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Eddie Rispone: Despite Some Resemblance, He’s No Ross Perot

By
Sue Lincoln
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Having seen Eddie Rispone’s performances in the televised debates, more than a few Twitter wits have remarked on the Republican candidate for governor’s resemblance to the late Ross Perot, who passed away in July.

“I’m starting to believe in reincarnation. I do believe that funny little man Ross Perot died, and immediately came back as Eddie Rispone. Call it deja vu, from ‘92!” one rhymster quipped.

Another tweet was more harsh: “Eddie Rispone is like an extra-racist, off-brand Louisiana version of Ross Perot.”

Some of that comparison no doubt results from Rispone’s silver hair and comparatively diminutive stature. Perot, who was 62 when he stepped onto the national political stage in 1992, stood a mere 5’5”. But the majority is due primarily to the high pitch of Eddie’s voice.

“He reminds me of a bad parody of Ross Perot, without any of the redeeming humor of Dana Carvey’s impersonation,” said another social media commenter.

(You can observe and make the mental comparison for yourself, Wednesday night, October 9. Louisiana’s network of Gray-owned TV stations – KSLA in Shreveport, WVUE Fox8 in New Orleans, WAFB in Baton Rouge, KPLC in Lake Charles, KALB in Alexandria, and KATC in Lafayette – will be airing the last pre-primary debate at 7 p.m.).

Both Perot and Rispone could be deemed business moguls. Both have been branded (in the case of Rispone, self-branded) as “outsiders.” But while the surface similarities may be striking, the policy framework behind each man’s facade is vastly different from the other.

Perot advocated for a balanced federal budget, an increase in the fuel tax, and higher taxes on the wealthy. He supported an assault rifle ban, gay rights, and was pro-choice, actively supporting Planned Parenthood. In present-day political descriptives, Perot would be termed “progressive.”

Eddie Rispone.

Rispone – as most ambitious Republicans are wont to do – is making every effort to embrace the sobriquet of “most conservative.” He opposes abortion under any circumstances, preferring to assert the “right to life” of the fetus any rights (including life) of the woman who is providing that potential human with all its sustenance. And, no matter what it costs citizens’ quality of life by way of reducing or eliminating current government programs, Rispone wants to lower taxes, particularly his own.

He can be termed a “self-made” multi-millionaire, as was Perot, although we do know Eddie Rispone has had more than a little help from Louisiana taxpayers in achieving his wealth.

He’s the chairman of ISC Constructors, LLC, which he founded with his brother, Jerry, in 1989. (Jerry, by the way, has a son named “Lane”. We can only speculate, but perhaps… in tribute to Lane Grigsby?) ISC is an industrial engineering and construction company based in Baton Rouge, with divisions in Beaumont and Houston, Texas and Sulphur, Louisiana. They design and build electrical instrumentation and control systems for large industrial plants, and employ approximately 2500 people.

As of 2015, ISC was ranked number 19 of the top 50 electrical contractors in the U.S., with annual revenue of $329-million. Since then, the industrial building boom in Louisiana has provided ISC with more work and close to a half-billion dollars in annual revenues.

Rispone’s wealth is great enough that his family foundation has assets in excess of $12-million, according to ProPublica. And he has been able to primarily self-fund his gubernatorial campaign with more than $10-million.

Profiting From the System

With no intentions of casting any aspersions on Rispone’s business acumen or the caliber of work performed by ISC Constructors, there is little doubt that he and his businesses have benefited greatly from Louisiana’s corporate-friendly tax incentive programs, although it’s difficult to quantify the actual dollar amount.

While ISC has participated in nearly every major industrial project constructed in the state over the past decade, they are sub-contractors. The company designs and installs the electrical components and control systems that run the machinery in refineries and chemical plants.

According to the Louisiana Department of Economic Development, from 2008-2016, ISC Constructors was a subcontractor on industrial projects that – combined – received more than $750-million in ten-year property tax exemptions under the Industrial Tax Exemption Program (ITEP). Projects at Motiva, PCS Nitrogen, Shell, and Valero Refining created 19 new full-time jobs between them. Other ISC-involved expansions- for Rubicon, TOTAL Chemicals, Exxon Mobil, and Marathon – created no new jobs whatsoever.

That should come as no real surprise because ISC primarily installs new computerized technologies and automation equipment that reduces or eliminates the need for human operators. What they do for these industries is, essentially, geared to eliminating jobs.

Sasol plant, Westlake. Photo courtesy Louisiana Chemical Association.

ISC has, however, directly benefited from the state’s Enterprise Zone tax credits.

For their work on the Sasol project in Calcasieu Parish, they’ve been getting $2.5 million a year in payroll tax credits since 2014, plus rebates on sales and use taxes for the materials, machinery and supplies used on the project. At ISC’s main headquarters in Baton Rouge, the addition of a new engineering facility, started in 2013, has netted nearly $3-million per year in payroll tax credits, plus sales tax rebates. The LED website currently lists both of these as “active contracts.”

As we have previously reported, in February and March of 2016, ISC Constructors asked the U.S. Department of Labor for permission to hire three foreign citizens, each at a base salary of $56,000 a year, through the controversial H1-B visa system. At the time those applications were made, ISC was in the middle of settlement negotiations with nearly a hundred former employees who were alleging they had not been properly compensated for the hour they had worked. The majority of them were Hispanic, and ISC ultimately settled the trio of federal class-action lawsuits with those 96 workers.

Perhaps that partially explains this full-page ad Rispone ran in the Times-Picayune on Friday, July 19th, promising violence when and if he is elected.

Education “Reform” Insider

Rispone’s campaign has done its utmost to depict him as a just an average working class, pickup-driving granddad. They dressed him in jeans and a plaid shirt for a TV ad, talking about the Trump bumper sticker on his truck, trying to make you think he’s simply another “good ol’ boy.” That ad, like nearly all his others, pushes a brand name: “outsider.”

Nope.

After all, political outsiders don’t generally fund and operate political action committees (PACs) of their own, nor do they contribute four, five, even six-figure amounts to candidates or other PACs. Rispone has been doing all of that for the past dozen years.

His entry into the world of political influence can be traced back to 1996, when he began developing deeper connections with the other two men now comprising the Erector Set. That year, Rispone was elected president of Associated Builders and Contractors Pelican Chapter, which Lane Grigsby had helped co-found in 1980. Art Favre served as one of ABC’s vice-presidents. In addition, Rispone was named to the executive committee of LABI’s Board of Directors, on which Grigsby served, that same year.

Over the years, this triad, through their companies, have contributed to ABC Pelican PAC, which Rispone’s son, Thad, now runs. Most recently, that PAC funded the Louisiana House Republican Caucus’s advertising and video campaign, through the four 2018 legislative sessions.

(Side note: political consultant Lionel Rainey, who ran the 2018 Louisiana House GOP campaign, is now managing Ralph Abraham’s gubernatorial run – not Rispone’s.)

Okay, that’s trivia; relatively minor money and influence, especially when compared to the rest of Rispone’s political story. But it does illustrate the long-term connections of the Erector Set cabal, and how long they’ve had to develop and test some of the strategy they’re using in openly seeking power this election year.

Rispone’s first notable taste of political power and influence came after then-Gov. Bobby Jindal named him to chair the Louisiana Workforce Investment Council in 2009. That group, comprised of business owners, public officials, trade and labor group leaders, was tasked with finding ways to prepare for Louisiana’s future workforce needs.

That was where they all began talking about the need for business and industry to “step in” and “assist” public education. The opportunity for business to profit – not just by having better-trained workers – but from the money taxpayers put into public education was too good to pass up. (As early as 2001, Ed Next – a publication of the corporately-funded EducationNext.org – had touted the potential in an article titled The Private Can Be Public.)

Louisiana had already made some moves in the direction of “education reform” (as the privatization movement is generally known), primarily in New Orleans, as financial necessity in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina encouraged the proliferation of charter schools. Additionally, in his first year as governor in 2008, Jindal – a devout Catholic – had pushed for lawmakers to authorize the funding of vouchers, so disadvantaged New Orleans schoolchildren could attend parochial schools, with state taxpayers covering the tuition. Jindal hoped to expand the program, officially referred to as “scholarships”, statewide. Rispone, also a devout Catholic, loved that idea and much of the rest of the “reform” platform. He then, along with Lane Grigsby, engaged in building some of the infrastructure that would help advance comprehensive “education reform” through Louisiana’s Legislature in 2012.

He and his wife Linda put $750,000 into producing The Experiment documentary, about students in New Orleans charter schools. Released in 2011, like the more widely-viewed 2010 film, Waiting For Superman, it became part of the public relations campaign put on by education reformers prior to the 2012 Louisiana legislative session.

As executive producers, Eddie and Linda benefited tax-wise from making the film. In 2010, they received a refundable income tax credit for $213,484.58, through Louisiana’s film tax credit program.

Eddie Rispone, 2nd from left: and Sec. Betsy DeVos, center. Original photo from ISC Constructors website.

Rispone also started and chaired the Louisiana Federation for Children, a state chapter of the national American Federation for Children, defined by SourceWatch as “a conservative 501(c)(4) dark money group that promotes the school privatization agenda via the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and other avenues. The group was organized and is funded by the billionaire DeVos family, who are the heirs to the Amway fortune.” (Yes, that would be the same DeVos – current U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos. And on ISC Constructors’ website, there’s a July 2017 article bragging about a meeting Rispone had with the Secretary, and the length of their work together.)

Bobby Jindal speaks at American Federation for Children summit, May 3, 2012.

Rispone ran the Louisiana Federation for Children PAC during the 2011 push to elect BESE members who would support giving John White the State Superintendent position, and the PAC also funneled money to legislative candidates who had indicated they backed education reform. The PAC spent $283,000 on those races.

The PAC lay fallow for the next three years, but in the election year of 2015, it started receiving large cash infusions, including contributions from DeVos and the Waltons. Rispone and his wife Linda each put $100,000 in, and at one point, the PAC had more than a half-million-dollars available to spend. It again put money into legislative races, as well as spending more than $122,000 to support three of the candidates for BESE. But the biggest spending came in November 2015, during the governor race runoff. LFC PAC spent over $265,000 on media buys opposing John Bel Edwards.

Shortly after Edwards’ inauguration, the Louisiana Federation for Children ran a TV ad campaign attacking the governor. They were upset over possible reductions to the statewide voucher program, which were being discussed – along with other cutbacks – as options for dealing with the budget mess left for Edwards by the Jindal administration. At a Republican meet-and-greet in January 2019, Rispone admitted he had personally financed the attack ads.

And in the summer of 2016, Rispone started a second LFC PAC – the Louisiana Federation for Children Action Fund, putting $150,000 of his personal money into it. Jim Walton contributed another $100,000 to the fund in December 2018, which was Rispone’s last as chairman of LFC, and as the operator of its two PACs. He resigned from the organization due to his gubernatorial campaign.

St. George Catholic Church. Rispone is a parishioner.

“God Has Asked Me”

On various occasions, Rispone has told Republican supporters that his decision to run for governor – like his advocacy for school reforms – “It’s all about my faith.”

And as Melinda Deslatte of AP described Rispone: “He chokes back tears when describing a drive to try to help thousands of children who attend public schools deemed failing by the state, saying ‘God has asked me to do something about his kids’.”

That may play well with voters outside the capital region, but those who live in the Baton Rouge area identify Eddie Rispone closely with the “St. George” movement, and all its undertones of white privilege. He’s been one of the biggest backers and funders behind the effort to carve out a new city – with its own school district – utilizing the Baton Rouge suburbs.

That voter initiative is on this October 12 ballot.

St. George and the School District Dragon

In 2012, the same year as the push for education reform, there was also a move to create a new school district within East Baton Rouge parish. State Sen. Bodi White filed bills to create Southeast Baton Rouge Community School System, which required a statewide constitutional amendment, plus separate approval by voters in the new district and voters in EBR parish as a whole. He also had a bill to allow creation of future separate school districts without requiring a constitutional amendment.

The new district would have grabbed 10 schools, including the 3 newest schools built by EBR. The measures died on the House floor.

In 2013, Sen. White tried again. At the time, I was covering education for LPB, and I asked him about this seeming to be a move toward resegregation.

State Sen. Bodi White interviews with Sue Lincoln.

“We’ve been through a lot in this parish in the last 30 years, with desegregation, forced busing. There’s a huge distrust about the school system,” White said, then added it’s not about race – it’s about economics.

“Probably about half of the school-age kids in this parish go to private or parochial schools. It’s an economic concern. Can you afford to send your kids to another school? We can pay it, but it’s killing us. I can’t put any money in my 401K. I can’t put any money in their higher education fund. I can’t upsize my house. You take $30,000 or more – cash – for tuition out of our household budget – it’s crippling us!”

He was certain a new school district was the answer.

“The people who live in this area of the parish would love to be able to send their kids back to public schools.”

Again, no joy in the legislature for a new school district. So by end of 2013, the movement to create the city of St George was launched.

Albert Samuels, a political science professor at Southern University observed at the time, “Though the campaign doesn’t talk about it in these terms, a predominantly white and middle-class area of south Baton Rouge is attempting to secede from a school system and a city that is majority African-American. Instead, they have the temerity to say with a straight face that this has nothing to do with race.“

In 2014, Rispone put $100,000 into the Better Schools, Better Futures PAC, which supported the St. George city creation. That PAC was run by Lane Grigsby.

When the St. George initiative failed to muster enough support to make the ballot, Rispone created the Citizens for a Better Baton Rouge PAC with $125,000 of his own, plus more than $83,000 from fellow member of the Erector Set, Art Favre. That PAC ran ads and sent out direct mailings in support of Bodi White’s 2016 run for mayor of Baton Rouge. (White lost.)

Yet Rispone, who now claims his campaign for the governorship is “all about my faith”, has a real bone to pick with the activist church and community-based organization, Together Baton Rouge, blaming them for the first failure of St. George. Last year, with the renewed effort underway to create the new city, Rispone started a non-profit organization to counter Together Baton Rouge, called Baton Rouge Families First.

“Together Baton Rouge opposed a group of parents trying to get a better education for their children,” he said, when announcing the new non-profit. “It might have been called St. George, but it was really about giving children a better education.”

Acknowledging that TBR’s opposition to cookie-cutter approvals of ITEPs further incensed him, he questioned that group’s actions as an expression of its members’ faith, saying, “If Together Baton Rouge truly wants to help families you would think they would be working with their ally religious leaders in educating congregants about morals, virtues, independence and family life – the bedrock of a sound society.”

“All about faith”? “Educating about morals, virtues, family life”? With all due respect, Mr. Rispone, what do your campaign contributions say about how much you truly treasure those values?

You and your company contributed more than $352,000 to David Vitter – his federal and state campaigns, and his Fund for Louisiana’s Future Super PAC – since the revelation and his admission of a “serious sin” in 2007.

In addition, you gave $100,000 to the Trump Victory fund, and have made every effort to hitch your campaign wagon to Trump’s star. This is the same man who bragged on tape that, “When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab ‘em by the pussy.”

L to R: Eddie Rispone, US Vice President Mike Pence, Ralph Abraham. Photo courtesy Twitter, via Lynda Woolard.

So, unsurprisingly, Trump isn’t saving all his love for you. He and his son and his vice president have been stumping – at the same time, on the same stage – for both you and Ralph Abraham.

Now, Eddie, don’t you wish you were an insider, after all?

Book Review | Nothing to Write Home About: Sarah M. Broom’s The Yellow House

By
Lydia Y. Nichols
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Featured image: A boulevard of imposing homes in New Orleans East. Source: the Bayou Brief.

The yellow house – where author Sarah M. Broom grew up and for which she named her memoir, The Yellow House – used to be green, back when Broom’s mother, Ivory Mae, purchased it with insurance money from her first husband’s death.

A teenage widow and mother to three small boys, Ivory moved into the house in a pocket of New Orleans East wedged between railroad tracks, a trailer park, and a six-lane highway with her new husband Simon Broom and his two daughters.

Together, Ivory and Simon hosted parties, had seven more children, made unfinished additions to the then-green house, and danced on the lawn after dark.

Simon worked at the NASA plant, played trumpet and banjo at second lines, and made the family’s social calendar which included membership in the Pontchatrain Park Social Aid and Pleasure Club. The blended Webb and Broom family had a pleasant enough life when they welcomed the 12th child, the author, to whom they gave the name Monique Sarah Broom.

Six months after Broom’s birth, Simon died from a brain aneurysm and there ends the dynamism of the book.

Somehow, Broom changes names, schools, jobs, friends, churches, careers, cities, continents, but per her portrayal, she remains unchanged. She writes about experiencing anxiety created by her brother’s crack addiction, guilt for having not experienced Hurricane Katrina as a resident, sadness at the death of her childhood friend, sometimes noting journal entries she’d made at the time.

She writes about her emotions but portrays herself as inhumanly constant. The Yellow House reads like a book-long double-dolly shot, dissociative, both self-centered and lacking in self-awareness, shrouded in blurry context.

New Orleans native Sarah Broom’s debut memoir “The Yellow House,” first published in 2015, has earned the author widespread critical acclaim, instantly establishing her as one of the nation’s most important literary voices.

More than a month has passed since I first sat down to read The Yellow House, excited by a memoir about someone like me – a Black woman writer from New Orleans, the youngest of a large family, with family roots in Central City, who sees in Black women’s relationship to home a universality, an opportunity to connect people through stories about the shared human desire to belong.

But I found myself constantly extending the benefit of the doubt: when Broom misrepresents Black New Orleans vernacular, when she suggests that gold teeth are evidence of criminality, when she refers to Black children in the French Quarter as criminals.

