[StBernard] A Question of Blood

[Westley Annis]

This article can be found on the web at 
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070409/sothern 


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A Question of Blood
by BILLY SOTHERN

[posted online on March 27, 2007]

St. Bernard Parish is trying to recreate the isolated, backward community it
maintained so carefully prior to Hurricane Katrina. By passing an ordinance
that restricts rentals to blood relatives, this formerly almost entirely
white parish would be freed of most of its Hispanic and African-American
residents and pushed back to its status prior to the storm, the 1950s... St.
Bernard needs outside assistance if it is ever to enter the second half of
the 20th century, much less the 21st. This racist ordinance needs to be
declared unconstitutional and the leaders closely monitored until they
repent or resign. 

--Letter to the Editor, New Orleans Times Picayune, October 1, 2006 

I am proud of St. Bernard for wanting to maintain its affordable, but also
stable, family-oriented atmosphere. I am tired of people...who attribute our
desire for stable, family-oriented neighborhoods to racism! 

--Response from a St. Bernard Parish resident, New Orleans Times Picayune,
October 4, 2006 

As you drive east on Claiborne Avenue through New Orleans's famously
devastated Lower Ninth Ward, you pass the destroyed remains of the Jackson
Barracks, a nineteenth-century military base. Suddenly, the print on the
street signs and the race of the people on the streets changes, and you find
yourself on Judge Perez Drive in St. Bernard Parish. Both sides of the
parish line were so devastated by Hurricane Katrina that the view here would
bring tears to the eyes of both William C.C. Claiborne, the first elected
governor of the state of Louisiana, and Leander Perez, the political boss of
St. Bernard and Plaquemines parishes through much of the early and
mid-twentieth century, for whom these streets were named. 

Most Americans have heard about people, mostly black and poor, dying in
their attics in the Lower Ninth Ward and seen television footage of the
utter devastation left behind after the storm. Far fewer have heard of the
struggle on the St. Bernard side of the line, where people, overwhelmingly
white, toil in obscurity and against monumental obstacles to create a future
in a parish that extends with little fingers of land through the bayous out
to the Gulf of Mexico and where nearly all homes were rendered uninhabitable
by the storm. People here feel overlooked but unsurprised. Being ignored,
kicked around, set aside--these are facts that are etched into their
collective history from a century of environmental exploitation, an
intentional levee breach during the 1927 flood to save New Orleans's Garden
District, devastation from Hurricane Betsy in 1965, a "trappers' war" with
outsiders down in the marsh, and now Katrina. 

In the early 1960s, Bill Schmidt took this drive across the parish line and
moved his family here for good. Schmidt had grown up in the proud but
castigated white working-class Lower Ninth Ward, where New Orleans "Y'at"
culture was in full bloom, with ethnic whites speaking in a manner that
sounded more Brooklyn than Montgomery. He was in the last wave of an exodus
of his white friends and neighbors from the Lower Ninth, where the Orleans
Parish School Board had recently begun integrating the city's schools by
ordering William Frantz Elementary School to accept the brave black
6-year-old Ruby Bridges. 

According to Liva Baker's Second Battle of New Orleans, this was the "worst
possible choice of schools from which to launch racial desegregation." As
she described, "Ninth Ward whites were not much better off [than their black
neighbors]. Originally settled by German, Italian, and French immigrants,
the area began life as a truck-gardening section in the nineteenth century
and remained a predominantly white working class section in the twentieth.
Over the fifteen years since the end of World War II, white New Orleanians
had been moving to the northeastern outskirts of the city, out toward Lake
Pontchartrain, as fast as swampland could be reclaimed, leaving the Ninth
Ward to those who couldn't afford to move. Many of them had been defeated in
the competition for material success and were least equipped psychologically
to handle the added humiliation they believed racial desegregation of their
children's schools would impose. That they lived in a housing project
already had demoted them to the level of the black families who lived in the
nearby all-black neighborhood. 'At least I'm not a nigger' counted for less
now than it once had. The prospect of black children transferring from the
neighborhood black schools to the neighborhood white schools promised the
final injustice." 

Rather than integrate, white Ninth Ward residents moved, mostly to what
locals call "the Parish," where the population grew by nearly 500 percent
between 1950 and 1970 to more than 50,000 residents. And the new residents
of St. Bernard could be sure that the local leadership wouldn't cave to the
ACLU, the NAACP and all of the other pressures of laws and judges that had
undone their previous community. Perez, the political boss, had made his
views on such groups clear, once exclaiming that the leaders of the NAACP
and the desegregation movement were "all those Jews who were supposed to
have been cremated at Buchenwald and Dachau but weren't," and taking a bold
stance against the national effort to integrate the South. 

Perez was actually one of the principals in the schism of the Democratic
Party in 1948, following the opinion of the United States Supreme Court in
Shelley v. Kramer, which barred racial prohibitions in property titles, and
he led the Louisiana delegation at the Democratic convention to cast its
electoral votes for Strom Thurmond that year. It was this sort of principled
stability that families like Schmidt's sought out in the Parish. And for the
next forty years, up until Hurricane Katrina, they found it here in this
hard-working, low-crime community of 65,000, nearly 90 percent of which was
white. 

