Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: In the Shadow of Statues
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S): Landrieu, Mitchell Joseph
BIRTHDATE: 8/16/1960
WEBSITE: https://www.mitchlandrieu.com/
CITY:
STATE: LA
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY: American
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born August 16, 1960, in New Orleans, LA; son of Maurice “Moon” Landrieu; married; wife’s name Cheryl Quirk; children: five.
EDUCATION:Catholic University, B.A.; Loyola University, New Orleans. J.D.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Attorney and politician. Member of the Louisiana House of Representatives, 89th district, 1988-92; Member of the Louisiana House of Representatives, 90th district, 1992-2004; Lieutenant Governor of Louisiana, 2004-10; President of the United States Conference of Mayors, 2017-18; Mayor of New Orleans, 2010-18.
POLITICS: Democrat.WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Politician Mitch Landrieu was the Democratic mayor of New Orleans and was formerly lieutenant governor of Louisiana from 2004 to 2010 and president of the U.S. Conference of Mayors. His memoir, In the Shadow of Statues: A White Southerner Confronts History, covers his political life and race relations in America. Landrieu is son of Maurice “Moon” Landrieu, mayor of New Orleans from 1970 to 1978 and a leading civil rights pioneer.
In 2018, Landrieu published his memoir, In the Shadow of Statues, about his service in political office as mayor of New Orleans and his controversial decision in May 2017 to remove four Confederate monuments, including the statue of Robert E. Lee. He discusses his now famous speech about why he removed the statues and the political and corporate backlash of his decision. He also discusses issues of race, the historical legacy of slavery in the South, institutional racial inequality that still plagues America, today’s racial domestic terrorism and rise of neo-Nazism, and misplaced nostalgia for a racially segregated country. Landrieu then talks about his upbringing and progressive education in a racially divided city, and his father, who played a vital role in integrating New Orleans in the 1960s and 1970s. A contributor to Kirkus Reviews called the book “A powerful, welcome manifesto in the cause of a new and better South—and a ‘better America.’”
In an interview with John Williams online at New York Times, Landrieu explained his impetus for writing the book: “When I gave that speech, it was directed to a local audience, so I was taken aback by the fact that it struck such an incredible chord across the country. …The ideas of race, class and understanding diversity as a strength and not a weakness—it seemed an appropriate time to get this down.” Writing on the History News Network website, Ron Briley commented: “Landrieu believes that just as it was essential for Germans to come to grips with the Holocaust following World War II, white Southerners must acknowledge the connection between Confederate monuments and the brutal institution of slavery that contributes to contemporary racism.”
“For a national audience, the book is an introduction to a man that most Louisianans have known for decades, but for readers back home, Landrieu emphasizes what he considers a critical lesson,” according to Lamar White, Jr. online at Bayou Brief. Landrieu said to White in relation to taking down the Confederate statues: “I had gotten into a place of figuring out how you do the right thing, no matter what. … It was the right thing to do historically; it should have been done a long time ago, and I wasn’t really calculating what (political) damage, if any, would be created.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, February 15, 2018, review of In the Shadow of Statues: A White Southerner Confronts History.
ONLINE
Bayou Brief, https://www.bayoubrief.com/(March 28, 2018), Lamar White, Jr., review of In the Shadow of Statues.
History News Network, https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/168406 (March 1, 2018), Ron Briley, review of In the Shadow of Statues.
New York Times Online, https://www.nytimes.com/ (March 25, 2018), John Williams, author interview.
National
< 'We Cannot Be Afraid Of The Truth': New Orleans Mayor On Confederate Statues
March 18, 20186:01 PM ET
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MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Late last April, in the early-morning darkness, a construction crew rolled up to the Battle of Liberty Place Monument in New Orleans. The workers dismantle it, loaded it onto a truck and carted it away. The scene would play out three more times over the next few weeks. Three more statues came down from their pedestals. New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu marked the occasion.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
MITCH LANDRIEU: There is a difference you see between remembrance of history and the reverence of it. For America, New Orleans, it has been a long and winding road marked by tragedy and triumph. But we cannot be afraid of the truth.
MARTIN: Sometimes quietly, sometimes with anger and even violence, cities around the country have been grappling with that truth, a truth embedded in the question of what to do with symbols that are still defended by some as reverence for courageous ancestors but are now understood by many others as political statements about white supremacy that no longer have a place in the public square. Mayor Landrieu's front-row seat in that debate is the subject of his new book, "In The Shadow Of Statues: A White Southerner Confronts History." And Mayor Mitch Landrieu joins us now from New York. Mr. Mayor, thank you so much for speaking with us.
LANDRIEU: Oh, thank you so much for having me.
MARTIN: You know, the country has been well-acquainted now with some of the drama around removing these statues after that neo-Nazi, white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Va., that, you know, very sadly resulted in death and many injuries. But New Orleans started before this, and your book - it's ostensibly about the statues, but the subtitle really says it all. Like, a white Southerner confronts history. I mean, the book is really about that grappling with history. And you call it the cult of the lost cause. I think the question for a lot of people - why is there such a fixation on this particular cause? Can you help people understand it?
LANDRIEU: Sure. Well, first of all, everybody comes to this issue from where they actually come from - where they live, who their family is, what the history is. The cult of the lost cause are not my words. Those are actually the words of the individuals that put the monuments up to basically send a signal to the rest of the country that the Confederacy may have lost the war, but the cause was an honorable and noble cause. And I, as a white Southerner, wanted to say this clearly that I recognize that the Civil War intended to destroy the United States of America, not to unite it. And it was specifically fought to preserve the institution of slavery. And for some reason, people are having a hard time - some people - just acknowledging that that is true, as though somehow that condemns their ancestors that fought in the war. I'm not here to condemn anybody. I am here to help heal a wounded nation.
MARTIN: It would help me if we could talk a little bit about you because you talk in the book a lot about your family. Your dad was the mayor. You know, your family's been in public life. Many people remember, you know, your sister was the United States senator from Louisiana. But you grew up in a really interesting way. I mean, you may - I don't know. I'm trying to think of...
LANDRIEU: Yeah, I could talk a little bit about it.
MARTIN: Yeah.
LANDRIEU: First of all, I'm one of nine children. I'm the fifth. I grew up in an integrated neighborhood. There's not a moment in my life that I can't remember race or the awareness of it not being there. In the book, I write about the fact that when I was in utero, my father was a young legislator, and he was one of two white Southerners that voted against the segregation package. And his life was threatened.
And then I jump forward to when I was 13 years old when my father, later on, was mayor of the city of New Orleans - after having taken down the Confederate flag, by the way, in the 1960s from the council chamber. And that a white woman came to the high school that I was at and confronted me and, you know, basically said that my father was an n-lover, and that the reason why I was the way it was was because I was really black and that my father ruined the city because he let black people in it. Well, when a woman - an older woman - is yelling at a 13-year-old, it's very confusing.
And so I tell those stories to just kind of make the point that this really isn't about public policy - although it is in some ways - that it's about the way we personally experience each other and how confused people can be about this very issue.
MARTIN: Before we let you go, I want to end up where we started, which is the monuments. How did it - how did you feel when you finally saw them go?
LANDRIEU: I felt very relieved. And I was very proud because when I talked to some of my dear friends - Terence Blanchard, for example - great jazz trumpeter, African-American, who told me, you know, when I started doing this that he had to walk by the P.G.T. Beauregard Monument every day when he was going to John F. Kennedy's School, and he felt less than everyday. He said to me he felt that the weight of the world had been lifted off his shoulders. And I was just really proud that New Orleans holds itself out as a wonderful place. We have rebuilt a broken city. There are a lot of lessons that we've learned through our agony, through the resurrection and redemption of a great city. But essentially, what the secret sauce is is that diversity is a strength, not a weakness. And if we can see each other, and hear each other, and touch each other and see the value in each other, we're all going to be better.
