by Gary Rivlin
Farrakhan and Nagin met later that night in the minister’s suite at the Windsor Court. There, inside one of the city’s pricier hotels, the two spoke about the shooting, but their main focus was the black diaspora—the hundreds of thousands of New Orleanians living elsewhere. This man whose words had proven so inspiring to Nagin a decade earlier implored the mayor to bring his people home. It is your obligation as an African-American mayor, Farrakhan counseled, to make sure New Orleans remains a black city. The two spoke for nearly three hours.
Nagin had a light schedule on the Monday holiday—just a morning ceremony at City Hall. There, Nagin would say a few words to honor Dr. King. Long ago his communications director had abandoned the idea that the mayor might deliver a speech if one of her people wrote it for him. “For Ray,” Sally Forman said, “there was no greater sin than sounding scripted.” He was an elected official more interested in “leaving a lasting impression,” Forman said, “than presenting any memorable ideas.” She had delivered a typed-out list of suggested bullet points to his office, but even then there was no telling if they would be used. His tendency to go off message had even become something of a public game between them (“Sally’s going to need the smelling salts for this one,” Nagin would say from the podium)—but the mayor had a more serious point to make. “Don’t make me speak all English,” Nagin snapped at Forman early in their relationship. “Don’t make me look weak.”
Mitch Landrieu, the lieutenant governor, was at City Hall that morning. Impossible to miss, he stood near the podium with a fussing baby in his arms. It had always been personal between Nagin and Landrieu, as the latter seemed bothered by the mayor’s slights of his sister Mary. Just before Katrina, Nagin ran into Landrieu at an event. “Mitch got right up to Ray, yelling at him,” Forman said. “I really thought it was going to end in a fistfight.” A widespread rumor had Landrieu running for mayor against Nagin that April. Others around Nagin thought that his late-night meeting with Farrakhan explained the speech the mayor gave that day. Forman, however, believed it was the pending election that inspired her boss to make the “impromptu decision that he’s not going to offer the same old same old with Mitch standing there.”
Nagin, dressed in an open-collared, striped shirt, wore a black armband around one bicep. “I greet you all in the spirit of peace this morning,” Nagin began, addressing the majority-black audience. “I greet you all in the spirit of love this morning, and more importantly, I greet you all in the spirit of unity.” People looked at one another, puzzled. This was not a Ray Nagin any of them knew.
He could talk about what made King great, Nagin told the crowd, but instead he wanted to tell them about his conversation that morning with the slain civil rights leader. “I just wanted to know what would he think if he looked down today. What would he think about Katrina?” The mayor brought up Gretna in his imagined conversation (“I said, ‘Mr. King, when they were marching across the Mississippi River bridge . . . and they were met at the parish line with attack dogs and machine guns firing shots over their heads?’ ”). He brought up the suffering at the Superdome and Convention Center and also the “knuckleheads [who] pull out some guns and start firing into the crowd.” With each incident, King expressed his disappointment via Nagin. (“And Dr. King said, ‘I wouldn’t like that.’ ”)
Nagin isn’t one for long speeches. He mentioned black-on-black crime and the decline of the African-American family and then got to his point, echoing the theme of self-reliance that Farrakhan and his acolytes had been preaching all weekend: it would fall on the black community to help itself. “God is mad at America,” Nagin said. “He’s sending hurricane after hurricane after hurricane, and it’s destroying and putting stress on this country. Surely he’s not approving of us being in Iraq under false pretenses. But surely he’s upset at black America also. We’re not taking care of ourselves. We’re not taking care of our women. And we’re not taking care of our children when you have a community where seventy percent of its children are being born to one parent.
