In the Shadow of Statues

by Mitch Landrieu

  The good news I seized on, five years after Katrina, was that people kept coming back. Three areas hardest hit in the flood—New Orleans East, Gentilly, and the Ninth Ward—now had about eighty thousand residents. The bad news was that they faced a thirty-minute drive to an emergency room. It took several years for us to build a $140 million, eighty-bed hospital in New Orleans East as a neighborhood anchor.

  With great foundation support, we started building infrastructure aimed at attracting private-sector investment and jobs. Resilient New Orleans, the country’s first comprehensive resilience strategy, included innovative ways for how we can better live with water, such as investing in green infrastructure like rain gardens and bioswales. It covered actions to combat climate change, including increasing the use of cleaner modes of transportation and mobility, such as bicycles. But the strategy also included connecting vulnerable populations with the workforce skills needed to compete for the jobs created by our investments. We began tackling issues of violence reduction and racial equity, and connecting those who need work with the skills needed to service the private sector.

  By 2015, ten years after the storm, New Orleans had the reputation as a cutting-edge leader in how to rebuild stronger and smarter. The city was growing. We’d turned around the city finances. We had been a declining city before the storm, we now had a future that was brighter.

  In the final months of my second term, the New Orleans economy has thrived, adding more than twenty thousand new jobs since 2010. We had recruited GE Capital Technology Center to the city with former governor Bobby Jindal, adding six hundred high-paying tech jobs, along with game developers and software creators. That, and aggressive digital and software development tax credits, provided groundwork for the single largest economic development announcement in New Orleans history, in November 2017, when DXC Technology, a Fortune 150 company, announced the arrival of a digital transformation center with two thousand jobs. A key factor was the infrastructure of colleges in the area with science and technology courses germane to DXC’s hiring stream.

  Today, spending from tourism has surpassed pre-Katrina highs. The Wall Street Journal’s MarketWatch named New Orleans one of the “most improved cities for business.” New retail is booming, and in many areas surpassing pre-Katrina levels. The city has become a hub of entrepreneurship activity, outpacing the national per capita average by 56 percent. We have seen more than $8 billion in private development since May 2010. As a result of growth and confidence in the market, property values are up 50 percent. We’ve begun construction on a new, nearly $1 billion airport terminal, which will add major international flights and improve global business opportunities in the region.

  Cities hold together by the quality of their people. New Orleanians by their nature are a hopeful, resilient people. In the last twelve years, we have been through hell and high water in this city, not just with Katrina, but Hurricanes Rita, Ike, Gustav, Isaac, the BP oil spill, and the national recession. But as the Mardi Gras Indian chant goes, “We won’t bow down.” After everything that we’ve been through, a poll of New Orleans residents on the tenth anniversary of Katrina done by the Kaiser Family Foundation with NPR found that a whopping 78 percent of residents are optimistic about the city’s future. New Orleans rebounded after 80 percent of the city was underwater in 2005, much of it for several weeks, to become one of the fastest-growing major cities in America, with thousands of new jobs, new industries, rapidly improving schools, rising property values, and a new, stronger flood protection system that will reduce the risk from hurricanes.

  This is not to say New Orleans does not have problems. We still rank too high on the income inequality list. The local criminal justice system still disproportionately impacts African Americans. Unemployment among African Americans has been three times that of whites. Gentrification and the lack of affordable housing is a real issue in far too many of our neighborhoods. And African Americans are more likely to live in poverty and to attend poor schools than whites.

  Let’s be honest: before Katrina, the public school system was a disgrace. White flight from integration sparked decades of disinterest, decline, and disinvestment. By and large they were schools where the poorest and, frankly, mostly black students were left to try to scrape out an education. Corruption and gross mismanagement by the local school board only made it worse.

  Katrina destroyed 110 of 127 schools, and when we went to rebuild, we felt there was almost nothing in them worth saving. The charter school movement that arose after Hurricane Katrina has brought a great improvement for youngsters. With $1.8 billion in federal funds invested to rebuild, renovate, or refurbish nearly every school in the city, we have outstanding learning spaces to help our kids thrive and realize their huge God-given potential. People argue about whether the charter school movement is the right way to approach education reform. Many vested schoolteachers lost their jobs and benefits after the legislature mandated a takeover of the school system following the 2005 disaster. A class action suit by 7,500 public-school teachers, mostly African American and women, won a large judgment from the state, only to be overturned by the State Supreme Court. Because of the way it was resolved, there remains some racial tension about this adult issue.

  Nevertheless, the charter schools, which supplanted most of the old Orleans Parish system, have been an unparalleled success. Students are graduating at higher rates; the dropout rates are lower. The number of failing schools has dwindled to 7 percent from a pre-Katrina peak of nearly 60 percent. Before Katrina, the achievement gap between African American children in the city—the kids people said couldn’t learn—and white youngsters in schools in the suburbs and the rural areas was more than 25 points. Now that gap has been nearly closed.

  Today, nearly every student attends a public charter school and families who used to have only one choice for their kids can now apply to almost every school in the city. In New Orleans, geography no longer defines a kid’s destiny; we’ve raised the bar across the board, insisting that schools serve every child, because in New Orleans we know that every child can learn and every child has the right to a great education.