Broom at the book signing hosted at Melba’s. Source: Twitter.

The final straw landed when Broom gave away copies of the book at Melba’s, a white-owned restaurant and laundromat in a gentrifying 8th Ward that many Black New Orleanians have avoided since a manager, the owner’s brother, said they would not screen the football game if any players kneeled in protest of police violence.

I was less disturbed by her choice to partner with them (after all, she doesn’t live here and might not have known their history) than by the realization that hers is the kind of narrative people like the Melba’s owners can get behind, a story of Black exceptionalism that supports the benevolent racist belief that Black people just need to ‘pull ourselves up by the bootstraps’ (expressed by the Melba’s owner in this interview).

Broom grew up in New Orleans East at the height of the area’s prosperity. New Orleans East, to this day, houses quite a bit of Black wealth and political influence. But you wouldn’t know that from The Yellow House.

Broom depicts the East as slums, characterized by “junkyards, trailer parks, and flagrant prostitution” as New York Times critic Dwight Garner writes.

Though Broom sort of acknowledges in her use of the phrase “the short end of Wilson” throughout the book that the area in which she grew up is hardly representative of New Orleans East as a whole, she undermines that distinction by recounting interactions between her and Black New Orleanians from the other side of the canal meant to drive home the East’s supposed alienation from the rest of the city.

“Often, when I tell fellow natives that I am from New Orleans East,” she writes, “[T]hey will say, ‘Oh baby, don’t tell nobody that.’”

When people say she doesn’t have a New Orleans accent, Broom explains by saying she’s from New Orleans East. But her brothers who are also from New Orleans East have accents according to her own account.

In Broom’s New Orleans, the French Quarter dominates the geography, and the East is an afterthought at best. After receiving her advance to write the memoir, Broom returns to New Orleans and lives in the French Quarter to conduct research for her memoir.

Broom writes that she chooses to live in the French Quarter to centralize herself in the story of New Orleans.

“The farther out you are from the French Quarter,” she writes, “the less tended you would be.”

That’s not the way I experience the city.

Until its demolition in 2008, the Iberville public housing development was across the street from the French Quarter, the Lafitte was just blocks away.

Central City, one of the most under-resourced neighborhoods in the city with the highest rate of gun violence, is separated from the French Quarter by a walkable mile. Rampart Street divides the French Quarter from the historic Treme neighborhood, part of which was demolished by imminent domain to build a community center that never came into existence and Louis Armstrong Park.

Half a mile further into Treme lies the Interstate – which fertilized the East’s development by bridging the two sides of the Industrial Canal when it was built atop the remains of black-owned homes, businesses, and Oak Tree-filled neutral ground.

Next to the interstate is University Medical Center, the private hospital that unnecessarily replaced the minimally-damaged public hospital after Katrina. Eighty city blocks of homes that had been rebuilt after the storm were razed to build it. Developers now propose to make the former public hospital a massive AirBnB complex, with a few market and below-market rate residences.

Each of these Black and under-resourced neighborhoods is within walking distance from the French Quarter. Past all of them, much farther from the French Quarter than they are, lay wealthier, whiter neighborhoods like the Garden District, Lakeview, and Bayou St. John.

The geographic and cultural centrality of the French Quarter to the lived experiences of Black New Orleans, to determining how resources and life chances are distributed, is a figment of Broom’s imagination.

Broom’s questionable, if not outright false, social and historical analysis is compounded by her lack of self-awareness. Broom, in her steadfastness, is as impossible a character as sill on piers atop swampland is a foundation for a home: You can try it, but in the long run, it won’t hold up against the surge of reality.

Broom’s childhood home at 4121 Wilson Avenue was destroyed and is now a vacant, blighted lot. In her debut memoir, Broom misapprehends the geography of the city and reveals a disorientation with the lived experiences of Black New Orleans. Image by the Bayou Brief.

It’d be one thing if Broom were the narrator of a novel – whose claim to objectivity or lack of self-reflection was just a character flaw that readers knowingly factor into their perception of the narrative. But this is memoir, Black memoir, the foundation of the Black American literary cannon laid by authors who, in the eyes of the law, were considered criminals, thieves of their own bodies, time, and labor.

In the genre of Black memoir, Broom’s attempt to appear staid, a flat, quasi-objective documentarian whose worst offense in life is having skipped school, challenges her credibility and amplifies the book’s analytical flaws.

Yes, urban planning has historically been and still is pretty freaking racist, but the isolation Broom attributes to urban planning seems mostly a result of her family dynamics – her mother’s social isolation following the death of Broom’s culturally-engaged father and the gap in age between Broom and her older siblings – than a result of New Orleans geographies.

Broom’s social and cultural isolation is her own, not the East’s, not everyone-who-lives-outside-the-French-Quarter’s. The home Broom writes is hers alone, and there’s nothing wrong with that, I suppose. I just wish she hadn’t tried to make it seem like she’s writing for a voiceless Black polity that, by and large, does not identify with her experience. The Yellow House left me wondering, what was the point?

This critique of urban planning that dovetails into a paternalistic chastisement of Black New Orleans for taking pride in our culture is not unique to Broom.

Tulane University academic Matt Sakakeeny and his Australia-based colleague Thomas Jessen Adams recently co-edited an anthology entitled Remaking New Orleans: Beyond Exceptionalism and Authenticity.

As explained in an Advocate op-ed, the editorial premise of Remaking New Orleans is that New Orleanians are more invested in preserving the veneer of cultural authenticity that drives racist economic development decisions than we are in combatting inequitable systems, like lack of quality public education and affordable housing.

Remaking New Orleans, edited by Thomas Jessee Adams and Matt Sakakeeny, 2019. Duke University Press.

Sakakeeny and Adams don’t explicitly refer to Black New Orleans but the cultural traditions that they describe as distractions – “creole cuisine, voodoo queens, and hot jazz” – are inarguably Black.

Our foodways, spiritual practices, and musical traditions share a primary purpose: to fortify relationships within our community through process and ritual.

Black New Orleans rests safely on the stilts of relationships. You are the family who chooses you, the schools you attend, the neighborhoods in which you grow up, the friends you run with. Within our families, at our schools, in our neighborhoods, we engage in the processes of relationship which leads to the products for which we are internationally renowned – our food, our spirituality, our music.

Broom writes that, in the aftermath of the Federal Flood, she realized the error in centering a place in one’s identity, but I disagree with the idea that that is an error.

Our choice to claim this place as part of our identity is a choice to honor our relationships, a practice that feels especially important in this post-Post-Katrina moment when New Orleans is being ‘remade’ by people who resent their lack of access to the social and political capital that comes with having gone through these processes. Our choice to claim this place as part of our identity is political, an act of civic engagement, a fortification of the relationships between Black people that it has been the primary task of white supremacy to dissolve.

As the city sinks and the water rises and the infrastructure fails and the newcomers call the cops on us for playing music where music has always been played, our relationships, which is to say our cultural integrity, buoy us up. There’s still time for Monique to grab on. I’m not so sure about Sarah though.

Erector Set: Power$ Behind the Hoped-for Throne

By
Sue Lincoln
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Louisiana, like the rest of the South, has a long history of wealthy white men banding together to influence state and local politics, donating individually and collectively to trade groups and candidates for elected offices. Once they were called “citizens’ councils”, and were aligned with the Dixiecrats. Now, they form non-profit “grassroots” organizations, set up political action committees (PACs), and are active within the Louisiana Association of Business and Industry (LABI), and the Republican Party.

November 1955 “Citizens’ Councils” newspaper. From public domain.

The latest gang seeking to dominate and control state government and policies are those we are calling the “Erector Set”.

Each of them has built his own multi-million-dollar company, through building industrial facilities for other multi-million-dollar companies. These men are used to running things and getting their own way. And they have friends who think like they do.

The mastermind of the current Baton Rouge-based triumvirate is Lane Grigsby, Chairman of the Board of Cajun Contractors, and Chairman Emeritus for the LABI Board of Directors.

Grigsby’s longtime friend and ally is Eddie Rispone, the founder and chairman of ISC Constructors, who is now running for Governor of Louisiana. Grigsby and Rispone have been working together to influence local and statewide political races and issues for nearly a decade.

The most recent addition to this cabal is Art Favre, founder and president of Performance Contractors, a company with 2017 annual revenue in excess of $1.5-billion. Favre “joined” the Erector Set early in 2018.

These three men are involved in many of the same interest groups: LABI, Associated Builders and Contractors (ABC), supporting LSU’s College of Engineering (of which they are all alumni), and, in the case of Rispone and Favre particularly, involvement in Catholic charities and fundraising for Our Lady of the Lake.

Art Favre

Favre started Performance Contractors in 1979, and had generally been considered a “philanthropic” corporate citizen until recently. Certainly, he invested his wealth in a variety of projects, including purchasing the majority interest in The Wharf at Orange Beach, Alabama, in December 2011. The development, which was in foreclosure, cost him a reported $14-million.

He has served on the Federal Reserve Board, and as director for Mary Bird Perkins Cancer Center at Our Lady of the Lake Hospital. He also donated $1-million toward construction of the new Children’s Hospital at OLOL. Additionally, he endowed the chairman professorship for LSU’s construction management program, for $1.2-million.

Up until the past couple of years, Favre was not one who could be classified as a “substantial” political donor. Although he – but more usually his company – contributed to campaigns and PACs, like LABI’s and ABC’s, it was always in relatively modest amounts.

In 2016, he put $58,000 into Eddie Rispone’s Citizens For A Better Baton Rouge PAC, which ran ads supporting Bodi White and opposing Sharon Weston-Broome in the Baton Rouge mayor’s race. Weston-Broome won that contest.

In 2017, Favre served as chairman of LABI’s Board of Directors. That threw him into close alliance with LABI’s chairman emeritus, Lane Grigsby. Prior to that, Favre had a pattern of giving $50 per year to each of LABI’s four regional PACs (East PAC, West PAC, North PAC, South PAC). But in April 2018, he put $25,000 into each of those funds – donated under his company’s name.

John Diez. Photo from LABI.

That same month, he personally put $100,000 into the LA Free Enterprise PAC, which Lane Grigsby had seeded with another $100,000 one month prior. The fund is managed by John Diez, president of Magellan Strategies, a research and polling firm based in Baton Rouge. Diez also serves as LABI’s Director of Political Action Committees and of the super PAC, Louisiana Committee for a Republican Majority, which has now been renamed the Louisiana Conservative Majority PAC. (That’s the super PAC once controlled by David Vitter, who has since turned it and its work over to Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry.)

The Grigsby-Favre LA Free Enterpise PAC spent about $75,000 of its money in the fall of 2018. In addition to hosting “PAC strategy meetings” at Hooters (Baton Rouge twice, Metairie four times, West Bank three times, and Bossier City twice) the PAC spent on oppositional research and direct mailings to influence the Plaquemines Parish Council elections – hoping to impanel a council that would vote to permanently end the parish’s coastal lawsuits against the oil and gas industry.

The first of those lawsuits was settled last week, just prior to its scheduled trial start date.

The Great Grigsby

Lane Grigsby

In 1973, Lane Grigsby founded what has become Cajun Industries – now with five divisions: Cajun Constructors, Cajun Industrial Design and Construction, Cajun Deep Foundations, Cajun Maritime, and Cajun Equipment Services. By 2016, the company’s total revenue was more than $721-million.

In 1976, Grigsby was one of the first to join the newly-formed Louisiana Association of Business and Industry, with its initial mission of getting the “Right to Work” law passed, and dismantle what then-head of LABI, Ed Steimel termed “uncontrolled and excessive political power of labor unions.”

(It should be noted that, in LABI’s arguments for passage of the “Right-to-Work” law, Steimel claimed Louisiana lagged behind the rest of the nation in job creation during the prior 8 years because of organized labor – neglecting to mention the effect Louisiana politicians’ hard-line stance in favor of segregation and against implementing Civil Rights.)

Distaste for labor unions has remained one of Grigsby’s core values. In 2014 and 2015, Grigsby was heavily involved in LABI’s push for the slyly named “Pay Check Protection” bill, which would prohibit governmental agencies from collecting and remitting workers’ union dues. LABI did internet broadcasts of these meetings for their members, and NOLA.com captured snippets from them, publishing Grigsby’s video commentary to YouTube. (Though they misidentify him in one clip as “Wayne” Grigsby)

“The impetus of it is to cut off the unions’ funding. They lose their stroke.” Grigsby explains. “This is a fatal spear to the heart of the giant, in truth.”

A second clip shows Grigsby stating, “Guys, this is where you grab the aorta, and shut it off. If you control the money flow, you control the success.”

While that bill failed to pass, there can be no doubt that Lane Grigsby controls plenty of money, and its flow to like-minded politicians and causes.

As one of the 1980 co-founders of Associated Builders and Contractors, he retains a lot of “stroke” with the organization, which operates two political action committees: ABC Merit PAC and ABC Pelican PAC (which is run by Thad Rispone), and which have each contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to Louisiana candidates over the years. Interestingly, those regularly benefiting from the ABC PACs are either Republicans running for statewide office, or state lawmakers who rank highly on LABI’s annual legislative scorecard.

(Also interestingly, there’s another PAC which goes by the “ABC” moniker: the Alliance for Better Classrooms. Grigsby originally set that one up in 2011. More on that later.)

Associated Builders and Contractors states in its strategic plan, “Without a voice influencing politics in the state, member companies will face complex and insurmountable challenges that will impact their bottom line,” and says the group’s goals include “robust political fundraising” and to “become one of the most influential lobbying organizations in the state.” Conveniently, that would align with electing one of their own as governor, would it not?

For at least eight years, Lane Grigsby has been refining his recipes for this year’s political picnic. He came to the attention of capital reporters in 2011, when – after his retirement from daily running Cajun Industries – he decided to infuse considerable cash and clout into buying the BESE races.

Campaigns for the unpaid elected Board of Elementary and Secondary Education seats were normally sleepy, low-budget affairs. But then-Gov. Bobby Jindal had decided he wanted the newly-imported Recovery School District superintendent, John White, to become State Superintendent of Education. In the spring of 2011, after demanding the resignation of then-state Superintendent Paul Pastorek – literally within days of White’s arrival – Jindal ran into resistance to his plan to install White in the top K-12 education post, with BESE members refusing to agree. (They are, technically, the ones with the power to hire and fire the Superintendent.)

John White with Lane Grigsby

Jindal was convinced having White at the helm would be necessary for implementing his planned “signature” legislation for his second term: education reform. Grigsby, who viewed the laundry list of proposed changes as being an opportunity for his business buddies to start profiting from the tax dollars going into public education – as well as spanking the state’s teachers who would not give up their faith and support in unions – was only too happy to help.

He stated unequivocally that he was working to “inject free-market principles into the monopoly of public education.”

In an interview with NOLA.com in October 2011, Grigsby offered an example from his business experience as an illustration.

“When job seekers interview at Cajun Industries, we have to find out how many children they have. We’ve got to take the number of children, multiply it by $10,000 and add that to their salary so they can put their kids in private school.”

For that race, Grigsby started and funded the Alliance for Better Classrooms (ABC PAC), seeding it with $100,000, and getting Cajun Industries and its executives to kick in another $160,000 overall. It’s a process he repeated in 2015, with his own and company donations, and adding $100,000 more in his wife’s name. That was to ensure elected BESE members would “hold the line” on education reforms and John White’s job, no matter who the new governor turned out to be. (This PAC is still active, and presently has former LABI president Dan Juneau at the helm.)

In 2015, Grigsby also started and ran Empower Louisiana PAC, which funneled millions from Michael Bloomberg, the Waltons, Eli Broad and others into the BESE races, to purchase BESE and protect John White.

In 2016, Lane Grigsby started another PAC, called “Citizens for Judicial Excellence”, sharing the address of Cajun Industries. It’s purpose? To influence judicial races. In particular, it was aimed toward candidates who might ultimately be positioned to rule on the coastal lawsuits against the oil and gas industry. Grigsby personally contributed more than $280,000 to CJE, and the PAC spent $316,350 on a single attack ad in the Jimmy Genovese-Marilyn Castle state Supreme Court race. Genovese was the target, yet he won the race.

Altogether over the previous decade, Lane Grigsby has contributed more than $2-million of his personal money toward stirring the political pot in Louisiana. Cajun Industries has put in nearly a half-million more.

Thus far this election year, Grigsby has personally donated $75,000 to the Louisiana Conservative Majority PAC, formerly known as the Louisiana PAC for a Republican Majority. And while he gave $1,000 to John Bel Edwards’ campaign on April 1 (perhaps as a joke?), last month Lane Grigsby became the sole funder of a brand new PAC, Movement for Change, Inc, contributing $100,000.

While not listed as an officer, merely as the PAC’s only contributor, Grigsby’s money (more than $90,000 of it) has been used to buy air time on urban radio stations in New Orleans, Baton Rouge, Lafayette, Lake Charles, and Shreveport-Bossier City. The stated purpose of the expenditures, according to the Louisiana Ethics Commission filings, is “INDEPENDENT EXPENDITURE ADVERTISING/MEDIA BUY FOR GOVERNOR’S RACE.” The radio ads are not bashing the incumbent, Gov. John Bel Edwards, nor are they boosting Eddie Rispone. Instead, they are supporting Oscar Omar Dantzler, an African-American from Hammond. A registered Democrat, Dantzler is a school bus driver, who does lawns on the side.

Presumably, the intent is to drain some of the black Democratic vote away from Gov. Edwards, preventing him from achieving the 50-percent-plus-one needed to win the jungle primary outright. With some polls showing Rispone leading Ralph Abraham, that would — theoretically — lead to a runoff between Rispone and Edwards, and an opportunity for the Erector Set to throw even more money into the political arena.