MARTIN: That's Mayor Mitch Landrieu, Mayor of New Orleans. His book, "In The Shadow Of Statues: A White Southerner Confronts History" is out this Tuesday. Mr. Mayor, thank you so much for speaking with us.
LANDRIEU: Thank you so much for having me.
Mitch Landrieu
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Mitch Landrieu
61st Mayor of New Orleans
In office
May 3, 2010 – May 7, 2018
Preceded by
Ray Nagin
Succeeded by
LaToya Cantrell
President of the United States Conference of Mayors
In office
2017–2018
Preceded by
Mick Cornett
Succeeded by
Stephen K. Benjamin
51st Lieutenant Governor of Louisiana
In office
January 11, 2004 – May 3, 2010
Governor
Kathleen Blanco
Bobby Jindal
Preceded by
Kathleen Blanco
Succeeded by
Scott Angelle
Member of the Louisiana House of Representatives
from the 90th district
In office
1992–2004
Preceded by
James St. Raymond
Succeeded by
Timothy Burns
Member of the Louisiana House of Representatives
from the 89th district
In office
1988–1992
Preceded by
Mary Landrieu
Succeeded by
Pete Schneider
Personal details
Born
Mitchell Joseph Landrieu
August 16, 1960 (age 57)
New Orleans, Louisiana, U.S.
Political party
Democratic
Spouse(s)
Cheryl Quirk
Relations
Mary Landrieu (sister)
Children
5
Parents
Moon Landrieu (father)
Education
Catholic University (BA)
Loyola University, New Orleans (JD)
Mitchell Joseph Landrieu[1] (/ˈlændruː/ LAN-drew;[2] born August 16, 1960) is an American politician and lawyer who was Mayor of New Orleans from 2010 to 2018. A Democrat, Landrieu served as Lieutenant Governor of Louisiana from 2004 to 2010 prior to becoming mayor.
He is the son of former New Orleans mayor and Secretary of the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development Moon Landrieu and the brother of former U.S. Senator Mary Landrieu. In 2007, he won a second term as lieutenant governor in the October 20, 2007 nonpartisan blanket primary by defeating two Republicans: State Representative Gary J. Beard and Sammy Kershaw.
He was elected Mayor of New Orleans on February 6, 2010, garnering 66 percent of the citywide vote and claiming victory in 365 of the city's 366 voting precincts. He was reelected mayor on February 1, 2014, with nearly 64 percent of the vote in a three-candidate field.[3]
Contents [hide]
1
Early life
2
Political career
2.1
Legislator
2.2
1994 New Orleans mayoral election
2.3
Lieutenant governor
2.4
2006 New Orleans mayoral election
2.5
2010 New Orleans mayoral election
2.6
Mayor of New Orleans
3
Spike Lee documentary
4
Humanitarian causes
5
Election history
6
References
7
External links
Early life[edit]
Landrieu was born and raised in the Broadmoor neighborhood of New Orleans, the fifth of nine children of Maurice "Moon" and Verna Satterlee Landrieu. After graduating from Jesuit High School in 1978, he enrolled at The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. where he majored in political science and theatre. In 1985, he earned a Juris Doctor (J.D.) degree from Loyola University Law School in New Orleans.
Landrieu is married to Cheryl P. Landrieu, also an attorney. The couple has five children.
Landrieu has been a practicing attorney for fifteen years and was president of International Mediation & Arbitration, Ltd. He is a member of the Supreme Court Task Force on Alternative Dispute Resolution which was responsible for developing the pilot mediation program in Orleans Parish. Landrieu is trained in mediation and negotiation by the Harvard Law School Negotiation Project, the American Arbitration Association, and the Attorney Mediator's Institute. Landrieu has also taught alternative dispute resolution as an adjunct professor at Loyola University Law School.
Political career[edit]
Legislator[edit]
Landrieu was elected to the Louisiana House of Representatives in 1987, where he served for sixteen years in the seat previously held by his sister and before her, his father.
Landrieu led the legislative effort to reform Louisiana's juvenile justice system with a focus on rehabilitation and reform as opposed to punishment and incarceration. As lieutenant governor, he continued to chair the Juvenile Justice Commission, the entity created by the legislation to implement the reforms. In January 2004, Governor Kathleen Blanco endorsed the Commission's recommendations.
Landrieu also led the effort by a coalition of artists, venue owners, and other interested parties who were successful in repealing the Orleans Parish "amusement tax", a 2% tax on gross sales at any establishment that features live music. As an attorney, Landrieu brought a case to court that resulted in the tax being ruled unconstitutional. He continued the fight by bringing the issue to the New Orleans City Council, who voted to repeal the tax. As a legislator, Landrieu sponsored a bill to repeal the law that allowed the tax to exist.
Landrieu crafted legislation to fund the Louisiana Cancer Research Consortium of New Orleans, a partnership between the Louisiana State University and Tulane University Health Sciences Centers. The cancer center will house state-of-the-art cancer research equipment and laboratories, significant because Louisiana has the nation's highest cancer mortality rate according to the American Cancer Society.
One of Landrieu's most ambitious projects as Lieutenant Governor of Louisiana has been the creation of the World Cultural Economic Forum (WCEF). The Forum, held annually in New Orleans, is directed towards promoting cultural economic development opportunities through the strategic convening of cultural ambassadors and leaders from around the world. The first WCEF took place in October 2008. He has carried on this project as mayor and has even established a formal cultural economy office at City Hall.
1994 New Orleans mayoral election[edit]
In 1994 Landrieu made an unsuccessful bid for the office of Mayor of New Orleans; the office went to Marc Morial, the son of another former mayor (the contest between sons of former mayors prompted some commentators to joke about establishing a tradition of primogeniture for the city's top office).
Lieutenant governor[edit]
Mitch Landrieu's 2003 campaign for Lieutenant Governor was his first bid for statewide office in Louisiana. In a field of six candidates, Landrieu garnered 53 percent of the vote and won outright in the Louisiana open primary, thus avoiding a general election. His principal opponents were three Republicans, former U.S. Representative Clyde C. Holloway of Rapides Parish, former Lieutenant Governor Melinda Schwegmann of New Orleans, and businessman Kirt Bennett of Baton Rouge.
2006 New Orleans mayoral election[edit]
Main article: New Orleans mayoral election, 2006
Landrieu in 2007
In February 2006, Landrieu officially announced he would run for mayor of New Orleans in the April 22 election. Before Hurricane Katrina the incumbent Ray Nagin was widely expected to be reelected with little difficulty, but post-disaster problems and controversies had left many New Orleanians interested in new leadership.
In the election of April 22, preliminary results showed Landrieu with the second most votes, with 29% of the vote to Nagin's 38%. Nagin and Landrieu faced each other in a run off election on May 20. Had Landrieu won, he would have been the first white mayor of New Orleans since his father left office in 1978.
With unofficial results showing 53% of the vote for Nagin, Landrieu conceded defeat shortly before 10:30 pm on election night.
2010 New Orleans mayoral election[edit]
Although Landrieu had at first indicated he did not plan to run for mayor, in December 2009 he announced he would be running in the 2010 New Orleans mayoral election,[4][5] in a bid to succeed Ray Nagin, who was term-limited.
Landrieu won with some 67% of the vote, with wide support across racial and demographic lines. His outright victory over 10 challengers in the first round of voting eliminated the need for a runoff election.[6][7] Landrieu is the first white person to hold the post since his father left office in 1978.
