Louisiana has a long and sordid history of embracing politicians who bend – and sometimes even break – the rules. Mayors and sheriffs, judges and legislators, attorneys general, insurance commissioners, congressmen and even governors have been caught with their hands in the cookie jar.
However,
over the past decade we’ve had fewer cases of public corruption, as
Louisiana citizens have exhibited less tolerance – in general –
for tainted public servants. The major exception is, of course,
Louisiana’s 2016 embracing of a thrice-married, self-admitted
serial philanderer trailing a string of bankruptcies and fraud
lawsuits into the White House.
Perhaps
it’s the D.C. environment, or the GOP dogma that affected the
northeast Louisiana congressman who would be governor, but there
seems to be something gone radically askew with Ralph Abraham’s
moral compass.
Screenshot of re-branded “Farmers” ad, from Ralph Abraham’s campaign Facebook page.
In June, as the Advocate’s superb Stephanie Grace reported, the Abraham gubernatorial campaign apparently didn’t realize that re-branding Dodge’s iconic 2013 Super Bowl commercial about farmers and posting it on Facebook was plagiarism and copyright infringement, making it illegal. It was also unethical, immoral, and ludicrously perverse. As Grace notes, the paean to farmers voiced by Paul Harvey does “speak at length about the value of putting in a long, grueling day and not cutting corners.”
Duh-huh.
Cotton fields in Alto, Louisiana, July 2019. Photo by Sue Lincoln.
And as we have reported, the veterinarian-turned-physician-turned-politician is much more than his “simple country doctor” persona would indicate. He owns some 2,300 acres of northeast Louisiana farmland, and has received seven-figures worth of federal farm subsidies over the years. Approximately half of the $2.6 million he and his family have received have been through the soil conservation program, which is, essentially, like being paid not to work.
Abraham, despite being one of those Republicans who is reliably on the warpath against programs that can be perceived as welfare, had no problems this past spring not doing the job he was elected to do. As reported by the matchless Melinda Deslatte of AP, GovTrack data showed he missed 196 of 509 roll call votes in the U.S. House, from last December – when he began his run for governor – through the last week of June. It’s a no-show rate of nearly 39%.
Among the votes missed was one crucial to his district and to all of Louisiana: Reauthorization of the National Flood Insurance Program.
On the other hand, perhaps not voting (though he was elected and is paid to do so on behalf of his constituents) is somehow, in his mind, being true to his beliefs. After all, while campaigning in March on the luncheon circuit, Abraham stated, “I’m just tired of people voting for a living instead of working for a living, because if they’re on that program of the government – and it could be a state or a federal program – what are they going to do? They’re going to vote to keep that program going.”
As we also told you, Abraham has had problems fulfilling his campaign promises to donate his congressional salary to charity. It was a pledge he showcased as part of his 2014 platform, and left in place on his campaign website through the 2016 election cycle. Yet as his spokesman Cole Avery stated, “Because of the loss of income, it was not a pledge he could continue beyond the first term,” Avery said. “When he made the pledge (in 2014) he was unaware he would be limited by law on what he could earn as a physician.”
Congressional rules, which were highlighted during the 2014 election cycle, require physicians serving in Congress to limit their earnings to no more than their “actual and necessary expenses.” The issue was raised as our own Lamar White, Jr. exposed “Double Bill” – then-Congressman Bill Cassidy, running for U.S. Senate – for collecting pay from LSU for treating patients on days he was actually in Washington, D.C., voting on federal legislation. At that time, Cole Avery was a reporter with nola.com, covering the Cassidy for Senate campaign.
Despite all of this, Congressman Abraham’s most recent financial disclosure statements filed with the U.S. House of Representatives indicate he’s gone back to earning money practicing medicine. In 2018, Abraham reported earning between $15,001 and $50,000 in “partnership income” from Guardian Health Clinic LLC in Rayville. For the previous year, 2017, he declared zero earnings from the clinic.
Rayville clinic grand opening. Photo courtesy: Richland Parish Chamber of Commerce.
Opened with local fanfare in May 2017, publicity by the Richland Parish Chamber of Commerce stated the clinic was jointly owned by Abraham’s wife, Patricia, and his daughter, Ashley Morris. That same publicity noted Ashley Morris is the chamber’s vice president. Also, a check with the Louisiana Secretary of State’s office shows the only officers listed for Guardian Health Clinic LLC are the two women.
Yet the congressman’s 2018 financial disclosure says he has a 50% interest in the clinic. And medical referral services on the web show that Ralph L. Abraham is the only physician at that location. All other health care is provided by nurse practitioners.
In fact, that’s where Doc Abraham was in June, when flood insurance came up for vote in Washington.
“At the last moment, House Democratic leaders scheduled the flood insurance vote, after I had already scheduled patient visits at my medical office,” Abraham stated. “I knew the legislation would pass with a wide margin of support, and my vote, in that particular instance, would have no effect on the outcome.”
It’s been variously reported, however, that Doc Abraham “gave up” his medical practice. On Father’s Day this year, he reposted something his daughter Ashley had written: “In recent years, my dad’s job has changed. He gave up a thriving medical practice to serve his country. It hasn’t been the easiest for our family. We’ve all had to make sacrifices.”
One Times-Picayune reporter even bought into the theme that he had “given up” his medical practice. In reality, he converted operation of his former “Abraham Medical Clinic” located in Mangham to Affinity Medical Group. While he earned $348,706 as a physician at that facility in 2014, once he was sworn into Congress in 2015, Abraham only declared $12,785 in earnings from that medical practice located at 261 LA Hwy 132.
Photo by Sue Lincoln.
Now renamed “The Medical Office of Mangham,” Abraham retains ownership of the real estate, and continued deriving income from it in 2017. Abraham’s congressional financial disclosure statements report his medical practice received income from the Mangham medical office of between $50,001 and $100,000 that year.
For 2018, the amount dropped dramatically, with income reported of less than $200, and the asset value – formerly listed as part of his Ralph Abraham MD APMC accounting – now shows as less than $1000. That means title to the property was likely shifted to another of Abraham’s accounting entities.
The Clinic Pharmacy of Mangham. Photo by Sue Lincoln.
But Abraham also owns and derives income from the Clinic Pharmacy of Mangham, located across the road from his former Mangham medical practice, at 252 LA Hwy 132. That income has remained steadily in the same range throughout his time in Congress, reported from 2015 through 2018 as annual income of between $50,001 and $100,000, with the asset worth between $250,001 and $500,000.
Overall, OpenSecrets estimated Ralph Abraham’s net worth at more than $12 million in 2015, ranking him the 47th wealthiest member of the U.S. House. While that pales in comparison to the wealth of fellow Republican and fellow gubernatorial contender Eddie Rispone, it certainly exceeds the personal wealth of the current mansion occupant, Gov. John Bel Edwards.
Whether you agree or disagree with some of the present governor’s stances on certain issues, he has consistently made it clear that he takes those positions from a place of personal moral certitude.
Doc Abraham, on the other hand, needs to get his directions straight, since it appears the hand on his moral compass keeps pointing south. He may think it’s directing him to Baton Rouge, but there’s another notable location south of his home base in northeast Louisiana. Angola also lies along the Mississippi River between Alto and the state capitol.
On Friday morning, as the people along Louisiana’s Gulf Coast awaited Barry with bated breath, in Old South Baton Rouge, a pan of cornbread baked in an oven. The baker, Sadie Roberts-Joseph – the well-respected and politically-connected 75-year old founder of the state capital’s Odell S. Williams Then and Now African American Museum, left the bread to rise in her sister’s oven – hers was broken – ‘and the pre-storm weather was perfect for a walk between their two homes.
She never returned to claim it.
Four hours later, police discovered Roberts-Joseph’s body in the trunk of a car on a dead-end street three miles from the sisters’ homes. And so far, that’s everything the public knows about the investigation after more than two days.
Later today, the coroner, Dr. William “Beau” Clark, will complete an autopsy to determine the cause of death. A source close to the on-going investigation says the police are withholding information deliberately – whether that decision was made to obfuscate the truth or to complete a thorough and just investigation we may never know.
Meanwhile, significant questions are going unasked and unanswered: Why would someone leave a car, with a body in its trunk, in a residential neighborhood in broad daylight, particularly on that Friday, when neighbors were almost certain to be home? Why would police not release the color, make, and model of the car especially in light of the $5,000 reward they are offering? To whom was the license plate registered? How did the police even find the car, and what was their justification for searching it? Why aren’t more people – particularly those politicians and community leaders who claim her as a friend – asking these obvious questions publicly?
“I am terribly confused by the anonymously graphic way we have found out about her death, simply that she was found in the trunk of a car three miles from her home,” said Philip Hackney, former LSU Law professor and a founder of the Dialogue on Race-Louisiana. Hackney knew Roberts-Joseph personally. “It’s not right to keep the public in the dark in this way. Not about a matter of such grievous importance to this community.”
After years of work in public service and in medicine, Roberts-Joseph founded the Museum in 2001 upon inheriting posters of notable African Americans from her former grade school teacher, the museum’s namesake Odelle Williams. Ms. Williams had broken the school administration’s rules by using the posters to secretly teach her pupils Black history.
