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

Conclusion: Prelude to Katrina

CONCLUSION Prelude to Katrina Deep within the Southern heart there still beats the driving fear, the firm resistance, the attitude toward race and progress which, though slightly tempted, show the dilemma of the New South as a battle against time itself. —Jason Berry, Vieux Carré Courier, 1972 In New Orleans, keeping faith in progress can be hard to do. Many people there have found it easier to put their confidence in things unseen and in life beyond life. In 1973, the Essex episode demonstrated that one man with a few dozen bullets could shut down a city at one of the most optimistic moments in its history. Thirty-two years later, Hurricane Katrina showed that an epic storm could do the same to a catastrophic degree. Unlike any others in New Orleans’s modern history, those two events exposed the city’s vulnerabilities. In both periods, the flaws were serious and anyone living there was aware of them unless they were partitioned by their own ignorance or arrogance or affluence. In the 1960s, the Great Society and the federal government were supposed to solve some of the problems. Tearing down Jim Crow and building up a War on Poverty— not to mention raising the levees—offered the chance to remake New Orleans into a city of “great destiny,” as Urban League leader Harvey Kerns suggested in 1964.1 In the 1970s, there was a growing optimism that the process was working, despite the Essex rampage. The city seemed to be 296 in the early stages of a civic renaissance. By the early 1980s, that hope had collapsed, and the inclusive, expansive vision of the Great Society had become a historical relic. Lyndon Johnson had made his promises in 1964, but his successors rarely felt obliged to keep them. In hindsight, the decades that followed them became a prelude to Katrina. During the 1970s, Moon Landrieu’s administration helped to transform downtown, construct the Louisiana Superdome, improve infrastructure , and reshape race relations. In doing so, he proved to be one of the most effective and agile political leaders in recent U.S. history. He courted investors and tourists with impressive precision and attracted millions of federal dollars to help pay for much of it. Landrieu, who went on to serve as Secretary of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development under Jimmy Carter, proved adept at capitalizing on the city’s intriguing culture, its influence in Congress, and its historic role as a regional transportation and financial center. New Orleans’s government had perennial fiscal crises, but money from the oil boom and the federal government were changing the city’s skyline, roadways, and political culture. Glass towers beginning to rise downtown seemed to signal that the city was set to shake off the torpor of its traditional economy and join the success stories of the new Dixie. After so many troubling years, the Saints had come marching in—literally. Given a franchise by the National Football League, New Orleanians embraced their team, known as the Saints, with the strange boosterish glee produced by professional sports. They could finally claim that they belonged to the big leagues—only to be disappointed for two decades before the team had its first winning season. Many fans believed their losing ways came from constructing the team’s home, the Superdome, on top of an old cemetery. The solution for some was to put paper grocery sacks over their heads and scream. The football team notwithstanding, many of New Orleans’s business leaders prized the city’s image almost as much as oil and river traffic. It was too costly to be seen as a socially stuffy, racially bigoted town. In fact, after the 1970s, tolerance and cultural diversity became one of the city’s strongest selling points, helping New Orleans seem to be a culturally authentic place in a crass age of materialism and homogeneity. Instead of leading the world in churning out high-tech components and computer Prelude to Katrina 297 parts, New Orleans became a center for manufacturing sensual liberation and enlightened relaxation, while comforting visitors with its colonial buildings, grand homes, narrow live-oak-lined streets, wrought iron, and quaint traditions. To market the city’s continuity with the past, civic leaders labored to suppress the racial discomforts of that past. This apparent transformation might be interpreted as a logical outcome of the...