Mayor of New Orleans[edit]
Shortly after taking office as Mayor of New Orleans, Landrieu announced the appointment of Ronal W. Serpas as the new Superintendent of the New Orleans Police Department until the latter's resignation in August 2014.[8]
Workers secure the Robert E. Lee statue for removal from Lee Circle, May 19, 2017
In 2015, Landrieu called for the removal from prominent public display of 4 monuments, 3 honoring Confederate leaders and one honoring a short-lived, violent coup of the state government by the Crescent City White League. The New Orleans City Council approved their removal the same year. After various legal challenges to removal were struck down, on April 24, 2017, the first, the long-contentious Battle of Liberty Place Monument was removed.[9] He was criticized by opponents of its removal for his lack of transparency.[9] The statues of Confederate Generals Robert E. Lee and P. G. T. Beauregard as well as Confederate President Jefferson Davis[10] were removed in May 2017.[11]
Spike Lee documentary[edit]
Landrieu was one of the participants in filmmaker Spike Lee's documentaries When The Levees Broke: A Requiem In Four Acts and If God Is Willing and Da Creek Don't Rise.
Humanitarian causes[edit]
In 2009 Mitch Landrieu became a supporter of The Jazz Foundation of America. He flew to NYC to present Agnes Varis with the coveted "Saint of the Century" Award at the Jazz Foundation of America's annual benefit concert "A Great Night in Harlem" at the Apollo Theater[12] in support of Varis' and the Jazz Foundation's work to help save jazz musicians, especially those affected by Hurricane Katrina.
Election history[edit]
State Representative, 90th Representative District, 1987
Threshold > 50%
First Ballot, October 24, 1987
Candidate
Affiliation
Support
Outcome
Mitch Landrieu
Democratic
4,525 (50%)
Elected
Lyn "Mrs. Woody" Koppel
Democratic
2,973 (33%)
Defeated
Others
n.a.
1,484 (17%)
Defeated
State Representative, 89th Representative District, 1991
Threshold > 50%
First Ballot, October 19, 1991
Candidate
Affiliation
Support
Outcome
Mitch Landrieu
Democratic
8,522 (63%)
Elected
Marilyn Thayer
Republican
4,939 (37%)
Defeated
Mayor of New Orleans, 1994
Threshold > 50%
First Ballot, February 5, 1994
Candidate
Affiliation
Support
Outcome
Donald Mintz
Democratic
56,305 (37%)
Runoff
Marc Morial
Democratic
49,604 (32%)
Runoff
Mitch Landrieu
Democratic
14,689 (10%)
Defeated
Others
n.a.
32,104 (21%)
Defeated
State Representative, 89th Representative District, 1995
Threshold > 50%
First Ballot, October 21, 1995
Candidate
Affiliation
Support
Outcome
Mitch Landrieu
Democratic
6,692 (57%)
Elected
Jeff Crouere Jr.
Republican
3,049 (26%)
Defeated
Others
n.a.
2,057 (17%)
Defeated
State Representative, 89th Representative District, 1999
Threshold > 50%
First Ballot, October 23, 1999
Candidate
Affiliation
Support
Outcome
Mitch Landrieu
Democratic
6,575 (70%)
Elected
Randy Evans
Republican
2,765 (30%)
Defeated
Lieutenant Governor of Louisiana, 2003
Threshold > 50%
First Ballot, October 4, 2003
Candidate
Affiliation
Support
Outcome
Mitch Landrieu
Democratic
674,803 (53%)
Elected
Clyde Holloway
Republican
249,668 (19%)
Defeated
Melinda Schwegmann
Republican
215,402 (17%)
Defeated
Others
n.a.
141,006 (11%)
Defeated
Mayor of New Orleans, 2006
Threshold > 50%
First Ballot, April 22, 2006
Candidate
Affiliation
Support
Outcome
Ray Nagin
Democratic
41,561 (38%)
Runoff
Mitch Landrieu
Democratic
31,551 (29%)
Runoff
Ron Forman
Democratic
18,764 (17%)
Defeated
Robert "Rob" Couhig
Republican
10,312 (10%)
Defeated
Others
n.a.
6,160 (6%)
Defeated
Second Ballot, May 20, 2006
Candidate
Affiliation
Support
Outcome
Ray Nagin
Democratic
59,460 (52%)
Elected
Mitch Landrieu
Democratic
54,131 (48%)
Defeated
Lieutenant Governor of Louisiana, 2007
Threshold > 50%
First Ballot, October 20, 2007
Candidate
Affiliation
Support
Outcome
Mitch Landrieu
Democratic
702,320 (57%)
Elected
Sammy Kershaw
Republican
376,336 (30%)
Defeated
Gary Beard
Republican
130,978 (11%)
Defeated
Others
n.a.
31,544 (2%)
Defeated
Mayor of New Orleans, 2010
Threshold > 50%
First Ballot, February 6, 2010
Candidate
Affiliation
Support
Outcome
Mitch Landrieu
Democratic
58,276 (66%)
Elected
Troy Henry
Democratic
12,275 (14%)
Defeated
John Georges
Democratic
8,189 (9%)
Defeated
Robert "Rob" Couhig
Republican
4,874 (5%)
Defeated
Others
n.a.
Defeated
Mayor of New Orleans, 2014
Threshold >50%
First Ballot, February 1, 2014
Candidate
Affiliation
Support
Outcome
Mitch Landrieu
Democratic
53,441 (64%)
Elected
Michael Bagneris
Democratic
27,991 (33%)
Defeated
Danatus N. King, Sr.
Democratic
2,638 (3%)
Defeated
Democrats, Please Don't Nominate My Mayor for President
Mitch Landrieu is getting some 2020 buzz, but New Orleanians can tell you about his spotty record.
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Michael Patrick Welch
Apr 4 2018, 10:37pm
Mitch Landrieu in 2017. Photo by Sean Gardner/Getty
Until last year’s removal of New Orleans’s Confederate statues made national news, Mayor Mitch Landrieu was largely unknown outside of his city. Today, he’s the latest Democratic flavor of the month. Landrieu followed up the release of his new book, Standing in the Shadow of Statues: A White Southerner Faces Down History, with a few victory laps of the lecture and talk show circuits, from The Week to 60 Minutes to the Daily Show, where mentions of his possible 2020 presidential run were met with applause. He’s also set to receive the John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award in May.
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As a New Orleans resident, I know the statues couldn’t have been removed without Landrieu—even though the energetic and righteous protest group Take Em Down NOLA is widely considered to have spearheaded the recent movement. Others trace the fight farther back: “That anyone would think Landrieu told us to care about this is insulting… Black leaders have been talking to me about this issue since I joined city government in 1977,” said City Councilperson James Gray during a contentious debate on the day of the vote to remove the offending statues. “I am the descendant of slaves—not free people of color, slaves—so I don’t need Mitch Landrieu to remind me to care about this.”
Landrieu surely won’t end up in prison like his predecessor Ray Nagin, and he has done a few good things while in office, like help get marijuana arrests down to almost zero (arguably a much bigger blow for racial justice than taking down the statues). And his speeches around the monuments’ removal were admittedly some of the best I’ve ever heard from a politician.
But Landrieu is not the president America needs. Dig past the statue issue, and you’ll find that Landrieu is known around town as the New Orleans mayor who aided and abetted a massive wave of gentrification. While he would clearly like to be remembered for removing New Orleans’s racist symbols, many locals will remember him for the following catastrophes:
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Airbnb
In 2005, Hurricane Katrina flooded 80 percent of New Orleans and displaced 600,000 households. In the following years, as locals struggled to return to their city, Airbnb was invented at just the wrong time.