The posters are just one of the Museum’s exhibitions. In the five-room shotgun, tucked below the Interstate-10 overpass that destroyed South Baton Rouge’s Black business corridor in the late 1960s, Roberts-Joseph displayed cotton, a mural-covered city bus from the year of Baton Rouge’s bus boycott, African masks, and other artifacts.
Every year, she also produced the city’s annual Juneteenth Celebration, a memorial of enslaved Texans’ two-years belated first taste of freedom (their enslavers had failed to tell them of the Emancipation Proclamation), this year in collaboration with Mayor Sharon Weston-Broome’s office.
Roberts-Joseph was in the business of empowering, reminding Black people in Baton Rouge of how far they’d come and how much they contribute to the world. Black leaders in Baton Rouge had, after all, conceptualized and pioneered the bus boycott model in 1953 that fired up the engines of the Civil Rights movement; Rev. T.J. Jemison was a founding member of the Southern Christian Leadership Council.
The Free Ride System, implemented in Baton Rouge’s five-day-long bus boycott. Photo credit: Louisiana Digital Media Archives.
It was no small feat for Roberts-Joseph to open and sustain, for nearly two decades, the city’s African American Museum. Artistic and cultural institutions in Baton Rouge are the most underfunded of any in the urban South. The nonprofit sector, where sustainability is largely dependent on raising funds from private foundations, is notoriously competitive. It can be especially cutthroat where funding is scarce.
In 2014, amidst the nationwide street art craze, the Arts Council of Greater Baton Rouge received $300,000 from the Michigan-based Kresge Foundation for “the development of arts-based planning strategies and the implementation of pilot projects designed to promote economic revitalization in the Old South Baton Rouge neighborhood.”
Roberts-Joseph, along with her city councilman, Tara Wicker, and several other South Baton Rouge residents, issued a cease and desist letter to the Arts Council requesting they put project plans before a body of resident stakeholders before implementation. Instead of doing so, the Arts Council just stopped the projects.
I imagine that hurt like hell for Roberts-Joseph – an outside organization being awarded, I’d estimate, two to three times her annual operating budget to produce projects supposedly for her community when her institution within the community ached for support.
Roberts-Joseph soldiered on though. Because as she was known to say, “Culture is the glue that holds people together,” and she knew herself to be the glue’s key ingredient.
In recent press about the Museum’s Juneteenth celebration, she’d begun rebranding the Museum as the Baton Rouge African American Museum – a shrewd move to market the institution as the sole museum of that kind in the capital and also to connect it to the two other African American museums in Southeast Louisiana, the New Orleans African American Museum and the River Road African American Museum in Donaldsonville.
“It was no secret that (Roberts-Joseph) had plans to expand and develop the museum,” said South Baton Rouge native Sharbreon Plummer, a PhD candidate in Arts Administration at Ohio State University in Columbus. “She definitely wanted to empower people in South Baton Rouge because the community has experienced so much disregard. Anything that encourages self-determination, that disturbs the downhome neutrality we’re supposed to have, is a threat.”
I watched on social media as news articles about Roberts-Joseph’s presumed murder spread through the national Black arts grapevine— artists, curators, scholars, writers, and philanthropists in New Orleans, New York City, Los Angeles, the Midwest. The fear, echoed from coast to coast: Was there a relationship between her murder and the cultural work she was doing?
In a state where, just last year, a series of racially-motivated church burnings were orchestrated by a sheriff deputy’s son and in a city where, just over three years to the date, Alton Sterling was killed by a police officer that state attorney general Jeff Landry chose not to charge – it’s not very difficult to arrive at that question.
If we agree that culture is the glue that holds people together, then if you want people to come apart, the key is to compromise the glue – the keepers of the culture.
Whether or not her murder is related to the cultural work in which she was involved, two questions – with equally alarming implications – still stand: What impact might the death of an elder who had the ears of elected officials, brought the community together through cultural work, and advocated for their cultural autonomy have on the stability of her historically under-resourced neighborhood?
And will the Museum, the only of-its-kind in our state’s majority Black capital, survive this crisis of leadership, the unexpected death of its life-long leader with no succession plan in place?
Though mum may be the word among Baton Rouge’s elected officials and police, time will tell.
(Editor’s note, Tuesday evening, July 16, 2019: Baton Rouge Police arrested and charged a male tenant from one of Miss Sadie’s rent houses with her murder. Allegedly, he was $1200 behind in his rent.)
Yesterday, “America’s weatherman,” Al Roker, provided some unsolicited advice to the good people of New Orleans: If he lived here, he would “make plans now” to evacuate. It’s a good idea to be prepared to evacuate any time you find yourself located within a potential hurricane’s “cone of uncertainty.”
It’s a bad idea for people in New Orleans to listen to Al Roker instead of the actual experts on the ground in Louisiana, and it’s an even worse idea for people like Al Roker to imply, as he did, that they have a better understanding of the situation than Mayor LaToya Cantrell or Gov. John Bel Edwards.
Right now, as Barry marches on its path toward Morgan City, the wind is beginning to pick up in New Orleans, but the only people who want us to panic seem to be those who think the main lesson of Hurricane Katrina was that the city should have evacuated more quickly.
New Orleans, of course, did not flood in 2005 because it was hit by a hurricane. It flooded because the federal government’s levee protection system failed. The catastrophic flooding began after Katrina left.
Both CBS and CNN have emphasized the possibility of Barry being a bigger rain event than Katrina. But rain didn’t cause the city to flood; levee failures did.
If New Orleans is decimated by a slow-moving tropical storm, it will have absolutely nothing to do with the reason Al Roker thinks. Ironically, the flash flooding that occurred on Wednesday- more than seven inches of rain in an hour- ended up proving the city’s pumping system is performing well, which should be reassuring and not a reason to panic.
The reason the city received such a deluge is a different story, but, apparently, it’s not polite to talk about climate science in a state dominated by Big Oil and the petrochemical industry. So, the official version remains what it always has been: This 301-year-old city was built in the wrong place. Pay no attention to the fact that this flooding occurred in parts of the city above sea-level.
Al Roker is not a meteorologist.
Al Roker has never lived anywhere even close to the Gulf of Mexico. He is, however, second cousins with Lenny Kravitz, and Lenny Kravitz once owned a house in the French Quarter.
I’m singling out Roker because he calls himself a weatherman, but he isn’t the only national reporter who has completely misrepresented the on-the-ground reality.
This morning, MSNBC reported that New Orleans was “already underwater.” Not true. And it’s not just standard sensationalism.
No one is predicting the levees will breach, but, once again, the Army Corps of Engineers hasn’t been inspiring confidence. And the confusion and ambiguities they created are the pretense currently being used by the national press to still cite the wrong numbers.
No y’all. No one thinks the water could rise to more than 20 feet.
Thus far, though, the Washington Post failed the most spectacularly, publishing a brazenly false story that suggests some sort of mass exodus is currently underway. Their story was so egregious that it merited a response from the City of New Orleans:
To fully appreciate the absurdity of WaPo’s presentation here, you have to see the featured image that accompanies the headline:
Those aren’t anxious residents fleeing the city; they’re two white tourists dudes rolling their suitcases outside of Brennan’s, a fine dining restaurant, in the French Quarter. Oh, the humanity!
There are notable exceptions: The New York Times smartly scooped up two veterans of the Times-Picayune to work on their coverage; it also helps that Dean Baquet, their executive editor, is a New Orleans native.
However, they’re the exception to the rule.
We understand why the nation’s attention is on New Orleans right now, and it’s something we all welcome. But if you’re here to cover a potential hurricane flooding New Orleans and you’re already lying about the weather outside or suggesting there’s some sort of mass exodus underway, you’re not interested in getting to the real story. You’re just here to film some disaster porn and leave as soon as possible.
We learned countless lessons fourteen years ago, most of which have been forgotten already. But we’ve known one thing for certain: There’s always a story in Louisiana.
The New York Times should bring back on a full-time New Orleans correspondent, and if the Washington Post is committed to never again making the same embarrassing mistakes, then they need to set up a New Orleans bureau.
This weekend marks the first major test of the John Georges’ mega-paper, which he is calling three different things but we will henceforth refer to as the Times-Picayune, and thus far, they have done a spectacular job.
As was the case in 2005, our local media is providing national reporters with a master class in how to report on an incoming hurricane.
Take notes y’all. This is a test you cannot afford to fail.
Publisher’s Note: We are pleased to introduce Lydia Y. Nichols as a contributing writer who answered our call for freelance reporters willing to augment our coverage of not-yet-Hurricane Barry. In her cover letter, Lydia wrote, “I was a child at the time of Hurricane Katrina and though I evacuated, as with many of us, this season gives me anxiety. Fourteen years later, I am a single mother, young and black like many whose images were covered by the media in the weeks following 8/29/05 to shape (or justify) the Federal Flood narrative, living in a neighborhood from which thousands were displaced and replaced by whiter, wealthier, more educated counterparts.” We didn’t hesitate. Now, the floor belongs to Lydia Y. Nichols of New Orleans, Louisiana:
There’s something about the way we live in New Orleans. Tucked between storm surge and river levees. A bay we call a Lake, a Mighty River, and an artificial waterway we built between the two to facilitate industrial expansion. Under bridges and ‘cross canals where we dance through the streets, paint murals of us dancing through the streets, have panels about us dancing through the streets. At overpriced galas, luncheons, exhibition openings where we schmooze and shimmy. Held together by a relatively unchanging calendar of festivals and Carnival.
