Publisher’s Note: The Bayou Brief is enormously grateful to former Gov. Buddy Roemer and the University of Louisiana at Lafayette Press for agreeing to share his story with us. Scopena: A Memoir of Home is available for purchase from Octavia Books in New Orleans and in print and digital versions on Amazon.Prologue
I am seventy-four, and I had a stroke July 2014. The stroke affected my fine motor skills and weakened my right side, but with physical therapy I’ve managed to regain my physical abilities enough to return to work in an investment bank that my son, Chas, started seven years ago. And although the stroke causes me to slur my words occasionally, the biggest enemy to my good health is diabetic-neuropathy.
Neuropathy is an affliction of your nerves causing you to lose feelings in your legs and other nervous connections. It is the result of Type 1 diabetes—in my case, a disease that I’ve had since I was twenty-nine. As a result of my neuropathy, I walk with a cane.
My stroke occurred when, as my wife Scarlett and I were leaving Sunday School one July morning, I slurred three words in talking about going to eat lunch.
Scarlett, a registered nurse, and I decided to go quickly to India’s Restaurant to eat and avoid the onset of a diabetic attack (due to low blood sugar). We didn’t have the testing meter for blood sugar with us, and Scarlett thought that if we ate I would be alright. So we did, and things were fine at the restaurant, but while we stopped at a gas station on the way home, I slurred several words, and Scarlett decided to rush me straight to the emergency room at the local hospital.
She called ahead, and they were ready for me. I was former governor of Louisiana and was well-known by most people, so I waved at a couple of folks on my way into the hospital. As a nurse, Scarlett was trained to let the doctors know what was happening with me.
I was feeling no pain but I noticed that my face was drooping and that the hand motions that they wanted me to do were not going well. I couldn’t touch the end of my nose with my right finger-tips, for example. They decided to do an MRI and, as they suspected, discovered I had suffered a stroke that affected me in my small motor skills and right side of my body. They kept me for several days, and finally released me to go home with a cane, recommending physical therapy on a daily basis.
About nine months after the stroke, I was struck with the on-set of neuropathy, a nerve disorder common to many people as they age, but particularly pronounced among people with Type 1 diabetes. People with neuropathy lose feelings particularly in their feet, but all nerves are affected. As a result, people affected often walk haltingly—like a person older than their age. While my speaking and walking had improved in strength for a year after the stroke, my neuropathy has decreased my walking abilities to about 50 percent of my former self.
So I have had a challenging two years with a stroke and operations on my right and left carotid arteries as a result, surgery on my prostate unrelated to the stroke, two cataract surgeries, and neuropathy. I have survived, and I have started thinking about my childhood and growing up on a cotton farm in north Louisiana—Scopena. My parents had both died recently, so I started remembering my childhood, how different it was from most people’s, how I was the oldest child and the natural one to tell about the events at Scopena, and how it might be of interest to new family members.
For years I have resisted writing about my growing up on Scopena in south Bossier Parish in the far northwest corner of Louisiana. I’m not a writer. Never wrote a book in my life. But Dad died on July 7, 2012, after a twelve-year bout with Alzheimer’s at the age of eighty-nine, and Mom died at ninety-two in bed at home in February 2016, and, in effect, I was free for the first time to write my own personal account of the events on Scopena in the 1950s, when I was growing up. Plus I felt a need to tell about events of which only I knew.
Despite my stroke, I count myself lucky not to be handicapped in my thinking and writing skills. I wish I could speak better—clearer and stronger and in my old rhythm, but it is a miracle that I speak at all. In the past my ability to speak well has always played a role in my success. Now, the premium is on listening. Dad always told me it would be that way—“Listen, Butch. Listen,” he would say, when I hadn’t paid attention to some important instruction. He was right, as usual.
So, unable to be as physically active as before, and with more time on my hands, my thoughts began to turn to writing about my Dad, my Mom, and our life at Scopena. It’s something that others have asked me to do over the years. Why have I resisted? Writing seemed something that somebody else did. Besides, to write about one’s father and mother is something that I hesitated to do. The damage to the perceptions of the living is always a danger. People might have different memories of events or they might have been told a skewed version of the truth that they have come to believe. Plus, it seemed almost arrogant to me for a man to write about himself, although when friends would write a book of memories or of some event, I would read it with pleasure. It was not something that I would do myself, I thought. But I was wrong, and worked for more than two years on this memoir of my early life and growing up on Scopena.
Dad and Mom were wonderful parents: careful, loving, protective, so I don’t write to expose a flaw I found in them. Any flaw is in me. What can I add to their legacy? Mom was a wonderful mother of five, smart as a whip, and beautiful as a spring morning. Dad was a leader in everything he did: Bossier Rural Electrification Cooperation, Bossier Farm Bureau, Louisiana Generation and Power Cooperation, National Democratic Party, and Louisiana State Commissioner of Administration, not to mention the father of five children who spent countless hours with each child when they needed it most.
Any flaw or fault that someone finds in these pages is a result of my experience. These are my perceptions and no one else’s.
So too, it’s hard for a son as close to his father as I was, to write about his father—particularly a father who is well-known in political circles, but not well understood; a father who never ran for political office himself, yet raised a son who ran eleven times and won seven, including races for congressman and governor, and lost for president. Dad never ran for political office so he never had to disclose his inner-self or his private records. He could appear to be one thing, but in reality he was something completely different.