There’s an old phrase that sums up that strategy: “more money than sense.”

Best. Advice. Ever.

It’s been just over 30 years since businessman Eddie Rispone received what he has termed “life-altering advice” from his dear friend and fellow construction mogul, Lane Grigsby.

Grigsby has himself called it “the best advice I ever gave anyone.”

What were these magical words?

“Liquidate all your stock and start your own business.”

The sanitized version of the story, offered as part of Rispone’s biography in his current run for Louisiana governor, says in the spring of 1988, Rispone was becoming increasingly dissatisfied with his quality of life. He’d been working for the same company, Matthews-McCracken-Rutland, also known as MMR Corporation, since 1975, and had risen to become its vice president, acquiring stock in the company when it went public in early 1987. Yet he had reached “a tipping point”, and Grigsby’s advice was the answer.

Rispone, then approaching age 40, sold off some 27,000 shares of MMR stock from April through July of 1988, resigned from MMR, and in early 1989 started ISC Constructors.

Perhaps it was truly as innocuous as a manifestation of mid-life crisis, coupled with sound advice from a trusted friend, resulting ultimately in solid business success.

Yet what is not mentioned now, in 2019, are the other things that were going on with Louisiana’s Erector Set – and Rispone’s world, in particular – in the late 1980s. Grigsby’s advice may have saved Rispone’s ass, helping keep his name and person out of a notorious federal court case developing at the same time.

Big Cajun II

In November 1988, the U.S. Justice Department indicted MMR, its former chairman Robert McCracken, and its president James “Pepper” Rutland on charges of bid-rigging the 1981 contract for building the second Big Cajun electric power plant in New Roads.

In May 1989, MMR and Rutland were convicted. All appeals were ultimately denied, and Rutland ended up serving six months in federal prison.

Rutland and Rispone – along with Art Favre, Performance Contractors’ CEO and Erector Set activist – were graduates of LSU’s inaugural Construction Technology class in 1972. In 1975, Rutland recruited Rispone to come to work for MMR.

MMR (then and now) does the same type of work Rispone’s ISC Constructors now specializes in – electrical construction and mechanical control planning and installation. By early 1980, MMR had built its business and reputation sufficiently to be included on the “invitation-only” bid list for construction of Big Cajun 2, a coal-fired electric power plant project in New Roads. MMR’s people met with electric company executives and drafted preliminary plans for the project.

But one of the national contracting firms on the bid list – Fischback and Moore, then the nation’s largest electrical contracting firm – was very much interested in getting the job themselves. According to court records, as was customary with several of the biggest national firms, “in March 1980, representatives of several large electrical contractors, including Fischbach and Moore, Inc., had a meeting at which they discussed allocating future electrical projects,” and agreed to submit higher bids so F&M would win the Cajun contract. The only thing standing in their way? That local upstart, MMR.

F&M’s southeast regional director Paul Murphy and that company’s New Orleans branch manager J.R. Sturgill arranged a meeting with MMR’s Robert McCracken and James Rutland. They met at the posh and private City Club in Baton Rouge, on December 19, 1980.

City Club in Baton Rouge

Murphy and Sturgill explained to the MMR executives that the other national firms had already agreed to let F&M be the low bid, and MMR needed to overbid, as well. McCracken and Rutland countered with an offer that MMR partner with F&M on the bid. But that wasn’t how the big boys played this game, and negotiations stalled. Murphy and Rutland took a breather.

Then, according to additional court records, “Murphy and Rutland announced, upon returning from the men’s room, that they had a deal.” In exchange for not bidding at all, MMR would be cut into F&M’s deal on Big Cajun, as a subcontractor. In addition to the money they’d earn for the work, MMR would get a $1.5-million “fee” as part of the “deal”.

Indeed, that’s how the deal to build Big Cajun Two went down – and how Rutland and MMR went down, causing Rispone (presumably) to worry in the late 80s about going down himself.

For just about the time Rispone began fidgeting about his future in the fall of 1987, the U.S. Justice Department issued subpoenas for MMR’s records regarding their dealings with Fischbach & Moore on Big Cajun, and a previous deal done with F&M at the Strategic Petroleum Reserves in Hackberry. At that point, F&M’s bid-rigging habits had become widely known through a series of well-publicized federal indictments and criminal cases across the country.

In June 1983, a federal grand jury in Seattle indicted Fischbach & Moore, the Howard P. Foley Co., and the Lord Electric Co. for conspiring to rig bids on four nuclear power plants in Washington state, and one in Indiana. In early July 1983, the same trio of companies was indicted by a federal grand jury in Pittsburgh, for conspiracy and bid-rigging on projects at eight U.S. Steel Corporation plants.

It is noted in the documents of the Pittsburgh case: “For approximately seven years, from 1974 to 1981, representatives of several electrical contracting companies met at the Duquesne Club in Pittsburgh. The purpose of these meetings was to decide among themselves which firm would receive the contract. That firm’s representative would contact the other contractors and would tell them what bid to submit, ensuring that his firm’s bid would be the lowest. Some of the firms kept track of the allocations to ensure that each contracting company received its fair share of work.”

And in August 1987, the U.S. Justice Department filed suit in Chattanooga, Tennessee, alleging Fischbach & Moore conspired with officials of Nebraska-based Commonwealth Electric Company to rig the 1980 bids on the Moccasin Bend waste treatment plant in Chattanooga. F&M’s Paul Murphy was also named in that case.

James “Pepper” Rutland

Convicted, and appeals denied, James “Pepper” Rutland served his six months, paid his federal fines, and once MMR had reorganized under Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 1990, resumed the position of CEO of the company, now known as MMR Constructors. Inc.

MMR Constructors headquarters is on Airline Highway in Baton Rouge, next door to Grigsby’s Cajun Industries HQ.

With the exception of Securities and Exchange Commission filings showing Eddie Rispone selling 27,000 of the 108,000 shares of MMR stock he owned in 1988, none of the federal documents currently available mention Rispone in connection with either MMR or the criminal cases.

He was, however, a company executive at the time, and undoubtedly supervised the Big Cajun and Strategic Petroleum Reserve projects, even if he was not the one designing and crunching the numbers of the bids and contracts.

There is something from the many court documents in the MMR case that stands out as food for thought now, thirty years later.

“At the sentencing hearing, Judge Mentz stated that he could not view the conspiracy for the Big Cajun bid in isolation, because the testimony adduced at trial showed that Murphy and Rutland had worked together to rig previous bids. He noted that MMR had earned a sizable profit as a result of its agreement with F & M, and that ‘apparently these deals were one of the reasons that MMR became so successful over the years’.”

What did Eddie know in the 80s? Did Grigsby’s advice save Rispone’s reputation and his ass?

We may never know.

How much influence and control will Grigsby have in state government IF Eddie Rispone wins the race?

Do you really WANT to know?

60 Years Ago, JFK Attended the 23rd International Rice Festival in Crowley. For the First Time, Here Are the Color Photos.

By
Lamar White, Jr.
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Sen. John F. Kennedy campaigns for President in Crowley. Congressman Edwin W. Washington is on the right. Photo source: the Reggie Family Collection; Colorized by Lamar White, Jr, Bayou Brief.

Next week, the people of Crowley will commemorate the sixtieth anniversary of a visit by, arguably, the most famous guests they have ever hosted, a young Massachusetts Senator named Jack Kennedy and his beautiful young wife Jackie, who were there during a campaign swing in Louisiana and Texas. Jack had been invited to Crowley by a young city judge named Edmund Reggie. Reggie, a popular Lebanese-American judge, civic leader, and powerful Democratic Party force, was widely admired by his friends and colleagues and, soon, the Kennedy Family as well.

His daughter Vicki, decades later, would fall in love and marry Jack’s youngest brother Teddy. The judge became Teddy’s father-in-law.

Jack and Jackie had gone to New Orleans first, but the following day, Friday, Oct. 16th, 1959, they headed to Crowley.

I decided to upload as many of these as I could, though the captions will remain a work in progress.

Who Will Run Louisiana?

By
Sue Lincoln
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That’s a very good question, and it’s the essence of what we are considering as we, the people of Louisiana, cast our ballots on Oct. 12th.

The dogma of American government doctrine we learned as children would have us believe “We, the People” ably and nobly run our democratic republic, as well as this “Gret Stet” of Louisiana.

But the political messaging that’s been escalating its bombing runs as we move ever closer to election day is saying – openly or subliminally – it’s an individual, or the political party that person is affiliated with, that is and/or has been running Louisiana into the ground.

This a continuation of the question state (and even federal) politicians have been forcing you to ask yourself for the past four years, as the Republican-controlled Legislature (the state House, in particular) and the Republican Attorney General have wrestled with the Democratic Governor to assert party ideology and dominance over governmental policies and practices in Louisiana.

Now, voters are not only selecting our next governor and other statewide-elected officials, but are also picking their legislators. Those men and women will have, in addition to their regular annual lawmaking duties, the added responsibility for drawing new district lines following the 2020 Census – affecting Louisiana political outcomes for another decade into the future.

The potential rewards of that type of influence are immense, and so (as predicted when the bulk of this article was initially composed and published at the beginning of this year) these state elections are proving to be the most expensive in Louisiana’s 207-year statehood history. Individuals and special interest groups have filled and now depleted their war chests, expending their financial and ideological ammunition in launching their assaults on their proverbial enemies via airwaves and cyberspace.

Of course, their real target is you, the voter.

Throughout Louisiana’s statehood, the question of “Who runs the state?” has been asked often. “Queen Sugar” and “King Cotton” were the state’s earliest economic drivers, and while Louisiana indirectly benefited from the early to mid-19th century Industrial Revolution, this state also ultimately lost population to it. Factories grew elsewhere, while Louisiana grew and exported the raw cotton and sugar that would clothe and sweeten the lives of the nation’s expanding population.

Deep beneath Louisiana’s fertile soil, another natural resource waited. As commerce and industry expanded elsewhere, so did the demands for ways to fuel it. In 1870, a night watchman in Shreveport lit a match, and “accidentally” discovered natural gas coming from a recently-drilled artesian well. In 1901, nine months after and 90 miles east of the first Texas oil “gusher” Spindletop, an oil well drilled near Jennings, Louisiana, also began gushing forth “black gold”. By 1906, the state legislature had passed its first oil and gas laws, and in 1909, the first oil refinery in the state – what is now the Exxon refinery in Baton Rouge – came on line.

Courtesy: Louisiana State Archives

Some quarter of a million oil and gas wells have been drilled in Louisiana since then (though 35% of them – some 80,000 – ended up as dry holes), and this state was a major contributor to fueling the nation’s phenomenal growth throughout the 20th century. Therefore, for most of that century, oil and gas interests ruled in and over Louisiana.

The peak of the state’s oil production was 50 years ago, however – in 1969, with more than 728-million barrels produced. It has been declining ever since. Within five years of that production peak, several scientific studies were released, showing that Louisiana’s coastal land mass has been declining, in direct correlation to its oil and gas production. It was Dr. Sandra M. Gagliano’s 1973 study that estimated 39% of Louisiana’s land loss was due to the industries’ dredging of canals through the coastal wetlands.

Realizing their influence was waning as their industry’s environmental impacts were being documented, discussed, and disfavored, oil and gas concerns developed a new tactic just over 25 years ago: the “economic impact study”. Louisiana Mid Continent Oil and Gas Association released the first-of-its-kind study in 1993, showing the offshore oil and gas industry provided Louisiana with a positive economic impact of more than $3-billion each year.

Louisiana Oil and Gas Association’s old logo.

It had the desired effect. In 1994, the state Legislature passed a massive incentive package, foregoing state revenue from severance taxes for certain types of wells – including wells deeper than 15,000 feet, and those that run horizontally. And, as LMOGA’s own “History of the Industry” proudly declares, “Oil and gas activity increased sharply after passage of the incentive legislation.”

Additionally, prices for crude oil, which had been around $25 per barrel at the start of 1994, went up around then, increasing to over $45 per barrel by the start of 1997. By November 1998, the price per barrel had plunged again, to a low of $17.25. Nearly ten years later, though, in June of 2008, the price per barrel of oil reached an all-time high of $161.28. In late August 2014, oil dropped below the hundred-dollar-per-barrel mark, dropping to $36 per barrel in early 2016. As of the end of 2018, the price was hanging around $45 per barrel.

In 1982, just over 42% of Louisiana’s total state general fund came from mineral revenues: oil and gas severance taxes and royalties. In the most recent budget year, those sources were barely more than 6% of total state general fund revenue. Corporate income taxes overall totalled less than five percent (4.8%) of the entire state general fund. Instead, we the people – through individual income taxes and sales taxes we pay – provided 74% of Louisiana’s state general fund revenue.

Yet despite the declining proportions of state revenues received from oil and gas – and from business and industrial corporations as a whole, our state keeps subsidizing the profitability of these industries through all manner of alluring tax exemptions.

Why?

Because “jobs”.

That’s the threat they always use: if we the people don’t give them tax break after tax break, they’ll take their businesses and jobs elsewhere. They won’t, of course. The last time a new refinery was built in the U.S. was 1977 – 42 years ago – and that was the Marathon facility in Garyville, Louisiana.

Other states won’t offer them what we have in the past and continue to present on proverbial silver platters.

As for the overall oil and gas-related jobs in Louisiana, the economist who has been doing the industry’s “economic impact” studies for the past 25 years, Dr. Loren Scott, reported the 2018 jobs total at 44,580. In 2008, it was 53,000. And in 1998, it was nearly 82,000.

That precipitous loss of nearly half the jobs the oil and gas industry once provided can be attributed to a number of factors. For example, what the industry rarely says is that advances in computerized controls and automation have eliminated the need for people to actually do many of these jobs. And, in fact, design and installation of these automation improvements that eliminate jobs is exactly what Eddie Rispone’s company, ISC Constructors, does.

Eddie Rispone at State Capitol, April, 2019. Photo by Sue Lincoln

So sure, Rispone and his company have “created” some jobs on their own payroll, but how many other jobs have they eliminated in order to increase the profitability of other companies?

Many of these industries have consistently applied for ITEPs, avoiding the payment of local property taxes for up to a decade, for improvement projects that actually eliminated jobs, rather than creating them. Up until recently, they got those tax breaks nearly automatically.

Take an example from the beginning of this year: Georgia-Pacific, a subsidiary of Koch Industries, announced in January it would be permanently shutting down and selling off the majority of its Port Hudson paper mill by mid-March. At least 650 employees of the East Baton Rouge facility lost their jobs – positions that paid, on average, about $80,000 annually.

It was a near-total turnaround from what local officials were told on month before, in December 2018, as Georgia-Pacific sought a new industrial tax exemption (ITEP) for a recently-completed $42-million expansion that promised 30 additional jobs. The exemption from paying property taxes on the expansion was valued at $772,000 in the first year.

In 2018, through ITEPs previously granted, G-P was already exempt from paying close to $9-million in local property taxes on the Port Hudson facility. Since 1998, they had received 36 exemptions, and avoided paying more than $203-million in property taxes, according to the database compiled by Together Baton Rouge.

Then Gov. Bobby Jindal speaking to Koch Brothers-backed AFP in 2015.

In 2010, the Jindal administration cut an “economic development” deal with Georgia-Pacific: the company would do a $300-million mill modernization, and the state would finance it with $300-million in Gulf Opportunity Zone bonds – plus give the company a $3-million tax credit and ITEP property tax exemptions. The state would benefit, we were told, because 1000 jobs would be “saved”.

How’s that working out for us, now?

Meanwhile, Louisiana remains a petro-colonial state, with our “good masters” consistently seeking rules and laws that favor their status and keep them flush with money to propagandize the people and contribute to the campaigns of candidates who will see the issues in a way that is advantageous for the oil and gas industry.

Consider what we now know of Exxon’s subterfuges, for example. In the 1970s, even as they were funding LSU’s initial research and studies into remedies for Louisiana coastal land loss, the petrochemical giant was also conducting pioneering research into global climate change. Yet after one of Exxon’s senior scientists informed company executives that, in 1977, there was general scientific agreement that burning fossil fuels was accelerating the global warming phenomenon, Exxon focused their secretive climate modeling research, ultimately determining, by 1982, that “significant reduction in fossil fuel consumption would be necessary to curtail future climate change.” The internal report to Exxon executives also noted “There is concern among some scientific groups that once the effects (of climate change) are measurable, they might not be reversible.”

Bless Exxon’s heart: they didn’t tell any of us. Instead they poured profits into an intentional public campaign of misinformation – questioning the science and fact of global warming, utilizing the same strategies previously employed by Big Tobacco regarding smoking and lung cancer, and – along with Koch Industries – provided climate change-denying organizations with tens of millions of dollars in support.

Here in Louisiana, the oil and gas industry paid lobbyists to argue against alternative energy proposals. They ultimately killed off the state’s solar energy tax credit program, which benefited homeowners and the environment, while arguing to keep the industry’s corporate concessions intact. They sought and received designations of refineries – and now pipelines – as “critical infrastructure”, protectable at gunpoint and making protesting those developments a felony.

They have battled and defeated every piece of proposed legislation to limit – or even study – industrial groundwater usage. And they’ve defeated every attempt to require facilities install fenceline air quality monitors, even as the oil and chemical companies “settled” EPA lawsuits citing them for decades of excess emissions in violation of the Clean Air Act.