There’s something about the way we live in New Orleans, considering the time and place, that’s oddly comfortable most of the year. Until the floods come and sweep us into reality: The glaciers are melting, the heartland is flooding, temperatures are rising, and it all comes down to us, to here.
On Wednesday morning, I was awakened by my giggly toddler. Excited at the prospect of experiencing an alternative weather phenomenon to debilitating heat and being able to name it, he yelled: “Rain! Rain!” Outside our living room window, the water already covered one of North Claiborne’s two lanes and the rain was not letting up. Sure enough, by 8 am, the sidewalk and both lanes were covered, and water had seeped into the bottom story of my apartment building.
Wednesday’s flood was the third in less than two years. The flooding on Aug. 5th, 2017 forced the public to pay attention to the Sewerage and Water Board’s drainage system’s inability to accommodate levels of rainfall that we in New Orleans would call average, and with not many changes having been made to infrastructure nearly two years later, this year’s Mother’s Day flood overwhelmed a still unprepared drainage system (can’t exactly call it a failure when we knew it was going to fail).
What happened on Wednesday, though, adding inches to an already record-high Mississippi River, arriving three days before the landfall of a potential hurricane, overwhelming neighborhoods on higher ground like the Irish Channel and the University area that are known to drain quickly. What happened on Wednesday was different.
Barry, the tropical storm gaining strength as it snakes through the Gulf, is expected to touch down on Saturday, with a storm surge that will impede the River’s ability to flow into the Gulf, and between rainfall and storm surge, the Army Corps of Engineers estimated on Wednesday, Barry will bring the River’s height to 20 feet which — that would’ve been above the levee in some areas like Algiers, behind the Army Corps’ Riverbend offices, and in parts of St. Bernard Parish.
The Army Corps later contested the breach threat, stating that the levee measurements were based on gauges using a 1929 datum measurement scale while the 1988 datum measurement scale it uses internally (but for some reason, not on the gauges) is more accurate.
Matt McBride, the founder of the website Fix the Pumps who emerged as a leading “watchdog” of government engineers in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, was livid about the Corps’ admission, pointing to a 288-page 2009 report by the Interagency Performance Evaluation Task Force (IPET). “Literally, Finding #1 in the Corps’ own wide-ranging ‘IPET’ investigation of their own failures which caused the levee failures after Katrina passed New Orleans was that the Corps’ use of different bases, or ‘datums,’ for measuring heights was a serious contributor to the failures,” McBride wrote on Facebook. “Doing so allowed shorter structures to be built without anyone realizing it until it was too late. Some levees or floodwalls ended up multiple feet shorter than intended. Here we are 14 years later, and we find out they’ve been doing nearly the same damn thing the whole time with the river levees, and the only way the public – and presumably a whole pack of elected officials and decisionmakers – found out was that the levees are threatened with surge.”
On Thursday, the Army Corps said that they anticipate that the water will only rise to 19 feet, instead of their original estimate of 20 feet, a seemingly convenient recalculation.
Mississippi River at Audubon Park’s “the Fly” in New Orleans. July 11, 2019. Photo by Lydia Nichols, Bayou Brief.
See, when it comes to bodies of water, the Gulf is usually our primary nemesis – that body of saltwater at the foot of Louisiana that strengthens storms with its increasingly-warm waters, feeding Georges, Katrinas, Ritas, Isaacs. The River and the threat it poses in response to our poor decision-making has been relatively diminished in stature. After collecting agricultural and industrial waste from ten states and numerous tributaries (41% of the nation’s riverine drainage) for decades, it is gathering at our feet and shouting for our attention.
Here we are, New Orleans, at the intersection of coastal erosion, sinking due to manmade infrastructure, underprepared drainage system, a storm that may back up the Mississippi River, and a weak levee system. Barry may not be the nail in our coffin, but it’s only a matter of time. And what are we to do about it?
We talk about the things that make New Orleans special – the food, the music, the joie de vivre.
But one of the under-appreciated uniquenesses of New Orleans is that the city’s people are among those most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change and the crude oil, natural gas, and petrochemical industries on which the city’s people depend by design are most culpable for climate change. And that’s before we even scratch the surface of the environmental injustices that have relegated Black and indigenous peoples, immigrants, and the working-poor to the most vulnerable areas of the most vulnerable region – on the lowest land, adjacent to poisonous plants, in neighborhoods with the least infrastructural support.
This characteristic, as those most vulnerable and those most able to do something about it, presents an opportunity.
In Ifa, one of several West African religions that influenced spiritual practices of the New World such as Voodoo, Oshun the goddess of rivers, carries bottomless bags of red thread, which she uses to connect all that is.
The River is a force of attraction.
She keeps the planets in proper orbit, she keeps our relationships in order with sweetness and the occasional act of retribution. We go to her to ask for assistance in attracting money, love, professional success. The River, like Oshun, orchestrates chaos, carefully winding into and out of attraction with what we want and that for which we no longer have use.
The alternative to the careful winding, to this orchestration of chaos, is the quick-fix – to force the attraction, to contain the attraction, ball it up – resulting in a tangled web that takes many times as long to undo as it would have to do it the deliberate way at the first opportunity.
The relationship of New Orleans’ built environment to the natural environment is a tangled web, and we have to contend with that – teasing the ends of thread out of centuries-old, matted knots patiently, deliberately, and with care. We want better infrastructure, sure, but what does better mean? Better as in more permanent, long-lasting, the standards partially responsible for this predicament in the first place? Are we going to double down on values of dominance (of land and of people) at the expense of the River’s ecology and by extension our own safety?
Beyond infrastructure and the responsibilities of our elected officials and the people they place in positions of power to make decisions that protect us, as a community, what does it look like to carefully wind ourselves out of those dependencies that we know have a cumulative impact on our ecology which, in turn, in real time, right now, threaten our lives and those of our neighbors?
Something about the way we’re living in New Orleans isn’t working, and the River has sent us a message: Something’s got to give.
When he was a boy, barely five, his birthplace, a town that couldn’t spell its own name, set in a pocket of rural northeastern Louisiana that had grown comfortable with being forgotten, had finally raised enough money to construct its first-ever “city” building. It was a peculiar place; even though it had lacked any municipal facility, the Princess Theater had been an institution for nearly a decade. And this boy was also peculiar, a seemingly self-taught, multi-instrumental musical prodigy. He was playing the mandolin by the age of three, and by five, he was learning to master the fiddle.
All told, only 2,000 residents, the population of a typical suburban high school, spread across four segregated square miles, lived in Winnsboro, Louisiana in 1938.
Ten or so years later, the boy- now a teenager- left for good, enlisting in the Air Force, where he’d serve as the band leader for USO shows, traveling all across Europe and entertaining thousands. But he wasn’t famous really, and neither was his bunkmate, a gruff kid from Ft. Worth named Larry Hagman. Most Americans remember Larry by a different name: J.R. Ewing.
When his stint in the Air Force ended, the kid enrolled at Centenary College in Shreveport, though it’s likely he just wanted to be in the same orbit as the Louisiana Hayride. That’s how he met Roy Orbison, and that’s where Orbison convinced him to join his band and move to Hollywood.
He never became a superstar, though he played music alongside dozens of them. He recorded a few albums under his own name; none were chart-toppers. Yet he was always considered somewhat of a musical legend, had been since he was a boy. So, it made since when Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel reached out and asked for his help with their next album, which they were calling Bridge Over Troubled Water. He and Paul were the only two who played guitar during the recording of the album’s title track.
But the album’s emotional core is a simple ballad that seemed to have come together somewhat haphazardly. Some argue it is Paul Simon’s finest work; it’s the song he sang to open Saturday Night Live for the first time since 9/11.
Paul wrote the lyrics, but the truth is the song, “The Boxer,” was constructed, from the very first note, by Fred Carter, Jr. of Winnsboro, the seat of Franklin Parish, Louisiana.
Fred passed away in 2010, and already by then, he had watched his daughter Deana catapult herself into the stratosphere. Her first album Did I Shave My Legs for This? sold five million copies, and her first major single, “Strawberry Wine,” became an anthem for countless teenage girls growing up in the late 90s.
There are a few other famous people from Winnsboro (not to be confused with Winnfield, a tiny town about seventy miles west and roughly the same size but home to three Louisiana governors, including Huey and Earl, and by coincidence, one of the most brilliant literary minds of the 20th century, the nation’s first Native American Poet Laureate, William Jay Smith). Though there were more than a handful of professional athletes, elected officials, and at least one perennial candidate, Luther Divine “None of the Above” Knox, from Winnsboro, Fred Carter, Jr., while he may have never returned, left the world wealthier simply by sharing his art.
Winnsboro is the final resting place for at least one other remarkable Louisianian: Myrtis Lucille Gregory Methvin, the second woman ever elected to serve as a mayor in Louisiana. Myrtis wasn’t born in Winnsboro, nor was she ever its town mayor. Her electoral successes occurred further to the west, in Castor, Louisiana, in Bienville Parish.
