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

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suggEsTEd REAdiNg ANd viEWiNg The Panther-police confrontation in New Orleans was, at its heart, the massacre that did not occur. Everyone I interviewed had expected a massacre after the negotiations broke down, and they all had theories , ranging from the mystical to the practical, about why that did not happen. My own theory is that while luck and divine intervention probably played a part, the unique history and culture of New Orleans brought together circumstances and people that defied the American racial narrative that the United States had tried to impose since it bought the city as part of the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. That narrative in 1970 said that police and Panthers were supposed to kill each other. A racial narrative is simply a collectively agreed-upon story that people tell themselves about what we call “race” to justify, explain, and predict our thoughts, feelings, behaviors, and political and social acts. Narratives are both personal and collective. They govern all aspects of our thinking, giving us a sense of continuity and control. They evolve. For instance, a personal narrative about romance that emerged from one’s childhood could be based on something as ephemeral as a favorite fairy tale. We adjust that narrative (sometimes ) as life experiences accrue. Racial narratives evolve to deal with changing laws, perceptions, and social conditions. The New Orleans narrative about race seems to me to be less cut-and-dried than the larger American narrative, more given to loopholes, caveats, and time-outs. Because people who live in New Orleans tenaciously remember history and the traditions of place and belonging, they tend to be more connected, even across race lines. European, African, and Native American bloodlines mingled early on in this city. The New Orleans narrative is, above all, creative in its ability to circumvent the absurdities that racism presents at any given moment in time. The American racial narrative asserted itself particularly forcefully 243 during the Civil War, the first Reconstruction (1866–77), the Jim Crow era at the end of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century , the second reconstruction when legal segregation ended (1956–66), and the third New Orleans reconstruction that is now happening post-Katrina. But the American racial narrative, to this day, never quite sticks. New Orleanians have always had their own parallel and competing narrative that is far more fluid and complex than the nation as a whole wants or is able to understand. And yet because of its “otherness,” this narrative can inform and perhaps eventually transform the larger racial narrative into a story of healing. The Panther scholars Charles Jones and Curtis Austin have been my mentors and have anchored the New Orleans story in their foreword and introduction to the larger Panther history and literature. Curtis Austin’s bibliographic essay in Up Against the Wall: Violence in the Making and the Unmaking of the Black Panther Party provides a complete review of current Panther literature. I will therefore limit this essay to the sources that have informed my understanding of the New Orleans racial narrative and some aspects of the city’s history that framed the Panther confrontation. Gwendolyn Midlo Hall’s Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Century describes how Africans from Senegambia shaped the culture and society of colonial Louisiana. In the eighteenth and nineteenth century “Creole” meant indigenous to Louisiana or New Orleans. For a discussion of the free black, or libre, society in colonial New Orleans, 1769–1803, the era of Spanish rule, see Kimberly S. Hanger’s Bounded Lives, Bounded Places. During this period, free people of African descent in New Orleans advanced their legal rights and privileges, their vocation, and their social standing as well as increasing their numbers. They inhabited two psychological worlds—free and nonwhite. Hanger’s book explores the origins of antebellum New Orleans’ free black population, unique in the South because of its size and influence, and its ambiguous status in what has remained until today an intricate and stratified society. Martha Ward brings nineteenth-century New Orleans vividly to life in Voodoo Queen: The Spirited Lives of Marie Laveau, her study of the two Voodoo priestesses the Marie Laveaus, who were mother and suggEsTEd REAdiNg ANd viEWiNg 244 daughter, free women of color, and prominent French-speaking Catholic Creoles. Their lives spanned the time when Creole racial...