Photo courtesy: Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana

The industry fought tooth and nail in 2014 to kill the Southeast Louisiana Levee Board lawsuit which accused 97 oil, gas, and pipeline companies of damaging the wetlands. They continue to try and buy elections of parish officials in an effort to kill off the 42 coastal land-loss lawsuits now pending trial in federal court. All this, despite the companies having signed agreements before dredging all those coastal canals – agreements which promised they would follow state law requiring proper maintenance of the rights of way and eventual restoration of the land to its original condition.

The oil and gas companies – and their allied chemical industries, all of which would continue their power and control over Louisiana – keep pushing for “tort reform” measures to pass the Legislature. These industries utilized portions of their profits to promote the narrative that “Louisiana is a judicial hellhole” because “trial lawyers are running the state” (with the unspoken, but implied addendum of “into the ground”).

Gov. John Bel Edwards is – by trade – an attorney, and a year-and-a-half ago, in March 2018, the Wall St. Journal published an opinion piece that previewed the tactics oil and gas interests would be using to try and defeat him – branding him as a trial lawyer who wants to retain power, along with all his trial lawyer friends. The author of that commentary, Allysia Finley, is rated “right” for her media bias, according to allsides.com. Certainly, right-wing bloggers and columnists with other publications picked up on her commentary, and over the following week amplified it, with statements such as “The trouble with trial lawyers is that for the most part, they suck the life out of the economy.” And they all re-iterated the oil and gas industry’s mantra: “The oil industry is booming in Texas while it is stagnant or declining in Louisiana. Blame it on the state and several parishes filling lawsuits against the industry.”

Unsurprisingly, ExxonMobil, Shell, PPG, and especially Koch Industries have been longtime heavy funders of the American Tort Reform Association – the group that publishes an annual “Judicial Hellholes” report. Louisiana is usually ranked near the top of this report, with accompanying statements such as, “The Pelican State’s legal climate has suffered at the hands of powerful trial attorneys and the politicians they have controlled for decades. Gov. John Bel Edwards, a trial lawyer, has helped further stack the deck against defendants down on the bayou, and Louisiana is unlikely to escape this litigiously fevered swamp anytime soon.”

The most recent report, issued Dec. 26, 2018, ranks Louisiana number five – up from number eight the previous year. California is number one, followed by Florida, New York City, and St. Louis, Missouri, then Louisiana. TopVerdicts.com’s most recent list of the 100 highest court awards in civil lawsuits shows California with 33 of the top 100 verdicts, with Florida having 11 on the list. But the highest awards, and the greatest number in the top 100 – 42 – were in Texas, including the top two verdicts. One was for half a billion dollars, with the biggest verdict being for more than $8-billion. Both of those cases were for business-to-business breach of contract.

Texas did not make the “Judicial Hellholes” list at all. Louisiana, ranked number 5, did not have a single case among the top 100 verdicts. Yet the oil and gas industry keeps telling us Texas has it right, while Louisiana suffers because trial lawyers are the problem.

Oil and gas isn’t the only business sector trying to attribute Louisiana’s problems to trial lawyers The Louisiana Association of Business and Industry has long been engaged in demonizing trial lawyers as the bane of Louisiana business, while they’ve waged a campaign for “civil justice reform”, as they’re now calling it. LABI has long been the primary financial backer of Louisiana Lawsuit Abuse Watch, which claims to be “a citizen watchdog group dedicated to stopping lawsuit abuse that threatens local businesses and jobs.”

LABI’s Stephen Waguespack

LABI president Stephen Waguespack – who was former Gov. Bobby Jindal’s executive counsel, and is himself a lawyer by trade – wrote a column October 3, 2018, titled “It’s Time for Some 1-800-LEGALREFORM.”

In it, he said: “It’s all about the incentives created by the State Capitol over the years to promote a lawsuit culture in Louisiana. What has never been honestly discussed with the public are the laws the Louisiana Legislature has put in place and protected over the years to intentionally incentivize and promote one of the most active lawsuit industries in the entire nation – laws that have become strong incentives created by the Louisiana Legislature to create a robust and competitive business environment for trial lawyers.”

Contrary to the usual preconceived notions of the makeup of the Louisiana Legislature, the majority of our lawmakers are not lawyers. (Perhaps logic would prevail more often, if they were.) Presently, only 27% (27 House members, 12 senators) of the 144 total legislators are attorneys by trade. However, more than 42% of total state lawmakers (45 House members, 16 senators) state their primary occupation as “business owner” or “business other”.

The Business of Running State Government

We hear it all the time: “Government should be run like a business.” Those most prone to spouting this cliche’ are usually members of the business community themselves, and generally have an idealized notion that business is efficient and – thanks to competition in the marketplace – businesslike operations foster effectiveness.

Yet as McGill University professor of Management Henry Mintzberg has written in the Harvard Business Review, “Running government like a business has been tried again and again, and has failed again and again.”

It is, essentially, a logical contradiction, which ensures it will not succeed.

Mintzberg points out that the measure of business success is profitability. Yet as we’ve seen during seemingly endless Louisiana legislative debates over the past several years, those who advocate for “more businesslike government” are also the ones adamantly opposed to the state having even a fraction of a cent of surplus funding – insisting repeatedly on making Louisiana “do more with less.”

“Government,” they insist, “is not supposed to show a profit.”

The two leading Republicans challenging incumbent Gov. John Bel Edwards are pitching hissy-fits because Louisiana has ended the past couple of budget years with comparatively small surpluses. They’re saying it’s proof we can reduce taxes, even while they each tout their business acumen as the reason to elect them instead of re-electing Edwards.

However, the last four years have proven the persistent efforts of the Jindal administration (aided and abetted by business people in the Legislature) to starve state government by privatizing government services – while further wooing business “customers” with corporate tax giveaways – have done nothing to increase Louisiana’s overall valuation. We remain at or near the bottom of every list of “quality of life” measurements. We, the citizen-”shareholders”, have seen minimal return on our investment.

Yet there is one sector of the business community that is doing phenomenally well, and it’s a segment of LABI’s membership that has been working behind the scenes for more than a decade, preparing to make their big move toward becoming the next answer to the question of “Who Runs Louisiana?”

Let’s call them the “Erector Set”.

They’re the construction industry, and the industrial construction contractors, in particular.

In April 2017, Lotte Chemical of South Korea agreed to move its US headquarters to Calcasieu Parish, overseeing their joint project with Westlake Chemical. That would need 3000 construction workers, and would eventually provide 265 permanent full-time jobs.

In January 2018, Entergy began work on a new $872-million generating plant in Calcasieu Parish, requiring 700 construction workers.

In April 2018, Formosa announced it would build a $9.4-billion chemical facility in St. James Parish, eventually offering 1200 permanent full-time jobs, and requiring 8000 construction workers.

July 2018, Shintech said it was ready to start a $1.49-billion expansion in Iberville Parish, for 120 more full-time jobs and 3000 construction jobs.

January of this year, Gov. John Bel Edwards and the Louisiana Department of Economic Development announced South Louisiana Methanol – a project of New Zealand-based Todd Corporation, partnered with Saudia Arabia-based SABIC – is building a $2.2-billion new methanol complex in St. James Parish. Ultimately, it will provide 75 permanent full-time jobs, and, while being built, employ 800 construction workers temporarily.

In March 2019, Exxon announced a $469-million expansion of its chemical plant in Baton Rouge, needing 600 construction workers.

In May, Louisiana Economic Development said Shell was “advancing plans” for a $1.2-billion expansion of its facility in Geismar, and would be needing more than 1000 construction workers for that Ascension Parish project.

In July, Methanex said it would need more than 1000 construction workers for building its third methanol plant in Geismar.

And in August, Formosa said it would need about 500 construction workers for a #332-million expansion of its Baton Rouge facility.

Louisiana is in a cycle of major industrial expansion, and with demand for construction workers continuing strong, the owners of Louisiana construction firms are earning record profits.

What to do with all that money?

A majority of CEOs and presidents of Louisiana’s top contractors utilize their wealth in philanthropic pursuits. Turner Industries’ Roland Toups is a notable supporter of Catholic organizations and a major contributor to Our Lady of the Lake Hospital’s programs and expansion campaigns. Ratcliff Companies’ Robert Ratcliff uses his wealth and expertise to support cultural improvement efforts in Alexandria.

Others use their wealth to benefit the universities located in their communities. Lenny Lemoine of Lemoine Companies is deeply involved with growth and improvments at U-L Lafayette. Lincoln Builders’ Clint Graham similarly supports Louisiana Tech, and Paul Flowers of Woodward Design+Build assists Tulane University in a like manner.

Over the past 15 years, each of them and their companies have contributed to political campaigns and causes. They and their companies give to business-related political action committees (PACs), including the LABI-run regional PACs, but not in major amounts. Additionally, they support candidates within or from their local communities, but rarely do they give the maximum amounts allowed by law.

A few of Louisiana’s industrial contractors have made politics their charity-of-choice. Robert Boh of Boh Brothers and Lawrence Gibs of Gibbs Contruction both donate large amounts to candidates’ campaigns. Yet looking through their records of contributions over the past 15 years, it’s clear they are “non-denominational” in their support, giving to Democrats and Republicans alike – as long as those running are members of the local community to begin with.

Other industrial contractors on Louisiana’s top ten list have made it their mission to grow their personal influence on government policies, spending immense amounts toward buying politicians and political influence, and funding large PACs under their own control. These are the ones we’re calling the “Erector Set”.

Over the past decade, they’ve been weaving their web of influence through activism within the Louisiana Association of Business and Industry. (Principals with five of Louisiana’s top ten contractors serve on LABI’s Board of Directors.) They’ve each endowed their own political action committees (PACs) with six-figure donations – PACs that they each chair and control – and have given copious sums to their buddies’ PACs as well as those run by LABI and the contractors’ own trade groups.

They’ve heavily supported certain candidates for offices – almost exclusively Republicans – and have engineered policy changes through those paid-for politicians.

And the Erector Set is hoping to crown one of their own as the new king: Eddie Rispone.

In Acadia Parish, A Family Empire Built Through the Clerk of Court’s Office

By
Lamar White, Jr.
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In the late summer of 1999, after a career spanning more than four decades, Andy Barousse (pronounced BAH-roos) finally decided it was time to pass the reins of the family business over to his 35-year-old son Robby. Andy had been in charge since 1968; it was the same job his father had held until the day he died.

For 59 of the past 68 years, the Acadia Parish Clerk of Court’s Office has been led by three generations of Barousse men. It is supposed to be an elected position, but in practice, the Barousses very rarely have attracted a challenger.

Clerk of Court is not the most glamorous title. Most voters have only a vague understanding of the job’s responsibilities, which are almost entirely ministerial. The Barousses have controlled the office, in part, because in Acadia Parish, they belong to a family dynasty established decades before Ambassador Joseph Kennedy began telling his friends that his young son, Joe Jr., would become President one day.

Unlike other family dynasties, the Barousses haven’t sought a spotlight outside the confines of the small, rural parish in southwest Louisiana their family has called home since 1837.

So, in 1999, when Andy pulled a fast one and retired on the final day of qualifying for another term, ensuring his son Robby could benefit from the power of incumbency and win without opposition, there wasn’t much of an outrage. The clerk had always been a Barousse, and what did the clerk do anyway? Who cares?

This year, though, for the first time since the sixties, the race for Acadia Parish Clerk of Court appears to be competitive. (To be sure, because it is such a small race, no one has bothered to conduct a poll).

Emily Stoma, a former bank executive from Crowley who lost a recent bid for mayor, decided to challenge Robby Barousse, and if the heated rhetoric that’s been exchanged by supporters of both candidates is any indication, Acadia Parish voters could be in for a long night next Saturday.

Stoma and Barousse are both registered Republicans. This has nothing to do with partisan politics.

Instead, the race is shaping up as a referendum on public corruption, and Stoma has put Barousse and his fiefdom directly into the spotlight they’ve hoped to avoid.

After receiving a trove of public records and internal reports from two sources, both of whom requested anonymity because of concerns over retribution and online harassment, I decided to do some digging. I grew up in Alexandria, which is around the same size as Acadia Parish, and I know personally the ways in which local, small town politics can often be almost comically vicious.

The race for Acadia Parish Clerk of Court, I soon realized, contains all of the components of a classic Louisiana political drama: A powerful family, a small town, allegations of corruption, piles of money, petty dramas, and, beneath the surface, a deep connection to history. Huey P. Long even makes an appearance.

I have no dog in this hunt. I don’t know either candidate, and frankly, to me, the ultimate outcome of this particular election is the least interesting aspect of the story.

Acadia Parish Clerk of Court may not be the most glamorous title, but public records confirm the most troubling claim Emily Stoma has made against her opponent: Robby Barousse has earned a fortune from the job.

Since his last election four years ago, he has taken in approximately $979,000 from taxpayers.

His car allowance is an astonishing $2,000 a month, and records indicate he is the owner of, among other things, a luxury Range Rover Sport and a newly-constructed home.

This year, Stoma’s focus on Barousse’s compensation seems to have struck a nerve. On Facebook, Stoma’s campaign page has received a steady supply of vitriol from a handful of Barousse’s most loyal supporters. To be sure, both campaigns have swapped allegations of yard sign thievery, and there are nasty rumors being circulated about family members of both candidates, none of which merit attention.

These documents, however, are worth considering:

Barousse has been the subject of public scrutiny before. In 2011, Wally Pierce of the Independent reported that Barousse’s chief deputy had circulated an inter-office memo announcing a new fitness program that was, in actuality, nothing more than a poorly-disguised attempt to force employees to canvass neighborhoods and raise money for Barousse’s reelection campaign.

He withstood the criticism at the time, partly because none of the dozen or so people on the office’s payroll were covered by civil service protections. They were all at-will. Barousse could fire any of them for any reason. At least that was the logic at the time.

In hindsight, there is a special irony about the Acadia Parish Clerk of Court’s sham fitness program: Employees had been told that if Barousse’s opponent won, then they’d likely lose not only their jobs but also their retirement benefits. Funding was tight.

It was a lie.

Robby Barousse had been in office for more than a decade before someone decided to challenge him; the only person whose job was threatened by the election was him. So Barousse went into full-scale panic mode, and his fear-mongering paid off.

After winning the first election in his life, Barousse gave himself and his chief deputy generous raises.

Last.year alone, when you account for his entire compensation package, Barousse was one of the highest-paid elected officials in the entire state, according to a database that documents the salaries of government workers. He was also the highest-paid public employee in Acadia Parish, taking in $43,000 more in 2018 than Sheriff K.P. Gibson.

In nearby Lafayette Parish, the Clerk of Court receives a base salary slightly higher than Barousse, but when you begin adding up all of the benefits, Barousse surges ahead. Lafayette, it is worth noting, has a population nearly four-times larger than the population of Acadia, and not surprisingly, its Clerk of Court is responsible for nearly four-times the workload as well.

“Material Weaknesses”: Missing Money, Trips to Vail and Florida, and a Six-Figure Check to the Sheriff

Stoma’s scrutiny has resulted in others coming forward with allegations of misappropriation and vote tampering, and though nothing definitive appears in the public record to support the claims about election interference, Barousse’s office has had some- let’s just call them “accounting issues.”

Recently, according to two different independent audits, Barousse’s office has repeatedly failed to comply with Louisiana’s Uniform Unclaimed Property Act, which mandates the office transfer any and all unclaimed funds to the state treasury after five years. It’s more interesting than it sounds.

In late 2015, an independent audit of Barousse’s office conducted by the Lafayette accounting firm Kolder, Champagne, Slaven, and Co. uncovered a series of alarming details, which they cited as material weaknesses, noting that there was a reasonable possibility that financial “misstatements” continue to occur if Barousse didn’t correct “deficiencies” in “internal controls.” It was a polite way of saying that he needed to get his act together; otherwise, he’d be in some deep trouble.

First, the firm found that Barousse could not properly account for 177 uncashed checks his office had issued, totaling $160,307; again, per state law, that money should have been given to the state treasury. Typically, when a clerk issues checks that end up never being cashed, it’s because the recipient has either passed away or moved to a different address. But $140,000 of the $160,000 should have been sent to someone known by everyone in Acadia Parish: The sheriff. Following the report, Barousse managed to remember the address of the sheriff’s department, and he finally paid up. But he still can’t seem to figure out where to send the other $20,000, and according to a more recent audit, his office continued to be in violation of the Unclaimed Property Act.

Second, the Lafayette accounting firm noted that Barousse had charged the clerk’s office for three out-of-state vacations: $4,350 for a trip to Destin, Florida; $2,681 for another Florida beach retreat in tony Bonita Springs, and $3,360 for an excursion to Vail, Colorado. For some reason, the auditor believed the expenditures weren’t an appropriate use of public money, notwithstanding Barousse’s claim that he’d merely been attending continuing education classes required of all clerks of court. Later, he said he had reimbursed the office for hotel “overages” and room charges, and he promised to find more convenient and less expensive destinations in the future.

A couple of years later, he hired a different accounting firm to conduct his office’s next audit.

If Robby Barousse had been appointed and not elected, the audit findings would have been more than sufficient grounds for termination, if not criminal prosecution. (After billing for a trip to Colorado, a friend of mine not only lost his job in government, he was also arrested and charged with theft). But the people of Acadia Parish have, thus far, been willing to look the other way. There, it pays to be a Barousse.

So, how is Huey P. Long connected to any of this?

Robby Barousse’s grandfather Homer P. (in the red tie) stands in front of his great-grandfather Edgar Baroesse’s general store in Branch Louisiana. Archival Photo colorized and restored by the Bayou Brief.

Coda:

One hundred and thirty-three years ago, when Acadia Parish was officially created, Louisiana Gov. Samuel D. McEnery appointed Robby’s great-grand uncle, Homer Barousse, to serve on its very first police jury.