Her husband worked for Roy O. Martin, Sr., the lumber baron whose scion, Roy O. the III, continues to run the family business and control an empire worth, according to some, well in excess of a $1 billion. Mayor Myrtis Methvin’s remains are interred in Winnsboro, though she was one of the only members of the family to make her way back; most stayed put in Central Louisiana. Her son became a successful lawyer in Alexandria, and last year, another Methvin woman decided to put her name on the ballot: Her granddaughter Mimi Methvin, an accomplished lawyer and magistrate judge, challenged incumbent U.S. Rep. Clay Higgins, ultimately finishing a distant but respectable second in the jungle primary. (Incidentally, although there are no indications whatsoever that she is even contemplating another campaign, her name comes up frequently as a candidate voters would like to see run again).
But since she is settled in South Louisiana, only a statewide campaign would put her in proximity with Grandma Myrtis’ headstone.
Mayor Myrtis Methvin
Even today, nearly a century after little Fred Carter picked up the mandolin for the first time in Winnsboro, northeastern Louisiana remains largely overlooked, unknown, or simply outright dismissed, a deceptively vast region blanketed by pine trees, farmland, and deep, multi-generational poverty.
The area is so vast that, last year, when a farmer named Jessee Carlton Fleenor from Loranger, Louisiana decided to campaign for the Fifth Congressional District, he told me that a round trip from and then back to his home in the Florida Parishes meant he’d be on the road for thirteen hours. There are sixty-four parishes in Louisiana and six different congressional districts, yet more than a third of the state’s parishes are in the fifth.
Because of the way the district is gerrymandered, depending on where you need to be, it’s sometimes actually more convenient to cut through rural western Mississippi.
Louisiana’s Fifth District is, objectively, the tenth-poorest district in the entire country. It’s split by geography, by race, by party, and often, as Jessee learned firsthand, by race within party. He lamented the number of times he would travel to a city or small town to meet with Democrats, only to learn that there were white Democratic groups and black Democratic groups who held separate meetings. “I wasn’t changing up my speech,” he told me. “I was giving it twice.”
His experience serves as a stark reminder that, even after party realignment following the passage of the Voting Rights Act, there are still reasons for lingering resentments and mistrusts. Currently, the fifth has the largest population of African Americans in the country who are represented in Congress by a white Republican.
By at least one account, the unfortunately-named Lake Providence in East Carroll Parish is the poorest place in the United States. For a few decades during the previous century, there had been at least one story that seemed to exemplify the American Dream that, at least initially, was born on the banks of Providence. As a child, along with his eight siblings, William Jennings Jefferson helped his father in working for the United States Army Corps of Engineers. He ended up at Southern in Baton Rouge, where his skills caught the attention of then-Gov. John McKeithen. He earned a degree from Harvard Law, and then he relocated to New Orleans, where he served as an aide to U.S. Sen. J. Bennett Johnston.
In 1990, after Congresswoman Lindy Boggs decided not to seek another term, “Dollar Bill,” as he was known even then, jumped into the crowded primary, and in the end, the hard-working, razor-sharp young lawyer from a poor family in the poorest city in America became the first African American to win a race for Congress in Louisiana. He’d win another seven consecutive terms before his luck finally ran out, but that story will have to wait for another day.
There is a reason I believe every voter in Louisiana should direct their attention to the Fifth District, and it’s not just because, like Dollar Bill and Mimi and Fred, I was born there and ended up settling somewhere else. I think we should all recognize, regardless of party, the enormous amount of work required to ensure that the district no longer ranks as one of the poorest places in the country (a problem that it has carried through gubernatorial and presidential administrations of both parties).
We should pay attention to the Fifth, because the district’s current congressman, Ralph Abraham, hopes to convince enough white conservatives (there’s no need to pretend differently) that he has done enough to earn your vote for governor.
Abraham is usually ten minutes up the road from Winnsboro, in Mangham. It’s right across the parish line. Abraham lives in Richland Parish.
If you’re the type of person who believes Washington is irreparably broken and that his chronic absences from his job are ultimately irrelevant, fine. Then let’s discuss character, integrity, and honesty.
Incidentally, the Fifth District is home to the country’s newest UNESCO World Heritage Site, which, unfortunately, I’ve still yet to visit. But it was genius to stick with the original name: Poverty Point.
Danielle Metz grew up in Uptown New Orleans. Both of her parents worked — her father as a cement finisher, her mother in a bakery — and together they earned enough to buy a home in a quiet neighborhood. Metz, who inherited the house, has lived there since she was released from prison in 2016. Cheryl Gerber/The Hechinger Report
NEW ORLEANS – The sun glowed gold, and a second line parade was tuning its horns just a few streets away. But Danielle Metz had missed half her life already, and she couldn’t spare the afternoon, even one as unseasonably warm as this mid-February Sunday.
She climbed the stairs to the shotgun house her mom had bought in uptown New Orleans more than half a century ago. Metz slipped through the screen door, then shut it tight enough to keep out the sun. Inside, she dug through a box next to her bed and pulled out the clothbound journal that a woman had given her in 1996, when they were both incarcerated in the Federal Correctional Institute in Dublin, California. Metz hadn’t kept much from the 23 years she spent in prison, but the journal had been too special to leave behind. She opened it and read the dedication as a reminder of what she hoped to accomplish now that she was out.
“To Danielle — There’s so many things we can’t get in here, but knowledge and education can’t be kept out by walls.”
Metz set the journal down on her glass coffee table and opened the Dell laptop she’d received as a perk from the community health job she worked during the week. Just two years earlier, Metz had barely known how to use a computer, but now, her pink-polished fingernails moved easy across the keys. She searched for Southern University’s New Orleans campus, and the school’s baby-blue website loaded. Metz looked for a moment at the home-page photograph, a row of black professionals smiling back at her. The man in the middle had been the one who suggested she apply.
Growing up, Metz had believed that college was for white kids and for “Huxtables” — black people she named after the upper-middle-class family in “The Cosby Show.” She knew, as she looked at the laptop screen, how improbable people might think earning a degree would be for her now. She’d dropped out of high school her junior year. At 26, a judge had sentenced Metz to three life sentences plus another 20 years for her role in her husband’s cocaine distribution. She’d thought she’d never see New Orleans again, let alone visit a university.
Even after President Barack Obama granted her clemency in 2016, Metz believed she couldn’t go to college. Nationwide, less than 4 percent of formerly incarcerated people have a bachelor’s degree, according to a report released last year. The chances seemed especially low in Metz’s home state. Louisiana had long held twin records, the world’s highest incarceration rate, and the country’s lowest rate of black college graduates. Put together, this meant tens of thousands of residents lacked a viable pathway to middle-class security.
But lawmakers had come to believe that a change was imperative for the state’s future. In 2017, Louisiana became the first state in the nation to “ban the box” on public college and university applications, prohibiting school officials from asking whether an applicant has a criminal record. Metz knew that people across the country were working to help people like her go to college after prison. Though Illinois and New York failed to pass “ban the box” measures for university applications, several other states are trying to follow Louisiana’s lead. And federal lawmakers from both parties are pushing to allow incarcerated people to access Pell Grants, financial aid that they’ve been barred from using since Metz first went to prison.
Metz was grateful for the legal shifts, but political momentum alone would not carry her through school. As the parade began its march through Uptown, she scrolled through the university’s website and hovered over the tab marked “current students.” She had no idea how long it would take or how much it might cost, but Metz didn’t care. She was going to college.
Metz grew up the youngest of nine children in a city barreling toward chaos. As a kid, she considered herself lucky. Both of her parents worked — her father as a cement finisher, her mother in a bakery — and together they earned enough to buy a home three miles away from the St. Thomas Projects, a public housing development where many other black families lived. St. Thomas was so poor and violent when Metz was young that Sister Helen Prejean described the neighborhood in the opening of her book “Dead Man Walking” as “not death row exactly, but close.”Sign up for our newsletter
Even as a little girl, Metz knew people who’d gone to jail, but her neighborhood was quiet, and her parents were dreamers. For years, her father urged her to become a nurse. Metz knew the job required a college degree, but she didn’t know anyone who’d earned one. In 1980, the year Metz enrolled at Walter L. Cohen High School, more than half the city’s black adults didn’t have even a high school diploma, let alone a university credential.
Instead, Metz longed to become a hairstylist. She’d practiced since she was a little girl on her mom, whose locks grew in so straight that people speculated she must have white ancestors. But even that goal felt unreachable after Metz became pregnant in 1985, her junior year of high school. She dropped out and assumed she wouldn’t have a career. She’d be a mother instead.
Six months after Metz gave birth to her son, Carl, his father was murdered.
Metz became a single mother just as the state’s economy was collapsing. Louisiana had long been dependent on oil — profits from the natural resource accounted for nearly half of the state’s budget then. But the price per barrel began falling in 1981, and by the mid-1980s, one in eight Louisiana workers was unemployed, the highest rate in the nation. New Orleans lost nearly 10,000 jobs, leaving few openings for a teenage mother with no credentials or documentable skills.
Metz didn’t take time to grieve. Most black people in New Orleans knew someone who’d been killed, she said. Instead, she started looking for someone to help raise her child.
Glenn Metz had money. He’d grown up poor in the Calliope housing projects, one of the most violent neighborhoods in New Orleans, but he owned two tow-truck companies by the time Metz met him. At age 30, he possessed the kind of quiet maturity that Metz, then 18, thought would make him a good substitute father for Carl. Glenn Metz wore such nice clothes and jewelry the night Metz met him that she suspected he at least dabbled in drug-dealing, but she told herself his business had nothing to do with her.