He appeared to be in command of whatever situation he was thrust in, but that wasn’t always the case. He was good at appearing in control, but, in truth, he was often ill at ease and asked for guidance from my mother, and from his own mother. The things that confused him at times, that made him seek guidance from someone he trusted, were “people” problems. The people problems weren’t a phobia for him. He wasn’t a head case. He just wasn’t as comfortable with people as he was with the “problems” they caused. He wasn’t a glad-hander, a slap-on-the-back kind of guy. He was quiet, and many considered him a “loner.” He wasn’t a mixer, to put it in a collegiate or political way. He was an “intimidator” in his approach to people. His tone; his attitude; his bluster were all designed to keep people away; to keep people ill at ease; to intimidate them. He would take the position that it had to be done his way or nothing would get done.
“People” problems were something that Dad at times needed help with. His mother, “Mine,” often would advise him about reaching out to people to solve a problem, but Mom was the real champion in quietly talking him into seeing the other person’s point of view. Many a time on the farm I can remember waiting for Dad to listen to Mine or Mom to decide how to implement a strategy that affected people. He was so sure on hedging or planting strategies, yet so uncertain in trusting a foreman to supervise an operation out of his sight.
This flaw was to bedevil him when he found himself, years later, in the turmoil of Louisiana politics—a politics that were “people,” not “performance,” oriented. He didn’t suffer fools well, and he had no patience with people. This was a thicket that Dad wanted to tame—he wanted the challenge—but he tried to do it by himself and without the help he needed from Scopena, including Mom or Mine. In fact, he left Scopena behind for this new challenge. It was a mistake, because he wasn’t prepared to handle the world by himself.
* * *
It has been relatively easy for me to avoid writing about when I was governor. A professional writer called me up after my term ended and made the case for me to write a book under his tutelage that would set the record straight on what I had done and why. I could care less what people think, although there is a story or two to tell about how we had pulled Louisiana back from the brink of bankruptcy and put the state’s finances on a stable path; how we had battled the teacher unions over my efforts to bring greater accountability to Louisiana’s schools; how we had attempted to create a single board to oversee the state’s colleges and universities to bring coherence and coordination to their budgets and planning; how we had gone to the mat with state legislators over my view that they had passed unconstitutional acts to restrict the right of women to abortion; how we had passed the first tough campaign finance disclosure bill in Louisiana history; how we had been the first administration to insist on tough standards to protect Louisiana’s air and water. The writer thought these issues would be most interesting if written from my point of view. Boring, it seemed to me. Too self-serving, I thought.
My problem as governor, looking back after twenty-five years, was often just the opposite of my father’s. He wouldn’t waste (his word, “waste”) any time with people working out a problem. Just do it his way, and everything would be fine. I wanted to hear opinions opposite mine from the people who were most involved. Maybe that’s what made me a “politician,” unlike Dad, who never was described as “political” in any of his dealings with people.
* * *
One thing that I took the lead from Dad on was the suspicion of money and politics. Dad always had a deeply felt belief that Washington, D.C., was too heavily influenced by people with money. He thought that money interests controlled Washington and kept it from representing Americans in general and the average man in particular.
When I ran for president in 2012, I expressed my concern about political action committee (PAC) money and influence-peddling in the presidential campaign of that year. That is what Dad believed, and that is what he taught me. He just couldn’t turn a political phrase with it. He couldn’t run a political campaign with it, because for a man deeply mired in politics—eight years as commissioner of administration of Louisiana—and never elected to a political office, he was the most anti-political animal on the planet. In fact, “politics” was a thing of derision to him. It was a game that he didn’t take seriously.
From Dad I got my cynicism of politics. From Mom, I got my idealism. Both can be valuable traits to have. Mom’s political idealism shone in 1978 when I lost my first race for Congress by two thousand votes in the midst of 100,000 cast ballots because I said a local project was a “boondoggle” with a couple weeks before the election; saying that we should balance the budget before building a “boondoogle.” After dropping to fifth place in a sixteen person field, I struggled to finish a close third in a losing election. Mom said she was proud of me for taking a stand, and the people would come to understand. (I won the next election for Congress two years later in 1980.) Dad said I ought to learn to keep my mouth shut during the two weeks before the election, although I could tell he was proud of me too.
In 2012, a New York publishing company tried to interest me in writing a book about my campaign for president that year under my signature issues: limiting contributions to no more than $100 per individual, not taking PAC or super PAC money, and reporting every penny contributed to the campaign. Let’s shine a light on money in politics, I thought. People now are clueless on where political money comes from and the influence over the politician and the politics that comes with it.
My ideas didn’t get much of a hearing, however. I got a good reception when I appeared on cable TV shows like Morning Joe, but the Republican Party established rules that shut me out of the debates. They set a minimum percentage in the latest poll for a candidate to qualify for the debate. I never qualified. I was always a point too low. If four percentage points were needed to qualify in South Carolina, I had three. If five were needed in New Hampshire, I had four. The highest I got was Florida at nine percentage points. They set the bar for entry at 10 percent, of course.
It was very difficult to gain in the polls if you didn’t participate in the debates because that was the way that you gained name recognition with the masses. And if you didn’t gain name recognition with the masses, you didn’t climb in the polls and earn a right to be in in the next debate. As Dad would have expected, since I had no money of my own, I ended my campaign for president after getting only a handful of votes in New Hampshire. Donald Trump four years later was to prove the power of my campaign stance. He didn’t know anything about politics except one important fact: money controls everything in Washington, D.C. I just couldn’t get the publicity he could, and he had wealth of his own and cut right to the chase: he didn’t care what the insiders felt, because they were the problem.
The idea of writing a book about running for president was a good one, but I was too frustrated with the result of the campaign. I was fed up with the sham the general election campaign had turned out to be. It was too painful, too recent for me to want to do it, given the difficulties of the effort. What seems so obvious to me—important elections are too often bought by the special interests—wasn’t so obvious to everyone else, or, if it was obvious, they didn’t want to acknowledge it. I was too close to the race, and too upset to write unemotionally about my race for president.
