertheless, the charter schools, which supplanted most of the old Orleans Parish system, have been an unparalleled success. Students are graduating at higher rates; the dropout rates are lower. The number of failing schools has dwindled to 7 percent from a pre-Katrina peak of nearly 60 percent. Before Katrina, the achievement gap between African American children in the city—the kids people said couldn’t learn—and white youngsters in schools in the suburbs and the rural areas was more than 25 points. Now that gap has been nearly closed.
Today, nearly every student attends a public charter school and families who used to have only one choice for their kids can now apply to almost every school in the city. In New Orleans, geography no longer defines a kid’s destiny; we’ve raised the bar across the board, insisting that schools serve every child, because in New Orleans we know that every child can learn and every child has the right to a great education.
Early in my life, Dr. Norman Francis drilled into me how important an education was to helping kids, particularly young African American kids, succeed in communities like New Orleans. Having a shot at an excellent education, despite your race or socioeconomic status, is the real way to level a playing field that is still unbalanced by the legacy of Jim Crow.
Before Katrina, the high school graduation rate hovered around 50 percent. Now, almost three quarters of our kids are graduating on time, with more kids enrolling in college than ever before. One of these New Orleans high school graduates is a young man named Jairron Isaac. A few years ago, he wasn’t going to pass the tenth grade, let alone go to college. His mom and dad sold drugs; both went to prison. As you can imagine, he struggled; but he enrolled in a charter school with a special focus on college. This made the pivotal difference. As Jairron said: “In life you have two choices, to be defeated or to conquer. I choose to conquer.” In 2010, Jairron enrolled at Morehouse College, one example of the very real impacts the new system of schools is having. That’s not to say we are close to perfect. Poverty is a huge deterrent to many children, but we are forging pathways for those who learn to find a new plateau.
Along with schools, health care is crucial. A dozen years ago, if a kid without a regular doctor or insurance had an earache, his mom faced a thirteen-hour wait time at the Charity Hospital emergency room just to get it checked out. In the last eight years we established a network of neighborhood health clinics with federal support. Dr. Karen DeSalvo, the New Orleans health commissioner, guided this process as a precursor to the Affordable Care Act, and later became President Obama’s acting assistant secretary of Health and Human Services. The St. Thomas Community Health Center, as an example, handles everything from chronic disease management to pediatrics, with a special focus on women’s health, conducting thousands of mammograms every year. Neighborhood health centers like St. Thomas serve 59,000 patients across the city every year, reducing the overload, and expense, at hospital emergency rooms. Two major hospitals are going up in the city, a Veterans Administration hospital and, adjacent to it, the University Medical Center, part of the LSU system.
The city’s pre-Katrina “big four” public housing projects were decaying, crime-ridden horrors that hardly gave the poor what they needed or what they deserved. These complexes were demolished in the Nagin administration. With HUD support we’ve invested more than $1 billion in public housing—creating over 14,000 affordable rental units for low-income families. We’ve emphasized building homes close to schools, health care, and transit. We can see the difference it’s made already at the former St. Bernard Development, now known as Columbia Parc. The St. Bernard was one of the old public housing developments first built by the Roosevelt Administration during the Depression. It had crumbled over the years. By the time Katrina hit, 25 percent of the 1,300 units were empty and the area was known for its violence. And then the levees broke, and as the sun rose the day after the storm passed, the St. Bernard Development was ten feet under water. We resolved to build back the St. Bernard not as it once was, but as it ideally should have been. Now, Columbia Parc is a mixed-income public-housing neighborhood that embraces public-private partnerships. The master plan for the neighborhood includes newly built schools, an early-childhood learning center, a recreation facility, a library, playgrounds, retail stores, and green space. And the crime rate has plunged.
With such historic poverty, New Orleans still has many disparities, some of them glaring. But as we enter 2018, the Tricentennial of our founding, New Orleans is a far better city than it has been in my lifetime, and a remarkable American comeback story. Rebuilding the city has been the most rewarding experience of my career in public life, second only to the happiness of raising a family with Cheryl. The best impulses of America show themselves when people work hard, dream of something better, and come together to make it happen. At times in the last eight years I was jarred by the scope of neglect and damage; my head and my heart told me that nothing is broken here or in America that cannot be repaired, no problem cannot be solved. The road is long; it takes sacrifice and is often painful. But we can get there, we can rebuild the city that so many of us dreamed New Orleans could be, had we gotten it right the first time. To do that, we had to be honest about our past and look to the future.