Growing up, Metz believed that college was for white kids and for “Huxtables” — black families she named after the upper-middle-class family in “The Cosby Show.” Cheryl Gerber/The Hechinger Report
According to federal prosecutors, Glenn Metz formed a drug ring just before he met the girl who would become his wife. Between 1985 and 1992, Glenn Metz and his crew came to dominate St. Thomas and Calliope, prosecutors said, distributing more than 1,000 kilos of cocaine and killing 23 rivals. Glenn Metz sat atop an organization manned by more than half a dozen enforcers, two of whom, prosecutors said, drove through town in an armor-plated pickup with the word “homicide” spelled out on the hood in gold letters.
Metz spent most of those years at home. “The Cosby Show” debuted the year she should have graduated high school, and she watched it and its college-based spin-off “A Different World” every week, dreaming of the life she wished she had. She took a few beauty school classes and occasionally cut hair in someone’s home, but Glenn Metz didn’t like when she left the house, she said. They married in 1989, and Metz soon gave birth to their daughter, Gleneisha. Metz didn’t have a social security number or any way to make money on her own. When Glenn Metz told her to ride with her aunt to deliver a few packages to Houston, Metz said, she did it.
Crack cocaine was spreading through black neighborhoods across the country then, and lawmakers blamed the drug for an increase in inner-city violence. New Orleans was especially hard hit. In 1990, the city topped 300 murders for the first time. Nearly every edition of The Times-Picayune that year carried news of cocaine busts. Police arrested scores of black men, including Metz’s older brother, Perry Bernard, for possession. As the city’s murder rate rose to the nation’s highest, investigators worked to take down Glenn Metz. His was the biggest and most violent drug ring in the city, prosecutors said. They indicted him and eight others, including Metz, in the summer of 1992.
Metz, who’d been temporarily living in Las Vegas with her husband before the indictment, fled to Jackson, Mississippi. She rented an apartment near Jackson State University and planned to enroll after the investigation concluded. When police arrested her there in January 1993, Metz figured she’d just get probation. Most people she knew went to jail “seasonally.” Her older brother had drifted in and out before a 1989 arrest netted him 13 years in a state prison.
After crack cocaine became popular, Congress adopted the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, establishing for the first time mandatory minimum sentences triggered by specific quantities of cocaine. The penalties were worse for defendants charged with possession or distribution of crack cocaine, favored by African-Americans, than for those accused of possessing or distributing the powder cocaine primarily used by white people.
But Metz, 25 then, had never had so much as a traffic ticket. She believed her involvement in her husband’s narcotics sales was minimal enough that prosecutors would let her go with a warning. Police did not find any drugs with her, and she was never implicated in any violence.
Instead, federal authorities charged Metz and her co-defendants under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. Lawmakers created RICO in the 1970s under President Richard Nixon as a tool to combat the Mafia, but prosecutors increasingly used it in the 1980s to fight drug rings. The charges under RICO carried automatic sentences of life in prison without parole.
The U.S. attorneys who prosecuted her case presented witnesses who were major narcotics suppliers or small-time drug dealers. They testified that Metz had driven packages to Houston for her husband and, on occasion, accepted cash payments and wired money to suppliers. The jury decided she was guilty.
Four months later, in mid-December, U.S. District Judge A.J. McNamara sentenced Metz to three life sentences plus another 20 years in federal prison.
“I hope that by the sentence you receive, others who might be tempted to follow your path of crime will have second thoughts,” McNamara told her.
Louisiana didn’t have a federal prison for women, so authorities sentenced Metz to FCI Dublin, a converted military barrack 35 miles east of San Francisco. As authorities led Metz away in shackles, she realized she would never become a nurse or a hair stylist. She wouldn’t become anything.
“It was as if I died right then and there,” she said.
If Metz had gone to prison a decade earlier, she might have earned a college degree inside. Since at least 1965, when Lyndon Johnson’s Higher Education Act explicitly granted incarcerated people the right to apply for financial aid, prisons have used what became known as Pell Grants to pay for post-secondary educational programs. By 1994, nine out of every 10 prison systems offered classes for incarcerated people. At FCI Dublin, women were studying English literature, psychology and sociology when Metz first arrived.
Just a few months after a judge sentenced her, President Bill Clinton signed the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, written by then-Sen. Joseph Biden, which banned incarcerated people from using Pell Grants to pay for college. Prisons across the country discontinued their education programs, and within a year, the number of incarcerated people enrolled in classes declined by 44 percent. By 1998, fewer than 4 percent of incarcerated people were taking post-secondary courses.
Dublin discontinued most of the college courses it had offered before. Debi Campbell, a woman who served time alongside Metz at the federal prison that year, said she and others were devastated by the news. Campbell had been working toward her bachelor’s degree before the prison stopped offering classes.
“There were a lot of us who really wanted to better ourselves,” she said. “But just like that, it was over. We complained, but it was in a bill. Congress passed it, so all we could do was cry.”
After the Pell Grants went away, Dublin offered only a few computer classes and sessions to help women earn their general education diplomas. Officials there told Metz that space in the classes was so limited they had to reserve spots for people who’d eventually get out and could use the education.
Though the federal prison system requires women without a high school degree to earn their GED, Metz said no one pushed her to take the exam her first two years. She might have gone longer without the credential if she hadn’t performed in a slam poetry reading one night in the prison. Marilyn Buck, a radical leftist who went to prison for crimes she committed with the Black Liberation Army, approached Metz after the reading and asked if Metz had her GED. Metz told Buck she was scared of the test. Metz read and wrote well, but she feared numbers.
Buck had earned her bachelor’s degree in psychology at Dublin the year before the ban. She told Metz to meet her early the next morning in the meditation room, and for months after, Buck spent two hours each day guiding Metz through the Algebra she should have learned in high school.
Metz earned her GED in December 1996, nearly three years after she went to prison. The other incarcerated women hosted a makeshift graduation, and one gave Metz the clothbound journal, which she’d ordered special from a bookstore in town. That night, just before bed, Metz recorded her thoughts in a loopy cursive.
“No one knows the joy that I feel in my heart,” she wrote. “This is only the beginning of a new start for me.”
Earning a GED, Metz told other women, was the best feeling a person could have inside a prison. She’d accomplished something even after she and other people believed her life was over. Metz wanted to do more, but she found herself still limited by the lack of classes offered at FCI Dublin. She tried for years to get into a computer graphics course, she said, but an official overseeing the sign-up sheet scoffed.
“What do you want it for?” Metz remembers him saying. “You’re never leaving here anyway. You’re going to leave out of here in a body bag.”
Eventually, Metz secured a spot in the class. She learned to make charts and use Microsoft Word. When she wasn’t in class, she tried to create her own curriculum. She watched the news and wrote poems about the headlines. She studied sports broadcasters and practiced as if she’d one day be reporting from the field.
In her journal, Metz acknowledged that she might never get out to use the knowledge she’d tried hard to gain. But so much of her life had turned out differently than she’d expected, she wrote.
“I never thought I’d be in prison serving a life sentence, but I am, and I never thought I would get my GED, but I did,” she wrote. “Now I’m in prison fighting, trying to win my freedom back. I don’t know how I will do it. All I know is it will be done.”
Metz appealed her sentence and wrote letters to politicians who might help commute it. One decade passed, then another, and Metz stopped writing in her journal. Much of her life was marked by absence; she had few successes to record. Her older sister had agreed to raise Metz’s children in California so they could visit her more frequently, but Metz missed her son’s basketball games and her daughter’s dance recitals. She couldn’t attend either of their high school graduations or Gleneisha’s wedding.
When Obama took office, Metz believed her time had come. This president looked like her, she thought. He would understand what white leaders hadn’t. A few years into his first term, Obama began granting clemency to people who, like Metz, had been sentenced for nonviolent drug offenses. By the end of Obama’s second term, he’d granted more people clemency than any of the last 10 presidents. But every time Obama released a list of clemency recipients, and Metz’s name wasn’t on it, she retreated to her room, sure she couldn’t go on.
Just a few months before President Barack Obama left office, he granted Metz and 324 other people clemency — the most grants of clemency any president had ever signed in a single month. Cheryl Gerber/The Hechinger Report
“He’s going to be leaving,” she thought. “If my name don’t show up, I’m going to be stuck here.”
Parents, friends and activists tried to help. They held vigils and made videos detailing her plight. Federal Bureau of Prison staff members submitted recommendation letters on her behalf, and in 2015, the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Louisiana wrote to the Department of Justice to say his office no longer believed Metz should remain in prison.
Finally, in the summer of 2016, Dublin’s warden called Metz to his office. The president had agreed to release Metz. That August, just a few months before leaving office, Obama granted Metz and 324 other people clemency — the most any president had ever signed in a single month.
Metz gave away most of the possessions she’d acquired in prison. She let other women have the white jeans and colorful sweat suits she’d brought before the prison changed its rules, outlawing civilian clothing. She left behind her eyeglasses and all of her hair accessories, but she kept the journal. Its opening pages were proof, she thought, of what she’d accomplished inside. The back half remained empty, space left to document the life Metz had thought she’d never get to live.