  Early in my life, Dr. Norman Francis drilled into me how important an education was to helping kids, particularly young African American kids, succeed in communities like New Orleans. Having a shot at an excellent education, despite your race or socioeconomic status, is the real way to level a playing field that is still unbalanced by the legacy of Jim Crow.

  Before Katrina, the high school graduation rate hovered around 50 percent. Now, almost three quarters of our kids are graduating on time, with more kids enrolling in college than ever before. One of these New Orleans high school graduates is a young man named Jairron Isaac. A few years ago, he wasn’t going to pass the tenth grade, let alone go to college. His mom and dad sold drugs; both went to prison. As you can imagine, he struggled; but he enrolled in a charter school with a special focus on college. This made the pivotal difference. As Jairron said: “In life you have two choices, to be defeated or to conquer. I choose to conquer.” In 2010, Jairron enrolled at Morehouse College, one example of the very real impacts the new system of schools is having. That’s not to say we are close to perfect. Poverty is a huge deterrent to many children, but we are forging pathways for those who learn to find a new plateau.

  Along with schools, health care is crucial. A dozen years ago, if a kid without a regular doctor or insurance had an earache, his mom faced a thirteen-hour wait time at the Charity Hospital emergency room just to get it checked out. In the last eight years we established a network of neighborhood health clinics with federal support. Dr. Karen DeSalvo, the New Orleans health commissioner, guided this process as a precursor to the Affordable Care Act, and later became President Obama’s acting assistant secretary of Health and Human Services. The St. Thomas Community Health Center, as an example, handles everything from chronic disease management to pediatrics, with a special focus on women’s hea
lth, conducting thousands of mammograms every year. Neighborhood health centers like St. Thomas serve 59,000 patients across the city every year, reducing the overload, and expense, at hospital emergency rooms. Two major hospitals are going up in the city, a Veterans Administration hospital and, adjacent to it, the University Medical Center, part of the LSU system.

  The city’s pre-Katrina “big four” public housing projects were decaying, crime-ridden horrors that hardly gave the poor what they needed or what they deserved. These complexes were demolished in the Nagin administration. With HUD support we’ve invested more than $1 billion in public housing—creating over 14,000 affordable rental units for low-income families. We’ve emphasized building homes close to schools, health care, and transit. We can see the difference it’s made already at the former St. Bernard Development, now known as Columbia Parc. The St. Bernard was one of the old public housing developments first built by the Roosevelt Administration during the Depression. It had crumbled over the years. By the time Katrina hit, 25 percent of the 1,300 units were empty and the area was known for its violence. And then the levees broke, and as the sun rose the day after the storm passed, the St. Bernard Development was ten feet under water. We resolved to build back the St. Bernard not as it once was, but as it ideally should have been. Now, Columbia Parc is a mixed-income public-housing neighborhood that embraces public-private partnerships. The master plan for the neighborhood includes newly built schools, an early-childhood learning center, a recreation facility, a library, playgrounds, retail stores, and green space. And the crime rate has plunged.

  With such historic poverty, New Orleans still has many disparities, some of them glaring. But as we enter 2018, the Tricentennial of our founding, New Orleans is a far better city than it has been in my lifetime, and a remarkable American comeback story. Rebuilding the city has been the most rewarding experience of my career in public life, second only to the happiness of raising a family with Cheryl. The best impulses of America show themselves when people work hard, dream of something better, and come together to make it happen. At times in the last eight years I was jarred by the scope of neglect and damage; my head and my heart told me that nothing is broken here or in America that cannot be repaired, no problem cannot be solved. The road is long; it takes sacrifice and is often painful. But we can get there, we can rebuild the city that so many of us dreamed New Orleans could be, had we gotten it right the first time. To do that, we had to be honest about our past and look to the future.

  And, as every parent knows, you can only be as happy as your saddest child.

  * * *

  —

  The shadow story of my city’s stirring comeback is the price we pay in the horrific loss of human life through gun violence, most of which erupts in the poorest parts of town. In America, we have become anesthetized to the pace of such homicides, one more numbing thirty seconds on the nightly news, much less the mass shootings that at times seem like some curse that our religious leaders cannot explain. Any politician venturing into this terrain risks being derided as a soft liberal, a knee-jerk on gun control, or some dewy-eyed idealist, pining for a world where people behave well and all children are safe. Fine. I absolutely want a city, and a country, where children are safe. Yet as the mayor of every large municipality knows, the first law of governing is pragmatism, forging a balance between what we must do to foster growth and accepting the limits of what we cannot do. The question for me is how we change those limits.

  My cell phone hums all hours of the day. Michael Harrison, the chief of police, sends me a text each time someone is killed. I try to visit the crime scenes and comfort the families who have lost their young. It is the most excruciating task I have as mayor.

  The names follow me.

  Ricky Summers. Briana Allen. Shawanna Pierce. Jeremy Galmon. Keira Holmes. Marcus McNeil. Daryle Holloway.