And, as every parent knows, you can only be as happy as your saddest child.
The shadow story of my city’s stirring comeback is the price we pay in the horrific loss of human life through gun violence, most of which erupts in the poorest parts of town. In America, we have become anesthetized to the pace of such homicides, one more numbing thirty seconds on the nightly news, much less the mass shootings that at times seem like some curse that our religious leaders cannot explain. Any politician venturing into this terrain risks being derided as a soft liberal, a knee-jerk on gun control, or some dewy-eyed idealist, pining for a world where people behave well and all children are safe. Fine. I absolutely want a city, and a country, where children are safe. Yet as the mayor of every large municipality knows, the first law of governing is pragmatism, forging a balance between what we must do to foster growth and accepting the limits of what we cannot do. The question for me is how we change those limits.
My cell phone hums all hours of the day. Michael Harrison, the chief of police, sends me a text each time someone is killed. I try to visit the crime scenes and comfort the families who have lost their young. It is the most excruciating task I have as mayor.
The names follow me.
Ricky Summers. Briana Allen. Shawanna Pierce. Jeremy Galmon. Keira Holmes. Marcus McNeil. Daryle Holloway.
All were human beings who were shot and killed on the streets of New Orleans in my time as mayor, and these are only a handful of the hundreds who died while I was in office. Some names haunt me, track me, sneak in and out of my dreams. Others, from further back in the past, stay with me for their own reasons. James Darby. Michael Norfleet. Joseph Norfleet. Senseless deaths, senseless quarrels, bullets that halted lives that deserved America’s promise.
If it is true that one person can change the world, it must be true that the absence of so many must change it as well.
In my eight years as mayor, the hardest day was May 29, 2012, when five-year-old Briana Allen died. It was her cousin Ka’Nard’s tenth birthday, and they were celebrating on their grandmother’s front porch. Balloons. Streamers. Music.
I remember my childhood birthday parties. One year, I got a pair of cowboy boots, another one brought a pair of big old boxing gloves. Standard cake and ice cream. Nothing was standard about the party where Briana was shot through her tiny midsection by an AK-47 bullet. She fell into the arms of her father, Burnell, who held her as she died.
Burnell was the intended target, a lifetime member of the notorious Allen family gang. During the party, two guys from the 3NG gang rounded the corner and saw Burnell on the porch. They didn’t care that he was standing in the middle of small children, old folks, aunts, uncles, and friends. They let it rip. One bullet found Briana’s gut—game over. Another bullet grazed her cousin Ka’Nard on the neck. A third bullet traveled three hundred yards down the street, crashed through a windshield, and exploded in Shawanna “Nonni” Pierce’s head. Pierce, a young single mother of three young boys, Kelby, Kolby, and Khody, had just turned the corner on her way to return a rental car after leaving a son’s graduation party. Just like that—gone.
The sun baked the shocked crowd at the party. Briana’s grandmother screamed in agony. The police tape stretched for blocks, flapping in the summer wind. Twenty-three rounds fired, five people hit, two dead. In some neighborhoods, this is another day on the streets of America. As Briana’s father held her tiny head in his hands, the blood pooled on the porch beneath birthday balloons, life seeping out of her, another loss, another wound in the city. Even as people gasped and mourned, the killings found other streets and fresh victims.
I had already made stopping the homicides a priority of my administration. But on that day, a counteroffensive to gun violence became my number-one consuming focus. I have often said that I didn’t choose this. The crisis grabbed me. And today, it remains my morning coffee and my nighttime prayer. I pray that we can turn our culture from one of death and violence into one of peace and life.
I have kept a photo of little Bri-Bri, as they called her, in my office since that time. Her smiling face stares at me as a reminder of why this work is important. It is critical to my city’s and our country’s future.
What happens to the lives left behind?