Metz lived in a halfway house when she first returned to New Orleans. Catholic Charities hired her for an AmeriCorps job packing food boxes for low-income senior citizens, and she was grateful for the work. She’d earned only 29 cents an hour cooking meals in the prison cafeteria. The AmeriCorps job gave her a stipend and a $2,200 scholarship to put toward her education. But Metz spent months unsure if she’d be able to use the scholarship.
She knew a few people who’d gone to college after prison. Her older brother had even earned his master’s degree in criminal justice after he finished his 13-year sentence, but he’d always been the smartest of the nine kids. Metz worried she didn’t have the same special aptitude.
One of the activists who’d helped Metz fight for clemency, Syrita Steib-Martin, had also attended the University of New Orleans after serving nearly a decade in prison, but she had initially been denied entry to the college because of her criminal record. Steib-Martin got in the second time she applied because she left blank the spot on the application that asked about convictions. Steib-Martin went on to her earn her bachelor’s in clinical laboratory science, became a supervisor at a local hospital and ran a nonprofit helping formerly incarcerated women. But Metz didn’t want to lie on an application.
Then, in March 2017, a man named Hakim Kashif visited the halfway house. He told Metz and the other women living there that he’d been released from prison half a decade earlier and was now close to earning his bachelor’s from Southern University in New Orleans. Metz didn’t know Kashif well, but she knew police had indicted him on drug charges in 1993, the same year she’d gone to trial.
Kashif showed Metz his school ID and a schedule of his classes. He carried his report card everywhere he went. He’d finished six semesters with nearly all A’s and B’s.
“You think you can get me into SUNO?” Metz asked him.
“Yeah, girl,” Kashif said. “Come on. I’m going to bring you down there.”
Kashif was self-motivated — he’d never doubted that he could and should earn his degree after he got out — but he knew most people needed more than encouragement once they left prison. He drove Metz the 10 minutes to SUNO that day and walked her to the admissions office. Kashif held the door open, and Metz stepped inside, staring at the building’s beige brick walls in wonder. She’d never been inside a university before.
“You really think I can go to college?” she asked him. Inside, Kashif introduced her to Brent Hodges, an admissions counselor who’d worked at the school since the late-1980s. Metz recounted her story timidly at first. She worried Hodges might turn her away, but she knew she needed to explain why she lacked most of the traits of a typical college freshman. She’d never taken the ACT, and she hadn’t studied math since Marilyn Buck tutored her inside the prison more than two decades earlier.
“That’s not a problem,” Hodges said. Louisiana hadn’t yet banned the box on college applications, but SUNO had enrolled plenty of students with criminal records, Hodges said. His was a historically black university in a city where, in 2017, African-Americans were 50 percent more likely to be arrested than white people. He’d be limiting his pool of applicants if he never considered giving students a second shot.
Hodges also believed that education was one of the surest ways to reduce recidivism. In Louisiana, researchers have found that 48 percent of ex-offenders end up re-incarcerated within five years. But a 2013 RAND Corporation nationwide study found that incarcerated people who got some form of education were 43 percent less likely to reoffend. Hodges also understood how difficult Metz’s life might be without an education. Nearly half of black women with criminal records are unemployed. Metz’s AmeriCorps job was temporary, and Hodges knew she’d have an easier time finding work if she had a degree.
“Just put that all behind you,” Hodges told Metz. “If you’re serious about school, fill this out.”
Though nearly half of SUNO’s students are 25 or older, Metz worried her classmates would think she was ancient and out-of-touch. She barely knew how to use a computer — it had been more than a decade since her prison class — and her fingers faltered on the touchpad of her iPhone. Cheryl Gerber/The Hechinger Report
He handed her an application packet. The form was simple, just two pages. Metz filled in the boxes that asked for her address and date of birth, then paused for a moment before writing down her intended major. She imagined herself working with young girls just beginning to veer down the paths she wished she’d avoided.
“I think I want to do social work,” she said.
Hodges told Metz that major sounded perfect. He waived the application fee, then gave her a study booklet to prep for the math and English placement exams Metz would take instead of the ACT. Kashif sat with Metz as she filled out the 108 questions on the Free Application for Federal Student Aid.
Five months later, in August, Metz returned to the university by herself. She wore a hoodie and Nike huarache sneakers — fashion she hoped made her look younger — and climbed the steps to Intro to Social Work. She was 50 years old, a college freshman, and happier than she’d ever been.
Metz scored high enough on the placement exams in math and English to test out of the remedial courses that Southern offers for students with gaps in their education, but she felt insecure during her first weeks on campus. Though nearly half of the university’s students are 25 or older, Metz worried her classmates would think she was ancient and out-of-touch. She barely knew how to use a computer — it had been more than a decade since her prison class — and her fingers faltered on the touchpad of her iPhone.
Occasionally, during icebreaker games and class introductions, she told other students that she’d spent time in prison. She wanted them to understand why the technology that came easily to them still flustered her. Some of the teenagers told her she was an inspiration, but Metz winced when one young man’s eyes widened after she explained that she’d served 23 years. “You done more time than I’ve been alive!” he said.
Metz sat in the back of classrooms and rarely raised her hand, but professors soon noticed that she often knew the right answers. Several pushed Metz to speak up in class.
“She was apprehensive about everything,” said Karen Martin, a professor of social work who taught Metz in a public speaking class. “I told her, ‘You have the wherewithal to achieve anything you aspire to. Shake off them little fears and them little doubts, and let’s roll.”
Metz was “a sponge,” Martin said, eager to learn and open to criticism. After Martin showed Metz how to outline and infuse voice into her writing, Metz delivered a speech about her life before and after prison that Martin recalls as one of the semester’s most powerful.
Though Martin and a few other professors helped, Metz largely relied on her 32-year-old niece, Santana Harper, to guide her through her first year of college. Harper knew how daunting higher education could be. She’d gone to Grambling State University on a track scholarship right after high school, but she’d dropped out after a year, then wandered in and out of college before enrolling in SUNO in 2012. She earned her bachelor’s degree in psychology a few months after Metz came home.
4 percent of formerly incarcerated people have a bachelor’s degree
When Metz signed up for an English literature class, Harper taught her aunt how to cite sources using APA Style and how to change the spacing in a Microsoft Word document so Metz’s essays looked the way professors wanted them to.
Harper had been only 7 when Metz went to prison, so they were strangers when Metz came home, but they grew closer in the university computer lab, commiserating over Microsoft Excel. One misplaced comma could mess up an entire spreadsheet. Some nights they spent hours backtracking to figure out where Metz had gone wrong on her Intro to Computer Information Systems homework.
Metz struggled so much with the computer class her second semester that she didn’t want to check her report card after finals. Harper offered to look with her, so they huddled over a computer together to search for her grades online. The page loaded, and Harper squealed.
“Auntie,” she said. “You made the dean’s list.”
“What’s that?” Metz asked.
Harper explained that it meant Metz had earned all A’s and B’s that semester, good enough for a 3.75 grade point average. Metz worked the phones in celebration. She called her brother and both of her children, along with every friend she imagined might care. The only way the day could have been better, Metz thought, was if she’d somehow been able to tell Obama the news.
“You don’t know what you did for me,” she imagined herself telling him. “I’m finally coming into my own. I made the honor roll.”
Metz spent the $2,200 AmeriCorps scholarship her first semester, so she took out loans to help pay for her second year. She found a new job working as a “violence interrupter,” an on-call position that required her to run to the hospital anytime a young person got shot, but she needed more money to pay for school and the taxes on her mother’s house. In January, she started a second job working in a community health clinic at Tulane University. The new gig would eventually allow her to take free classes at the prestigious private school, but working double shifts meant Metz could no longer fit in regular courses at Southern. Computers still scared her, but she decided to take her spring semester online.
In February, Metz pulled two textbooks out of her gold book bag and began to read. She’d signed up for general psychology and a social sciences elective called Introduction to Alcohol and Drug Abuse. Harper arrived mid-afternoon and asked if Metz needed any help. Metz waved her niece off. Four semesters in, Metz felt like she could navigate nearly all of her homework on her own.
The more she read, the more Metz understood what had gone wrong in her life. She’d never talked to a counselor before, but as she read a chapter in the psychology book, Metz wondered if her life might have turned out differently if she had talked to someone after she got pregnant or after her boyfriend was murdered.
Metz switched to the textbook called “Drugs, Society and Human Behavior.” The homework that week required Metz to chat with the other students online about the reading, and she considered telling them about her own experiences.
Metz began taking online classes through Southern University in New Orleans earlier this year. She hoped the classes in psychology and drug abuse would lead her to a career in social work, but the more she read, the more she learned about her own life. She never used drugs herself, so hadn’t thought about how drugs affected the families around her. “That’s the way I thought,” she said. “But now I feel like that was wrong.” Cheryl Gerber/The Hechinger Report
“All I was thinking was, ‘I need money for my kid. I’m with somebody and this is what they do,’” she said. She never used drugs herself, so hadn’t thought about how drugs affected the families around her. “That’s the way I thought, but now I feel like that was wrong. Them drugs had to be distributed to somebody. Somebody’s family had to use those drugs.”