* * *
My thinking has changed about a book about my childhood and my Mom and Dad now that they are gone, and now that I’m over seventy and realize that I probably won’t be so lucky on my next stroke. I warmed to an idea I had been thinking about for a long time: writing an account of what it was like to grow up on Scopena—our farm where I lived as a boy from 1950 until 1960, when I went away to college at age sixteen—and what lessons my Dad taught me about family, hard work, race, and life; and Mom, about love and people. Dad was a wonderful father. He raised me to be independent in all my interactions with people and with groups. And Mom—she was the best.
From the very beginning, I was an unusual politician, an independent-minded congressman in a highly charged partisan atmosphere who refused to take PAC money. Because of my independence, I stood out from other Democratic congressmen in joining Republicans to work for what I thought was the good of the country. For example, I joined some forty members of Congress—all Democrats and out of 535 house members—to form the “boll weevils” caucus to support the initiatives of President Reagan, a Republican. But no colleagues joined with me to prevent the purchase of Congress by PACs by not taking their money. Many were good, decent members of Congress, but they were compromised by taking the PAC money. I see it now; I didn’t see it then.
I decided it would be important for me to go back to my roots at Scopena and try to gain an understanding of why my views were so different than those of the typical politician. Was it an accident of time and place, or did it have to do with my upbringing?
I grew up during a time when “family” meant security and sharing more than it does now. There are many examples of lessons learned that can still be relevant in twenty-first-century America, but they are seldom taught these days. My Mom and Dad were extraordinarily devoted parents who had unusual ideas about childrearing that led them to raise five gifted children. This book is about my mother and father, mostly my father, because of the tragedy that befell him when he dared stick his head into Louisiana politics. But most of all, it is about the farm that we grew up on in the 1950s. It is about Scopena.
In those ten years that I lived at Scopena, I formed my views of the world based on the value of individuals rather than on the color of someone’s skin, and I learned the keys of success that I carried into the world far from there, keys like hard work, team effort, honesty in reporting what you saw. The truth is that the highest hurdle I had to jump in life and the thing that prepared me the most for politics, Louisiana-style, were the demanding standards set by my father years ago—at Scopena.
Scopena is a place. You can see it from Highway 71 South, and see its cotton gin, tennis courts, swimming pool, shop, its big front yard, and its tall pecan trees. But the heart of Scopena—the life of Scopena, the magic of Scopena, the uniqueness of Scopena—was Mom and Dad, raising five kids under a philosophy that ignored what the rest of the world thought and that emphasized individual effort. With Dad and Mom gone, I want to tell the story of Scopena before it too is gone or unrecognizable.
Race relations in the 1950s were relatively progressive at Scopena, unlike what was happening in the rest of the South. This is not to say that black people had no problems at Scopena, many of their rights as people were not protected, but Mom and Dad ensured that on Scopena they counted as much as white families—in pay, in housing, in opportunity for advancement, even in voting. Regardless, to be black, even on Scopena, was to be a second-class citizen.
* * *
In the 1950s, when the bulk of this tale takes place, Scopena was a big, and getting bigger, farm, far away from the city and what was happening in Louisiana and in the nation. It was far from Louisiana politics. It was a scene of political discussions to be sure, but it was the type of place to which politicians came to seek support and money, not a place that grew politicians. For a long time when I was growing up, Scopena meant farming, not politics. For me, Scopena was the most important place in the world, but to most people in the city, it was where we country-people lived.
We were twelve miles from Bossier City. Dad was the boss man. And there was nothing to challenge his dominance. He didn’t have to put up with backtalk from anyone, because we lived in a special world, in which he was in charge.
Scopena: A Memoir of Home is available for purchase from Octavia Books in New Orleans and in print and digital versions on Amazon.The Bayou Brief is a non-profit news publication that relies 100% on donations from our readers. Help support independent journalism about the stories of Louisiana through a monthly or one-time donation by clicking here.
Update (June 13, 2020): Two and a half years after the publication of this article, the Confederate monument continues to stand outside of the Caddo Parish Courthouse.
On Thursday, Oct. 19th, 2017, in the very last city in the American South to officially lower the Confederate flag at the end of the Civil War, the Caddo Parish Commission stunningly agreed, in a 7-to-5 vote, to remove a monument to the Confederacy from the prominent place where it has stood since 1906, in front of the parish courthouse in downtown Shreveport.
As the votes flashed across blue monitors and Commission President Steven Jackson announced the historic outcome, many in the audience leapt to their feet and cheered. Some wept with joy. An elderly African-American woman sitting in a wheelchair at the front beamed broadly.
“That moment meant to me we were closing a very dark chapter in Caddo Parish,” Commission President Jackson, an African-American Democrat, told The Bayou Brief, “and it was a smoke signal to the rest of Louisiana and the country that we are a more inclusive, tolerant, and progressive parish than we were when an all-white police jury in 1903 agreed to place the monument.”
Commissioner Matthew Linn, a white Republican, was similarly adamant. “If the monument isn’t moved, the Caddo Parish Courthouse needs to be,” he said to The Bayou Brief.
But within hours of the vote, the United Daughters of the Confederacy’s (UDC) Shreveport chapter filed suit to stop the monument from being moved.
Fifty years after Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant after the Battle of the Appomattox Court House, the UDC had raised funds and lobbied for local government support for the design and construction of the monument; the monument, they claim, belongs to them, not to the citizens of Caddo Parish or the commission.