  All were human beings who were shot and killed on the streets of New Orleans in my time as mayor, and these are only a handful of the hundreds who died while I was in office. Some names haunt me, track me, sneak in and out of my dreams. Others, from further back in the past, stay with me for their own reasons. James Darby. Michael Norfleet. Joseph Norfleet. Senseless deaths, senseless quarrels, bullets that halted lives that deserved America’s promise.

  If it is true that one person can change the world, it must be true that the absence of so many must change it as well.

  In my eight years as mayor, the hardest day was May 29, 2012, when five-year-old Briana Allen died. It was her cousin Ka’Nard’s tenth birthday, and they were celebrating on their grandmother’s front porch. Balloons. Streamers. Music.

  I remember my childhood birthday parties. One year, I got a pair of cowboy boots, another one brought a pair of big old boxing gloves. Standard cake and ice cream. Nothing was standard about the party where Briana was shot through her tiny midsection by an AK-47 bullet. She fell into the arms of her father, Burnell, who held her as she died.

  Burnell was the intended target, a lifetime member of the notorious Allen family gang. During the party, two guys from the 3NG gang rounded the corner and saw Burnell on the porch. They didn’t care that he was standing in the middle of small children, old folks, aunts, uncles, and friends. They let it rip. One bullet found Briana’s gut—game over. Another bullet grazed her cousin Ka’Nard on the neck. A third bullet traveled three hundred yards down the street, crashed through a windshield, and exploded in Shawanna “Nonni” Pierce’s head. Pierce, a young single mother of three young boys, Kelby, Kolby, and Khody, had just turned the corner on her way to return a rental car after leaving a son’s graduation party. Just like that—gone.

  The sun baked the shocked crowd at the party. Briana’s grandmother screamed in agony. The police tape stretched for blocks, flapping in the summer wind. Twenty-three rounds fired, five people hit, two dead. In some neighborhoods, this is another day on the streets of America. As Briana’s father held her tiny head in his hands, the blood pooled on the porch beneath birthday balloons, life seeping out of her, another loss, another wound in the city. Even as people gasped and mourned, the killings found other streets and fresh victims.

  I had already made stopping the homicides a priority of my administration. But on that day, a counteroffensive to gun violence became my number-one consuming focus. I have often said that I didn’t choose this. The crisis grabbed me. And today, it remains my morning coffee and my nighttime prayer. I pray that we can turn our culture from one of death and violence into one of peace and life.

  I have kept a photo of little Bri-Bri, as they called her, in my office since that time. Her smiling face stares at me as a reminder of why this work is important. It is critical to my city’s and our country’s future.

  What happens to the lives left behind?

  Briana’s father was soon arrested for another murder. He is now serving life behind bars. Briana’s uncle would be dead within the year, ambushed by two men with assault rifles. The true epilogue to this terrible story is actually prologue for the future of New Orleans. It is about little Ka’Nard Allen. It was his birthday party that was interrupted by gunfire. He was hit in the neck that day. But for the grace of God, Ka’Nard survived, although he could not escape the violence all around him. Five months later, Ka’Nard’s father was fatally stabbed by his stepmother. And then, nearly a year to the day of his cousin Briana’s death, Ka’Nard was again caught in the crossfire, this time shot in the cheek along with eighteen others at a Mother’s Day parade. Twice this boy came within inches of getting his head blown off. We expect little kids like Ka’Nard to soldier on, stand on their own two feet. Is that the best we can do? Could you, or I, bounce back, move on? His other scars run deep, but are not yet visible to us.

  We have seen this all before. Why is the political will missing to respond with a countermeasure, a policy, as a civilized people should?

  Let me take you back to another Mother’s Day, this time
1994. Families were picnicking at A. L. Davis Park in Central City. Nine-year-old James Darby was playing a pickup football game. A little girl got elbowed in the face during a fracas; she went home in tears. Her father had left the family. Her older brother, Joseph Norfleet, nineteen, the man of the house, was that day drunk and high. He saw his sister’s black eye and flew into a rage. Egged on by an older stepbrother, he grabbed a shotgun and jumped in a car. It was a short trip back to A. L. Davis Park. Joseph stuck his shotgun out the window and shot into the crowd, aiming for someone else in the Darby family but instead hitting James in the head, killing him instantly. Nine years old. Just a few weeks earlier, James Darby had written President Clinton:

  Dear Mr. Clinton,

  I want you to stop the killing in the city. People is dead and I think that somebody might kill me. So would you please stop the people from deading. I’m asking you nicely to stop it. I know you can do it. Do it. I now you could.

  Your friend,

  James.

  We use that overused word tragic to describe terrible events, and in this case for tragedy at both ends of the gun. The pain and agony of losing not one child, but two. James died and was buried in cold ground. And Joseph, nineteen, lit up and showing a child’s bullying bravado in what he did, went to the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola for the rest of his life. Several years ago I went to see him at Angola. It was surreal. He spoke of the day he now regrets. He spoke of having been shot twice in his life on the rough streets of New Orleans before that day. We are left to wonder what might have been. As the years pass, we talk about violence just as “part of the culture.” Each murder becomes one small part of some impossibly large whole.