“We ask black people: It’s time. It’s time for us to come together. It’s time for us to rebuild a New Orleans, the one that should be a chocolate New Orleans. And I don’t care what people are saying Uptown or wherever they are. This city will be chocolate at the end of the day. . . .” And then he added: “This city will be a majority African-American city. It’s the way God wants it to be. You can’t have New Orleans no other way; it wouldn’t be New Orleans.” After a smattering of applause a self-conscious Nagin concluded, “So before I get into too much more trouble, I’m just going to tell you, in my closing conversation with Dr. King he said, ‘I never worried about the bad people who were doing all the violence during civil rights time.’ He said, ‘I worried about the good folks that didn’t say anything or didn’t do anything when they knew what they had to do.’ ”
SALLY FORMAN DIDN’T THINK it was a big deal when Nagin referred to New Orleans as a chocolate city. He had used the phrase before and nobody had ever cared. “I don’t think Ray had any idea it would blow up like that,” she said.
But Nagin’s expensive campaign consultant, Jim Carvin, knew. Carvin had been on the winning side of six consecutive mayoral contests in New Orleans, including Nagin in 2002, but Nagin’s speech left Carvin wondering about his chances at number seven. “It’s always difficult when your candidate says something without discussing it with you,” a droll Carvin says in the film Race, a documentary by Katherine Cecil about the 2006 New Orleans city election. “It was strictly shoot-from-the-hip Ray Nagin.” Within hours of Nagin’s speech, the cable news stations were carrying the story that the mayor of hurricane-ravaged New Orleans had just described Katrina as God’s wrath. Soon the “chocolate New Orleans” line replaced the God theme. That line dominated the news for weeks. Within days, it seemed every tourist shop and street vendor in town was selling a T-shirt depicting Nagin as Willy Wonka and New Orleans as a chocolate factory. (One version: NOW WITH 50 PERCENT MORE NUTS!)
“It’s part of our culture to talk about chocolate cities,” Nagin told CNN the day after his speech. He mentioned the song “Chocolate City,” George Clinton and Parliament’s ode to Washington, DC. Washington was the country’s first “chocolate city,” Nagin explained, followed by Newark, Detroit, and New Orleans. Nagin would apologize for his comments—but only up to a point. “I crossed the line when I brought God into the discussion,” he confessed to the New Orleans Tribune. “But I see no problem talking about New Orleans remaining diverse.”
Uptown saw “chocolate city” as the end of Nagin. He was no longer the erratic mayor who maligned his own city by exaggerating the crimes that occurred after Katrina and then flipped, flopped, and stalled whenever he needed to make a decision. Now he was the buffoon. “Congress can finally stop accusing us of being corrupt,” wrote Clancy DuBos, the chief political writer for the Gambit, the city’s alternative weekly. “Nagin has finally given them a fresh argument: that we’re stupid, incompetent, and led by a mindless racist.”
Polls revealed a black New Orleans split over Nagin’s speech. Eighty-two percent of the poll’s respondents said they weren’t offended by the “chocolate city” reference, though a majority agreed that he “could have said it better.” Fifty-nine percent of blacks said they had a favorable view of Nagin (compared to 13 percent for Bush, 24 percent for FEMA, and 40 percent for Blanco). Warren Bell, a lifelong New Orleanian who had been the city’s first black news anchor on local network TV, thought the whole event had been overblown. “New Orleanians refer to this as a chocolate city,” Bell said. “Certainly the chocolate people did.” Bell, who by that time was working in the president’s office at Xavier, was no fan of Ray Nagin’s, but he also viewed the mayor’s reference, whether deliberate or not, as a brilliant political stroke: a way for the mayor to use his megaphone to signal to his African-American constituents scattered across the country that he supported their right to return. “The people for whom that was designed to appeal . . . are
glad he said it,” Bell said. “I think that endeared him to more black voters.”
INCUMBENT MAYORS DON’T LOSE in New Orleans. Clancy DuBos, the political writer, searched back sixty years to find the last sitting New Orleans mayor denied a second term. But then, it had been a hundred years since a city had been devastated like New Orleans (San Francisco, 1906; Galveston, 1900). Six months earlier, Nagin was sitting on a $1.3 million campaign war chest and looking at what DuBos dismissed as “nuisance opposition.” Post-Katrina, twenty-three people filed to run against Nagin. “A 20-Ring Political Circus,” the Washington Post said of this election taking place at the end of April, eight months after the flood.