The UDC argued the commission’s “vote to remove the monument violated (their) rights to free speech under the Constitution’s First Amendment, to due process under the Fifth Amendment, and to equal treatment under the law in the 14th Amendment.” The lawsuit also seeks a judgment declaring that the UDC Shreveport chapter owns the parcel of land on which the monument stands.
Although the minutes from a June 18, 1903 meeting of the Caddo Parish Police Jury, the governing parish authority at the time, show the jury did, in fact, vote to give the parcel of land to the UDC for the monument’s erection, there is no paper deed or record that evidences the transaction ever actually happened.
A week after the commission’s vote for removal, Jackie Nichols, a white woman in her mid-60s and the current president of the UDC Shreveport chapter, summarized to a local television station what she believes are the reasons the Confederate monument should stay in its current place. It honors Confederate soldiers who fought in the Civil War, she argued, and is therefore “a surrogate tombstone” for those killed and buried in unmarked graves away from their homes. She detailed the fundraising efforts beginning in 1891- before the UDC Shreveport chapter had been formed- to raise $10,000 (the equivalent of $275,000 today) and the parish governing authority’s vote to both donate the land to them for the monument and provide an additional $1,000 for its construction.
Jackie Nichols. Source: Facebook
But Nichols also revealed a key problem with allowing Caddo’s Confederate monument to stay where it has been for the past 111 years. She quoted a speaker at monument’s 1906 dedication ceremony, Methodist Rev. Dr. W.T. Bolling:
The men who went forth to battle under this banner were not actuated by hate, by desire for conquest, or to maintain the institution of slavery, but battled for what they believed to be a great fundamental doctrine, a foundation principle in a government founded upon the consent of the governed.
This quote comes straight out of the false narrative that white Southern historians and former Confederate leaders constructed in the years after the Civil War, one that the UDC played a major part in embedding in the collective white Southern psyche. Historians have a name for this narrative, which glorifies the Confederacy’s role in the Civil War: “The Lost Cause.”
A must-see video by Vox, “How Southern socialites rewrote Civil War history,” summarizes the Lost Cause narrative’s three main tenets: 1) the Confederacy fought heroically and nobly to defend the Southern way of life in the face of overwhelming forces from the North; 2) slavery was a benevolent institution and most slaves were happy; 3) slavery was not the root cause of the Confederacy.
The UDC, in fact, had Confederate monuments built all over the South, a highly successful campaign that helped instill Lost Cause tenets in white Southern culture called the Civil War Commemorative Sculpture Movement.
Jackie Nichols’s inclusion of an assertion by a speaker at the 1906 dedication of Caddo’s Confederate monument that men went to battle “not to maintain slavery” but because of an unnamed “foundation principle in a government founded upon the consent of the governed”– a government that included a large percentage of a population who could not give consent – demonstrates how intertwined a glorified and factually incorrect version of Civil War history is with these remaining Confederate monuments. Caddo’s monument exemplifies that false version of history.
But there is another even more troubling and patently absurd remark Nichols put in at the end of her statement (emphasis hers): “This monument could be seen as CELEBRATING the END of enslavement in America and the BEGINNING of freedom for the enslaved people, and for Women as well.”
As most of us recognize, the end of the Civil War and the emancipation of slaves did not mean freedom for African-Americans, and it especially did not mean that in Caddo Parish.
****
In the decade following the Civil War, white men in Caddo Parish were killing and terrorizing African-Americans in such high numbers that the parish earned the name, “Bloody Caddo.”
In 1896, the same year the UDC Shreveport chapter formed and began raising funds to have the Caddo Confederate monument constructed, violence surged again across Caddo and the state of Louisiana to stop African-Americans from voting for the Republican-Populist candidate for governor. In 1903, when the UDC Shreveport chapter was lobbying the police jury for financial and political support for the monument’s construction, African-Americans had been almost completely disenfranchised, and whites were institutionalizing a system of white supremacy that would leave African-Americans with very few freedoms.
Yet the history of what was happening to blacks in Caddo Parish at that time was all but silenced until the late 1960s, and even after that was subsumed to the Lost Cause narrative, which metaphorically and literally whitewashed the history surrounding Caddo’s Confederate monument.
The monument, in its current place outside the courthouse, stands for a false and romanticized myth that dominated the historical narrative for far too long. If this monument and monuments like it are finally removed, the Lost Cause narrative will no longer have a hold on Southern culture. Instead of honoring history, Caddo’s monument distorts, perverts, and glorifies the most hateful, bloodiest, and ugliest 212 of the 12,598 weeks that have passed since America declared its independence on July 4th, 1776.
****
If you’re on the 500 block of Texas Street in downtown Shreveport, the monument is impossible to miss. It is thirty feet high and stands at the head of the center walkway that leads to the courthouse’s front entrance. Made of marble and granite, the monument has a seven-foot high statue of a young Confederate soldier standing on a pedestal at the top.
The soldier is surrounded by busts of four Confederate generals on a lower pedestal: Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, P.G.T. Beauregard, a Louisiana general, and Henry Watkins Allen, another Louisiana general and Louisiana governor in 1864 until the Confederacy surrendered in 1865. A life-sized statue of Clio, the muse of history, points to a book, which is inscribed with, “Erected by the United Daughters of the Confederacy. 1905, Love’s Tribute to Our Gallant Dead. Shreveport Chapter 237.”
The UDC Shreveport chapter wanted a Confederate monument that would serve several purposes. One was to honor the Civil War veterans who were aging while they were still alive. Another was, as the book inscription says, to honor soldiers from Caddo Parish who died in the war by having it serve as a cenotaph, “a sepulchral monument erected in memory of deceased persons whose bodies are buried elsewhere.” (The federal government only paid to have bodies of Union soldiers killed in the war transported back to their homes for burial. Confederate soldiers were usually buried where they had died, in unmarked graves).
