New Orleans after the Promises: Poverty, Citizenship, and the Search for the Great Society

12. Acronyms, Liberalism, and Electoral Politics, 1969–1971

CHAPTER TWELVE Acronyms, Liberalism, and Electoral Politics, 1969–1971 And you’ll find that a good many of these people that you take in there and give them a job for a couple of years wind up being the leaders in your state. —President Lyndon B. Johnson explaining the War on Poverty to Georgia Governor Carl Sanders, July 1964 The election season of 1969–1970 was a test of racial liberalism. Black voters, primarily organized by neighborhood councils and political groups that this study refers to as the Acronyms, put the racially liberal Moon Landrieu in the mayor’s office. Seven years after the New Orleans Police Department dragged civil rights activists out of City Hall by their feet, racial liberals walked in through the front door with keys in hand, ready to set the post-Jim Crow political agenda. The coalition that produced Moon Landrieu’s triumph was fragile, however, and endured severe early testing. How would progressive electoral success affect the arrangements of the Soft State, the energy of the grassroots, and the dialogue about the black role in public life? Could racial liberals continue to answer the voices from the streets, or could they actually evolve into alienators and segregators themselves? The August 1965 Voting Rights Act was only one reason for Moon Landrieu’s success. Immediately after the Act passed, a well-coordinated 246 campaign raised the number of black voters from about 35,000 to approximately 52,000. Those new voters did affect the mayoral campaign that year. Victor Schiro changed campaign strategies and carefully reached out to certain black leaders, enabling him to win the campaign by attracting almost 30 percent of black votes. Between 1966 and the mayoral primaries of 1969, another 12,000 black residents had registered, but black voters still only accounted for approximately 30 percent of the local electorate . The city’s 65,000 black voters could determine a close election if they were unified around one candidate and if that candidate could also secure about 40 percent of white voters.1 In 1969, that candidate was a young white liberal with a history of opposing segregation and supporting federal social policies. A new era in southern politics had arrived. Moon Landrieu received less than half of the white votes but over 90 percent of African Americans supported him. In 1969 and 1970, the liberal political triumph showed that black votes, black political activism, biracial cooperation, and Great Society programs could remake electoral and bureaucratic power. Nationally , liberalism was waning, but locally, Landrieu’s election—and similar ones throughout the South—was part of the first legitimate stand of southern racial liberalism. These new long-haired, biracial leaders grafted the growth-based progressivism of the immediate post–World War II era onto the racially charged, therapeutic politics of the 1960s. In doing so, those biracial liberals—and occasional radicals—demonstrated a shrewd grasp of the issues at play and the broader changes underway in American culture, though shifts in governmental funding and a serious decline in the oil economy in the 1980s undercut them. Black Politics The history of black politics in New Orleans is one of enduring black frustration . During Reconstruction, groups such as the Fourth Ward Republicans and black leaders such as P. B. S. Pinchback provided well-organized black involvement in New Orleans’s civic affairs. After Reconstruction, power returned to white supremacists and black political participation was limited to bargaining with white leaders and the occasional chance Acronyms, Liberalism, Electoral Politics 247 to influence federal patronage during Republican presidencies. In 1892, the black Comité des Citoyens, or Citizens Committee, challenged racial segregation on a Louisiana railway. Their defeat in the landmark Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) decision, which enshrined the principle of “separate but equal” as U.S. law, set the course for the Jim Crow racial system. In the early twentieth century, neighborhood-influenced social clubs became the primary source of black political organizations. The Autocrat Club, led by A. P. Tureaud, and the San Jacinto Club held sway over the Seventh Ward Civic League, the Federation of Civic Leagues, and the New Orleans NAACP. Tureaud, a Creole Radical, mounted persistent legal challenges to segregation.2 World War II was the pivotal event in the black search for power. The war stimulated economic growth, put black citizens into leadership roles (albeit typically segregated ones) in the armed forces, and shaped...