New Orleans’s status as a tourist destination has made Airbnb popular with tourists visiting the city. As a result, for almost a decade, New Orleans’s famous shotgun houses have been getting bought up and turned into amateur hotels, often by out-of-state, absentee (white) landlords, damaging the fabric of neighborhoods and forcing residents to deal with tourists literally in their backyards.
Landrieu and his administration have seemed mostly oblivious to how bad Airbnb has been for New Orleans’s tender post-K housing market, not to mention its (black) culture. Following years of inaction on the issue, the City Council voted in 2017 to legalize Airbnb’s fauxtel scam and create a permitting process, but that hasn’t solved the problem. Locals have been evicted from their homes in droves by greedy landlords who can make more money off nightly rentals than yearly leases. As the value of homes used as hotels spikes, that raises the assessed value—and thus property taxes—for locals around them. And because the Landrieu administration hasn’t improved the city’s bleak poverty rate, many New Orleanians can no longer afford homes in their own neighborhoods.
“Treme was too expensive, when I was putting my heart and my soul and my energy into trying to get my family back home,” said singer John Boutte, most famous for penning the theme song for HBO’s Katrina drama Treme. The Treme was America’s first black neighborhood where free people of color could purchase land. After Airbnb hit the Treme, Boutte chose to relocate 30 minutes away, onto New Orleans’s Northshore (which isn’t in New Orleans at all). “I lived in Treme all my life, and I know the real value of those homes,” Boutte told me. “There’s a big bubble right now, man.”
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In 2015, The New Orleans Advocate reported a shift in New Orleans’s black population from the city to the suburbs—a change that cannot be blamed on Katrina alone, but on the combination of Katrina and Airbnb. Only now are Landrieu, Mayor-elect LaToya Cantrell, and other officials considering taking further action against laws governing Airbnb properties—which seems a lot like discussing the fire while standing in its smoldering ashes.
Cameras, Cameras Everywhere
There’s existed no question that Landrieu couldn’t answer with more cameras of one sort or another. Mayor Nagin installed New Orleans’s first 30 traffic cameras, and they quickly started producing revenue for the city in the form of traffic tickets. Landrieu has doubled and tripled that number, and today the city makes over $15 million a year off its poverty-burdened citizenry via those traffic camera tickets.
Landrieu’s love of surveillance extends beyond the traffic cameras: On his way out of City Hall, he unveiled an unprecedented $40 million citizen surveillance program that would have required cameras outside all 1,500 of the city’s bars, nightclubs, restaurants, and stores selling alcohol—and all of the cameras would have fed into the city’s newly-upgraded 24-hour monitoring center.
Under immense public pressure, the City Council eventually abandoned that part of Landrieu’s “safety plan,” but proceeded to post around 100 red-and-blue blinking cameras around the city, many right outside of surprised homeowners’ windows. Chuck’s Sports Bar, the Hangover Bar, and other watering holes received the obnoxious blinking cameras as punishment for perceived bad behavior. A whopping 150 more such cameras are planned for this year.
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In this and other ways, Landrieu has been to New Orleans sort of what Giuliani was to New York. Except without the drop in crime.
Avoidable Flooding
Of course, New Orleans often floods during major storms, but the situation has worsened dramatically in the last few years. As mayor, Landrieu also served as president of New Orleans’s Sewerage and Water Board, which manages the intricate and essential pumping system that keeps our city from drowning. During that time, the pumps fell into fatal disrepair. Some had been dead for years, and eventually caused two separate mini-Katrinas after harsh rains last summer. Cars and homes and the Krewe of Zulu’s clubhouse were flooded by thigh-high rain. Having neglected the pumps’ upkeep for too long, the S&WB is only now pursuing an $80 million emergency plan to revive them in time for next hurricane season, which starts any minute now.
Hassling Music Clubs and Banning Go-Cups
In 2013, the Landrieu administration targeted and temporarily closed several popular music clubs whose paperwork had lapsed. His administration’s focus on reining in music helped to kill off nightclubs like jazz staple the Funky Butt and Donna’s brass band club and decreased the presence of traditional brass bands in the French Quarter and on Frenchmen Street.
Even worse, during that period the administration began enforcing a long-dormant law against posting concert flyers. Where once every pole in New Orleans served as an informative, colorful collage of art and musical information, now only politicians can legally post flyers. Especially for musicians, this single, small act changed the face of the world’s music capital.
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All of this apparently gave Deputy City Attorney Dan Macnamara a taste for blood, and he continued pursuing other supposed “nuisance bars” like the old man hangout Mercedes Place in the Lower Nine, punishing them all with what seem to be New Orleans’s first ever bans on go-cups, an essential part of the city's drinking culture.
New Orleans musicians and other culture-bearers have felt so threatened in the last few years that they formed the Music and Culture Coalition of New Orleans (MACCNO) in 2013 specifically to defend against the Landrieu administration’s interference.
Raiding Strip Clubs
Last month, the Landrieu administration targeted Bourbon Street strip clubs, labeling them dens of illegal sex trafficking, despite a lack of real evidence. In the same city that venerates its long-dead red-light district, Storyville, police raided Bourbon Street’s totally legal topless clubs just before Mardi Gras 2017, suspending alcohol licenses and putting bartenders and dancers out of work during the busiest time of the year.
After marching in the streets against the City Council’s proposed cap on the number of Bourbon Street strip clubs, the dancers finally won their battle in City Hall and all the alcohol licenses were reinstated—though not before deep financial harm was caused to many.
So no, Mitch Landrieu is not our country’s—or Democrats'—savior. He is just more proof that American politics has been pulled so far to the right that a “run-of-the-mill centrist” (to quote the New Republic) seems not just excitingly liberal, but looks something akin to a real leader.
The Southern Democrat who could shake up the 2020 field
‘I think he’s a remarkable talent … on the Bill Clinton, Barack Obama scale,’ says one admirer of New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu.
By EDWARD-ISAAC DOVERE 03/21/2018 05:01 AM EDT Updated 03/21/2018 12:42 PM EDT
Mitch Landrieu is spending his final year as mayor serving as president of the U.S. Conference of Mayors, traveling the country as he leads a bipartisan rejection of the Trump administration‘s policies on infrastructure, immigration, health care and more. | Sean Gardner/Getty Images
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Mitch Landrieu isn’t, for the moment, getting ready to run for president. But that’s not stopping the Democrat who led the rebuilding of New Orleans from speaking out against institutional racism and what he calls the “nightmare loop” that links Donald Trump to David Duke.
With a media tour for his new book, “In the Shadow of Statues” (out Tuesday), and after headlining this month’s media-fest Gridiron Dinner in Washington, Landrieu knows he’s kept people talking. Monday night on “The Daily Show,” he smiled through a long burst of applause when Trevor Noah pitched him on 2020. Ridiculous as he and everyone around him knows it is to think about a New Orleans mayor making a serious bid for the White House, they also see the unique profile he’d have in a huge Democratic field concentrated on the coasts — the white Southern liberal who loves wrestling and musical theater, and looks like he could blend right in at a Trump rally.
Barack Obama has taken note of Landrieu’s record as mayor and a speech he gave last year on removing Confederate monuments. The former president has said privately that he could see the appeal of a bald white guy from Louisiana talking up progressive politics in a smooth Southern accent. Though Obama is far from signing up, some notable players in his orbit are daydreaming of finding the next unlikely superstar and making it happen.
Landrieu sees the situation. He says he just doesn’t necessarily see himself as the solution.