For Caddo Parish specifically, the monument would also mark a historically significant event by being built on the spot where the last Confederate flag on land was lowered on May 26, 1865, signifying the official surrender of the Confederacy.
That spot, described in a commemorative plaque in front of the monument, was in front of Caddo Parish’s first courthouse which “became the Confederate capital of Louisiana and headquarters of the Trans-Mississippi Department, from 1863 to May 26, 1865.” This important historical marker was part of the reason the Caddo Confederate monument was entered into the National Park Service’s National Register of Historic Places (NRHP) on January 29, 2014.
The monument’s NRHP registration form notes that the monument is “one of four major Louisiana monuments representing what is known by historians as ‘the Cult of the Lost Cause.’” It is placed in “Phase II” of the Commemorative Sculpture movement, known as “the Celebration of the Confederacy,” when “a particularly popular form of veneration was the memorial” usually erected in a park of by a courthouse.
An important part of the UDC’s Sculpture Movement was to have Confederate monuments erected near or in prominent public spaces. People wanting or needing to access or walk by those public spaces had to experience the monuments’ inclusion in them, whether they wanted to or not. In this way, the monuments became a permanent, integral, and almost seamless part of civic life and the built environment.
Another reason for making the monuments so easily accessible and part of civic life was laid out bluntly in Caddo’s Confederate monument NRHP registration form:
The monuments to the Confederate leaders and the common soldier allowed the war generation to etch their devotion to the cause in stone and to pass on to those who could not read, especially the children, the need to preserve history, to indoctrinate the future generations with a romanticized version of the past.
Southern women realized that the next generation would not have the same emotional and personal ties to the war as those who had lived through it, so it became their burden to modify celebrations of the Confederacy into terms that the future generations could best understand.
As the Vox video points out, the UDC did not rely on just imposing Confederate monuments in public spaces to indoctrinate future generations. Its members campaigned to have the Lost Cause version of Civil War history the only one taught in schools throughout the South up until the mid-1960s by getting school boards “to reject any [history] textbooks that did not ‘accord full justice to the South’” and by closely monitoring “history books to make sure ‘Northern Influence’ never reached the classrooms.”
To reinforce the teachings of Lost Cause history, the UDC formed auxiliary groups called the “Children of the Confederacy,” which were usually set up as after-school programs. One of the main activities of the Children of the Confederacy groups was to memorize and recite the Confederate Catechism, a booklet written in 1929 by Lyon Tyler, the son of U.S. President John Tyler. The Confederate Catechism contains the core beliefs of, you guessed it, the Lost Cause.
There aren’t many children who learn the Confederate Catechism anymore, and the UDC does not have a big presence now, with just 20,000 members in the country (in the early 1900s, the UDC had 100,000 members.) However, the UDC’s campaign to embed the Lost Cause’s tenets in the Southern and the national conscience, with its education campaign and the Commemorative Sculpture movement, was wildly successful. A 2011 Pew Research Center survey found that 48% of respondents believed the main cause of the Civil War was “over a difference of interpretation in constitutional law,” while 38% thought it was “the South’s defense of an economic system based on slavery.” 39% of black respondents believed the differences-over-constitutional law reason. In the public hearings held by the Caddo Commission’s Monument Advisory Committee, there were echoes of the Lost Cause narrative in most of the comments made by those opposed to moving the monument.
The glaring failure to acknowledge what African-Americans experienced in Caddo Parish after the Civil War has greatly helped in maintaining a belief in the Lost Cause historical narrative. The killing, terrorizing, and suppression of blacks at that time could not be told or emphasized over the past 111 years because the Lost Cause narrative would fall apart. Many of the “heroic” Confederate veterans in Caddo Parish that the Confederate monument was built to honor and who, according to a keynote speaker at the 1906 dedication ceremony, did not go to battle to maintain slavery but did form paramilitary units that hunted, tortured and lynched blacks after the war. The whitewashed history and the grim, real history cannot be reconciled.
****
How, exactly, did Caddo Parish become known as “Bloody Caddo”?
After the Civil War, there were two documented periods in which large numbers of whites murdered and terrorized blacks. One was the decade immediately after the Civil War. Whites, angry and fearful of blacks now having the right to vote and serve on juries, terrorized and lynched blacks all over the South.
Louisiana was the most violent state, and Caddo Parish was the most violent parish. According to a 1991 article, “Bloody Caddo: White Violence against Blacks in a Louisiana Parish, 1865-1876” by Gilles Vandal, out of a total of 3,494 recorded homicides in Louisiana statewide, 566 homicides were in Caddo Parish. African Americans were 85% of homicide victims and 84% of them were murdered by whites.
An astonishing 70% percent of black victims were killed by more than one white person. Vandal writes that whites formed well-organized “reconstituted Confederacy military units of fifty to two hundred men riding together” and turned the parish into “a hunting ground.” Whites would drag black men out of their homes to wooded areas and either kill them or order them to leave right then without anything but the clothes on their back. Most of the men who led the reconstituted Confederacy military units were from wealthy and upper middle class families; in other words, these were respected leaders in the parish. Vandal notes too that whites in Caddo “more than in any other parish or region, largely rallied behind the calls for white solidarity.” The Shreveport Times, the region’s major newspaper, regularly urged whites in Caddo and surrounding parishes to participate in the violence.