Her fingers hovered over the keys. She knew it might be useful for her classmates to know what she’d learned, but some days, she didn’t want to be Danielle Metz, the woman who spent two decades in prison. She began typing.
“Reading this has broadened my knowledge of drug use and how often drugs are abused,” she wrote. “I never knew it was so extensive.”
Obama made another important decision for incarcerated people the year he granted Metz clemency. He authorized a pilot program that allowed a small number of incarcerated students to use Pell Grants to pay for classes. Sixty-seven colleges signed up and have offered more than 1,000 courses in state and federal prisons since. Nearly 600 incarcerated people have earned a degree because of the pilot.
In April, a bipartisan group of lawmakers introduced a bill that would make the program permanent. Clinton’s ban is still in place, but Congress this year will vote on a reauthorization of the Higher Education Act, a vote that will allow them to strike the ban Clinton signed the year Metz went to prison.
Annie Freitas, who – along with Steib-Martin – is the co-executive director of the nonprofit Operation Restoration (and who is also a Tulane University doctoral student studying the intersections of the education and incarceration systems), said repealing the ban would be “the most significant thing to happen in prison education in the last 30 years.” But she and other activists believe the Pell Grant ban is just one of dozens of barriers incarcerated people face as they seek an education.
Nearly 600 incarcerated people have earned a degree because of a pilot program that permits some prisoners to use federal Pell Grants
Freitas is working to help other states pass ban-the-box measures. Since Louisiana lawmakers unanimously approved their bill in 2017, only Maryland and Washington have followed, leaving formerly incarcerated students in dozens of states still vulnerable to rejection for their past mistakes.
In New Orleans, at least, Metz believes that for some people, the biggest barrier isn’t money or a prying admissions counselor: Most people she knows don’t believe they can attend college, so she uses her weekends and occasional lunch breaks to do what Kashif did for her.
In February, she took an hour off work to speak at a graduation ceremony for people finishing a reentry program offered by the Orleans Parish Sheriff’s Office. Metz, wearing a blue plaid suit and silver wingtips she’d found on deep discount at the mall, stood as a program official played “Pomp and Circumstance” from an iPhone. As the graduates shuffled across the room, Metz thought back to the ceremony the women had thrown for her in prison.
“I know how y’all feel with them cap and gowns on, because when I got my GED, that was the best achievement for me,” Metz told the graduates. “I used to tell myself when I was in prison, if I ever get the chance to go home, I’m going to go back to school.”
She’d practiced the speech all weekend, employing the techniques Martin had taught her in the public speaking class. The group laughed as Metz recounted the way she’d claimed a chair in front of the prison TV, intent on learning everything she could from the news. One woman teared up as Metz described the day Obama granted her clemency.
“Now here I am outside in society living my best life,” Metz said. “I love the fact that I can just ride down the streets of New Orleans and get me a hot sausage sandwich or yaki mein. But what I value most is my education.”
The crowd clapped, and Metz smiled as the sheriff handed each graduate a diploma-like certificate. They’d learned anger management and office skills in the program, and as they passed Metz, she hugged each one, urging them to dream of their next graduation. A young man in blue Air Jordans accepted his diploma and announced he’d enrolled at Delgado Community College. The sheriff asked the man what his best subject was, and the graduate pulled the sheriff into a hug before replying, “Math.”
Most of the other graduates had yet to start college, and when the ceremony ended, they formed a line to ask Metz for advice. Metz told them it was easy. She knew they might also struggle with Excel and APA citations. Or maybe they’d hide in the back of classrooms, feeling old and decades behind. But as the graduates celebrated their first small victories, Metz imagined that they, like her, had survived far worse.
Coda: After this story was published, Danielle Metz received this letter in the mail:
Publisher’s Note: This is the second part of my two-part interview with Henry Walther, which I had intended to publish last week (notwithstanding the fact that last week, I traveled with my family to a remote corner of Alberta, Canada and had just assumed- rather ridiculously, in hindsight- that there was no possible way I would encounter any issues with high-speed wireless connectivity). My apologies for the delay. I am now, once again, safely below sea-level.
Summer in New Orleans is when things slow down to a sweaty crawl. It’s too hot for overly strenuous outdoor activities, especially in the age of climate change. With the conclusion of Essence, the festival season is now officially over. One reason the Essence Festival thrives is that it’s held in the air-conditioned splendor of the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center and the Superdome.
Summer is when those of us who lived through Hurricane Katrina and the Federal Flood watch the weather carefully.
Hurricane season has just begun, so it’s wise to track the tropics. The National Weather Service and others have outstanding predictive models, but hurricanes are inherently unpredictable. After such wet slow-moving storms as Harvey and Michael, we’re nervous. I evacuated in 2005, which resulted in a six-week exile, but despite the lack of direct trauma, I still have a mild form of PTSD any time we’re in the cone of uncertainty.
It’s been quiet so far but that could change in a hurry. Beware, take care.
In between the start of hurricane season and Essence Festival, something major happened.
Eight days ago, the upstart New Orleans Advocate swallowed the venerable Times-Picayune. So much for things slowing down in the summertime.
It’s been interesting to have a front-row seat to what was probably the last print newspaper war in American history. The Times-Picayune seemed to have all the advantages but lost the war. What was once the monopoly daily in New Orleans destroyed itself through a combination of bad personnel moves, poor planning, and the almost farcical inability of its outside owners to understand the New Orleans market.
Reporters and editors gamely tried to overcome inept corporate management, but it was a losing battle that ended on July 1st, 2019.
Some historical perspective is required to reinforce my point. This is the third merger involving the Times-Picayune, so a relevant timeline that focuses on recent events as well as sales and mergers is in order (in two parts):
The paper is now known as The Times-Picayune/New Orleans Advocate.
(Publisher’s Note: For the sake of posterity, rather than directly embed tweets, we decided to publish screenshots, with links attached).
The decline and fall of this local institution began in the summer of 2012. The paper was at the peak of its prestige because of its brilliant coverage of Katrina and the Federal Flood. It had formed an even closer bond with its readership during the storm, flood, and recovery. In that pre-social media era, I kept up with the local news from exile in Bossier City, Dallas, and Baton Rouge via NOLA.com and, more importantly, its message boards.
It’s how I learned my neighborhood had not flooded, which was the beginning of an ongoing case of survivor’s guilt but that’s for another day.
“The Newhouse Corp greedheads are wielding the ax today at the Picayune, which is located at 3800 Howard Avenue. 202 employees are being ‘laid off’ (fired or sacked to you and me) today, which is 49% of the Picayune’s newsroom staff. It appears that some folks, including venerable sports columnist Pete Finney found out about being made redundant by an article at NOLA.com. Stay classy Newhouse.
“The city has been in denial about this development: there are petition drives to stop the demolition derby, but Newhouse isn’t even interested in selling. They have a point to make and they’re going to make it. The Picayune as we know it is on life support and will be dead in the fall. But stupidity, not the internet killed it.”
Newhouse/Advance rebranded the Picayune company as the NOLA Media Group. They should have stuck with Advance to emphasize the irony of the company’s retreat in the New Orleans market. It was at that point that I started calling the rump newspaper, The Zombie-Picayune. Another nickname of the period was The Sometimes-Picayune.
For some reason, Newhouse/Advance thought that shitting on its own product and firing many of its more experienced (thereby higher paid) staffers would result in a “lean, mean, and robust” product. All these actions did was alienate its local readership and open the doors to a competitor.
In response to the “disruptive” chaos wrought by Newhouse/Advance, The Baton Rouge Morning Advocate started a New Orleans print edition later in 2012. It did not become fully competitive with the Picayune until it was sold in 2013 to the Greek tycoon of New Orleans, John Georges. I’m also Greek-American but do not know Georges. In fact, I once called him, “the dullest Greek tycoon in recorded history.”
In addition to being one of the wealthiest people in New Orleans, Georges is a failed political candidate: In 2007, he lost a campaign for governor, running as an Independent. Three years later, he lost a campaign for New Orleans mayor, running as a Democrat. Then, in 2015, while vacationing in France, he dispatched one of his attorneys to sit in the parking lot of the Louisiana Secretary of State’s office during the final hours of the final day for qualifying. (Lamar will have more on this bizarre chapter in an upcoming article).
Georges has always been a Republican at heart, interested in power and influence however he can accumulate it. So, now, he’s decided to become a Greek media tycoon, pursuing a regional strategy by buying news organizations throughout South Louisiana.
The crown jewel in the Georges Gret Stet media empire was a newspaper in his hometown. The New Orleans Advocate newsroom became a veritable Picayune-in-exile, employing Dan Shea, Peter Kovacs, Martha Carr, Gordon Russell, Stephanie Grace, Keith Spera, and a host of others. They helped put the Advocate on the map and made it a serious contender in the newspaper war, winning a Pulitzer Prize earlier this year for Best Local News Reporting (and finishing as a runner-up for Best Editorial Writing).
Meanwhile, the Picayune moved locations several times, had a second major wave of layoffs in 2015, and sold the paper’s former headquarters on Howard Avenue. It’s under demolition to make way for a high-tech golf driving range. I am not making this up.