Briana’s father was soon arrested for another murder. He is now serving life behind bars. Briana’s uncle would be dead within the year, ambushed by two men with assault rifles. The true epilogue to this terrible story is actually prologue for the future of New Orleans. It is about little Ka’Nard Allen. It was his birthday party that was interrupted by gunfire. He was hit in the neck that day. But for the grace of God, Ka’Nard survived, although he could not escape the violence all around him. Five months later, Ka’Nard’s father was fatally stabbed by his stepmother. And then, nearly a year to the day of his cousin Briana’s death, Ka’Nard was again caught in the crossfire, this time shot in the cheek along with eighteen others at a Mother’s Day parade. Twice this boy came within inches of getting his head blown off. We expect little kids like Ka’Nard to soldier on, stand on their own two feet. Is that the best we can do? Could you, or I, bounce back, move on? His other scars run deep, but are not yet visible to us.
We have seen this all before. Why is the political will missing to respond with a countermeasure, a policy, as a civilized people should?
Let me take you back to another Mother’s Day, this time 1994. Families were picnicking at A. L. Davis Park in Central City. Nine-year-old James Darby was playing a pickup football game. A little girl got elbowed in the face during a fracas; she went home in tears. Her father had left the family. Her older brother, Joseph Norfleet, nineteen, the man of the house, was that day drunk and high. He saw his sister’s black eye and flew into a rage. Egged on by an older stepbrother, he grabbed a shotgun and jumped in a car. It was a short trip back to A. L. Davis Park. Joseph stuck his shotgun out the window and shot into the crowd, aiming for someone else in the Darby family but instead hitting James in the head, killing him instantly. Nine years old. Just a few weeks earlier, James Darby had written President Clinton:
Dear Mr. Clinton,
I want you to stop the killing in the city. People is dead and I think that somebody might kill me. So would you please stop the people from deading. I’m asking you nicely to stop it. I know you can do it. Do it. I now you could.
Your friend,
James.
We use that overused word tragic to describe terrible events, and in this case for tragedy at both ends of the gun. The pain and agony of losing not one child, but two. James died and was buried in cold ground. And Joseph, nineteen, lit up and showing a child’s bullying bravado in what he did, went to the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola for the rest of his life. Several years ago I went to see him at Angola. It was surreal. He spoke of the day he now regrets. He spoke of having been shot twice in his life on the rough streets of New Orleans before that day. We are left to wonder what might have been. As the years pass, we talk about violence just as “part of the culture.” Each murder becomes one small part of some impossibly large whole.
I am haunted by the lives we could not save. The river of federal funds that allowed me to rebuild this city provided no levee system against the tides of violence sprung from the porous gun laws of this country. I had no power to stop the flow of guns; the criminal justice system can only arrest and incarcerate the worst offenders. In the face of futile gun laws, I decided to raise awareness and set an alternative path. We have made a significant dent, but it is only that, a dent. We have so much more work to do. I firmly believe that this is a solvable problem if we treat gun violence as both a public safety issue and a public health crisis. We vaccinate people to thwart disease. Against gun violence, society is passive.
A politician learns from youngsters trapped on the front lines of this carnage how desperately they want to avoid drug gangs and change their circumstances. Ricky Summers, sixteen, was surrounded by violence in his Central City neighborhood. Ricky was determined to get out and be different. He was one of the original “KIPPsters” enrolled in the first class at Knowledge Is Power Program in Central City, part of the charter school effort. With ambitions for college, Ricky was struggling to become a man without the guiding hand of a father. His eighth-grade English class had been studying Langston Hughes’s poem, “Harlem.” “What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? . . . Or does it explode?”
Ricky was in his school uniform when they found him behind a blighted house, shot in the back. Ricky’s dream was violently denied, his rich potential snuffed out like too many before him. What must we do to save young men like Ricky Summers?
Not too far from Briana Allen’s photo are stacks of red binders in my office. They hold the stories of murder victims in my city—more than one thousand of them since I took office in 2010. Emotions overflow at funeral services. Another prayer vigil, a moment of silence, an endless cycle, primarily young African American men killing each other.