Vandal argues whites in Caddo Parish reacted more violently both to freed slaves’ new civil rights after the Civil War and federal control of the region than in other areas of the South because Caddo and nearby parishes made up the only region in Louisiana that was spared in the war.
“The parish did not live through the terror, famine, and other sufferings brought by the war; no rebuilding, no repair or reconstruction needed to be done there,” he observed. “Moreover, the war had brought great prosperity to the parish, as Shreveport became the capital of Confederate Louisiana after the fall of New Orleans.” Thus, whites in Caddo Parish “stubbornly opposed the federal government and its reconstruction policy and…strongly resented the presence of federal troops, particularly when those occupying forces were composed of black regiment.”
Since blacks made up 70% of Caddo Parish’s population after the war, according to Vandal, whites also feared losing their power now that blacks could vote. Most of whites’ attacks on blacks in the decade after the war were politically motivated. Violence surged in the months and weeks leading up to the 1868 and 1874 presidential elections, with white paramilitary groups targeting politically active blacks and white Republicans during the two presidential election years. According to Vandal, “at least 290 homicides (51% of the total number) occurred during those two [election] years” and “no less than 220 blacks (74%) (were) killed by whites” at the time. Other methods of intimidation were to deny blacks jobs and leases and to ostracize white Republicans, which were likely to make them and their families homeless or even in danger of starvation. The number of black families left Northwest Louisiana after relatives or friends were killed or just from fear they would be is unknown.
In an amicus brief filed by the American Civil Liberties Union in 2011 related to a black man convicted of murder in Caddo Parish, the ACLU notes that whites who lynched and terrorized African-Americans faced no punishment whatsoever. Congress eventually passed the Civil Rights Act of 1875, outlawing racial discrimination in jury service. The hope was more attackers would be brought to justice and that would lead to a decrease in violence against blacks.
In Louisiana, however, juries remained largely all or almost all white because of courts often rigging jury selection to keep African-Americans off of juries.
Violence against blacks surged again across Louisiana in the run-up to the 1896 gubernatorial election. African-Americans were then over 60% of the state’s population and were posed to vote for the Republican-Populist ticket. White Democrats in Louisiana used violence, intimidation, and fraud to prevent blacks from exercising their right to vote.
While white women in the UDC were finding new political and social power in launching the Commemorative Sculpture Movement, African-American women were being beaten with barbed wire by white men “to intimidate families inclined to support the Republican-Populist ticket.” Although the majority of votes in the gubernatorial election went for the Republican-Populist ticket because of African American support, Louisiana Democrats reportedly doctored the results and won. In 1898, a Constitutional Convention convened by the Louisiana government imposed “crippling educational and property qualifications that resulted in the official disfranchisement of Louisiana African-Americans,” Vandal notes.
Another period of intense white-on-black violence in Caddo Parish occurred between 1877 and 1950, which the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) documented in its study, “Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror.” In this study of lynchings in 12 states, Caddo Parish had 45 recorded lynchings of black Americans by enraged mobs, the third highest number in the nation. EJI notes, “Lynchings were violent and public events that traumatized black people throughout the country and were largely tolerated by state and federal officials…. many African-Americans who were never accused of any crime were tortured and murdered in front of picnicking spectators.” EJI argues lynching was an instrument of terror that was used to “enforce racial subordination and segregation.”
Associate professor of history at LSU-Shreveport Dr. Gary Joiner believes the actual number of lynchings to be much higher.
When the Caddo Parish Police Jury voted to support the UDC Shreveport’s Confederate monument construction in 1903, black men were already essentially disenfranchised. John Ratcliff, one of the Caddo Commission’s Monument Advisory Committee’s members wrote in a Shreveport Times op-ed, published the day before the commission’s vote on the monument, that the Caddo Parish Police Jury’s vote in 1902 to allow the Confederate monument to be built in front the a public courthouse “did not fairly or justly represent the citizens of the parish.”
He noted that in 1902, “the parish had 15 ‘colored voters.’”
“If blacks had been able to vote,” Ratcliff argued, “it is highly likely they would have voted for different candidates to sit on the CPPJ, ones who would have likely not voted in support of the UDC’s Confederate monument proposal.”
No monument has been built commemorating the African-Americans killed by whites during the Bloody Caddo period or afterward.
No gravestones have been placed at sites where African-Americans were lynched or at a site commemorating those buried in unknown places.
Since 1906, African-Americans have had to look at a monument that honors those who fought to preserve the enslavement of their ancestors, in front of a courthouse where justice is supposed to be meted out fairly.
Until at least the mid-1960s, African-Americans had to be silent about the murder, terrorizing, and brutal repression of their ancestors at the hands of whites at the time the UDC campaigned for and succeeded in having the Confederate monument built.
“A monument that stands for injustice has no place in front of an institution of justice,” Commission President Jackson said to The Bayou Brief. “Caddo Parish leads the country in sending African-Americans to death row. We must turn the page on the supremacy that monument stands for.”
Donna Brazile is one of Louisiana’s most notable and consequential native daughters, and although she lives and works in Washington D.C., her heart has always belonged to her home state. Among many other incredible accomplishments, Brazile became the first African-American woman to ever lead a national presidential campaign, serving as Al Gore’s campaign manager in 2000. She has also served twice as the interim chair of the Democratic National Committee, including a recent assignment during the 2016 election, an experience she chronicles in her controversial new memoir Hacks.
Earlier today, I spoke with Brazile, who is celebrating her 58th birthday back home in New Orleans this weekend, about her passion for Louisiana, about Roy Moore’s quest to become the next senator in Alabama, about the frustrations she had with the Clinton campaign when she served as the interim chair of the DNC, about Russian interference in last year’s election, about her latest book, and about yard signs.