The demolition accelerated on the same day that the Advocate absorbed the Picayune. Here’s a report by WWL-TV’s Danny Monteverde (who was purged by the Picayune in 2012):
I mentioned the 2012 and 2015 layoffs, but there was a third wave this year. This time by new ownership. It’s a tough time to be a journalist with a local news organization. The process was similar: Some offers came with demotions and pay-cuts; others were equitable and accepted. A grand total of ten of the last 65 Advance-era Picayune newsroom employees remain on staff as of this writing.
The reason I’ve gone into detail about what’s happened since 2012 is to provide context for our readers in support of my analysis of the newspaper war. I’ve followed the conversation on social media, which seems to center around the notion that the Times-Picayune was sacked and pillaged by barbarians bent on vengeance. Instead, repeated mistakes by Newhouse/Advance management ended their run in New Orleans.
The human costs of the Picayune purges and the newspaper war have been considerable. Reporters and other staffers bore the brunt of Newhouse/Advance’s poorly planned, badly executed transition to a digital first strategy. Making matters worse is that these mistakes were made by managers who were no longer with the company at the end of its run.
I like to call New Orleans the world’s largest small town.
I know many of the people who were laid-off in 2012, 2015, and 2019. Some have landed on their feet with the winner of the newspaper war; others have left town; still others have left the profession, which is a pity.
“Columnist Jarvis DeBerry said he turned down the Advocate’s offer for several reasons, including doubts about their opinion content, business model, pay grade and the fact that they are owned by a politician (Georges unsuccessfully ran for governor in 2007 and mayor of New Orleans in 2010. He has served on the Louisiana Board of Regents and is a commissioner of the New Orleans Public Belt Railroad). He also said he felt a sense of ‘triumphalism’ that ‘rubbed a lot of people completely the wrong way.’
“‘They seemed to think we would all be desperate for jobs,’ DeBerry said. ‘It didn’t seem like there was a healthy respect for the people who were, like I said, just working hard.’”
Respect is in short supply in the 21st Century.
History essentially repeated itself in 2019. The same thing happened when Newhouse/Advance had the hammer in 2012 and 2015. They used that metaphorical hammer to smash a successful newspaper to pieces.
What does the future hold for journalism in New Orleans?
I have some serious concerns about John Georges.
Foremost among them is his ownership of both The Times-Picayune-Advocate and Gambit Weekly. When the Picayune was the monopoly daily, Gambit was an independent voice, and Kevin Allman covered the hell out of the 2012 Picayune purge. Kevin remains editor of Gambit. Thus far, Team Georges has let Kevin and his team do their own thing. Let’s hope that continues. Author’s note: Kevin Allman is a friend of mine, so I get to call him by his first name.
It has also been fascinating to watch the newspaper war play out on social media. There are those who have either forgotten the 2012 Picayune purge or are ignorant of it.
Neither Newhouse/Advance nor Georges Media have clean hands.
They’ve laid off many journalists and made others feel disrespected. Respect is a precious commodity; once it’s withdrawn, it rarely returns.
I hope that local ownership will benefit the community and the Picayune after 57 years of absentee owners. I’m not an admirer of John Georges but he has more of a stake in the paper than the Newhouses and their minions ever did. It’s his town; if he blows it, he must live with the consequences.
And New Orleanians are not shy about voicing their opinions.
I have some unsolicited advice for the journalists who work at the newly merged paper: Form a union as soon as possible. There have been three waves of layoffs, and there may well be more to come. Georges is all about the money and if the company isn’t profitable, the ax will fall again.
I am cautiously optimistic about the future of journalism in New Orleans. It’s a great news town, the local TV stations do good work, and there are many online outlets that are ready, willing, and able to take up the slack; one of which is, of course, the Bayou Brief.
Finally, a note on the title: This piece started off life with a different title, but my wife, Grace, suggested this play on the Tennessee Williams play and movie, “Suddenly Last Summer.” It was number six on my list of the top forty movies set in Louisiana, after all. Besides, when you steal a title, you should steal from the best. Thanks to Grace, Tennessee Williams, and Gore Vidal, who wrote the screenplay, for the “sudden” inspiration.
Candidate John Bel Edwards is road-tripping around the state, holding rallies in support of his re-election for governor. Today he’s in New Orleans, and on Tuesday he’ll be in Lafayette, then Lake Charles. Wednesday, he’ll be in Alexandria and Shreveport, then Thursday morning, he’ll be back in Monroe, which is where I caught up with his campaign last Monday.
Although
he’s updated some of his campaign staff, Gov. Edwards is utilizing
some of the same templates that worked for his victory four years
ago, coupled with touting his administration’s accomplishments in
the face of partisan obstinance from the Republican-controlled
Legislature – particularly the House.
His first TV ad, released today, is a case in point. Titled “Surplus,” it begins with a still shot of former Gov. Bobby Jindal, reminds voters of the fiscal mess Edwards inherited from that prior administration, and points to the state’s improved and stabilized finances.
Solid segments of the Edwards’ 2015 base came from the teachers’ unions, and having secured modest pay raises for educators and support personnel this year, he is meeting with local teacher groups on this summer’s campaign trail. He’s holding roundtables, listening to teacher concerns and confidential complaints, and – unsurprisingly – they are still wanting him to do everything possible to reverse some of the Jindal education reforms of 2012.
“Get rid of Act 1, please,” Sandy Lollie, president of the Monroe Federation of Teachers, urged at last week’s discussion. “Despite the ‘accountability’ that was promised, the school boards aren’t regulating principals, and the legislature isn’t doing anything, either. Because of Act 1, it’s open season on teachers, and all we hear is “do what we say, or else’.”
Photo credit: Sue Lincoln, Bayou Brief.
Nodding in agreement, the governor responded, “That’s why I fought against it when I was in the Legislature. And it’s ironic that the principals are having to be the enforcers, since principals were all teachers at one time.”
And
although he didn’t do so by name, Edwards got some digs in on one
of his declared challengers, Eddie Rispone, by reminding the teachers
of the methods he was engaged in
using, in order to pass the 2012 reforms.
For those who don’t remember (although many public school teachers do), the rhetoric ahead of the reforms included Jindal’s statement to LABI about teachers, that “(t)hey are paid according to how long they have been on the job, regardless of their performance,” along with the dire warning that, “(i)f any actual business was set up like this, they would go under in a matter of months. That’s what’s about to happen to our education system.”
Gov. John Bel Edwards last week reminded the Monroe-area teachers he met with of the angst generated by the Jindal reforms and their promoters (including Rispone and fellow member of the Erector Set, Lane Grigsby), saying, “When your motive with respect to education is to drive choice, in order that you and your friends may profit from it, then you do what they did then. You diminish teachers. You were demonized, as if you ever had – then or now – a choice on the first day of school who sits in your classroom.
“Teaching
is a profession, and teachers should be treated with all the respect
of the professionals that they are. In public opinion polls, and
voting exit polls, do you know what people say is one of the most
admired professions? It’s not politicians. It’s teachers.
“And I hope when you put your head on your pillow at night, you realize the positive effect you have on people — today and for the future.”
Following
his meeting with teachers in Monroe, the governor crossed the
Ouachita River and met with two Army veterans who are launching a
mead-making business based in West Monroe. Curtis
Sims and Cameron Myers are the owners of Louisiana’s first-ever
meadery, Two Warriors.
Photo credit: Sue Lincoln, Bayou Brief.
“They’re Louisiana veterans, and they’re using Louisiana honey and Louisiana fruits to make their product. They’re also among the first to sign up for participation in our state’s ‘Veterans First’ business initiative, passed in the legislature this year,” Gov. Edwards told the small group gathered to tour the start-up’s facilities. “Now, if you want to patronize veteran-owned businesses, you’ll be able to find them in our database, through the state Department of Veteran Affairs, and Louisiana Economic Development.”
It’s
another example of Gov. Edwards using dependably safe campaign
strategies, although we
can’t help but note some
irony in
his continuing to run against Jindal, while utilizing a combination
of the two reliably popular things Jindal did in his
2011
re-election campaign: touting economic development, and honoring
veterans. While
Jindal, who never served in the U.S. military, handed out medals to
Louisiana veterans in showy ceremonies, from the premise that he
was the state’s “commander-in-chief,” John Bel Edwards’
honoring of those who’ve served is
entirely
in keeping with his values
and persona, as a West Point grad and an Army veteran himself. It
also, as a strategy, subtly synchronizes with what most political
observers believe was Edwards’ winning message four years ago, the
anti-Vitter “Prostitutes Over Patriots” ad.
Last
Monday’s campaigning (and some events
this Wednesday and Thursday) was deep in Louisiana’s 5th
congressional district, whose U.S. Rep. Ralph Abraham has also
announced he’s challenging the governor this fall.
Photo credit: Sue Lincoln, Bayou Brief.
It’s
interesting to note that while yard signs and billboards for this
clerk of court or that state representative were blooming along the
highways and backroads, from Vidalia to Monroe not a single “Abraham
for Governor” marker could be spotted – not even in his home
village of Alto. This
on Monday July 1, the day after Abraham had been the featured speaker
for “God and Country” Sunday at Alto Baptist Church.
Conventional
political wisdom says it’s early yet for the governor’s race,
with qualifying still one month away, on August 6-8.
And, traditionally, the big push for any of the serious campaigns
starts on Labor Day weekend. This year, that gives the candidates a
full six weeks to spend their advertising dollars and make their case
to the voters for the primary election on October 12.