In 2011, five John McDonogh High School students were killed before they had a chance to make their mark on the world. It is a sad, horrifying truth that in 2011, a John McDonogh High student was more likely to be killed on New Orleans streets than a soldier fighting in Afghanistan. Let that sink in.
Statistics confirm that 80 percent of the victims know one another. Most of the “beefs” or disputes are so petty as to leave us numb over the waste of human life. Day after day young men kill someone they know, and not just in New Orleans. They are not faceless, nameless thugs who die out of sight and mind; they are flesh and blood. They matter. Their deaths are not God’s will. Often, as I have tried to focus attention on this issue, many people, not just whites, turn away. Not my problem . . . Just thugs killing thugs . . . They get what they deserve . . . It’s not my fault.
One of the biggest sticks that was used against me in taking down monuments was that I should be focused on murder, not monuments. Not one of those people helped me in fighting murder or helping young, black men in my time at City Hall. And my record on murder reduction is unlike any other administration. But the opponents to taking down the monuments used any excuse they possibly could.
The great civil rights activist and congressman John Lewis refused to stand aside, asking, “If not us, then who? If not now, then when?”
Our battlefield is on the street and in the heart. The mass shootings in churches, schools, movie theaters, and malls are the opposite face of the same coin: too many guns, too little preventive intervention. This is a mental health issue, a security issue, and the greatest moral issue in America today. Where are the voices of our religious leaders, calling down the failure of legislators and government to face this blight? If this is not a pro-life issue, what on God’s earth is it?
Since at least the early 1970s, major urban centers have experienced gunfire like warfare. Every year, nearly fifteen thousand people are murdered on American soil—about forty people lost every twenty-four hours. In Las Vegas, before the horrific massacre from the hotel window of people attending a country-music concert, a life went down to gun violence on average once a day. That bears repeating: In most major cities, someone dies each day from a gunshot. The weapon of choice, most often a handgun; the victims and perpetrators disproportionately young African American men.
As former Philadelphia mayor Michael Nutter has so forcefully said, if a foreign enemy killed fifteen thousand American citizens, there would be hell to pay. If the Ku Klux Klan murdered thousands of young black men, this nation would be in an uproar. But for some reason we are hardened to domestic gun deaths and remain eerily silent. Maybe it is in slow motion—we refuse to hear it or see it because we place too little value on the lives of young, black men.
This humanitarian crisis is not in some far-off nation, but here on our streets, in our neighborhoods, in our homes. America cannot be strong abroad if we are under attack at home. Morally, economically, and for the good of this nation’s strength and security, we must change this hideous situation. It is wrong for police officers to patrol streets in crime-ridden areas at a disadvantage in weapons. As president of the United States Conference of Mayors, I worked with my colleagues in proposing policies to increase mental health facilities, reduce prison terms for nonviolent offenders, and broaden programs to reach at-risk youth. We want to limit the guns and strengthen the rules about who can buy them and what they can buy. We must get Congress to address the cadaver in the living room, as Republican and Democratic mayors, police chiefs, and law enforcement officials have done.
From 1980 to 2012, a total of 626,000 people, a disproportionate number of them African American men, were murdered in America. That’s more citizens lost to murder in thirty-two years than all of our servicemen killed during World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, the Persian Gulf War, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan combined. I refuse to accept that America is so callous about human life. This must stop.
The response in Congress has been tepid because of the racial dynamics: most of the victims are young blacks, not part of the Republican base, not worth the risk of offending the powerful National Rifle Association. People are scared to speak up. Or perhaps, as a nation, we have bought into an evil notion—that the lives of these mostly young African American men killed every day have less value and thus don’t deserve our urgent attention.
