Epilogue
Pope Paul VI in the 1960s declared: “If you want peace, work for justice.” Today we hear his words with an altering twist: “Where there is no justice there is no peace.” I heard a lot about justice and peace at marches and from activists, especially in the wake of Ferguson, Baltimore, and Baton Rouge. “No justice, no peace!” My entire life I thought that meant, “If you don’t give me what is rightfully mine, I’m gonna hurt you, I’m gonna take it by any means necessary.” I took it as an implied threat.
I didn’t really get that what it actually meant was, if everything is not fair, it creates alienation. And when people are alienated from one another, and they can’t share with one another what it is that they have, it is likely to lead to some level of violence. Poverty is a form of violence, I believe. So is not having access to health care, or not having a real job so that you, too, can create generational wealth for your family. There is an institutional violence, as Robert Kennedy told us many, many years ago, that comes with there not being any justice. So where there is no justice, there can be no peace. A columnist for the New Orleans Times-Picayune, Jarvis DeBerry, put it more simply:
The phrase “No justice, no peace” is probably as misunderstood and misconstrued as the phrase “Black lives matter.” The same people who hear “Black lives matter” as indifference to other people’s well-being are likely the same people who hear “No justice, no peace” as a promise to hurt somebody. If somebody said, “No rain, no flowers” or “No pain, no gain,” the meaning would be clear: the second thing won’t happen without the first. The speaker wouldn’t be accused of spitefully keeping flowers from growing out of anger at a drought.”
We all come to the table of democracy in the United States of America as equals. That’s the aspiration. That’s what makes America great. That is what everybody has a right to, that is what everybody is entitled to, but in order for you to get there, you have got to bring somebody along with you. This isn’t what we merely aspire to; it is a truth that cannot be denied: that we are all better together, because we all benefit from one another. We all have to go forward together, or we don’t go forward at all. Now, again, just like “no justice, no peace,” that’s not a threat. It’s not a playground game, where if you don’t give me what I want, you’re not gonna get what you want, cause I’m not gonna give it to you. It’s not a sacrifice, or a zero-sum game (if you win, I lose). It’s an invitation for us to do better, together. To understand that we all benefit when we are truly at the table as equals. So, if you are the mayor of the city and you want to take a culture of violence and turn it into a culture of peace, you have to produce justice, because if there is no justice, there is no peace. I only understand that today because of what we faced. It shouldn’t have to take that kind of ordeal for the rest of America to get it. But as this writing was coming to a close, another lawsuit was filed to invalidate the laws cited to enable our moving the statues. Even after the statues are down and even after what happened in Charlottesville, there are still folks fighting hard to revive the message of the Lost Cause.
As I think about how to move forward, I am reminded of the many teachers on race and equity that I have been blessed to meet and engage with in my role as mayor. Bryan Stevenson, Marian Wright Edelman, John Lewis, Barack Obama, Henry Louis Gates, Orlando Patterson, Cornel West, Charles Blow, Michael Eric Dyson, Ta-Nahesi Coates, Angela Glover Blackwell, Jesmyn Ward, Judy Reese Morse, and many others who have challenged me and fed my intellectual curiosity. I have benefited greatly from their work and, more important, their perspectives, even when I disagree (as I have sometimes). I will continue to be a lifelong learner on these topics, as this is one of the best ways to understand and grow as a human being.
I am often reminded of the lyrics of a song from one of my favorite shows, South Pacific, a brilliant musical in my view. I am still struck by the way Rodgers and Hammerstein handled the experiences of GIs on an island in the Second World War, a place where different cultures intersected and where we could see dramatized the yearning soldiers felt to finally go home. I was in high school when I saw the film version and played the record over and over. The song I’m thinking of is called “You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught.” The gist is that hate is a learned behavior, passed down from parents to children, generation after generation. Hate is not the natural order of things. The question then remains—what do we need to do to unlearn it?
I now realize that in those lyrics I was hearing a counterstory to my own life, as I remembered parents who carefully taught us to embrace people whose skin was a different shade, not to hate or fear “the other.” The Jesuits stressed that we should be “men for others,” a message that has been central to my life in politics.