A real estate appraiser joined the race, as did a radio DJ, an aircraft mechanic, a paralegal, and two preachers. Manny “Chevrolet” Bruno, who ran against Nagin in 2002, was also a candidate. The motto of this unemployed actor working as a bookstore clerk was “A troubled man for troubled times.” He proposed that the city legalize hashish and create a red-light district like Amsterdam’s to pay for a state-of-the-art levee system. He suggested polygamy as a solution to the city’s repopulation problem. Even one of Nagin’s former chiefs of staff (his former chief administration officer in the local parlance) announced her candidacy.
Most of Nagin’s twenty-one challengers were white. That was no surprise to Lance Hill, who described the 2006 mayor’s race “as the white community’s best opportunity in thirty years to take back political control of New Orleans.” It wasn’t just an academic from Tulane seeing it that way. “There’s a lot of people in the black community,” City Council president Oliver Thomas said, “saying that people in the white community are trying to pile on.” Even evacuees around the country could see for themselves what was happening during an election covered by CNN, Fox, and MSNBC as if it were a national election. Chris Matthews would serve as co-moderator at the last big debate, broadcast nationally by MSNBC, before the election runoff.
Ron Forman, who had announced his candidacy a few months before election day, was the early favorite. He had the Times-Picayune’s endorsement. He also had the money, which he’d made sure to line up before entering the race. “I told them, ‘Look, guys, I don’t have the wealth,’ ” Forman said. “ ‘If I’m going to step up, you have to step up with me.’ ” Three days later, he said, he had raised $2.5 million. Like in Night of the Living Dead, Forman joked, “people just keep showing up at my door each night, carrying stacks of checks, each one of them for five thousand dollars.” Pre-Katrina, Boysie Bollinger donated $5,000 to Nagin’s reelection campaign, but then various subsidiaries of his (Bollinger Gulf Repair, Bollinger Marine Fabricators) gave another $45,000 to Forman that winter. Jimmy Reiss and his spouse also gave Forman $10,000 between them, and Reiss served as a chief Forman fund-raiser. For Reiss his efforts served as penance for any role he had played in the creation of Ray Nagin. “Absolutely the wrong guy for the job at the moment,” Reiss said. The plan to seize back control of City Hall seemed on track.
Then Mitch Landrieu entered the race.
IT HAD BEEN AN agonizing few months for Ron Forman, starting with the disintegration of his relationship with Nagin. “The core group of people I work and socialize with are more the wealthy, the business leaders, the philanthropic community,” Forman said. “I was ‘Ray’s guy’ to them.” He had stopped defending Nagin around October, but it was one thing to let someone know you’re disappointed in him and another to announce that you intend to take his job. He even sat down with Mitch Landrieu to try to convince him to enter the race. “But he tells me, ‘I think I can do more good in Baton Rouge than New Orleans,’ ” Forman said. “And I believed him.” Even after talking with Landrieu, Forman vacillated: “I told one person yes but then I’d tell someone else no.”
Sally Forman informed her boss what was happening shortly after the Chocolate City speech: “I told the mayor, ‘Unbeknownst to me, my husband has decided he’s running against you.’ ” The resignation letter she released to the media stressed the respect she had for Nagin, but privately she confided to people that the end couldn’t come soon enough. “Ray started to mistrust people around him, and some crazy things started to happen,” she said. “He started fighting. There were lines being drawn.”I
Ron Forman might have been the candidate of the Uptown blue bloods, but he wasn’t one of them. His father was a welder, his mother a bookkeeper. He was a Jew in a community known to harbor anti-Semitism; worse, after earning an MBA at Tulane, he went to work for Mayor Moon Landrieu—a figure cursed up and down St. Charles Avenue, the liberal who handed the city over to the blacks. But after two years working for Moon Landrieu, Forman was put in charge of the city’s zoo, a place so bad the New York Times had described it as a “ghetto for animals.” He’d earn the business community’s gratitude by transforming it into one of the city’s crown jewels. The zoo, along with the aquarium, which had been born under Forman’s tutelage (paid for by a tax on the city’s homeowners), attracted more than 3 million visitors a year, and Forman was helping make everyone rich. A likable, large-featured man always quick with a quip, he was invited to join Rex and became a fixture at events wherever the privileged and the well-connected gathered. “If you were mayor or in the council, you were my friend,” he said.