Instead of grappling with this problem, we desperately look for quick fixes and want to “get tough”—more prisons, more guards, more guns. But history tells us that that will just make things worse. We can’t imprison our way out of this problem. America has more people incarcerated than more than a dozen other countries combined. And many nations with fewer people in prison have less crime and lower murder rates. Since the early 1980s, the number of incarcerated people in the United States has increased more than fourfold, going from less than a half million to about 2.2 million people today. That increase is more than double the rate of inflation over the same period. In Louisiana alone, since 1990, the population in prison has more than doubled, from about 19,000 to about 40,000 today. That leaves about 1 in 86 adults in our state incarcerated, with nearly half serving sentences for nonviolent, mostly drug-related offenses. America spends about $70 billion every year on corrections, roughly on par with the budget for the entire Department of Education. Indeed, on average, public schools spend about $12,000–$13,000 per pupil per year. To incarcerate one person for one year costs about $30,000, depending on the state. In two decades, Louisiana went from spending about $275 million on incarceration to $750 million today. Remember Joseph Norfleet? The state will spend several million dollars keeping him behind bars for life. And Louisiana’s violent crime rate is higher now than it was in 1977.
I have seen it up close, standing over the body of a young African American boy, gunned down like a dog, lying on the street, eyes open, tongue protruding, lifeless. You stare and think this should not be.
You look paralyzed at the police officer in the operating room of our trauma unit, a gunshot to the head. You think this should never be. I have seen more than I want to see. But once you’ve seen something, you can’t unsee it.
I attend as many of the funerals as I can. The city owes the families some presence, a sign that we grieve with them, knowing things aren’t right. It is hard beyond words to put yourself close to a family shattered by violent loss. It is a duty I will not miss when I’m not mayor. But in fulfilling this responsibility, I have come to see that whether mother or father, son or daughter, grief is not filtered by whether the deceased was a police officer, an innocent child, or a young man with a rap sheet, “in the life.” When you are standing at the casket and hear the sobs and feel the heartache around you, the distant cries of Black Lives Matter and Blue Lives Matter fade as you realize that we are all losers in this culture of violence. This is a problem that can be fixed. It requires a national, holistic policy in public health—not unlike our efforts to contain Ebola or our newfound recognition that the opioid epidemic needs a sweeping commitment to mental health and substance abuse treatment.
Treating the cause and not just the symptom is important. It was not done in the 1980s and ’90s when we locked up mostly African American crack cocaine users and threw away the key. We had a “war on drugs.” “They” were criminals and had to be dealt with by the justice system, political leaders argued. But yet today, with a mostly white face on the opioid crisis in the Rust Belt and the northeast, we’re talking in much more holistic, public health terms. There is empathy and compassion for those with addiction. Policymakers today talk about destigmatizing drug addiction. Police are being trained to administer Narcan, a drug that saves the lives of those overdosing. These are good changes, but I worry about the lingering effects of the old mentality. Black men and women are still in prison for drug possession charges decades ago, and so the cycle continues.
And so you might ask, with so much urban warfare in the poorest streets, how have we responded as a nation? Even little kids can tell you, “Out here it is kill or be killed”—that cold, that simple. Yet for too many Americans, this reality may as well be on another planet. Murder and violence are the poisonous fruit grown from the soil of injustice, racism, and inequality—fertilized by guns, drugs, alcohol, and disintegrated families. Hope fades, hate grows, people feel they have nothing to lose. To those who say it has always been this way, I answer: We made this problem by neglect; we can be proactive and fix it.
All of this happens in the shadows of statues whose message has always been, as Terence Blanchard said: African Americans are less than.
Every murder leaves a wake of destruction, the collateral damage of gunshots. An innocent child loses a father; a mother’s heart is broken; a family is sent reeling into an abyss. But the endings don’t have to be entirely bleak. Consider Leonard Galmon. Leonard’s father was killed on the streets of New Orleans when he was four; his seventeen-year-old mother was alone. As Leonard moved through school, he found a path in the Recovery School District that led him to Cohen College Prep, a charter school. With the help of his teachers, Leonard applied to colleges and universities. He was accepted to Yale University with a full scholarship. Leonard’s story made the front page of the press, and more articles and editorials followed. He was honored by the City Council and the State Legislature. Congratulations and donations flooded in from across the city; he showed the determination to find a way. He had good help, which is what many more young African American men on the bitter edge need in order to turn themselves around; they, too, can do great things with the right support and guidance.
Those of us who had easy paths to education should realize how steep the odds are for first-generation college students; only one in ten who start college actually graduate. With hats off to Leonard Galmon, I look forward to the day when it will not be front-page news when a young African American from New Orleans is accepted by Yale, because so many others followed in Leonard’s path.