“The country’s in a dark hour. My commitment has always been to do what I can to help,” Landrieu said. “You never say never. At the moment, I can’t see a pathway.“
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And he knows he’s laying out what sounds like a platform. The subtitle of his book, a frank account of racism in America, is “A White Southerner Confronts History.” It includes tough words about the failures of politics to stop discrimination. In one passage, Landrieu points out that on the campaign trail, Ronald Reagan condemned the murders of civil rights workers, but that he then approved a budget that served pickled relish as a vegetable in poorer public schools.
He also knows, according to a person close to him, that running statewide in red Louisiana would likely be impossible after some of the decisions he’s made and constituencies he’s catered to as a strongly Democratic mayor. Also that his father, former New Orleans Mayor Moon Landrieu, sometimes regrets not having run for president himself.
Landrieu hasn’t raised money or hired any consultants or conspicuously campaign-minded aides. But he does have his prominent cheerleaders with local roots, like Louisiana native and former interim Democratic National Committee chair Donna Brazile, who said he’d be “a fantastic candidate.”
“We all know had Hillary Clinton won, Mitch Landrieu would have been a candidate for several Cabinet appointments,” Brazile said, stressing that she wasn’t making an endorsement. “But given the circumstances, I think it’s important to keep his eyes open and see which way the wind will blow in 2020.”
“It’s one thing to run for president, and it’s another thing for people to take you seriously. He clearly falls into the second category,” said James Carville, the Clinton political guru. “I think he’s a remarkable talent ... on the Bill Clinton, Barack Obama scale. The more people see him, the more people will like him.”
They’re not the only ones.
“I think he could have a really strong appeal as somebody who would run entirely outside of the Washington, D.C., ecosystem, and I think there’s a real hunger for that among Democrats. He fits that bill, and others do as well,” said Mitch Stewart, Obama’s Iowa field director in 2008 and battleground states director in 2012. “In a field of 15 to 20 candidates, in the first couple of states, you don’t need to get 50 percent. Can your posture, can your values as a candidate — would 15 to 20 percent be enough to prove viability? The calculus is different than in 2008 and 2016.”
Stewart added, “He would be one of the few candidates who I think could appeal to the African-American community and the white working class.”
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In 2010, after moving his family back to New Orleans and feeling distraught at the state of the city, Carville talked Landrieu into a late entry into the mayor’s race with a poll that showed he’d win easily, despite his three previous losses for the job.
Carville said he’ll try to be that convincing again.
“I’ll do my best, because I’d like to see him run,” he said.
Landrieu’s book tour is taking him all around the country, ahead of an enormous tricentennial bash in New Orleans just before his term ends in May.
“I think people in the country are thirsting for an answer for how we get out of where we are and get us to where we need to be,” Landrieu said. “This has less to do with me, than can we please find somebody to really run the country … to get us out of this seemingly manufactured chaos that we’re in and get us to some security.”
He contrasted Trump’s record with his own experience leading a city devastated by Hurricane Katrina and wracked by years of mismanagement that’s now on the rise. New Orleans, Landrieu said, is “a city that is ascendant that used to be descendant.”
Landrieu is spending his final year as mayor serving as president of the U.S. Conference of Mayors, traveling the country as he leads a bipartisan rejection of the Trump administration‘s policies on infrastructure, immigration, health care and more. He said Washington needs to pay closer attention to the performance of mayors from both parties.
“The question we have to ask ourselves is why Washington is so stuck when you have all of this innovation going on,” Landrieu said.
But Landrieu’s big mission, and one that he said he doesn’t need to run for president to pursue, is making people confront racism — their own and the country’s. That starts with Trump but goes much deeper, he said. Everything that America is going through now, he said, Louisiana has seen already.
“We can recognize it more clearly, and we hear dog whistles more acutely. I was trying to wake the country up to the fact this is not new,” Landrieu said.
In the book, Landrieu traces Duke’s rise through state politics in the 1980s and 1990s — the two served alongside one another in the statehouse in Baton Rouge. Landrieu writes that Duke advanced by tapping into economic anxiety and got a pass on his racism from other Republicans who “saw him as a slick operator of calculated expediency, but very few wanted to speak out against him.”
The former Klansman, Landrieu writes, was regularly undercutting facts in an early version of “fake news!” A passage from a newsletter from Duke’s National Association for the Advancement of White People, Landrieu writes, “sounded a whole lot like ‘Make America Great Again.’”
“It seems so benign, but the word again gave the line its punch. Again fills African-Americans with dread. Exactly when were we great before? What are we going back to? And by the way, your great wasn’t so great for me,” Landrieu writes.
Landrieu said he’s going to take some time when his term ends to recover. He’s been in office for 30 years straight, working his way up. He has five children, and he said he wants to earn a living.
The last section of his book makes a more direct case against Trump, weaving in his own personal history and quoting Robert F. Kennedy.
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"Poverty is a form of violence, I believe. So is not having access to health care, or not having a real job,” Landrieu writes. “We all come to the table of democracy in the United States as equals. That's what makes America great.”
If Landrieu decides to run, he’ll have the rare luxury of not having a job — either to distract him from the campaign or to trigger complaints that he’s ignoring his work for the sake of his political ambitions. His admirers say Landrieu‘s background also gives him the advantage of being able to speak credibly to Trump voters.
“If he showed up somewhere, people would show up to hear what he has to say,” Carville said. “That’s a huge thing. Not everybody crosses that threshold from Day One.”
Correction: An earlier version of this story and headline incorrectly described Landrieu as Cajun.
Mitch Landrieu is the mayor of New Orleans. He was elected in 2010 and is now completing his second four-year term. A Democrat, Landrieu served as lieutenant governor of Louisiana from 2004 to 2010. He is also president of the U.S. Conference of Mayors. His father, Moon Landrieu, was mayor of New Orleans from 1970 to 1978 and a leading civil rights pioneer.
By John Williams
March 25, 2018
Image
Credit
Sonny Figueroa/The New York Times
New Orleans is a great American city, but it’s not often that its mayor becomes well-known on a national scale. That happened in May 2017, when Mayor Mitch Landrieu delivered a speech about the removal of the last four Confederate monuments in the city. “These monuments celebrate a fictional, sanitized Confederacy,” Mr. Landrieu said, “ignoring the death, ignoring the enslavement, ignoring the terror that it actually stood for.” The speech was widely shared while arguments about how best to remember and commemorate history continued across the country. In his new book, “In the Shadow of Statues,” Mr. Landrieu surveys Southern history and its lingering divides in deeper detail, and also shares details about his childhood, when he was harassed and threatened because of the progressive racial politics of his father, Moon Landrieu, who was then mayor of New Orleans. Below, Mr. Landrieu discusses the differences between writing a book and writing a speech, how musical theater helped shape his view of the world and more.
When did you first get the idea to write this book?
When I gave that speech, it was directed to a local audience, so I was taken aback by the fact that it struck such an incredible chord across the country. We started to field a lot of requests to write a book. I always wanted to write a book, but I wasn’t sure exactly what I would write about. The ideas of race, class and understanding diversity as a strength and not a weakness — it seemed an appropriate time to get this down. The message met the moment.
What’s the most surprising thing you learned while writing it?
The toughness with the form. It’s a lot more constricting than giving a speech. You don’t always speak the way you write or write the way you speak. And you don’t use as much historical detail in speeches because speeches, by design, are supposed to be short. The more you talk, the less people listen.
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Mitch Landrieu
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Cheryl Gerber
I read Michelle Alexander’s book, “The New Jim Crow.” That was really instructive, how it jumped off the page. Although I don’t agree with everything he says, Ta-Nehisi Coates’s book was interesting.
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There was a pretty intense reaction to the issue of taking the monuments down. My mother would say, “I’m not sure that’s a smart thing to do.” And I’d walk through with her what the history is. And she said, “We didn’t know any of that stuff. We didn’t know whether Robert E. Lee ever stepped foot in New Orleans.” A gentleman named James Loewen wrote a book called “Lies Across America” that does an exhaustive job of going back and talking about miseducation.