Forman pitied Nagin, whom he considered a friend: “We needed a Giuliani but that wasn’t Ray. He had to live with that each day and it took its toll.” It had once been a joke between Forman and Sally, the mayor’s tendency to describe himself as “percolating” on a problem. But it was no longer funny. “I’m not trying to sound heroic, but someone had to pick up the flag that Ray had left lying on the ground,” Forman said.
Running against Nagin felt awkward, but squaring off against Landrieu left Forman feeling “torn to pieces.” Moon had been an early mentor; Moon’s wife, Verna, chaired the zoo board. Forman had known Mitch since the younger Landrieu was a boy. His mother, Verna, would bring him to meetings and “he’d run around the boardroom, up on everything,” Forman said. “He was wild.” Forman was a fan of Mitch Landrieu the politician, who always knew he could count on a campaign contribution from Ron Forman. “This is someone I’ve been supportive of his whole career,” Forman said.
Forman thought about dropping out. He even broached the topic with some of his backers. “But by that point, I had already spent three hundred thousand or four hundred thousand dollars of their money,” he said. “I had made these commitments.” He hoped his money and his message, bundled with the Times-Picayune’s endorsement, would secure him a spot in the runoff, against Nagin or Landrieu.
Forman proved a lousy candidate. He’d flash a smile and give people a pat on the back but never said anything. Privately, he agreed with those who said that a city built for almost 650,000 needed to shrink following Katrina, but when speaking in public, he avoided talking about the future of the city’s flooded neighborhoods. “It became such a hot political subject that no one wanted to talk about it,” he later confessed. When the subject of the future of the neighborhoods came up, he’d talk generically about the New Orleans he loved. “What makes us rich is our diversity,” he would say. “Without diversity, we’re the suburbs.” It was critical that we give everyone a chance to come back home, he said, but offered no plan for doing so. He believed a lot of valuable ideas were hidden inside the Bring New Orleans Back Commission’s report, but he left that unsaid as well.
Forman’s campaign team broke the bad news to him a few weeks before election day. The election was a three-person race, as they had expected, but Forman was running third in a contest that would pit the top two vote getters against one another in a runoff. “The hard part,” confessed Forman, “is when they tell you, ‘You have little of the black vote, you have a lot of the white vote, you have a lot of the wealthy vote. You’re being portrayed as the blue blood. And to change that, here are the ads we have about Mitch and Ray to bring down their numbers.’ ” He knew what the campaign professionals were asking h
im: How much did he want to be mayor?
THE PRESS WAS READY to crown Mitch Landrieu the winner even before election day. How could he lose? Landrieu was a well-known son of Louisiana politics with nearly twenty years in politics. He was the state’s lieutenant governor. In a field of neophytes, Landrieu was a polished campaigner who had the media savvy to handle the extra burden of the Washington Post, the New York Times, CNN, and the hundreds of other out-of-town reporters who would be parachuting in to cover New Orleans’s 2006 municipal elections. The racial politics also seemed to break Landrieu’s way. He’d get his share of white votes and also do well in the black community. His voting record in the state legislature was that of an old-style liberal who cared about the downtrodden. More important was his father’s reputation as the man who opened City Hall to blacks in New Orleans. “There’s historically been a lot of carryover loyalty there,” said Silas Lee, a local pollster and Xavier University professor.
Landrieu had grown up not in Uptown but Broadmoor, a mixed community in the western half of the city. “We were playing baseball against one another since the fourth grade,” said Jacques Morial, the second-born son of the man who took Moon Landrieu’s place as mayor and the younger brother of Nagin’s predecessor.