In 1837, when he was a teenager, Homer Barousse’s father Jean left his home in the Pyrenees Mountains in southern France and set sail for Louisiana. He’d settle in a region teeming with other newly-arrived French-speaking immigrants, many of whom had made the voyage after being forced out of their homes in a part of present-day Canada known as Acadie. They became known as Cajuns, culturally distinct from those like Jean who came from the Motherland.

Jean Barousse married, fathered a family, and opened up a successful store in what is now Church Point, Louisiana. When he died in February of 1893, his estate was valued at the equivalent of $600,000. Jean had two sons, Edgar, who expanded the franchise to the town of Branch, and Homer, the politician.

Edgar named one of his sons Homer Pierre, in honor of his brother, and Homer P., as he was known, later followed his uncle’s footsteps into public office, winning election as Acadia Parish’s Clerk of Court.

Image courtesy of the Rayne Acadian-Tribune.

But Huey P. Long wasn’t nearly as close with Homer P. Barousse as he was with Uncle Homer, who parlayed his appointment to the Police Jury into a storied career as a powerful state Senator.

By the time the Kingfish arrived in Baton Rouge, state Sen. Barousse was already an institution and a quiet but fierce behind-the-scenes operator. He was the rare politician who accumulated power without generating headlines. During his first year as a legislator, he didn’t even author a single bill, and he wasn’t fond of public speaking. In other words, he was the polar opposite of Huey P. Long.

Yet he would become one of Huey’s most loyal allies, and famously, in 1929, as the so-called anti-Long faction pushed for his impeachment and removal from office, Huey visited Homer Barousse at the Heidelberg Hotel in order to plead with him to sign onto a document known as the Round Robin. Huey was shoring up the votes he needed to stay in power, even before the legislature opened debate on his removal.

Truth be told: Huey didn’t need to ask. Homer Barousse was a loyalist; he had already turned down a $50,000 bribe from an anti-Long colleague hoping it’d be enough to change his mind.

Homer Barousse outlived Huey P. Long by one year. When he passed away in 1936, he had the distinction of serving alongside thirteen different Louisiana governors.

Despite his friendship with Long, state Sen. Barousse was known for his strong opposition to public graft and corruption. Notably, he had championed a bill that required local and parish agencies to provide a detailed monthly accounting for their expenditures, perhaps recognizing that if no one cares to pay attention, politicians would be likely to shower themselves with generous pay raises, fancy cars, and all-expense paid vacations.

In 1976, the acclaimed historian Greg Lavergne published a definitive essay about the life of Louisiana state Sen. Homer Barousse for the Attakapas Gazette, and fortunately, he has generously shared the essay on his personal website.

Of Second Lines, Clothespin Votes & Jacques Chirac

By
Peter Athas
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It’s the first week of October and it’s still hot: July hot, August hot. People are trying to convince themselves that it’s not *that* hot but they’re as delusional as your basic red-hatted Trump supporter. In the immortal words of Cole Porter:

Complaining about the heat usually makes me feel better as does hearing Ella’s voice. It didn’t work this time because it’s October. Climate change is real, y’all.

Last Saturday, my wife Grace and I attended the memorial service and second line for Gilgamesh Atticus Alexander Homan whose tragic death at the age of 18 was noted in my last column. It was a beautiful ceremony held in a modernist chapel on the Xavier University campus where Gil’s father Michael professes.

The highlight of the service was when one of Gil’s buddies began his talk as follows: “Gil was a legend.” 

Also legendary is this image from the second line handkerchief, which we waved as we followed Egg Yolk Jubilee to the wake:

Gil *was* a legend. He will be missed.

Let’s move on to our first full-blown segment. I have prepared a meme to serve as the subject header. It’s Claes Oldenburg’s clothespin sculpture commissioned by the city of Philadelphia in 1976.

Confessions of a Clothespin Voter

A truism of being a red state liberal is that we’ve all had to vote for statewide candidates we were not crazy about. I’ve voted for people whose views were similar to mine but whose ethics I was dubious of Edwin Edwards, Dollar Bill Jefferson, and Cleo Fields come to mind in this category.

Then there are the Blue Dog Democrats I’ve voted for with varying degrees of enthusiasm: Bennett Johnston, John Breaux, Kathleen Blanco, and John Bel Edwards fit neatly in this category.

Mary Landrieu was a sui generis Blue Dog because of her pro-choice stance. It drew withering criticism from the beloved Archbishop and friend of the Landrieu family, Philip Hannan. Senator Landrieu stood her ground.

That brings me to the 2019 Gret Stet governor’s race. I am unabashedly pro-choice. I have obviously voted for pro-life Democrats but all of them supported exceptions; typically for rape, incest, and to protect the life of the mother. Earlier this year, we learned there was an exception to this list of exceptions: John Bel Edwards who signed a barbaric anti-abortion bill aimed at overturning Roe vs. Wade.

I was an enthusiastic Edwards supporter in 2015. A squeaky-clean West Pointer was the perfect foil to the man who was clearly the worst person in Gret Stet politics: then Senator David Vitter aka The Sinator, Vitty-Cent, and Diaper Dave. 

There’s nothing worse than a sanctimonious hypocrite and there was never a bigger one than David Vitter. He was a dragon that needed slaying. Bobby Jindal was bad enough but replacing him with Vitter was like going from the frying pan to the fire. I will always be grateful to JBE for sparing us Governor Vitter.

I voted for Edwards in 2015 knowing that he was anti-choice. If he was a no-exceptions right to lifer then, I did not want to know: he was the anti-Vitter. I assumed that such a basically decent man would have the same position as former Governor Blanco and other Blue Dogs. I was wrong. These are darker times and the so-called pro-life right believes they can realize their dream of reversing Roe in one fell swoop. Their dream is my nightmare.

That brings me to the choice we face in 2019. For me, it will be a clothespin vote to re-elect Governor Edwards. I am disappointed in his no-exceptions position on a woman’s right to choose BUT he’s been a good governor on many important issues, especially Medicaid expansion. He’s clearly an abler man than his Republican challengers, Doc Abraham and Major Donor Rispone. Rumor has it that the latter is a “conservative outsider and Trump supporter.”#sarcasm

Having affixed my clothespin, I pledge to respect those who cannot vote for Edwards because of his retrograde position on reproductive rights. I have not and will not donate money to Team Edwards or advocate his re-election with so much as a yard sign. He is, however, much better than the alternatives. 

I hope Edwards wins in the primary, so I won’t have to see Rispone and Abraham ads every time I watch the local news. I hear Rispone is a “conservative outsider and Trump supporter.” I never want to hear that again.

The last word of the segment goes to Dwight Yoakam:

Louisiana began life as a French colony. The influence of France looms large in the Gret Stet. It has influenced our food, language, music, and place names throughout South Louisiana. New Orleanians may not pronounce Burgundy and Chartres Street as our French cousins do but the sensible among us honor our French legacy. C’est magnifique.

That brings us to a segment in which we honor the passing of a man who was such a good friend to America that he told us the truth about the Iraq War and tried to stop it. That’s what real friends do: they level with you. But there was no talking sense to the Bush-Cheney administration. Their supporters were worse: they tried to rename French fries, freedom fries. It didn’t stick.

Jacques Chirac, R.I.P. 

Chirac was a colossus who stood astride French politics for nearly 50 years. His passing last week at the age of 86 was overshadowed in the news by the impeachment mishigas.

I’m here to restore Chirac to the limelight. He was so fond of our country that one of his nicknames at home was l’Americain.

Jacques Chirac was Mayor of Paris, twice Prime Minister, and President of the Republic from 1995-2007. He won two presidential elections and lost two more as a candidate of the Center-Right. By American standards, he was more like a moderate Democrat than a conservative Republican. He was a staunch supporter of the European Union as well as of closer ties with the United States but as equals, not poodles. Chirac did his own bit of dragon slaying by defeating the neo-Fascist Jean-Marie Le Pen in 2002.

One of my stock jokes during the second Bush presidency was that Jacques Chirac was more fluent in English than his American counterpart. Chirac studied in America as a young man; spending two years in New Orleans:

“If you flagged down a taxi in New Orleans during the early 1950s, your driver might have been a future president of France.

Jacques Chirac, who died Thursday in Paris at age 86, used his income as a cabbie to help pay his expenses during a two-year stay in New Orleans while he was working on a postgraduate thesis about the port.

New Orleans originally was going to be just a stopover during the young man’s 1953 road trip around the United States, according to a 2003 story in The (Lafayette) Daily Advertiser.

But, the newspaper said, Chirac was so taken by the city’s post-World War II growth that he changed his thesis topic to concentrate on the port and stayed for two years.”

This proves that Jacques Chirac was a man of taste and refinement. He was also, like many Louisiana politicians, something of a rogue:

“By the time he left the mayor’s office, in 1995, there was increasing evidence that corruption and political skulduggery had been widespread during his tenure. But despite his later conviction in court, there were no allegations while he was in office that he had enriched himself. There were suspicions, however, that he must have been aware of the corrupt schemes of his associates, particularly of Jean Tiberi, who succeeded him as mayor.”

Chirac did no prison time and his reputation was merely dinged by the conviction. It’s what happens when you’re a lovable rascal with a reputation for personal kindness and warmth.

Back to New Orleans. Chirac’s bona fides as an honorary local were reinforced by the sub-krewe of PAN in the first Krewe du Vieux parade after Katrina and the Federal Flood with this theme:

That was the year before I joined Krewe du Vieux. The Buy Us Back, Chirac theme was one of the reasons I begged Ashley Morris for a spot in PAN as I recounted earlier this year inConfessions of a Krewe du Vieux Member. 

PAN subsequently passed from this mortal coil to be reborn as Spank. It’s a pity that the same can’t be said for Jacques Chirac. Repose en paix.

That concludes this edition of 13th Ward Rambler. In an oddball tribute to Jacques Chirac’s 18 years as Mayor of Paris, Joni Mitchell gets the last word:

Taking the Helm: The “Negro Captains” and Crews of the Post-Civil War Gulf Coast

By
Troy Gilbert
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Featured image: Lugger captain and his crew docked on the Mississippi Sound, ca 1890. Photograph by Lewis Hines.

Captain Anatole McKan stood at the helm of his 59-foot double-masted freight schooner and ordered his crew to make way in the Pearl River delta forming the boundary between Louisiana and Mississippi. Pushing away from the docks of the sprawling Poitevent & Favre Lumber Company, the 37-year old former slave used the slow, dark current of the East Pearl River to turn his schooner, Ella C. Andrews, south towards the open waters of the Mississippi Sound in 1877.

Heavy in the water with 35,000-square feet of freshly milled long leaf yellow pine stacked on board, Captain McKan’s crew of four black watermen raised sails for their 45-nautical mile run to New Orleans’ West End. It would take some time for the Ella C. Andrews to labor up and gain momentum, but once the heavy canvas sails were aloft and her lines cleated off and stowed, his men could relax until their turn to the west.

McKan, a native of Covington, was under sail on their twice weekly lumber run to his home waters in Louisiana, a place that has completely forgotten his name and others like him even though they achieved something conventional wisdom deems improbable – to stand as former slaves turned Captains in command of schooners and crew in commerce on the post-Civil War Gulf Coast.

In fact, in action and by law, while underway and no matter the color of one’s skin, the Captain of a vessel is considered the “master” and responsible party for all that occurs on a vessel under their command, barring an “Act of God.” As McKan navigated through the oyster shoals of the Mississippi Sound and into the windings of the Rigolets in the Louisiana marsh to reach Lake Pontchartrain, the difference between his life the minute he stepped off the schooner versus standing at the helm with the salt wind on his face, sails trimmed and fully in control would have been vast and stark.

In a region reeling from the Civil War and slavery, McKan wasn’t the first nor would he be the last “Negro Captain” to accomplish this on the waters of the post-war Northern Gulf Coast. In fact it was incredibly common, and he was but one in a long line of Gulf Coast black watermen and captains lost to time.

West End New Orleans, ca. 1890. Steam powered tugboat pulling schooners from out of the New Basin Canal. Source: Louisiana Digital Library.

With roads scarce and railroad bridges over the miles of marsh and waterways non-existent, coastal Louisiana and Mississippi’s harbors and ports on the Mississippi Sound and the Gulf of Mexico were growing as lumber, fishing and resort towns serving New Orleans and Mobile – and it was nearly all sail powered. Schooners, oyster luggers, and flashy new steamers made way along the coast and through the muddle of shallow lakes and bays interconnected by narrow passes through the marsh to deliver cargo, mail, and people, and before the first Mississippi River bridge was completed in Louisiana in 1930, even railcars hopped onto steam powered ferries to cross the river.

Wooden boatbuilders and shipyards peppered the Mississippi Gulf Coast and the Northshore of Lake Pontchartrain, and it wasn’t uncommon to see mastless wooden sloops lowered from the upper floors of downtown New Orleans office buildings as wealthy businessmen built small sailboats on empty upper floors for their personal means of transportation.

Boats of all types were an inescapable way of life on the Gulf Coast, so it was inevitable that before the Civil War, slaves were trained to crew many of these freight schooners, especially in the “lake trade” running between New Orleans and the Mississippi Coast.

In the 1930 pamphlet “The Progress of the Races,” Etienne William Maxson wrote one of the only detailed glimpses into the extent of these black watermen, ship’s masters, and captains involved in the Gulf Coast lake trade from the 19th Century. Maxson, a black man who worked most of his life for the federal government and was at one time a Commissioner of Elections and a postmaster in Hancock County, Mississippi, states, “It is true that colored men ran their master’s vessels in slave time on Pearl River and Lake Pontchartrain, carrying commodities into New Orleans, but they were mere sailing masters and not full fledged captains, because a white man had to be on board to clear the law.”

On any given day, nearly twenty schooners, several steamships, and untold “gayly painted” oyster luggers with their canvas sails stained red were arriving and disembarking at New Orleans West End, then known as New Lake End, and at the mouth of Bayou St. John. In sheer dockage numbers for these smaller vessels and their cargo tonnage landing along the New and Old Basin Canals running south from the lake through the cypress swamps to the city, these manmade canals were every bit as busy as the Port of New Orleans on the Mississippi River.

These lake trade schooners, many manned by slaves, would have been a common sight on the canals and their turning basins with the Old Basin’s terminus adjacent to “Place des Nègres” now known as Congo Square and the New Basin finishing alongside what would eventually be known as Storyville. However, these sailors would have been less common along the docks at the port on the river in New Orleans, but still significant with slave crews running schooners from upriver plantations or hired out as maritime “temp” workers to steamship captains desperate for hands.

Long before the collapse of slavery at the end of the Civil War, significant numbers of blacks turned to the water in search of freedom. And driven by the explosive growth of a huge new market created by expanding railroads and steamship lines after the conflict’s end, a vast armada of black watermen bet their futures on the burgeoning oyster trade. — Mark St. John Erickson. Source: The Cape Charles Mirror.

In the decades leading to the Civil War, Northern free men of color took to the seas in growing numbers as hands, carpenters, cooks and stewards onboard great sailing ships where skills were paramount and pay was generally equal between the races. In the Journal of American History in March of 1990, Professor W. Jeffrey Bolster states, “For a black man then, the ship provided a unique workplace where his color might be less a determinant of his daily life and duties than elsewhere.”

Sailing the oceans as the United States established itself as a maritime nation and power, these black merchant crewmen called on all manner of foreign ports – they also called on ports in the slaveholding Southern states. Tossing lines onto the docks in Charleston, Savannah, or New Orleans, these sailors would have tied up alongside slave ships offloading their terrible, enchained cargoes. The thoughts of these disparate groups of men seeing each other on the southern wharves and resigned to vastly different fates will never be known or perhaps even understood.

But what is known is that these free sailors of color were considered a threat.

Even in New Orleans, a city accustomed to a large population of free blacks and Creoles, many of whom enjoyed near equal societal status with whites and some themselves slaveholders, these worldly free black sailors clambering high up in a ship’s rigging for all to see or casually walking the streets of the French Quarter with wages in their pockets were a perceived direct threat to the institution of slavery.

Whether it was simply their revolutionary existence in the romantic lifestyle and freedom offered up by the seas or the idea of these men speaking with local slaves and spreading “curious notions” of freedom, either way, it led to coastal and river towns and cities throughout the South to enact various laws allowing local authorities to temporarily jail these sailors while docked in their ports.

On March 30, 1850, the Daily Picayune reported on the intense and growing argument between Northern and Southern senators in Congress regarding the constitutionality of jailing these men, “This is the revival of the old question which the North has disputed so long, and the South invariably asserted – whether the slaveholding States have the constitutional power to prohibit the access to their population of free negro sailors, who arrive by sea in Northern vessels.” Further, “The right of every community to take measures for self preservation, and as a precautionary measure, to put under restraint or to exclude entirely from their waters and their shores, such persons as they have reason to know to be dangerous to their social peace, is inseparable from their existence as a State.”

Reports of worse outcomes other than temporary imprisonment for these free sailors of color exist, including particularly nightmarish scenarios of getting sold into slavery by monstrous captains upon their docking in Southern ports.

A war would have to be fought to resolve these existential questions and to end slavery, and during the conflict, the Union Navy was unique in that it was racially integrated, unlike the Union Army. In the U.S. National Archives’ Prologue Magazine in the Fall of 2001, Professor Joseph P. Reidy states, “Nearly eighteen thousand men of African descent (and eleven women) who served in the U.S. Navy during the Civil War have been identified by name. At 20 percent of the navy’s total enlisted force, black sailors constituted a significant segment of naval manpower and nearly double the proportion of black soldiers who served in the U.S. Army during the Civil War.”