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In what way is the book you wrote different from the book you set out to write?
I always conceptualized writing a book after finishing 30 years of government service, which I’m getting ready to do in May. I assumed the book would be about how my team and the people of New Orleans rebuilt a great American city, what we actually did to turn the city around. Part of taking the monuments down, as much as it was about how the past informs the future, was also an aesthetic choice about how you rebuild a city and where you put physical structures. Steve Jobs always talked about the symbiotic relationship between function and design. Every mayor is in some ways an architect.
But then when I gave the speech, it reignited an issue that I had dealt with my entire life and was the culmination of not only my work but my father’s work and a lot of people in the civil rights movement and probably the biggest issue in the country, which is race. I also thought about writing a memoir, so I decided to write about my life and how race has informed every step of it.
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Who is a creative person (not a writer) who has influenced you and your work?
I really wanted to be a professional actor when I was young. I got a degree in theater, and as a consequence I’ve always had a keen ear for poets and playwrights. I always thought that’s where the truth was, not just about human nature but also about history. And I was always drawn to the history of musical theater, Rodgers & Hammerstein and Leonard Bernstein. “West Side Story” was one of my favorite shows. And in “South Pacific,” there’s a song called “You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught,” which is about where racism comes from. I can quote the lyrics: “You’ve got to be taught before it’s too late / Before you are six or seven or eight / To hate all the people your relatives hate / You’ve got to be carefully taught.” When I was doing these shows as a kid, the lyrics informed the way I was thinking about life.
The ultimate writer of the American songbook is Stephen Sondheim. He’s been one of the more incredible inspirations in my creative thinking about how you form thoughts and communicate to people.
Persuade someone to read “In the Shadow of Statues” in 50 words or less.
It’s essential if we really want to move forward that we do so together. We cannot do that unless we deal forthrightly with the issue of race. And unless and until we do that, we’re never going to reach that aspirational moment where out of many we are one.
This interview has been condensed and edited.
Follow John Williams on Twitter: @johnwilliamsnyt.
In the Shadow of Statues
A White Southerner Confronts History
By Mitch Landrieu
227 pages. Viking. $25.
A version of this article appears in print on March 26, 2018, on Page C5 of the New York edition with the headline: Rethinking The Old South. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
Landrieu, Mitch: IN THE SHADOW OF STATUES
Kirkus Reviews. (Feb. 15, 2018):
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Landrieu, Mitch IN THE SHADOW OF STATUES Viking (Adult Nonfiction) $25.00 3, 20 ISBN: 978-0-525-55944-3
"Has the white South truly reckoned with the Civil War?" The mayor of New Orleans, scion of an old progressive family, writes of the controversy surrounding his city's removal of monuments to the Confederacy.
Landrieu acquired national renown during the fraught post-Charlottesville spring of 2017 when he delivered a reasoned if quietly defiant speech about the reasons that New Orleans decided to remove four Confederate monuments, a decision that "wasn't sitting well with some of the powerful business interests in the state." In fact, some of the contractors who bid to do the removal work came under the threat of death, even as inflamed neo-Confederates and their allies protested what Landrieu defended as the prerogative of a democratically elected city government. That opposition, the author unhesitatingly declares, represents institutionalized racism: "You may have the law on your side, but if someone else controls the money, the machines or the hardware you need to make your new law work, you are screwed." African-Americans, he adds, know all about this perversion of justice, but it's an eye-opener for others who have not experienced that update of the peculiar institution. The statues--of Robert E. Lee, Pierre Beauregard, Jefferson Davis, and the "Reconstruction-era organization of racial militants" called the White League--may disappear, but the attitudes of those defending them will take longer to erase, particularly given the intransigent leadership of people like David Duke. Landrieu charts his family's long history of racial fairness; his father, as he recalls, "voted against twenty-nine Jim Crow laws at the [Louisiana] legislature in 1960," falling afoul of the segregationist leadership. The author concludes by noting that while the tide seems to be turning, the conflict endures, with "domestic terrorism" afoot as "part of the ho-hum racism that eats through our country every day."
A powerful, welcome manifesto in the cause of a new and better South--and a "better America."
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Landrieu, Mitch: IN THE SHADOW OF STATUES." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Feb. 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A527248256/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=c1cf068f. Accessed 6 June 2018.
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Review | Mitch Landrieu isn’t shadowboxing.
In the Shadow of Statues: A White Southerner Confronts History.
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By Lamar White, Jr. - March 28, 2018
There’s an obvious parallel to New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu’s first book, a provocative memoir about family, community, and race in America titled In the Shadow of Statues: A White Southerner Confronts History, and perhaps in the future, students of political science or mass communication or African-American studies will read Landrieu’s book alongside its older cousin, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, written more than 23 years ago by a candidate for the Illinois state senate named Barack Obama.
“Any similarities are completely unintended,” Landrieu tells me. “Interestingly enough, though, the President struggled with the same conflicts, though they were probably more acute than the ones I had. But he grew up with one foot in both racial worlds. I really hadn’t thought about (the parallels between our books) before now, but I grew up in a mixed neighborhood and, of course, I had a foot in both worlds as well.”
While the biracial Obama spent his childhood years shuffling between his white mother in Indonesia and his white grandparents in Hawaii, with only one brief visit by his Kenyan father and namesake, Landrieu was born and raised in a large, nuclear family steeped in Louisiana politics. His older sister Mary was a three-term U.S. Senator; their father Moon, before he was appointed Secretary of Housing and Urban Development during the Carter administration, was himself a two-term mayor of New Orleans.
After the Recording Academy eliminated the category of Best Zydeco Album and collapsed it into the ambiguously-named Best Regional Roots Album, Louis Michot, the frontman for the Grammy-award winning Cajun French band Lost Bayou Ramblers, found his band competing against Hawaiian musicians for the same top prize. On first glance, it may seem completely absurd, but as Michot once told me, he discovered their music shared many of the same rhythms, messages, and instincts as music made on a faraway island. The comparisons, it turned out, were fair.
On paper and on a map, Barack Obama and Mitch Landrieu don’t appear to have both straddled the same two worlds; they seem to have grown up in entirely different universes. But their stories and insights, particularly about race, identity, and privilege, share a rhythm and an aspirational message about America.
Landrieu’s book, which will debut in The New York Times’ Top Ten List, isn’t nearly as raw or personal as the former president’s, but Barack Obama wrote his first book when he was only 34 years old and before he’d ever held a single political office. Mitch Landrieu, on the other hand, waited until he was 57 years old, after spending 16 years in the state legislature, six as Louisiana’s Lt. Governor, and another eight as mayor.
Because of term limits, Landrieu cannot run for another four years, but even if he could, his pathway to victory would have been more challenging. Not merely because of his controversial decision to remove four public monuments glorifying the “Cult of the Lost Cause.” Many of the critics in his own hometown are folks who largely agree with him on that particular issue but blame him, fairly or not, for a host of other things: The ineptitude of the Sewerage and Water Board, the proliferation of short-term rental units, income inequality, the plague of gun violence, rampant redevelopment, and, of course, the pumps and the potholes.
On Election Day in 2010, Landrieu’s campaign was careful to manage their expectations; he had run for mayor twice before, in 1994 and then in 2006, and had lost both times.
They had hoped that he would narrowly survive the jungle primary against ten opponents; instead, Mitch Landrieu won in seismic fashion, capturing 67% of the vote in a runaway. That night, surrounded by a diverse crowd of hundreds at the recently restored Roosevelt Hotel, Landrieu declared victory.