Imagine with me two children representing the hundreds of kids living on opposite sides of oak-lined St. Charles Avenue, the famous street with the streetcar tracks. They live a few blocks away from each other, but a world apart in every other sense. In Central City, a boy named James, fourteen, goes to public school; he lives on Seventh Street with his mom and two younger brothers, a few blocks downriver from St. Charles. A one-bedroom apartment in a long, thin, rundown building. Every morning, James’s mom catches the 5:30 bus to a downtown hotel. She won’t get back from her second job as a security guard until nine that night. James gets home from school. Not much is going on in the afternoon. As the sun sets, James is restless, hangs with friends at his corner. His mom tries her best, but the drugs, easy money, and guns are everywhere, and most of the time no one’s at home to help him resist the lure of the street. One day, James’s mom finds a pistol under his bed. Imagine young James, in tears, telling her the same thing I have heard from kids just as young: “It’s for protection.” Again, I hear: “Mayor, out here it’s either kill or be killed.”
Meanwhile, four blocks on the upriver side of St. Charles, at a home in the Garden District, another fourteen-year-old, Mike, goes to private school. The family lives in a large four-bedroom house. Mom is a lawyer, Dad’s in finance. They’re good people, working long hours downtown, but the nanny is home for Mike when school lets out, unless he’s at practice for the tennis, football, or basketball teams, or stays for Chess Club or Quiz Bowl practice. Every night, the family eats dinner; Mom or Dad makes sure he does homework. Mike in the Garden District hopes to follow in Dad’s footsteps. James in Central City: his dad’s in Angola prison.
On Mardi Gras, the two boys head to St. Charles Avenue, drawn by the exotic splendor of the Zulu King, the beauty of the Rex parade, the backbeat of the St. Augustine Purple Knights Marching 100, the bounce of Al Johnson’s voice singing “Carnival Time” in a truck parade.
James watches from the lake side of St. Charles, Mike from the river side. For a brief moment, they occupy the same world, hearts beating to the same rhythm, catching beads and dancing in the same street. In between floats, as kids play in the street, perhaps they meet or reach for the same pair of beads, joined in the synthesis of time, geography, culture, race, and music, all shared, touching the same reality, things they both want, perfect symmetry for one moment in time.
But when the parade ends, they go back to their lives on different sides of St. Charles Avenue, to different worlds.
In James’s Central City, the average household income is less than $36,000. In Mike’s world, in the Garden District, the average household income exceeds $128,000. In Central City, 69 percent of households are run by a single parent, mostly a mother. In the Garden District, only 3 percent are single parent households. In Central City, people are twice as likely to rent rather than own, five times as likely not to have a vehicle. To make ends meet, the mom earning minimum wage must work day and night, typically two jobs; latchkey kids wait hours for Mom to come home.
Since 2010, Central City has seen more than three hundred shootings. Walk a few blocks away, it is a different world; there were only two shooting victims in the Garden District over the last seven years. Think again about fourteen-year-olds, James and Mike, each walking home that Mardi Gras night. For James, as on many nights in Central City, NOPD searched the area after a shooting. Witnesses say it was a young black man in a hoodie. Cops, already on edge, see James with his hood up and pull toward him fast and close. James jerks his hand out of his pocket. He is holding a black cell phone. Will the police know that? Sometimes this is how tragedies happen, and for young men like James, the margin of error between life and death is razor thin. If we replace James with Mike from the Garden District, the difference in that margin of error would likely allow Mike to live.
These same two neighborhoods produced Joseph Norfleet and Peyton Manning. They’re about the same age and may have played on the same football team at the nearby A. L. Davis playground some thirty years ago. Imagine them meeting in some football scrimmage and then going their separate ways. One on a pipeline to prison, the other to NFL prosperity.
Some people are cynical and say we cannot change. I believe we can. The great part of being American is that we believe in endless horizons, that for every problem there is a solution, that no breach or divide cannot be repaired. I have hope because of young people like Leonard Galmon. Out of despair, hope rises. Leonard went to Yale because hope was his compass.
