Showdown in Desire: The Black Panthers Take a Stand in New Orleans

12. This Time We Ain’t Movin’

12 this time we Ain’t movin’ The evictions from St. Thomas and from Piety Street had only increased the Panthers’ determination not to be evicted from Desire. Their programs had continued without interruption after the shootout, and the police stance had strengthened support for the Panthers in Desire. Despite more than a dozen Panther arrests, a core group of armed Panthers living in a Desire apartment said they would fight to the last person to defend their “home” if the police interfered. In early November, five clergymen, two black (Jerome LeDoux and William London) and three white (William Barnwell, Harold Cohen, and Joe Putnam, who had preached on the shootout), decided to see if they could help. Fearing a racial Armageddon, Chief Giarrusso and Mayor Landrieu asked the members of the clergy to join the negotiating effort on November 16, a month and a day after the shootout, to try to get the Panthers to leave peacefully. In 2003, two of the clergymen—the Rev. William Barnwell and Father Jerome LeDoux—recounted the story. Until Easter of 2007, Jerome LeDoux, S.V.D., pastored St. Augustine’s Catholic Church in Tremé, the oldest mixed-race Catholic church in the city. The Reverend William Barnwell, a retired Episcopal priest, teaches and consults nationally on church outreach work. In 1970 Father LeDoux, who is black, had been to Desire many times. He had scheduled the Panthers to speak at his theology class at Xavier University. For his part, Barnwell, who is white, saw Desire as alien territory. “Will they take us hostage?” he asked himself on the 95 drive into the development in mid November. “Of course not,” he repeated, as if it were a mantra.1 Both priests remembered the Panther headquarters as a fortress. According to LeDoux, it had “window-high sandbagged walls, scores of grenades, dozens of assault rifles, and numerous bandoliers of ammunition occupying most of the space of the floors of both stories .”2 Panthers were making a statement with their fortifications and also with their rhetoric. Barnwell, in his memoirs of that time, quotes one of the Panthers as saying, “You’ve moved black people with your urban renewal programs so you can build shiny new buildings we never see the insides of. You’ve taken us from our homes to beautify our city as though people don’t matter. You moved us to build Interstates that we can’t afford cars for. This time we ain’t moving.” According to Barnwell, the mediation went like this: “Look,” said a black priest, “if you will just leave this apartment for a few weeks and make formal application to the Housing Authority, I think we can arrange for you to have it legally. Already some people have agreed to pay the rent.” Father LeDoux confirmed this for me. “Yes, I said that. I said it to Poison [Harold Holmes]. He was leaning out of the door without his shirt on. He wouldn’t look at me.” Barnwell’s amazingly detailed memoir contains this dialogue: “Man,” said George [a Panther spokesman that Barnwell recognized from coverage onTV], “you haven’t been getting the message.We don’t have to make no formal application to no housing authority. This is our housing project, our community. We are here because the Desire residents want us here. Ask them, if you don’t believe us. That’s all the authority we need.” “The police are going to come in here and shoot up the whole place and kill every one of you. They mean business. I can promise you that,” LeDoux responded, according to Barnwell. “It ain’t no different from any other time,” responded a Panther, as recorded in Barnwell’s memoir. “They’re always coming in here and shooting up everything. The only difference is this time they are going to have to kill a whole lot of us. And for every one of us they kill there’ll be ten more right from this project to take his place. It ain’t no different.” thiS time we Ain’t movin’ 96 “Will you listen to reason?” another member of the clergy asked. “Your reason is white man’s reason,” said someone Barnwell doesn ’t identify. “Look at what your reason has got us: bad housing, rats, wall-to-wall roaches, schools that don’t teach you nothing but how to smoke dope...