During my work on this book, Will Landrieu, the youngest of our five, a basketball player at Jesuit, was filling out college applications, and showed me his entrance essay. With Will’s permission, I share part of it here.
Growing up as the son of the mayor of New Orleans, I have seen the struggles of leadership. In response to years of discussion, my father decided to remove the Confederate monuments found across our city. He delivered a speech on the topic that though nationally applauded, was locally controversial. There was discord in the city leading to tense protests that bordered on violence. Despite thirty years of earning the public’s approval, the vitriol thrust through my father’s professional life directly to the daily lives of our family. We didn’t feel safe anywhere or with anyone.
For the two days after the removal, I walked down the school hallway bracing myself as my classmates yelled out “nigger lover” and “your dad is ruining the city.” My closest friends even sent me articles with false rumors about my father. Until now, I have kept these words to myself.
Standing up for others is excruciatingly lonely. I know my dad must be more hurt and lonely than I am. As my black friends explain, at least my family is lonely by choice. They were simply born just a little bit darker than I was. Until the monuments were removed, my friends never imagined they would live a day where they wouldn’t walk the hallways, or sit in history class, in fear of the next hateful comment.
I know the decision is right because my friends would want someone to stand up for them. I have the ability to do that, so I intend to take full advantage of my privilege. I know that great decisions have great costs, but those costs are a fraction of what the people we are making them for have endured.
I will let paternal pride fall away and admit when I read Will’s lines, I thought back to the woman berating me as an eighth grader outside the gym of that same school, and thought back to the phone calls on South Prieur Street when my dad was mayor and my mother took the calls, shielding us from the hostility of hateful anonymous voices. My son is correct in saying that there is a loneliness that comes with standing up for others; and yet I ultimately am proud of how far we have moved the conversation. If behavior is learned and passed on, that means we can continue to make progress, one person, one family at a time.
Politics in the highest sense is grounded in hope. If we put our best instincts and willing minds to the common good, we can rebuild what has been destroyed by storms, derailed by hate, or eroded by neglect, and steer our society on a saner, safer course. We can pass on the promise of America to our young. We have made great strides in that direction in this city I have been privileged to govern.
“I am sorry.” “I forgive you.” Perhaps the six most powerful words in the English language. Staying mad is no strategy for getting better or ahead or for feeding our families. We seem to spend a lot of time assigning blame to others. It’s a never-ending search. I can’t ever figure out whose fault anything is. But I am pretty clear that I have a responsibility to help fix whatever is broken. And so do you. As Father Tompson would say, go do the thing that will do the most good for the most people, in the shortest amount of time.
One of my great thrills as mayor is to know that NASA has chosen the Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans East to build the rocket that will eventually take a human mission to Mars. It’s part of the Orion Mission. Those of us old enough to remember the excitement of watching Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon in 1969 know it was the culmination of our hopes for a soaring America, a show of our pioneering spirit, a determination to do really big things.
Rather than a look backward, space exploration is America’s bold commitment to explore the world’s new frontier. As impossible and daunting as it seems, we invest time, technology, know-how, grit, determination, money, aspiration, and dreams. We suffer setbacks and defeats. And yet we keep trying, never doubting our ability to find the outer reaches of the universe in a quest for knowledge that could improve the quality of our lives on earth.
When we testify in court, we swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. This is important because anything but the whole truth and nothing but the truth will lead us astray. Unfortunately, that is the story of the American history most of us know, particularly as it relates to race. To move forward, we must commit to tell the whole truth about our past. To move forward, we must find that new space on race here, a zone of belief that holds promise for a nation committed to justice for all of our people, making right what we have failed to do, and insisting that we will do what it takes to reach the next threshold for humankind. We find that new space, in politics and society, if we confirm our belief in democracy as a welcome table for people created equal under God, where the pursuit of equity is an open field for opportunity and responsibility. As the scientists continually course-correct a mission error in order to make the next flight safer, so we must learn to revise the mistakes in our perceptions of history, to acknowledge with honesty what went wrong so that we can learn how to make it right. We are all being called to a better day, a better South, a better America. I have great faith that we will respond well to that call. Now is the time to choose our path forward.