I began our conversation with a question about former Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco, and her response will be published later today, in full, as a part of a separate story. Aside from that, this is a complete transcript of our conversation: Lamar White (LW): Donna, it’s a tremendous honor to speak with you on behalf of The Bayou Brief. How are you?
Donna Brazile (DB): It’s my last day here on campus. I’ve had a great semester here at Harvard University, at the Shorenstein Center of Media, Politics, and Policy. I get to return to Washington D.C. tomorrow, and I’m looking forward to going back to teaching at Georgetown.
LW: So, this question comes from one of our most talented writers at The Bayou Brief, a young man who loves to write about old things- that is, the history of Louisiana. His name is Mitch Rabalais of Abita Springs. He’s a student at Southeastern Louisiana University, and he asked me to ask you this:In 1987, you managed Mary Landrieu’s first statewide campaign, for state treasurer. It was one of the first major statewide campaigns in Louisiana in which the candidate was female. Given the attitudes of many voters in the state at the time, what unique challenges did that campaign have?
DB: Mary ran at a time when voters were looking for someone who could not just run the state’s finances but also someone with experience. Although she was a very young woman at the time, people knew that she had lots of experience in state government, and they gave her a chance to lead.
I think the most fulfilling part to me was learning how to mobilize people outside of the New Orleans regional area, areas where she was not as familiar because she didn’t have strong name recognition in the north in Shreveport and Monroe and also in the center of the state, in Alexandria. So, it posed some significant challenges, but she was able to overcome all of them.
LW: Thanks so much, Donna. I have just a few more questions I’d like to get to, and they’re all about your book, Hacks, which I read, front to back, and thought was important and riveting, by the way.So, first, at a recent luncheon hosted by the Independent Women’s Organization in New Orleans, you spoke about the ways in which hackers infiltrated the DNC, and I think you went into greater detail, at times, than you did in your book. Would you mind sharing some of the things you said at that luncheon about Russian interference in our election?
DB: One of the things I wanted to point out- not just in my book but elsewhere- is what exactly we were worried about. Because of the severity of the hacking and the persistence of the Russian intelligence services and their allies, we took steps to try to protect our data from being corrupted. We needed our data to target voters, to raise funds, as well as to communicate in the final weeks of the campaign.
So, I like to tell people that in addition to the e-mails being leaked- sometimes we got spoof e-mails, I was concerned about the corruption of the data that would inhibit our ability to reach people at a crucial moment in the election cycle. So, I think it’s important to understand that we learn more and more about what’s happened, not just from the investigations on Capitol Hill, but also by Director Mueller. I’m hoping that we learn how and if that data was used in a way to compromise our election integrity.
We do know that the Russians attempted to hack into 21 different state organizations, and what worries me is that with the hacking of the Democratic National Committee and the hacking of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, we may learn soon whether or not there was any help in the targeting of that data, the use of that data, or the corruption of that material.
LW: So, the name of your book Hacks is sort of a double entendre. It has two meanings. On the one hand, it’s about Russian interference, and on the other hand, Hacks probably refers to a number of people who were involved in the political campaign.One character stuck out to me in particular in your book. It’s this young man named Brandon, who you referred to quite a bit, and I also thought he was one of the most fascinating characters in your book. First of all, who did he work for exactly? Did he work for the Clinton campaign, or did he work for the DNC?
DB: He was actually paid from the Joint Victory Fund. Brandon Davis was hired months before I became chair of the party to lead the general election on behalf of the Joint Victory Fund. So he was never a member of the DNC staff.
He had strange powers to control the party at a time I believe the party should have been exercising its own independence. Remember, we were fighting the Russians. And the party is not just responsible for the turnout for the electoral college. We had down ballot races across the country, including some Senatorial races that were not funded by the presidential nominee. So, I wanted to make sure there were sufficient resources for all of the candidates.
In fact, when the election was over, I was able to send resources home because there was still a Senatorial race in Louisiana, and I wanted to contribute to the success of the mayoral race in Baton Rouge as well.
LW: Yes, and I appreciate that. I know that the mayoral race in Baton Rouge was sort of overlooked by a lot of folks, even in the state of Louisiana. But back to Brandon. With the arrangement he had, when you were interim chair before, was there any analog to Brandon then? The idea of being employed by a joint fundraising committee seems like a relatively new development, and it seemed like no one really had firing power over this guy.
DB: No, he reported to Brooklyn. That’s why I called him the clerk. But this is not about individuals. It’s about the addendum to the joint fundraising agreement, which was made the chief of staff of the DNC, Amy Dacey, and Mr. Robby Mook, who was the campaign manager of the Clinton campaign.
As I mentioned in the book, I found this arrangement to be unethical because it prevented me from doing my job, even when I went out and raised money. Finally, I had to go out and raise more money so that the DNC could compete everywhere and to provide resources for those down-ballot races.
LW: You mention Robby Mook. I was also struck by your criticism of his strategy, which seemed to value metrics and data analysis over actual human interaction. I could sense your real frustration when you wrote about constantly negotiating with Brooklyn for funding outreach in minority communities.Hillary won the popular vote by nearly 3 million. In any other advanced democracy on the planet, the candidate who won by 3 million votes would be the real winner.Still, you’re from a state where yard signs are a way of life. Pundits now like to say, “Signs don’t vote. People vote.” But you made the case for yard signs, arguing that the Clinton campaign failed to utilize them effectively. Why?
DB: I come from a time when if people put out signs, it was not just a sign of commitment but also that was a sign in the neighborhood that there was some form of grassroots activity. Perhaps the person who put up that yard sign was also the person responsible for going door-to-door, the person who was responsible for calling undecided voters, or the person who reminded voters to vote on election day.