The long-sought stability and security are no longer apparent on Bill
Schmidt's Pecan Drive, which, like almost every other street in the parish,
took many feet of water during Hurricane Katrina. Of the forty brick ranch
houses on the block, most are still lifeless shells, five have been cleared
entirely down to the concrete slab and a few have white FEMA trailers parked
out front. Only two have been renovated by their owners, a consequence of
the fact that until recently, not a single resident of St. Bernard Parish
had received a cent of the billions that Congress allotted for redeveloping
the Gulf Coast. One of those houses, neat and tidy amid the boarded-up homes
and overgrown yards, belongs to Schmidt. In that house, in Schmidt's desire
for things simply to return to the way they were, a second flood arose--this
time one of controversy, recriminations and accusations of racism. 

Schmidt, afraid that his neighborhood would re-emerge transformed after
Hurricane Katrina, proposed an ordinance to the Parish Council that would
prevent people from renting their homes to people unrelated by blood. In
late September 2006 the Parish Council took this up and the proposal became
law. Schmidt's block, like a thousand others in St. Bernard Parish, was
protected from change even while it was suspended in devastation. 

Anger at the ordinance was immediate in this region where race and its
complexities provide the subtext and backdrop for nearly every nuance of
public life. The Greater New Orleans Fair Housing Action Center sued,
pointing out that 93 percent of St. Bernard Parish property owners were
white and that the ordinance effectively discriminated in the same manner
that was found unconstitutional in Shelley v. Kramer five decades earlier,
even if the reality of race was hidden in the language of blood. Its brief
argued, "St. Bernard Parish seeks to perpetuate segregation by preserving
the parish as an overwhelmingly all-white enclave." 

The council presented a world-weary and defiant face in light of the suit
and attacks that came in the local press. Parish council member Craig
Taffaro, who represents Chalmette, much of which is now a brownfield site
due to an oil leak from an international oil company's refinery during
Katrina, denied any racial motivation and mocked those who were imputing
such implications to a reporter from the Times Picayune: "What a tremendous
burden it must be to believe that everything is motivated by race. Our
motivation is simply to do what's best for our recovery and to restore and
maintain our pre-Katrina quality of life." 

Another council member cited the uniform gratitude of his constituents in
passing the ordinance and explained that the Council would not revoke it. At
the next council meeting, they lawyered up and hunkered down for a fight,
over the objection of the eccentric, outspoken and white--like the rest of
the members--council president Lynn Dean, who had voted against the
ordinance and who wrote that it was intended to keep blacks from moving to
the parish in his column in the St. Bernard Parish Voice. Dean tried to
simplify the issue at the meeting, saying, "Our parish is broke. We don't
have the money to fix roads. We are going to hire an attorney, and when it's
all over with, we are going to lose." The meeting ended in closed session,
with the council moving to censure Dean for his outrageous invocation of
race in criticizing the ordinance. 

But things had changed by the council meeting the following month. In the
late-morning December sun, in a double-wide trailer behind the destroyed
Parish Government Building on Judge Perez Drive, council members said the
pledge, prayed to Jesus and worked their way through their regular
business--naming the Parish's "Teacher of the Year" and castigating the
director of the company with the contract to disburse billions in federal
rebuilding funds for failing to pay out a single dollar to residents or to
any of the council members, all of whom lost their homes to the
storm--before reaching the business of the rental ordinance, which had
brought me and a few other print and television journalists to their
down-to-earth and informal meeting. On the docket was a new ordinance, to
revoke the "blood ordinance," maybe at the urging of their $200-an-hour
lawyer, maybe because they just realized that they had better things to do
than fighting the rest of the world on this. 

Bill Schmidt, reading from prepared notes, spoke against revoking the
ordinance, arguing against the tide, "They say it's a racial thing.... I
don't want to hear this baloney about this being about race.... We just
wanna live as we lived before." And then defiantly, but sad: "I'm from the
Ninth Ward. I've always lived with this negative image. I'm looked down at
by the rich people. I don't care what other people think about the Parish."
And as much as most of the council members seemed to relate to him, they
voted unanimously to back down from this fight and to revoke the ordinance,
and then moved on to the business of rebuilding. 

The television cameras and other journalists left quickly after the
ordinance was revoked, eager to report the story for the evening news. I sat
for a while and listened to the council address the true and seemingly
insurmountable obstacles the parish faces. Levee maintenance. Oil
contamination. Sewer funds. Closing the canal built through the parish for
industry that worsened Katrina's destruction. With each issue the council
members seemed almost powerless in the face of the human, natural, business
and financial forces against them. And it became clear how the rental
ordinance had risen to the top of the stack of parish business. It was easy.
It brought the people of the parish together--at least most of them. It was
about making an "us" and saying "the hell to you" to all those "thems." 

As I walked out of the meeting, probably by then the only face that everyone
didn't recognize, a man walked up to me and spoke bitterly, "Now you can go
tell the people up in New York and Washington all about it." I tried to
explain that I lived in New Orleans. That we weren't all against them. That
we hoped for the best in their recovery. But he seemed unconvinced. I got
into my car and drove back down Judge Perez Drive across the parish line. 

---
Billy Sothern, an anti-death penalty lawyer and writer living in New
Orleans, is working on the forthcoming Down in New Orleans, a book about the
realities of American poverty and racism revealed by Hurricane Katrina, to
be published by University of California Press.