In 2012 we launched a program called NOLA for Life with the stated agenda of reducing homicide and giving youngsters on the margins activity and structure as our budget allowed. We asked police officers, mothers of murder victims, criminologists, focus groups with young men “in the life,” How can we reduce this problem? Can we find a strategy worth applying on a greater level? Each group told us essentially the same things: solutions for prevention have to be visible on the streets. You have to change a lot in a given culture to reduce murders when killing is so widespread. More jobs, good schools, healthy neighborhoods, stronger families, a better police department—all play a pivotal role; we also learned that murders happen in small groups of young African American men who hang out together.
The same profile emerges time and again. Roughly one in three murders happens in the same four neighborhoods, and 80 percent of the victims are young black males. Many are high school dropouts and unemployed. Eighty percent had an arrest record; more than half of them are under twenty-nine, and close to 80 percent of the murderers knew their victims. After talking to young men who fit the profile, we learned that they want to get out of the life. We go to those young men doing violence and we literally sit them down and say, “We value you, we love you. Put down the gun and we can help you. If you don’t, we will take action to protect the city.”
Sometimes the opportunity to make a change helps us get someone on the right track. I think about one young man who dealt drugs, carried a gun, ran with a crew. When he got involved with NOLA for Life, he came with two of his partners. Before the end of the year, one of them would be arrested for murder and the other would be shot dead. But he chose a new way. With our help, he got a job, worked hard, and has been promoted. He got off the streets and into a local community college. He is building a life for himself and his young children.
The other piece to this murder-prevention strategy is a local, state, and federal Multi-Agency Gang Unit. It has targeted 14 violent groups, gotten 150 individuals indicted, and by using RICO racketeering statutes, put dozens of gang members behind bars. The message we send to those terrorizing our neighborhoods is: You have a choice. Stop the shooting, put down your gun, and we will help you get on the right path—or we are coming for you. We don’t have all the answers, but we’re focused on supporting young men who turn away from the violence. With Michael Nutter and several philanthropic foundations we started Cities United, which brings together mayors from across the country to address the violence among African American men.
CeaseFire New Orleans seeks to stop the cycle of violence by mediating conflicts; hundreds of youth from the toughest New Orleans neighborhoods come out for Midnight Basketball to play, learn from role models, and get connected to a chance for jobs and job training. We are working hard to help ex-offenders get their life back on track, with programs like Café Reconcile. This piece is really important to break the cycle. A third of the million prisoners released each year will go back to jail within three years.
Now, we can wait until they commit another crime, or we can anticipate their needs and meet them partway with job training, counseling, and employment offices. We’ve got to shut this revolving door. It is outrageous that one in fourteen black men is behind bars, and one in seven is either in prison, on parole, or on probation. To fight violent crime and murder we can’t ignore the social dysfunction that causes it.
New Orleans has become a laboratory for social change with promising results. We launched an aggressive post-incarceration reentry strategy—a program that reaches out within seventy-two hours of release from prison and connects the ex-inmates with a workforce reentry program of services and jobs. Murder is at a historic quarter-century low. That is not easy for people to believe when the nightly news reports so much killing. I am not blaming the news media for doing their job. We still have too many murders, but we keep searching for the truth about city streets and how to stop the worst of it. We have a long way to go, but how far we have come.
I want historians who look back on this time to write about the people who met their terrible crisis of human rights in America and did what was just and decent to make the fundamental changes to uphold life in the poorest streets. The lives of children depend on it. Jefferson’s words “All men are created equal” require a constant evaluation of ourselves.
Until every life matters, including black lives, we won’t be able to plant seeds of hope in beleaguered neighborhoods and fulfill America’s lofty promises. I believe that we are bound together as one people, indivisible, with one shared destiny. We cannot allow young black men to feel forsaken. We must go forward together or not at all. We must press on, share the agenda that the culture of homicides is evil and unacceptable, and resolve ourselves to changing it, however long it may take or incremental it may be. But to do so requires us to value every life. The monuments hover and tell a different story. The shadow these symbols cast is oppressive. It is in this broad context that people must now understand that the monuments and the reasons they were erected were intended not to affirm life but to deny life. And in that sense, the monuments in a way are murder.