Legacies and lessons of the mayors
Editor's Column from LCV Spring 2010

In the run up to the now concluded race for the mayoralty of New Orleans, the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities conducted an unprecedented program, "The Mayors Series," in an effort to provide historical context to the partisan debates of current issues. At a moment when New Orleans is still trying to reinvent itself following Hurricane Katrina, we thought it crucial to understand and contrast the nature of the city under previous mayors. Among the issues we hoped to illuminate were the demographics - i.e. the size of the city, its racial distribution, how the infrastructure of the city evolved - and what were the major challenges and legacies of each administration. We also hoped to better understand the character of the mayors and their respective styles of governance.

We commenced with the post-war administration of DeLesseps "Chep" Morrison (1946-1961) and proceeded sequentially through the next six decades of six two-term administrations: Victor Schiro, Moon Landrieu, Dutch Morial, Sidney Barthelemy, and Marc Morial, culminating with the incumbent Ray Nagin. To secure a balanced range of perspectives, each panel included members of the administration along with scholars and journalists. All the living mayors, with the exception of Nagin, consented to short video interviews that preceded the public panel discussions.

Different Times, a Different City
The New Orleans we discussed spanning the 64 years of mayoral tenures was a very different place in each historical frame. From an overwhelming white majority city in 1946, the city grew to its largest population in 1960 of 627,000. By 1978 it had transitioned to a majority African-American city with a population that steadily eroded until it fell to 454,000 with a 69/31 percent black/white composition just before Katrina hit. With the election in 2010 of Mitch Landrieu, this second son of a former mayor inherits a city of approximately 328,000 with a 62/38 percent black/white population.

Of all the mayors, I found my imagination piqued by the remarkable historical moment of the Schiro administration (1961-1970), about which I was plagued by nary a rumination until the panel unfolded. For it was Vic Schiro who came into office obliged, if not actually inclined, to enforce the laws of segregation, and then midway through his tenure, literally from one day to the next, he was required to enforce desegregation and a radically altered legal and social universe. This transitional moment is arguably the unresolved legacy which has dominated all subsequent administrations.

Legacy or Loss
The legacy of each administration, was with rare exception characterized by reference to a large capital project - whether or not the mayor himself was actually the prime mover - such as the Superdome, the casino, the Arena, riverfront streetcar or Woldenberg Park. Not one mayor seemed concerned that more basic infrastructure, such as streets, schools, and drainage, was being funded at 10 percent of other cities such as Baton Rouge. Only Marc Morial cited the reduction of crime as one of his signal accomplishments. More notable than their "accomplishments" was the universal absence of addressing more important indices of progress such as high school graduation and literacy rates, per-capita income, the number of new private sector jobs created, private investment, and the expansion of the tax base.

In fact, it was especially telling that the last four mayors viewed the loss of the white middle class as nothing more than an opportunity to consolidate their political base. Not one saw the flight of the middle class for what it also was: a dramatic and mortal contraction of the city's tax base with its corollary damage to both the city treasury and infrastructure, and especially the erosion of the public schools. Without the tax base or a politically-invested middle class, the public school system was doomed to mediocrity. As a consequence, no strategy was ever considered, let alone implemented, to reverse the trend, except perhaps the creating of magnet schools to attract the middle class back to the public schools, a policy that proved far too little far too late, and in any case was never fully embraced, as evident in the composition of even the new charter schools.

One overwhelming lesson derived from the "Mayors Series" was that several failures were common across administrations. Except for the brief respite of the Marc Morial administration, crime and a contracting tax base ravaged the city from the 1970s onward, following the flight of the white, and later the black middle class from the core city. Most importantly, the lack of mayoral power over public education also clearly lay at the root of not only crime, but the economic stagnation of the city. Until someone is politically answerable for the quality of education, there will be little likelihood of meaningful improvement. Sadly, not one of the six recent candidates for mayor, not even the victor, has any intention of being legally responsible (such as by amending the city charter or state constitution) or anything more than a sideline cheerleader for public education. Seven mayors can predict the inevitable consequence.

—Michael Sartisky, Ph.D., Editor-In-Chief