The very next day, the New Orleans Saints won the Super Bowl.
By most objective metrics, Landrieu’s eight years as mayor of the Crescent City have been a resounding success. He inherited a systematically corrupt government that had saddled the city with nearly $100 million in debt and no savings, a government that had squandered countless opportunities for federal and nonprofit grant funding, costing the city at least $200 million, and a government that had tarnished much of the goodwill the city received from all over the world in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina; there were at least two major foundations that threatened to pull out of the city altogether unless it quickly got its act together.
Today, New Orleans is resurgent; unemployment is near historic lows; homelessness has been reduced by 80% and effectively eliminated among veterans; the city has asserted itself as a national magnet for entrepreneurship and the creative arts; tourism is booming, and investment is up. The city turned a deficit into a surplus; it now has the highest bond rating in its history. There’s a sprawling new hospital campus; a new airport is under construction.
His predecessor, C. Ray Nagin, is currently an inmate at a federal penitentiary in Oakdale, Louisiana, while Landrieu is serving the final month of his tenure on a personal high note: He’s overseeing the city’s tricentennial anniversary; he’s on a national book tour; he’s the president of the U.S. Conference of Mayors, and people are talking about him like he could be president of the United States.
In the Shadow of Statues, Landrieu often comes across as an earnest, principled, though, as Jarvis DeBerry of The Times-Picayune points out, sometimes frustratingly naive politician.
I first met Mitch Landrieu more than a decade ago when he was the state’s Lt. Governor; I don’t believe he is actually naive, and his memoir only falters in the brief moments where he shifts away from personal narrative into exposition. Landrieu is a gifted writer, but his book, after all, isn’t just a personal memoir; it’s a political document.
Still, this much is unquestionable: Because of his decision to remove four public monuments glorifying the “Cult of the Lost Cause,” Mitch Landrieu will likely never be governor of Louisiana. He knows this. At some point, maybe six years ago, he could have been elected governor, but the timing wasn’t right. Today, there’s no way; the timing is still not right.
“By the time I got to be mayor,” he tells me, “and by the time this monument issue had been raised- remember I had been through Katrina, Rita, Ike, Gustav, the national recession, the BP oil spill, and I’d been either second in command or first in command in all of those emergency responses- I had gotten into a place of figuring out how you do the right thing, no matter what. And I didn’t really count the immediate political consequences. It was the right thing to do historically; it should have been done a long time ago, and I wasn’t really calculating what (political) damage, if any, would be created.”
At the same time, he recognized he could afford to spend his political capital, even if it made him permanently unpopular among most white voters outside of Orleans Parish.
“I remember my daddy telling me a long time ago, ‘What do you think you have political capital for? You’re supposed to spend it.'” he said. “I think history is going to look at this decision as one of the many steps that a lot of people took to get us to a better place.”
There are particularly moving moments in the book, none as much as Landrieu’s riveting and anguishing chapter about Hurricane Katrina.
For a national audience, the book is an introduction to a man that most Louisianians have known for decades, but for readers back home, Landrieu emphasizes what he considers a critical lesson.
“The point that I was trying to make in the book, a point I didn’t have time to make in the speech, was how much worse off we are in the South, in Louisiana for constantly exporting our creative talent, our intellectual capabilities, and our human capital,” he tells me. “That’s a big story. Just imagine if all of those people who were great at what they did were able to stay in Louisiana.”
Landrieu’s tenure as mayor will likely be regarded as the most consequential in modern city history, even by his adversaries.
“I’m not a hero, and I’m not particularly a courageous person,” he said to reporter Michelle Goldberg. “But at some point you have to be willing to lose your job to do the right thing. That’s the only time you really find freedom.”
Four days later, the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation honored Landrieu with one of the nation’s most distinguished awards: He will be this year’s recipient of the Profile in Courage Award; last year, the prize was given to Barack Obama.
Review: In the Shadow of Statues, by Mitch Landrieu
Posted By Kevin Allman @KevinAllman on Tue, Mar 6, 2018 at 3:19 PM
click to enlarge
“I cannot remember a time when the issue of race was not part of my life or our family’s,” Mitch Landrieu writes in his new memoir of sorts, In the Shadow of Statues: A White Southerner Confronts History. “It’s like a song you can’t get out of your head … Race is a soundtrack that stays with me.” It’s certainly the soundtrack for the mayor’s first book, which filters Landrieu’s life from childhood to today, all through the lens of race. As Landrieu puts 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 genesis of this book was the nationally admired speech Landrieu delivered last May at Gallier Hall as, blocks away, the statue of Robert E. Lee at Lee Circle was removed in a true Hollywood South moment. (The speech itself is included as an appendix.) Landrieu is blunt about its effect: “The speech gave me a great deal of favorable attention in the national media,” he admits, “but in my hometown, the tide has not so quickly turned.”
Those in his hometown might well ask: For whom is this book written? It clearly seems aimed at those who are just being introduced to Louisiana politics and the Landrieu family in particular, but the mayor’s voice — passionate, prolix, fast-talking, often strong-headed — will be familiar to local audiences. Those looking for political gossip or score-settling will be disappointed; this is not that kind of book.
"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.”
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Landrieu recalls classmates and others taunting him when his father, former Mayor Moon Landrieu, effectively desegregated City Hall in the 1970s, and answering the phone at home to hear someone shout “Moon the Coon!”. Another lesson for the young Landrieu comes during a scrap with a black man during a college pickup basketball game in Washington D.C., which he says is “the first time anyone had challenged me solely on the basis of my race” (or, at least, the first time he noticed it). “I had played hundreds of basketball games in my backyard with black boys and no one ever spit hate-eyes like that guy did at me,” he recalls. “And then it hit me. I learned that day black people can be blinded by race, too.”
Stronger than these anecdotes — and more interesting — is a chapter titled “David Duke and Donald Trump, A Nightmare Loop,” in which Landrieu, as a newly minted state representative, observes the ascent of neo-Nazi former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke to the state house. “I watch our country’s institutional crisis provoked by [President Donald] Trump,” he writes, “and my thoughts turn again to the parallels with David Duke’s psychodrama. There is nothing the country is experiencing today that we in Louisiana haven’t seen or faced in the last thirty years.” Two more chapters — one on Hurricane Katrina and the federal floods, another on the recovery under Landrieu’s mayoralty — follow Landrieu’s ascent to the lieutenant governor’s office, and what he was and wasn’t able to do in the years between the storm and when he took local office.
click to enlarge
Photos by Derick Hingle & Kandace Power Graves
But it all comes back to the issue of the statues, and conversations Landrieu had with friends Terence Blanchard and Wynton Marsalis, who convinced him they had no place in a 21st-century New Orleans. “My education came late, but it caught up with me in a hurry,” Landrieu writes. “So here I am in my second term, thinking, if anyone can rid of those symbols it’s me.” Though just about everyone in New Orleans (and elsewhere) has made up his or her own mind on the matter, Landrieu still walks the reader through his thought process: “What did Robert E. Lee, who allegedly spent one night in New Orleans, actually do for this city, compared to Louis Armstrong, Fats Domino, Tennessee Williams, the Marsalis family, the Neville family, Anne Rice — how many names do I need?”
Those looking for political gossip or score-settling will be disappointed; this is not that kind of book.