Reidy further concludes that 7,800 of these men who enlisted in the Union Navy were either fugitive slaves or slaves freed along Southern coastlines after their capture and occupation by Union forces.

Not long after New Orleans fell to the Union on May 1, 1862, Anatole McKan enlisted with the 91st U.S. Colored Infantry and served at Fort Pike in the Rigolets and on the Pearl River. While not serving in the U.S. Navy, his unit did occupy and patrol these same waterways that he likely sailed as a slave and that certainly would become familiar to him as a schooner captain after the war.

The crew of the USS Miami during the Civil War. Source: National Archives.

Slaves and free men of color along the Northern Gulf Coast had long developed an inseparable connection to and tradition with the water in the shipbuilding, transportation and seafood industries, and Etienne William Maxson wrote of McKan and nearly 40 other “Negro Captains” sailing the lake trade from the Pearl River lumber mills during the Reconstruction and Jim Crow Eras.

“The Poitevent & Favre Lumber Company were the first on the Pearl River to employ colored captains and engineers on their schooners and boats, first to have colored sawyers, and as contractors and stevedores,” Maxson explains. “As early as 1869 they began to favor colored employees in this way, and the precedent set by this company has been followed by all of the lumbermen on the Pearl River, and by some on the coast of Mississippi and in Louisiana.”

By 1869 and only four years removed from the cessation of the Civil War, the first direct evidence of a black schooner captain sailing the lake trade on the waters of the Gulf Coast without a white master onboard appears with Captain Gilbert Burton.

Professor Neil R. McMillen author of Dark Journey: Black Mississippians in the Age of Jim Crow states, “Along the Gulf Coast, the race numbered importantly in the naval trades, as master boat and shipbuilders, caulkers, and steamboat engineers. Beginning with Gilbert Burton, who in 1869 became the first ‘colored captain’ on the Mississippi Coast, blacks also commanded schooners and barges on the Pearl River, the Gulf sound and Lake Pontchartrain – sometimes apparently, with racially mixed crews.”

The embrace of black workers, captains and crews in Mississippi’s timber industry, especially on the Pearl River, appears to be the direct opposite of the attitude of the state’s commercial seafood industry. In the midst of explosive growth around 1890 with oyster canneries opening in many of the coastal towns, but centered in Biloxi, the Mississippi seafood industry took a page from canneries in Baltimore, Maryland and imported seasonal labor via train. Known as “Bohemians,” these mostly Polish workers initially worked many of the canneries in deplorable conditions, but were quickly replaced by Croatian immigrants, some as young as six years old, with deep ties to the fishing and oyster trades on the Adriatic Sea and who had previously settled into the oyster industry in Louisiana, especially in Plaquemines Parish some fifty years earlier.

While hiring these “Slavonians” may not directly point towards a racist motivation, Charles Dyer in a series of travelogues written in 1895 titled “Along the Gulf” reports on several seafood processors on the Mississippi Coast including the E. C. Joullian Packing Company of Biloxi. “Mr. Jouillian who is a native of Alabama first started his plant in Scranton, Miss., but only stayed at that place until 1888 when he built the factory which he at present occupies,” Dyer states. “He believes in the use of white labor exclusively, and not a black face can be seen inside of his establishment.” Dyer then adds, “He also has from 25 to 30 schooners engaged in handling the raw material.”

It is doubtful that any owner or manager of an oyster cannery would reject a freelance schooner-full of freshly tonged oysters from a black captain simply due to their race, and there are reports of Mississippi’s lumber schooners sailing to harvest oysters from Louisiana’s waters east of the Mississippi River when the prices were high. However, one can easily extrapolate that if a cannery refused to hire blacks to work their shucking and canning operations, this practice would have certainly followed over to their hiring of captains and crew on their company owned schooners.

With newspaper reports of “negro captains” throughout the Northern Gulf Coast incredibly rare except when one was involved with a crime or a sinking, it’s difficult to get a handle on exact numbers of African American captains and crews, but federal government reports in 1884 list nearly a fifth of all individuals employed in the seafood trade in Louisiana and Mississippi as “colored,” although these numbers were recorded several years before the heyday of oyster operations on the Mississippi Coast.

During this same time period in the oystering waters of the Chesapeake Bay, black oyster lugger crews and captains in Virginia outnumbered their white counterparts by nearly four to one.

Tonging for oysters in coastal Louisiana. Source: Louisiana Digital Library.

Captain Anatole McKan would have certainly known Captain Burton with the two sailing for the Poitevent & Favre Lumber Company on the Pearl River and it’s possible that he was trained by Burton, although it’s more likely that McKan and Burton both worked as slaves in the lake trade in the years leading to the war. It’s inconceivable that the owner of a schooner would put their major investment into the hands of a captain with only a few years of experience, which only lends credence to these men having worked and been master’s of schooners while slaves.

In 1879, the Poitevent & Favre Lumber Company employed 18 lumber schooners, and with evidence of nearly 40 black captains sailing from the Pearl River during this time, it’s safe to make the assumption that these men and their crews sailing for the lumber mills located on the Pearl River were not an aberration, and more so the norm.

The Poitevent & Favre Lumber Co.

Captains with seniority and greater experience would regularly graduate up to newer and faster vessels and this was commonplace, no matter one’s race. While McKan’s first command as a free man was on the schooner Emma Jane, he would later take the helm of at least five other schooners including the Alice McGuigan which was used as a training vessel by the Poitevent & Favre Lumber Company. While her captain, McKan would have trained scores of future black sailors including his two brothers in law and his sons.

These freed men built a career and eventually entrepreneurial businesses for themselves and their families in a maritime industry on the Gulf Coast generally understood to be completely controlled by white men, and their stories should stand alongside any slave to middle class history of America. When McKan retired from the helm of schooners, his two sons, Captain Standford McKan and Captain Nicholas McKan, plied the lake trade under his management and he reportedly owned several of these vessels running lumber, including the largest and the fastest.

He died on April 20, 1937.

Maxson’s pamphlet, written in 1930, offers up a rare glimpse into an important aspect of Gulf Coast maritime and cultural history almost completely lost to time, as well as the stories of these captains who were once so common on Lake Pontchartrain, the Mississippi Sound and the Gulf of Mexico. He states, “The colored captains on Pearl River were said to be the best sailors in these waters and carried the best crews. They ran some of the fastest vessels. Their cargoes were chiefly lumber. To say that a man was from Pearl River was all the recommendation he needed to get a job to handle lumber anywhere.”

The turning basin at the end of the New Basin Canal, near the site of the present-day Superdome. New Orleans, Louisiana. ca. 1890. Source: Louisiana Digital Library.

CODA:

Other than being born a slave in Covington, LA in 1840 (as was his mother – although his father was listed as Irish), Captain Anatole McKan next appears in historic records as master of the 64’ schooner Lillie Schmidt in 1873 which was owned by the Poitevent and Favre Lumber Company.

The Lillie Schmidt was constructed by Lucien Pichon in 1873 at Bayou Bonfouca in Slidell, LA with a figurehead on the bow. In 1877, McKan was the master of the 59’ Ella C. Andrews. In 1894, he shows up as the master of the schooner Axel. McKan also shows up as master of the Julia Rickert, the Emma Jane, and the Alice McGuigan at various times.

In the 1890 census, he lived in Pearlington, Mississippi and married Malinda on March 30, 1884 in Hancock County. In the 1900 census, they still resided in Pearlington with a son Nicholas living with them aged 19.

In 1932, McKan lived at 2326 Bienville St. in New Orleans. He died in New Orleans on April 20, 1937 and was survived by two sons, Captain Standford McKan and Captain Nicholas McKan as well as 11 grandchildren.

In 2012, almost all of Sci Academy’s seniors were accepted at college; seven years later, 65% had dropped out.

By
Casey Parks
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Rinata Williams was an “extraordinary” student, who always wanted to go to college. She dreamed of attending a historically black school out of state, maybe Spelman College or Clark Atlanta University.  Photo: Cheryl Gerber for The Hechinger Report

Lake Pontchartrain glistened as Rinata Williams rode north from New Orleans. She watched from the backseat in August 2012 as the city gave way to the causeway, miles and miles of concrete bridge she hoped would ferry her to the future she’d been promised.

No one in her family had ever left home for college. Before Hurricane Katrina, just half of New Orleans public school students earned a high school diploma, and few went on to succeed at a university. But as her mother steered toward Alabama, Williams believed she would be different. She’d spent four years at a high school determined to send minority students like her to college. She’d earned a high GPA, an above-average ACT score and a scholarship  worth tens of thousands of dollars. She’d been one of the first graduates in a new charter school landscape that many in New Orleans believed could fix a broken education system.

They cruised east, and her favorite R&B station crackled with static as the signal from New Orleans faded. Her uncle turned around in the front passenger seat. Soon, he told Williams, everything would be new. He twisted the dial and landed on a station playing Tim McGraw. Williams listened to a few lines, then began to sing. She actually liked the country song.

The sun blared bright as they pulled close to Birmingham Southern College. The campus looked as beautiful as it had when Williams visited with a high school chaperone a few months earlier. Williams loved the way its brick buildings sat on a hilltop, the way the grass stayed green and mowed. But her stomach tightened as she looked out now. She was the only student with dark skin and the red-and-black braids that had been popular back home.

Her mother killed the engine, and Williams started to cry. Newspapers had reported that nearly everyone in Williams’s graduating class at Sci Academy in New Orleans had been accepted to college, as if they were a group moving toward one unprecedented future together. But her friends had left for universities in Vermont and Colorado and Massachusetts. Her family would drive back to New Orleans that afternoon.

Williams opened the car door, then cried harder. To succeed here, she realized, she would have to face college alone.

Williams had always wanted to go to college. She dreamed of attending a historically black school out of state, maybe pledging a sorority at Spelman College or Clark Atlanta University. But she wasn’t sure how she’d make it out of New Orleans until 2008, when she met a skinny white guy from Washington, D.C.

Ben Marcovitz was unlike anyone Williams knew. He was 28, but already had degrees from Harvard and Yale. He’d studied English and theater in college, and moved to New Orleans for a girl. After a year of teaching there, he’d come to believe that he could help any student get into college.

Marcovitz knew some people might think his goal unachievable. Just a third of adults nationwide have bachelor’s degrees, and New Orleans’ students, most of them black and from low-income families, face particularly bleak odds. Only one of every ten low-income students nationwide finishes college on time. But, Marcovitz told himself, people thought the four-minute mile was impossible until Roger Bannister ran one in three minutes, fifty-nine seconds. Statistics are only true until someone bucks them.

His was a brash mission shared by a new breed of charter school leaders who said they could succeed where traditional neighborhood schools had failed. By 2008, education reformers had opened charters in Texas and New York with similar “college for all” promises. Nowhere was this movement stronger than in New Orleans. The city’s public school system had been such a “disaster” before the hurricane that Education Secretary Arne Duncan later called Katrina the “best thing” that ever happened to education in New Orleans. After the 2005 storm, in a state effort to reinvent the city’s schools as charters, the school board fired nearly all of the city’s public school teachers, most of them black. Eventually, every neighborhood school in New Orleans either closed or became a charter, many of which were staffed primarily with novice, white teachers.

“She’d spent four years at Sci Academy learning how to improve her writing and study habits, but no one in high school had talked about what college would feel like if your only friend dropped out and your roommate couldn’t bear to live with you. She’d never learned to navigate being the sole black woman in a residence hall full of white people who didn’t understand her.”

Williams was just 14 when Marcovitz told her she could be part of something historic at Sci Academy, the charter high school he was opening on the east end of town. But she’d been around enough adults to discern which ones were genuine, and she believed Marcovitz. Plus, she had little to lose. She’d attended three middle schools since the hurricane and assumed she’d go, as her family members had, to George Washington Carver Senior High, a 9th Ward institution that the state had long ranked “academically unacceptable.”

When Williams enrolled in mid-August 2008, she found that Sci Academy was different from the schools she’d attended before. The hallways, lined with black tape, created lanes that forced Williams and her classmates to walk single-file. Students had to sit up straight, make eye contact and talk in “a scholarly voice.” Classes lasted until 5 p.m.

Sci Academy
When Rinata Williams enrolled in mid-August 2008, she found that Sci Academy was different from the schools she’d attended before. The hallways, lined with black tape, created lanes that forced Williams and her classmates to walk single-file. Students had to sit up straight, make eye contact, and talk in “a scholarly voice.” Classes lasted until 5 p.m. Photo: Cheryl Gerber for The Hechinger Report

The black tape reminded Williams too much of the jails some of her family members had spent time in, but she loved hearing her homeroom teacher call their class UCONN after her alma mater, and she didn’t mind staying late because her instructors never seemed to stop working. They answered the phone after dark if Williams called when she stumbled over homework.

Williams was “extraordinary,” Marcovitz said, deeply curious and capable of the kind of complex thinking not common in most high school freshmen. She trawled the dictionary for new words and spent school bus rides proofreading friends’ papers. She tutored other kids from public housing. Her initial test scores were below grade level, but nearly every student came to Sci academically behind. Most still read at an elementary school level. Some couldn’t read at all.

Both Williams and Sci Academy thrived during her time there. By her sophomore year, Williams was earning all A’s and B’s, and Sci’s test scores were the best of any open-enrollment high school in the city. Sci’s students performed so well, Oprah gave Sci Academy $1 million in 2010 and called Marcovitz and other charter leaders “real-life superheroes.”

When Williams and her classmates began considering colleges, Marcovitz wanted the teenagers to have the same experience he’d had at Maret, a prestigious private school he’d attended on scholarship in D.C. He brought in an ACT expert, and hired an admissions counselor away from Wesleyan University to help with their personal statements. Sci even paid for the students to visit dozens of colleges across the South and Northeast.

Williams considered Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University, a historically black university in Tallahassee, but when she toured, the dorms reminded her too much of New Orleans’s public housing projects. College, Sci Academy’s teachers had told her, was about new beginnings, so Williams scrapped her application.

Researchers have found that low-income students are more likely to earn a bachelor’s degree if they attend more challenging institutions, so Sci’s teachers encouraged the teenagers to enroll in the highest-ranked schools that would accept them — no matter how white, how far away, how foreign.

As graduation neared in 2012, Williams narrowed her choices to Louisiana State University, Sewanee and Birmingham Southern, schools whose campuses were pretty and whose populations were majority white. That April, Sci officials rented a church auditorium down the road for the school’s first Senior Scholar Signing Day. As cheerleaders rallied the way they did for football teams elsewhere, Marcovitz announced that 49 of Sci Academy’s 52 graduates were headed to college — a then-unheard of rate for a New Orleans public school with open admissions. Some were going to Wesleyan, Amherst and Smith, selective institutions with near-perfect graduation rates.

Williams, who’d never missed a day of class and finished with Sci’s top honors in math, chose Birmingham Southern. The private liberal arts school wasn’t the historically black college or university she’d once dreamed of, but it was bucolic, the “new scenery” she’d come to believe college should be.

In recent years, charter high schools with Sci’s “college for all” mission have celebrated as “100 percent” of their graduating classes enrolled in college. Few have publicized how their alumni fared after enrolling, but in 2011, the nation’s largest nonprofit charter school network released a report criticizing its own outcomes. Yes, KIPP officials wrote, their first students in Houston and the Bronx had gone to college at more than double the average rate of their peers. But KIPP had tracked its alumni and found that only a third earned a bachelor’s degree — above average for low-income students, but a long way away from KIPP’s goal of 75 percent.

Still, Marcovitz believed that he and his staff could help Sci’s graduates hurdle any obstacles. As Williams and her classmates moved away in the summer of 2012, Marcovitz expected they’d all have “a happy ending with college.” Then, “pretty much immediately,” Marcovitz said, he realized he’d underestimated just how tough college would be.

Williams wasn’t sure what to do after her mother and uncle dropped her off in Birmingham. She looked around her dorm. She hadn’t brought any decorations, so the walls were bare. The wood desk was empty, too, but her mother had made the bed with a brand-new sheet set and comforter, so Williams sat on the twin bed, opened the laptop her godbrother had sent, and downloaded Skype and ooVoo so she could chat with her friends long-distance. She looked around again. The sun was still shining, but she pulled back the covers, climbed in and fell asleep.

She forced herself to go to orientation that weekend, but as her classmates went around in a circle introducing themselves, she grew nervous. Every school Williams had attended in New Orleans was nearly 100 percent black. Only a tenth of the students at Birmingham Southern were black, a fraction that felt even smaller that first week. Williams was one of only three black students in her residence hall, and she worried her New Orleans accent might make her seem unusual. “You don’t want to seem uneducated with these people,” she told herself, “so just stay real quiet.”

Williams was relieved when classes started the next morning. In high school, classes had always come easy. At Birmingham Southern, she strolled toward Introduction to Film, smiling, but when the instructor asked the class to write two pages explaining what they hoped to do in film, Williams froze. She had chosen to major in music business because she wanted to help people make art. She believed movies, like music, could be therapy for people who might never go to a counselor. But she couldn’t find words to explain her goals, so when she tried to write the paper later that week, she sat motionless in front of her laptop. Finally, a few hours before class, she scrambled together a few dozen sentences. The professor returned the paper graded a C-.

Williams tried harder in her courses, but no matter how well she did on essays or tests, she still felt uncomfortable. She didn’t talk in class, and she never went to the cafeteria. Instead, she survived off packs of ramen that her godbrother sent in bulk. She grew close to the only other black woman in her dorm, a first-generation student named Ashley. They went to the gym together every day for a month before Ashley decided to drop out. She had a kid; the college wouldn’t let her keep the child in her dorm, and she couldn’t afford a babysitter.

