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Fade to Black: Hurricane Katrina and the Disappearance of Creole New Orleans
Arnold R. Hirsch
| How could you have reelected Ray Nagin? More accusation than query, it was a question frequently put to New Orleanians after the mayor's successful campaign in the months following Hurricane Katrina's devastation of the Gulf Coast. Mayor C. Ray Nagin had been overwhelmed—as had every other public official regardless of race, gender, or political affiliation—by what was only in part a "natural" disaster. The scenes of suffering and degradation outside the Superdome and the New Orleans Convention Center testified to the city's callous incompetence and to a mind-numbing sloth that seemed to have taken up permanent residence in city hall. Reelect Ray Nagin? How, indeed. |
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On the surface, Nagin's close victory over the white liberal Mitch Landrieu in a May 2006 runoff following a twenty-three-candidate nonpartisan primary seemed easy to explain. Nagin was the only African American among the three major candidates in what had been a majority-black city. Landrieu, his most dangerous challenger, was the state's lieutenant governor and the son of Maurice "Moon" Landrieu, a former mayor of New Orleans who had orchestrated the civil rights revolution in city government and politics in the 1970s. Ron Forman, a civic leader and head of the Audubon Nature Institute, which includes the city's world-famous zoo and aquarium, emerged as the favorite of the old, conservative elite, much of which had backed Nagin in 2002.1 Queasy at the thought of a liberal Landrieu victory in 2002, members of the elite then found Nagin, a black executive for Cox Cable (a TV, Internet, and phone provider) who mouthed familiar "reform" slogans, preferable to a traditional Democrat. The conservative realists who flocked to Nagin's successful 2002 candidacy abandoned him four years later for a revived white hope. The mayor thus found his 2006 campaign hemorrhaging white voters and alienating the black masses, who not only offered a strong critique of his performance, but had never warmly embraced Nagin himself. |
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Before Katrina roughly 67 percent of New Orleans's residents were black; their majority among registered voters was slightly less. Driven from the city by Katrina, they remained Nagin's electoral base and his vehicle on the road to a second term. In eliminating Forman and the twenty other candidates, it remained for Nagin, Landrieu, and the entire city to argue over the unprecedented measures (the use of centralized polling places, liberalized absentee voting procedures, and the provision of transportation for displaced voters) designed to get evacuated voters to the polls. Race figured prominently in these discussions as people wondered who would be welcomed back to the city, and who might be excluded, whether by accident or design. Nagin's now-famous Martin Luther King Jr. Day speech in January 2006, which invoked God's desire that New Orleans remain a "chocolate city," brought into the open the tension that had been building.2 |
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The mayor's attempt to run as a "race man" was so awkward it would have been amusing if the consequences had not been so serious. His abandonment of his usually proper grammar before select audiences and the donning of a T-shirt bearing the name of a public housing development over a dress shirt and tie (a near-Nixonian moment) accentuated, rather than bridged, the distance separating him from the city's poor.3 But the average black citizens' fear of losing one of their own as mayor was palpable, and his need of their support inescapable. |
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