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Publishing a book that melds policy and biography is a rite of passage for any politician hoping to ascend to a national stage (see: Bobby Jindal, Leadership and Crisis), and the publication of In the Shadow of Statues — coming as it does in the last weeks of his mayoralty — naturally will raise questions as to its ultimate purpose, as well as its intended audience. (Despite requests, the publisher, Viking, did not provide Gambit with a galley or finished book for review purposes.) Landrieu will go on a book tour later this month, starting in New York and continuing through Atlanta, Philadelphia and Washington D.C., but Viking hasn’t announced any local readings or signings, which may provide a further clue to that intended audience. (No coauthor is listed, though in the book’s acknowledgments Landrieu thanks local writer Jason Berry as a “collaborator,” and his former deputy mayor and longtime aide d’camp Ryan Berni for “shepherding and writing from beginning to end.”)
Most conspicuously absent from In the Shadow of Statues is the answer of where those statues ultimately will end up, the context in which they will (or won’t) be displayed and what will replace them on the now-vacant plinths around town. Early in the book, Landrieu writes, “Symbols matter. We use them in telling the stories of our past and who we are, and we choose them carefully.” It seems strange, then, that what's next for the statues is a question as open as what's next for our outgoing mayor.
In the Shadow of Statues: A White Southerner Confronts History
By Mitch Landrieu
Viking. 227 pages. $25
Publication: March 20, 2018
3-1-18
Review of Mitch Landrieu’s “In the Shadow of Statues: A White Southerner Confronts History”
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tags: book review, Mitch Landrieu, In the Shadow of Statues
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by Ron Briley
Mr. Briley is faculty emeritus at Sandia Preparatory School and HNN’s senior book editor.
On May 19, 2017, New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu delivered an address explaining the decision of his administration to remove four Confederate statues from city property. While the removal of the statues generated considerable controversy within the Crescent City, Landrieu’s eloquent speech confronting the burdens of Southern history and providing a framework for racial conciliation received national acclaim, leading some pundits to suggest that Landrieu seek the Democratic nomination for President and challenge the racial divisiveness of President Donald Trump. And Landrieu enjoys a Louisiana pedigree that encourages such political ambitions. His sister, Mary served as a U. S. Senator from the state, while his father, “Moon” was also Mayor of New Orleans and fought to desegregate the city during the 1960s. Following in the footsteps of his family, Mitch served as a state legislator from 1988 to 2004 and was then elected Lieutenant Governor of Louisiana. In 2010, he won election as Mayor of New Orleans and is now completing his second and final term of office in that position. In chronicling the work of his administration in rebuilding New Orleans following the devastation of Hurricane Katrina and the corruption of former Mayor Ray Nagin, Landrieu does come off as a politician who might be interested in seeking higher office—and there is much to admire in the Landrieu record. For historians, however, the real value of In the Shadow of Statues is how Landrieu expands upon the ideas of his May 2017 speech to confront the shadow that slavery continues to cast over Southern and American history.
Landrieu describes how even though he came from a progressive white Southern family, he was unable to really perceive the weight of Southern history upon black citizens until jazz musician Winston Marsalis explained to the Mayor that he could not support a city revitalization project until offending monuments to the Confederacy and legacy of slavery were removed from city property. The ultimatum from Marsalis forced Landrieu to re-examine some of his assumptions regarding Southern history. Landrieu confessed that while growing up in New Orleans he paid little attention to the city’s Confederate monuments, but after talking to many of his black constituents, and taking a walk in someone else’s shoes, the Major recognized that to blacks the statues provided a daily reminder of how white Southerners who fought to preserve an institution that terrorized their ancestors were celebrated by the city. Landrieu had his staff investigate the Confederate monuments and found that most were constructed during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to bolster Jim Crow segregation, while more recent Confederate memorials were erected during the 1950s and 1960s as part of a racist resistance to the Civil Rights Movement.
The Mayor persuasively argues that the monuments are a perversion of Southern history and attempt to perpetuate the mythology of the Lost Cause in which the Civil War was fought to preserve an ideal agrarian civilization in which blacks and whites lived in harmony. Thus, the cause of the war was not slavery but the defense of state rights against Northern aggression. This mythology seeks to erase the beatings, rape, labor exploitation, and separation of families that characterized American slavery. The Confederate monuments are also used to discredit Reconstruction in which the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution were depicted as the “rape” of the South by freedmen, Yankee “carpetbaggers,” and poor Southern whites—a distortion of history also perpetrated in influential Hollywood films such as Birth of a Nation (1915) and Gone With the Wind (1939).
In addition to confronting the reality of Southern history and challenging the mythology of the Lost Cause, Landrieu insists that the legacy of slavery is alive and well today in the racial inequality of a city such as New Orleans. Landrieu documents how the destruction of Hurricane Katrina revealed the vulnerability of the black community in New Orleans who lacked the resources to evacuate in wake of the storm. The Mayor also deplores the violence in the black community which all too many whites seem willing to accept, seemingly endorsing the perspective of the Black Lives Matter movement when he asserts, “Perhaps, as a nation, we have bought into an evil notion—that the lives of these mostly young African American men killed everyday have less value and thus don’t deserve our urgent attention” (150). Fewer guns, better schools, more jobs, and a more equitable distribution of resources are needed to address these issues, but confronting the reality of the American past is also part of the solution.
Thus, Landrieu believes that just as it was essential for Germans to come to grips with the Holocaust following World War II, white Southerners must acknowledge the connection between Confederate monuments and the brutal institution of slavery that contributes to contemporary racism. Landrieu insists, “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 to not affirm life but to deny life. And in that sense, the monuments in a way are murder” (159).
The Landrieu administration targeted four Confederate memorials for removal. The Mayor found an obelisk celebrating the 1874 uprising of a White League militia against the legitimate Reconstruction government to be especially unsettling, racist, and historically inaccurate. Though beloved by many Southern whites, Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis had little direction connection with New Orleans, and Landrieu hoped that the removal of their statues might not elicit great protest. The Mayor was more concerned with a memorial to native son General P. G. T. Beauregard whose post-Civil War political career encouraged racial reconciliation. Compromise and healing, however, were not the theme of the memorial that featured a mounted general waving a sword and leading his Confederate troops into battle in defense of slavery. Beauregard would have to go as well, but Landrieu laments that he underestimated the resistance to the removal of any monuments. The Mayor and his family, along with contractors for the removal, were confronted with death threats. Despite such vehement opposition, Landrieu displays no regrets about his decision to dismantle the racist symbols of the Lost Cause, concluding, “Politics does not provide many moments for an elected official to take a moral stand, realizing that you may well pay a political price in doing so but you know in your heart that you’ve done something that will make you a better human being” (199).
While the core of Landrieu’s book concentrates upon the question of Confederate monuments, a chapter addresses the rise of David Duke in Louisiana politics during the 1980s. Landrieu relates how he worked with both Republicans and Democrats in the Louisiana legislature to oppose the racially divisive agenda proposed by Duke. The former Klan leader has praised Donald Trump for championing the rights of white Americans, and Landrieu finds parallels between Trump and Duke, writing, “Donald Trump is not a Nazi, yet he has courted white nationalists as Duke did, and like Duke, he speaks and tweets a fountain of lies, lying as naturally as normal people try to be truthful” (82). In highlighting how he helped to foil Duke’s agenda in the Louisiana legislature, Landrieu appears to suggest that he might have the experience to challenge the divisive politics of President Trump on the national stage.
Regardless of whether he decides to seek high office, Landrieu is an articulate voice for confronting the centrality of race to the American experience. Landrieu grew up in a prominent white Louisiana family that challenged racial segregation in the state, yet in his everyday life he failed to recognize the symbolic presence of New Orleans monuments commemorating slavery and racism. It took the vision of Winston Marsalis to open Landrieu’s eyes to the shadow cast over his city by Confederate monuments. It is time for Southern whites to join Landrieu in acknowledging the symbols of oppression which they have erected on public squares and parks throughout the region. Confronting the history of slavery should provide a platform upon which to address the troubling legacy of racism within American society.