After Ashley left, Williams spent most of her time alone. She didn’t have money or a car, so when other students explored the city, she stayed behind. She wrote letters to her 11- and 9-year-old sisters, then taped their replies to the wall above her bed. When her roommate asked to be transferred mid-semester, Williams didn’t blame her.“I’m very awkward,” Williams thought.

Williams had no idea how to make Birmingham Southern feel right. She’d spent four years at Sci Academy learning how to improve her writing and study habits, but no one in high school had talked about what college would feel like if your only friend dropped out and your roommate couldn’t bear to live with you. She’d never learned to navigate being the sole black woman in a residence hall full of white people who didn’t understand her.

At the end of 2012, Williams packed her clothes and letters for Christmas break. She hadn’t told anyone, but she’d decided she couldn’t go back to Birmingham in January. As her mother drove her home, Williams daydreamed about transferring to the University of New Orleans. UNO wasn’t as prestigious as the private school Sci’s counselors had steered her toward, and she’d have to repay Birmingham the tens of thousands of dollars they’d given her as scholarship, but she imagined she might be happier in Louisiana.

10 percent – Proportion of Sci Academy’s college-bound graduates of the class of 2012 who had dropped out of college by Christmas that year

Her mother drove across Lake Pontchartrain, then Williams’s old neighborhood appeared. It wasn’t as idyllic as her college campus, but Williams didn’t care. The air smelled familiar. Her sisters rushed out, and she was home.

By Christmas, 12 percent of Sci Academy’s first graduates had either dropped out or transferred to a community college.

Sci Academy
Eddie Barnes had been one of Sci Academy’s most celebrated students. He’d finished with the fifth-highest GPA and won nearly every social accolade the school doled out. When he got into Middlebury College, a selective school in Vermont, Barnes felt confident he would earn a degree by 2016. Photo: Cheryl Gerber for The Hechinger Report

Most couldn’t point to just one reason they’d stumbled. They missed their families or needed to find jobs to pay for gaps in their scholarships. Students who enrolled in a North Louisiana university found that the food was too bland. No place in America is like New Orleans — not even North Louisiana — and it hurt too much to lose the city again after they’d been displaced by the hurricane. Others grew unfocused after they freed themselves of Sci’s scaffolds. For years, Sci’s teachers had controlled the way the teenagers sat, talked and studied. In college, on their own, students said they weren’t sure how to structure their time.

Some earned their first-ever F’s, and the failures depressed them. Eddie Barnes had been one of Sci’s most celebrated students. He’d finished with the fifth-highest GPA and won nearly every social accolade the school doled out. When he got into Middlebury College, a selective school in Vermont, Barnes felt confident he would earn a degree by 2016.

Only 4 percent of Middlebury’s students are black, but Barnes found “other ghetto kids,” students who’d grown up, as he had, hearing guns firing in the middle of the night. His Intro to Russian class was tougher than Advanced Spanish had been at Sci Academy, and he couldn’t always bring himself to trudge through the snow toward his 8 a.m. psychology class. But he spoke up in Romantic Literature, and he helped other students with their African American Religious History papers. Still, none of those wins mattered after his grades came back lower than he’d expected. By the second semester, Barnes was on academic probation. He stayed in his room, shivering even when everyone else thought the dorm was warm, and told himself he was a failure. He dropped out his sophomore year.

“It was the saddest point in my life,” Barnes said. “I felt like I couldn’t do anything. I felt inadequate. I didn’t have any type of positive thought about anything.”

Jordan Pierre, after one semester at Louisiana State University, also landed on academic probation, but he worked harder the following spring and pulled his grade point average up to a 3.2. He hoped to earn a degree in business law, but during his sophomore year, Pierre fell $8,000 short of the money he owed the university. He’d maxed out on loans, so Pierre applied for grants and scholarships, but none materialized.

“It was the saddest point in my life. I felt like I couldn’t do anything. I felt inadequate. I didn’t have any type of positive thought about anything.” – Sci Academy graduate Eddie Barnes, on dropping out of college in his sophomore year

In 2014, Pierre enlisted in the Air Force, intending to use his salary and the G.I. bill to pay for his education. But he had to take semesters off for basic and technical job training, then the military deployed him to Qatar, Kuwait and Turkey. He squeezed in online classes when he could, and earned an associate degree through the Community College of the Air Force, but as he passed his 22nd birthday, Pierre couldn’t help feeling ashamed that he hadn’t earned his bachelor’s.

“It weighs heavy on me,” Pierre said. “I didn’t want to leave, but I really didn’t know how I could continue.”

Williams withdrew from Birmingham Southern just after Christmas 2012, and enrolled at the University of New Orleans. She felt more comfortable at the local university, a diverse school with a sizable black population, but she found UNO’s larger classes overwhelming. She sat in the front row for the sociology and biology seminars, but couldn’t concentrate in a room with more than 30 classmates. She missed the way Sci’s teachers had locked eyes with students, the way instructors adapted their styles to make sure she understood every lesson. Williams wanted to ask for help, but couldn’t go during her professors’ office hours because she’d taken a full-time job as a Save-A-Lot cashier. Most nights, she got off at 1 a.m. She didn’t have a car, so she spent hours waiting for buses in a system with infrequent service. She had to be up again by 5:30 to catch the 7 a.m. bus, the latest she could ride to make it on time for her 8 a.m. math course.

In biology, she found a seat in the back where she could doze as her professor droned on in terms she didn’t recognize. In her dreams, the instructor sounded like Charlie Brown’s teacher, a muted trombone going wah wah wah.

Sci Academy officials tried to help their graduates. Marcovitz hired a woman to track the alumni; she and other staff emailed students and visited a few out of state. They bought college textbooks for some, and gave internships or jobs to a fourth of the class, including Eddie Barnes. Sci even paid back Birmingham Southern so Williams could try UNO without worrying about the money she owed the Alabama college.

Williams didn’t want to ask for help after she fell behind her first semester at UNO. Instead, in August 2013, she transferred to New Orleans’s Delgado Community College. That fall, Williams switched her major from music business to psychology in hopes of becoming a counselor. She still worked long hours, and she didn’t have a car, but she felt more at home. Strangers introduced themselves when she sat in the courtyard. She started helping other students with their classwork, and soon she no longer felt isolated as she had at Birmingham Southern. Even big classes didn’t bother her. Students lined the walls in her packed medical terminology course, but the professor made eye contact with everyone, and that connection helped keep Williams focused.

Sci Academy
Rinata Williams never missed a day of high school and finished with Sci Academy’s top honors in math, but she struggled at Birmingham Southern College, a private liberal arts school where she was one of only three black students in her freshman dorm. Photo: Cheryl Gerber for The Hechinger Report

Williams loved Delgado so much that she kept going even after she had to take a second job in 2014. The cost of renting an apartment in New Orleans rose sharply in the decade after Hurricane Katrina as developers and AirBnB rentals helped gentrify once-affordable black enclaves. The average cost of a one-bedroom apartment rose to more than $1,400 a month, a rent Williams couldn’t afford with her Save-a-Lot job. She took another full-time position at a Winn-Dixie; by the end of the year, she was working 85 hours a week.

Some days, Williams missed the bus, so she walked or paid for a taxi. When she was too late to walk and too broke to call a cab, she skipped classes. Eventually, a professor told her that she’d never pass if she continued missing days. Williams knew she could reach out to Sci, but her high school counselors couldn’t buy her a car or pay her rent. Marcovitz couldn’t sit up with her at 3 a.m. while she puzzled over psychology homework in the one hour she had to spare.

As students reported back, Marcovitz told himself he’d been “horribly unstrategic” and naive. He vowed to learn from the struggles Williams faced. He created new college success classes at Sci to prepare students to face issues such as imposter syndrome. He and his team began to question whether the best-ranked colleges were always the best fit for his students. Marcovitz had believed that his students should attend schools like Middlebury and Smith because he’d thought those elite colleges would open the most doors for them after graduation. But what if Barnes and Williams had gone somewhere else, somewhere that made them feel at home?

“It was terrifying at a systemic level. These things are make-or-break for our kids and we hadn’t even thought about them.” – Ben Marcovitz, founder of Sci Academy in New Orleans, on the school’s failure to prepare graduates for the social and psychological issues they would face in college

Marcovitz recognized that he needed a staff who knew, firsthand, how alienated black students could feel on a majority-white campus. He needed teachers who’d attended historically black schools and participated in African American fraternities and sororities. Marcovitz expanded his college counseling program and hired more New Orleans natives and people of color, counselors he believed could better help his students find not just the highest-ranked college, but the college best suited for each teenager.

Marcovitz believed in studying and learning from the ways he’d failed, but tinkering with his model was slim solace for the deep, “heartbreaking” regret he felt about his first graduates. For years, Marcovitz had woken up every morning thinking about those students before he thought about anything else. He’d believed he’d stay just as close to them after they went to college. But that optimistic devotion, Marcovitz realized, had disguised the financial, social and emotional problems he should have addressed.

“It was terrifying at a systemic level,” Marcovitz said. “These things are make-or-break for our kids and we hadn’t even thought about them.”

In the fall of 2015, after Williams failed a third semester, she began to question whether college was the surest path to the life she wanted. The few people she knew with bachelor’s degrees hadn’t found high-paying jobs. And some of her high school classmates had reached the middle class even though they’d dropped out of college. One earned $85,000 a year working for Coca-Cola. Pierre, the student who left LSU for the Air Force, had a good job working in the executive branch of the federal government. Others had joined the Army or the sheriff’s department and seemed fulfilled. Darnisha Gordon left Delgado after a month, but she’d traveled to the Dakotas and Montana with AmeriCorps, and she found work as a certified nurse’s assistant that she said “completes me.”

Marcovitz, too, had noticed that many of his students were happy and prosperous without a degree. As the years went by, Marcovitz came to believe that he had been too narrow-minded in seeing college as the only badge of success. He now runs six high schools. Though his organization, Collegiate Academies, still publicizes the fact that 99 percent of seniors are accepted to college, and his mission still includes a focus on preparing students for college, Marcovitz believes that for some young people, living “lives of unlimited opportunity” — finding careers or vocations they love, even without a degree — might be just as good.

Williams loves learning. She writes down words she doesn’t know to look them up later, and spends her free time scrolling through the Internet to research any topic she can conjure. She didn’t want to quit. So many people had believed in her — Marcovitz, her family, even Oprah Winfrey. If she persisted, she would prove them right. It didn’t matter where you came from, what you looked like, or how much money you had. All children can succeed. But she was tired. She’d been out of high school for more than three years, and she still didn’t have enough college credits for even an associate degree. When the semester ended in late 2015, Williams withdrew from Delgado.

By 2016, four years after their triumphant graduation from Sci Academy, only two members of that inaugural class had finished college. Neither had had an easy time. Erica Willard was so depressed and homesick at Colorado College that she “completely broke down” when she saw a group of upperclassmen cooking fried chicken and cornbread, the soul food she’d grown up eating. Troy Simon, who went on to earn a master’s degree in Divinity at Yale, realized at Bard College that higher education might divide him from the family members he’d left behind.

“You become your own person, and that is scary,” Simon said. “There is a fear of letting go of family, letting go of your community. I struggled with that. There is a feeling that I am an interloper now, an outsider.”

“We underestimated the importance of social integration. We underestimated the cultural gaps between the communities our students come from and the more elite highly selective institutions that a lot of people got placed into.” – Brian Beabout, a former New Orleans teacher who now studies the city’s charter schools as an associate professor of educational leadership at the University of New Orleans

Only six of Sci’s first graduates finished college within six years, the federal standard for on-time graduation. Another three earned degrees this year. Though eight students, including Pierre, are still working toward a degree, 65 percent of the 49 students who enrolled in college have dropped out.

Sci’s parent organization Collegiate Academies is the only New Orleans charter organization that has publicly shared its college persistence results. Most of the city’s charter high schools don’t track the number of alumni who go on to earn bachelor’s degrees, and KIPP New Orleans, the one network that does, declined to share data for its students. KIPP’s first graduating class from New Orleans has only been in college for five years, one year shy of the federal cutoff for “on-time” graduation. But researchers at the Educational Research Alliance, a Tulane-based organization that studies the post-Katrina education reforms, found last year that the new high schools have increased college graduation rates by 3 to 5 percentage points since Hurricane Katrina. Though Sci’s graduation rate is slightly higher than the national average for low-income students, neither it, nor any other New Orleans high school has come close to achieving the “college for all” they once promised. 

Most made the same mistakes Sci did, said Brian Beabout, a former New Orleans teacher who has evaluated charter applications for the state and who now studies the city’s charter schools as an associate professor of educational leadership at UNO. Most charters hired young white teachers and counselors from selective universities. They steered students toward elite institutions. Those high schools did improve academics for a huge swath of the city, Beabout said, but many did so without preparing their students to succeed socially in college.

65 – Percentage of Sci Academy graduates who had started college in 2012 who had dropped out by September 2019

“We underestimated the importance of social integration,” Beabout said. “We underestimated the cultural gaps between the communities our students come from and the more elite highly selective institutions that a lot of people got placed into. Even if I can hang in my college algebra classroom, can I make a happy life for myself in a dorm with very few people who have had very similar life experiences?”

Over time, Marcovitz came to believe that a more diverse teaching corps could help students. His initial hiring pool, he realized, had been biased. He’d only hired people from within his own network — “circles that rippled out from my white privilege.” That first year, only one of seven teachers identified as a person of color. Today, more than half of the 140 teachers who work at one of his schools do.

Sci Academy
Raven Matthews celebrates her recent graduation from the University of New Orleans during a crawfish boil with friends and family, New Orleans, May, 25 2019. Photo: Cheryl Gerber for The Hechinger Report

As Marcovitz’s staff has focused more on social integration, he’s found that the students who returned to Sci for non-academic help were often the ones who succeeded in college. When Jeon Domingue took a year off Amherst, she moved home to work for Sci. She graduated in 2017 and now works for Opportunities Academy, a post-secondary program that Marcovitz’s organization runs for students with intellectual and developmental disabilities. Raven Matthews attended four colleges before earning her degree from UNO this May, but she remains so close to Marcovitz that she babysits his children, and now works at one of Marcovitz’s schools in Baton Rouge. And Marquisha Williams turned to her old high school for advice after she dropped out of the University of Louisiana at Monroe and grew ill with what she later discovered was lupus. Sci’s counselors helped her find therapy and a low-pressure job. When she enrolled at LSU, they paid for her textbooks. She graduated last December.

Rinata Williams didn’t turn to Sci for help because she was too embarrassed. She’d earned enough to buy a car and rent an apartment, but she didn’t want to feel like a disappointment, so she ignored Marcovitz’s invitations to alumni celebrations. One night in 2017, two years after she left Delgado, she went to pick up a friend from one of the parties she’d skipped. As Williams waited in the parking lot, Marcovitz walked up to her car. He knew she wasn’t in college, but he wanted to be a part of her life.

“We want to see you and catch up,” he said.

Williams stared at him. She considered explaining everything she’d been through, but most people she told didn’t understand, so she laughed and told Marcovitz sure, they could talk some time.

Williams still wants a degree, though pursuing one left her worse off financially. She is deeply in debt and her credit score dropped after she defaulted on the $22,000 she owes in student loans. She tells friends she will go back in a decade when she has money and time enough to think. For now, she works the night in a post office mail room, but she wants to help people. Maybe, she thought this summer, she could stop by Sci a few days a week to talk to any students who need it. Williams knows she isn’t as credentialed as the counselors who will guide graduates forward. But struggling through college was its own kind of instruction, and in that, Williams is more of an expert than most educated people will ever be.

This story about Sci Academy was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education.

The Other General

By
Lamar White, Jr.
-

George Mason Graham, the so-called “father of LSU,” had a name that opened doors.

Yet today, despite his central role in establishing the state’s flagship university, there is very little scholarship on Gen. Graham of Tyrone Plantation. You won’t find his name on the school’s Wikipedia page. The $4.1 million residential hall that had been named in his honor in 1958 was quietly demolished about a decade ago. In 1980, in an art heist that remains unsolved, the only known full-length portrait of Graham was stolen, cut off of its frame and removed from the walls of LSU’s David Boyd Hall.

Even though there are affiliated campuses in Alexandria, Eunice, and Shreveport, LSU- as a brand- is now inseparable from Baton Rouge. The university is at the core of the city’s cultural, social, economic, and political identity. But LSU actually began in the piney hills of northern Rapides Parish, 2.5 miles away from Louisiana College, a tiny private school that squandered its academic reputation after a faction of far-right Southern Baptists hijacked its leadership 14 years ago. Aside from a few historical markers, some wooden benches, and a picnic table, LSU’s original campus is now only a couple of acres of otherwise unremarkable vacant land next to the VA Hospital.

For most of my life, I’ve been fascinated by the complicated history of Rapides Parish, the land where I was born and raised. My interest is partly because Rapides and its parish seat, the city of Alexandria, had once seemed poised to become the state’s second-largest metropolitan area and economic engine before it was decimated during and then in the aftermath of the Civil War.

Some believe Interstate 10 serves as the unofficial line of cultural demarcation in Louisiana, but in my opinion, the real border is the Red River, which slices through the state, splitting both Shreveport and Bossier City as well as Alexandria and Pineville before wandering into the Atchafalaya and connecting with the Mississippi. Alexandria is located in the geographic center of Louisiana, in a region that is both literally and figuratively the crossroads of the state.

When I was five, my great aunt Sue published a book entirely about the history of Rapides Parish, which you can still find for sale on Amazon for $38.50.

On the other side of the Red River, across from Alexandria, the landscape changes dramatically: Cypress and swamp are replaced by pine and rolling hills; Baptists outnumber Catholics; country dethrones jazz and zydeco; food is fried, not boiled, and French is a foreign language spoken in a distant land.

Admittedly, my fascination with the history of Rapides Parish is also driven by curiosity about my own genealogy; my father’s family has been in Rapides Parish for at least five generations, mostly arriving in the early 1850s, the same time a wealthy Virginia-born planter living on the banks of Bayou Rapides began charting out his vision for a new public university.

In addition to his own autobiography and the genealogical work of his descendants, Mason Graham, as he was known, is the subject of only one serious work of academic scholarship, which was published in 1969 and, unfortunately, contains a handful of glaring factual errors. During the past three weeks, I’ve consumed just about everything one can find out about Mason Graham, and the portrait that has emerged is of a man beleaguered by tragedies, haunted by his family’s legacy, and animated by both the good and the evil of his young country. He was a thoughtful, intelligent, and generous man to his friends and colleagues, but he was also a virulent racist who saw no contradiction between his support of slavery and his belief in the high-minded aspirations about equality, justice, and freedom that breathed life into a new nation.

No doubt, there will be those who disagree with my characterization of Mason Graham. I do not find any value in sentimentalizing the antebellum South or in conveniently overlooking the horrors of slavery, nor do I find it credible to promote the pernicious belief that slave owners should be understood merely as “men of their time,” as if they were just victims of circumstance.

Given the recent efforts across the American South to reconsider the ways in which municipalities and public institutions contextualize their historical ties to slavery, the Confederacy, and the Lost Cause, it should not be too surprising that there’s been renewed attention to a remarkable irony about Louisiana’s flagship university: Its very first executive (then known as a superintendent, once known as a chancellor, and now known as a president) was Union Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman. While Sherman remains one of the most consequential and controversial leaders in American history and the subject of countless biographies, LSU would not exist today if not for the other general.

“If you know your LSU history, you know that George Mason Graham was the glue that held the university together after the Civil War,” Henry Bacot, the long-time Director of LSU’s Museum of Art, told the Daily Reveille two years ago. Professor Bacot’s assessment is accurate, but Mason Graham was also much more than the glue that held LSU together during Reconstruction. He was the singular force that assembled the school’s creation.

Yet Graham has largely been relegated to the footnotes. Perhaps this is due to a dearth of scholarship. Perhaps it is also because his extraordinary contributions to the school are complicated and undermined by his hypocritical support of slavery. 154 years after the Civil War, we continue to grapple with how to tell the story of America’s original sin, and according to polling, even today, nearly half of the country believes monuments that glorify Confederate leaders should remain in the public square, despite their gross distortion of historical truths and the numerous ways in which they communicate oppression and hatred to racial minorities.

But you cannot tell the story of Louisiana without also confronting the horrors of slavery, and you cannot tell the story of LSU without also confronting the good, the bad, and the ugly truths about the school’s father, Mason Graham.

The gravestone of George Graham, the father of George Mason Graham.

George Graham’s Son

His name was his mother Betsey’s idea, a way of honoring her late husband, former Secretary of War George Mason V., who died in 1796 on his 43rd birthday. Betsey was just 28, widowed with six small children. Seven years later, she married another man named George.

Although he lacked a famous surname, George Graham, a lawyer with whom she would have four more children (two of whom died in infancy), eventually became one of the young country’s most distinguished public servants.

He had briefly served as the nation’s Acting Secretary of War, under both President Madison and President Monroe, the same job as Betsey’s late husband had held. Graham helped transform West Point into both an academic institution and military academy, and he ironed out the details of a treaty with Spain that recognized the Sabine River as the border between Texas and Louisiana. After the Department of War, he served four years as President of the Washington, D.C. branch of the Bank of the United States, and after the bank, he was appointed as the nation’s Commissioner of Public Lands. When he passed away in 1830, he was remembered as a friend to all seven U.S. Presidents and as the legal representative of the Marquis de Lafayette.

The Masons, though, were one of America’s first family dynasties.

Betsey’s former father-in-law, George Mason IV, had been a Founding Father, a contemporary, childhood friend, and neighbor of George Washington, and the author of the Virginia Declaration of Rights, the document that formed the foundation of the Bill of Rights in the U.S. Constitution. In fact, Mason was also one of three delegates to the Constitutional Convention who refused to sign onto the document, which he believed needed to be amended to include an itemized list of guaranteed rights and a repudiation of slavery (despite the fact that he was himself a slave owner). In 1792, as George Mason IV was on his deathbed, Thomas Jefferson traveled to Gunston Hall, Mason’s home in Fairfax County, Virginia, to say farewell and pay his respects.

There were only a handful of families as well-known- the Taliaferros, the Lees, the Randolphs, and the Townsends- almost all of whom were also from Virginia. Although he wasn’t technically a member of the Mason family dynasty, Mason Graham had been born into the rarefied air of the American aristocracy.

Betsey gave her son a name that opened doors, but it also left him big shoes to fill, with a foot in two extraordinarily accomplished families.

After Betsey’s tragic death in 1814, George sent their seven-year-old son Mason and their young daughter Mary to live with his brother John, an assistant to then-Secretary of State James Monroe. (Mary would later become a highly-respected nun, Sister Mary Bernard of Georgetown).

George decided to go “into the field” as a captain, to investigate the “Napoleonic exiles” that had established Champ d’Asile, a French armed settlement in southeast Texas, earning the distinction of being the first-ever “Anglo-American” to travel to the area. On that tour, Captain Graham met Jean Lafitte, “the notorious smuggler” who was then living like a king in Galveston; apparently, he received some commitments from Lafitte to recognize the United States’ authority in the neighboring Louisiana territory.

As a kid, despite his father’s absence, Mason had received a stellar education: Small private schools in Georgetown and Washington, D.C., and then a coveted spot at the military academy George had helped to transform: West Point. (He received his “warrant” to attend West Point from Vice President John C. Calhoun). Mason didn’t last long there, ostensibly due to his poor eyesight, and he transferred to the University of Virginia. In 1828, instead of returning to UVA for his junior year, 21-year-old Mason dropped out of college and moved a world away, to Rapides Parish, Louisiana.

Years before, his father had purchased a cotton plantation there, and Mason was tasked with overhauling its operations. It’s likely he had been sent to Louisiana- more than 1,100 miles away from his hometown- as a temporary assignment. At the time, Mason was aimless, having flunked out of two schools and appearing to have very few prospects as a military officer.

Today, Fairfax, Virginia is home to George Mason University, now the largest four-year school in the Commonwealth. But a century before George Mason University opened, Mason Graham had spearheaded the creation of a different school, a small seminary and military academy in Pineville, Louisiana that eventually moved to Baton Rouge and changed its name to Louisiana State University.

In 1980, this portrait of George Mason Graham was stolen from LSU’s David Boyd Hall, along with four other valuable paintings. Nearly four decades later, the paintings remain missing, and the heist is still unsolved.

“Ranaway”

Mason Graham wasn’t the founder of LSU; the state legislature was. Yet LSU, as an institution, would likely not exist if Mason Graham hadn’t moved to Rapides Parish, Louisiana. And Mason Graham wouldn’t have ever moved to Rapides Parish if the slave trade had been illegal.

Six years after he arrived, Graham returned to Virginia, got married, and brought his new wife and his sister, Sister Mary, back to Louisiana. By then, he had owned his own plantation near Cotile Landing, in what is now the town of Boyce. A year later, in 1835, his young bride died after giving birth to the couple’s first child. A month later, the infant passed away.

“This left Mr. Graham in a restless, objectless condition,” the Daily Picayune later reported, “and under the influence of this spell he sold his plantation and returned to Washington.”

He came back for good in 1842, purchasing Tyrone Plantation on the banks of Bayou Rapides, a few miles outside of Alexandria.

At the time, an astonishing 74% of those living in Rapides Parish were enslaved African Americans. There were more slaves in Rapides Parish- over 15,000- than anywhere else in the state.

Graham quickly reasserted himself as a prominent planter and civic leader. Indeed, even though he had been “rambling about” until his return in 1842, he never severed his ties to Louisiana. In 1839, he served as the state’s one and only Whig delegate at the party’s presidential convention, supporting- to no avail- the candidacy of Henry Clay.

In 1843, a year after moving into Tyrone Plantation, Mason Graham organized a militia group, the Rapides Horse Guards, which, by all accounts, was essentially a precursor to the Ku Klux Klan. The Rapides Horse Guards was formed for only one purpose: To prevent an insurrection by terrorizing and inflicting violence against black slaves.

Three years later, as the nation became embroiled in the Mexican-American War, Graham refashioned his militia as a volunteer military regiment, and because he had briefly attended West Point and had organized the Rapides Horse Guards, he was named as its captain. Even though his company spent only three months in Mexico before being sent home to Louisiana, Mason Graham stayed put and saw action as the aide de camp to Col. John Garland during the Battle of Monterrey.

At the age of forty, with his military credentials finally firmly established, Mason Graham went back to his family at Tyrone Plantation.

Graham was born into privilege, but slave labor and cotton made him independently wealthy.

By 1860, he was worth the equivalent of at least $6.1 million. It’s unclear, however, if he ever possessed more than twenty human beings at any point, but there is very little doubt that Mason Graham was capable of horrific cruelty, despite his reputation as a “high-toned gentleman” and his fierce opposition to secession.

In September of 1860, he took out a classified ad, announcing that anyone who encountered “an elderly brown complected man named Edmund” and a “stout young mulatto fellow named George,” two slaves who had runaway from his plantation “without any justifiable provocation,” were authorized to shoot and murder the men “wherever they may be met with.”

We may never know the fates of Edmund and George, but when they fled Tyrone Plantation, Mason Graham was already beginning to panic about his own future and the future of his proudest accomplishment, the Louisiana State Seminary of Learning and Military Academy.

After nearly seven years of false starts, including a series of engineering failures that required a complete rebuild, the school had finally opened its doors in January, but as the nation prepared for a presidential election, Mason Graham recognized the inevitable: The union would break, and along with it, so too would his young school.

Esto Perpetua

On Jan. 18th, 1861, William Tecumseh Sherman, superintendent of the Louisiana State Seminary of Learning and Military Academy, sent Gov. Thomas Overton Moore a letter of resignation.

“I accepted such position when Louisiana was a state in the Union, and when the motto of this Seminary was inserted in marble over the main door: ‘By the liberality of the general government of the United States. The Union — esto perpetua,’” he wrote.

Although he had served for only a year, Sherman was widely admired by the Board of Supervisors, including Gov. Moore, a staunch secessionist. Like all but one other member, Gov. Moore was from Rapides Parish and had been an enthusiastic supporter of the school well before he was elected governor.

For most of the 19th century, higher education was virtually non-existent in Louisiana. There were a small handful of private schools. A couple of Harvard-educated professors opened the College of Rapides in Alexandria in 1824. A decade later, in 1834, seven physicians in New Orleans founded the Medical College of Louisiana, which was ostensibly a public school even though it received barely any public support. “Although the Territorial Legislature in 1805, and, later, the state legislatures, attempted to provide for public education, the effort was mostly on paper,” Sue Eakin explained. “The legislature made provisional grants to these private academies requiring a certain number of indigent students be allowed to attend the school. There is no evidence that this was carried out.”

The Medical College of Louisiana subsequently rebranded itself as a part of the University of Louisiana, which was created, at least on paper, in 1847, at the same time the legislature also authorized a search for the land they needed to construct an entirely new public university. It took them five years to decide on land three miles north of Alexandria, across the Red River, in an area that would one day be known as the town of Pineville. (After closing down during the Civil War, the University of Louisiana eventually reopened as a private university named in honor of its benefactor, Paul Tulane).

Mason Graham was appointed by Gov. Paul Hébert as Vice President of what was then called the Board of Trustees in 1853, but because the governor was, by statute, the president of the board, Graham was effectively its leader. (While Gov. Hébert had appointed Graham, the decision to locate the school in Pineville was made by Hébert‘s predecessor, Gov. Joseph Marshall Walker, who owned a plantation in Rapides Parish).

While the legislature may have had little appetite for funding the University of Louisiana, they believed in Mason Graham’s vision for the school in Rapides Parish. The state sank money into building the new campus. It’d take another decade before the main building was finally erected, only to be deemed structurally unsound by two engineers working for P.G.T. Beauregard. But for a number of reasons, state lawmakers and the school’s leaders were determined.

Antebellum Rapides Parish was at the epicenter of the state’s cotton industry, which meant it was home to both a small number of wealthy and enormously powerful white planters and a massive population of enslaved African Americans. Not surprisingly, this made men like Mason Graham paranoid, especially as the practice of slavery became increasingly less tolerated nationally and Northern and Western states and territories began banning slavery within their borders.

Graham wasn’t just concerned about the possibility of a mass insurrection; he was also concerned about the younger generation of white men. They were lazy, he thought. Undisciplined. They lacked a work ethic and had been spoiled by inherited wealth.

Tyrone Plantation, circa 1920. Source: Louisiana State Library. Today, Tyrone operates as a bed and breakfast and a wedding venue.

When the Board of Supervisors convened their first meeting at Tyrone Plantation, they were divided about what kind of school they would open. Some argued in favor of emulating the University of Virginia, where Graham had spent two listless years. Others, including Graham himself, believed in following the example of another school in Virginia, the esteemed Virginia Military Institute. Only a military academy could guarantee the kind of rigorous discipline Graham had believed to be in desperate need.

Mason Graham ultimately prevailed. A military academy, it turned out, would be significantly cheaper to operate than a traditional four-year university, and Graham already knew exactly the person who should lead the new school. He had worked his contacts in the Department of War and received a glowing recommendation from Gen. Don Carlos Buell for a 39-year-old lawyer and banker who had served under him during the Mexican-American War. His name was William Tecumseh Sherman, and as Graham soon discovered, he had also served under Gen. Roger B. Mason, Graham’s half-brother.

Sherman and Graham would enjoy a unique and lifelong friendship, exchanging countless letters both before and after the Civil War. Even though he was the only Northerner on the school’s staff and his brother John was an ambitious Republican congressman from Ohio who opposed slavery, William Tecumseh Sherman was trusted by the men who had hired him to run Louisiana’s new military academy. After Abraham Lincoln was elected and the secession became a reality, Sherman tendered his resignation. He’d tried to resign once before, after a job opportunity in London seemed too good to pass up. Mason Graham begged him to stay.

This time, though, Graham made little effort to change his mind; he respected Sherman as a man of principle, and he deeply opposed Louisiana’s decision to secede, believing that the state could reach some sort of compromise with its northern neighbors.

With Sherman gone, the Louisiana State Seminary and Military Academy suspended classes, and its cadets became Confederate soldiers.

A month later, Mason Graham took out another classified ad:

Conflagrations

William Tecumseh Sherman and Don Carlos Buell, the man who recommended him for the job in Louisiana, became national heroes during the Civil War, fighting to preserve the Union that Mason Graham’s father and the family of his namesake, the Masons, had helped to create. Mason Graham lost nearly everything.

His home at Tyrone Plantation had been spared, but his cotton fields were burned to the ground and his cattle was either killed or set loose. He lamented the destruction in his autobiography, writing in the third person. “His (Graham’s) gin and 600 barrels of cotton and all of his barn burned. His corncribs full of corn and all others of his foodstuffs stolen, along with his horses, mules, and oxen. His cattle, hogs and sheep slaughtered, and his slaves gone,” he wrote.

He began the decade with a fortune worth the equivalent of at least $6.1 million, and he ended it with less than $160,000 in assets.

George Mason Graham officially earned the rank of “general” in 1867, though he had been elected as a Brigadier General by his company in Rapides and Avoyelles Parishes following the Mexican-American War. While horseback riding with his wife, Graham suffered a horrific injury that rendered him paralyzed. Gov. James Madison Wells, who was also from Rapides Parish, named him an Adjutant General of the State of Louisiana.

In May of 1864, Union Gen. Nathaniel Banks burned down the city of Alexandria. It would take two decades for the city to rebuild.

The school in Pineville was left alone, and on Oct. 2nd, 1865, it reopened under Superintendent David Boyd. Four years later, though, on Oct. 15th, 1869, the main building of the Louisiana State Seminary of Learning and Military Academy (it was already being referred to as Louisiana State University, though the name wouldn’t be official until the following year) caught fire. It was a total loss.

By then, Mason Graham had receded into a nominal role on the state school’s Board of Supervisors. He had been spending more time back in his native Virginia, where he was free to vote for a Democrat. Against his will, he had been nominated to run for Congress in what was then Louisiana’s Fourth District. He made it abundantly known he was not interested in the job and lost an election in which he had never campaigned.

In 1878, he came back to Tyrone Plantation for good, for the second time in his life. He re-immersed himself into the school, which had swiftly been relocated into the former home of the State Institution for the Deaf, Dumb, and Blind. It was supposed to be a temporary move, but despite the best efforts of those in Rapides Parish, LSU would remain in Baton Rouge.

Toward the end of his life, Graham sent a dispatch to an old friend who was now working in the Department of War, William Tecumseh Sherman. He asked Sherman for the government’s permission to use the Pentagon Barracks in Baton Rouge for the school. The irony didn’t escape either man. Years before, when Louisiana decided to oust federal troops from the barracks, Sherman knew he had no other choice but to resign. This time, though, he was happy to oblige.

Mason Graham died in the early morning of Jan. 31st, 1891 at the age of 84. He is buried at Mount Olivet Cemetery in Pineville next to a chapel that had served as the makeshift headquarters for the Union during the Civil War.

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