It’s a sign of the health of a campaign. It’s a sign of the vitality, visibility, and viability of a campaign, so I believe yard signs play a role.
But look, they’re not the most important thing in an election. Clearly, I would list cybersecurity as more important than that, but I still believe it’s a sign that the campaign has active support in the area, especially in rural areas. When you go out to rural areas and communities and you see big signs, that’s a sign that somebody there takes interest in that election and in that campaign.
LW: Expanding on that, do you think that maybe that gives other people permission to consider voting for a candidate they otherwise would not or that their support of a candidate is something shared by their neighbors?
Everyone has their own way. Some people like to post pictures on Facebook. Others tweet out their support. But others are like me. They like to put out yard signs. There are many ways to show your support for a candidate. I just think it’s one that shouldn’t be forgotten.
LW: In your book, you mention some radio ads on stations that reached minority communities in Florida that you were lobbying to purchase and that weren’t purchased. Even though the audience was limited, you said it was worth it because the people who listen to stations like this one listen to it all day long.How influential do you think decisions like these were in the end? Because obviously, although Hillary Clinton won the popular vote, she lost some of the swing states by a really close margin. Do you think it made a difference?
DB: Donald Trump wanted to challenge Secretary Clinton in parts of the country where Democrats have done well, and one of the areas he was trying to challenge us in was in the African-American community. He pointed out in August- I believe it was August 19th- “What the hell do you have to lose?”
Well, I think you have to respond to a candidate who was quite effective in dominating the news media day by day. So I wanted to ensure those voters in Little Haiti and other places what Secretary Clinton was offering and what the senatorial candidates were offering, because in a close election, you have to go after every vote, not just the traditional people but the nontraditional people who need what I like to call “lead time” before they make up their mind on who to support.
LW: Tomorrow there is an election in Alabama that many people are comparing to the 2015 Louisiana gubernatorial election between John Bel Edwards and David Vitter. Obviously the moral issues are much more severe in Alabama, where there’s an accused child molester on the ballot. What do you make of this election? The latest polling has Doug Jones ahead by ten points. What do you think will happen on Tuesday?
DB: No one can predict a race like this in Alabama, because we don’t have any recent data other than the presidential where Donald Trump, as you know, carried the state by a substantial margin.
But Donald Trump didn’t compete with anyone. The Democrats didn’t play.
The difference in Louisiana is that at least we’ve had Sen. Landrieu for a long time. We’ve had John Bel Edwards. We’ve fertilized the ground. We’ve had local elections.
In Alabama, all they’ve had is for the last two decades are local elections, and I don’t want to make a prediction until the voters decide. I’m hoping that turnout will be above normal and that people will understand that Doug Jones is refreshing and that he is going to lead the entire state and not just one faction of the state. He’s a man of character, and hopefully, the voters of Alabama will see through all of the smoke and all of the bluster of Donald Trump and decide not to send someone who, at one point, was banned from the mall to the United States Senate.
I think that would send an ugly message to the country and a terrible message to women, and besides that, I just think that Doug Jones is what Alabama needs.
LW: Turning back to Louisiana for a moment. You spoke about the election of John Bel Edwards and how Democrats here fertilized the ground to make his victory possible, and I agree. But at the same time, there were other Democrats on the ballot, including Chris Tyson, an African-American candidate for Secretary of State who did not win. In fact, there has been no African-American elected to statewide office since Reconstruction and that was P.B.S. Pinchback, who was actually appointed. What do you think the future of the Louisiana Democratic Party is?
DB: I think the future is going to be bright. Now, we have a lot of work to do in the state, and it continues to have a significant red pocket. But I think it is important that we continue to elect good people, men and women of valor across our state. I’m hopeful for our future.
I don’t have a shortlist yet for 2019 or beyond, but I’m just hoping that we are able to continue to celebrate our diversity, to encourage a new generation of Louisianians to run for office, and to hopefully embrace more than just conservatives.
I think the party is strong; it’s vibrant. But I would hope that we continue to elect Democrats from the local sheriff’s office all the way up to the governor’s office, but we need to continue to branch out and embrace the diversity in our party, our state, and our country.
LW: I have one final question. You’re from here, and there seems to be this strange concentration of political pundits who have Louisiana connections. Andrew Breitbart and Newt Gingrich went to school here. The editor of The New York Times is from here. So are Erick Erickson, Charles Blow, and Don Lemon.Oh, and so is James Carville, who says you’re like an aunt to his daughters.
DB: I am. And you forgot Charlie Cook.
LW: That’s right. Charlie Cook from Shreveport, Louisiana.
DB: I love my state. I love everyone there. I learned recently that one of my great, great, great grandfathers might have been Congressman Thomas Butler from the Butler Greenwood Plantation in the Feliciana parishes. I’m proud of my state. I’m proud of the history that we’ve made, and I’m proud of the progress we’ve made. And I just hope that we continue to hurry history because we’re going to need Louisiana and Louisianians to become more innovative, to advance a new spirit of entrepreneurship, and I’m looking forward to coming home this weekend to celebrate my birthday. I was born in Charity Hospital 58 years ago this week.
I’m proud of the work that we did on the Louisiana Recovery Authority and the new hospital that has come into existence. And I’m looking forward to coming home next year as well, not just for Mardi Gras but also for the 300th anniversary celebration of New Orleans and also the inaugural of our first female mayor, LaToya Cantrell. I’m excited about the future.
LW: I was going to ask if you think there’s something in the water here in Louisiana that creates all of these political pundits. Is there something you learn about in Louisiana that you don’t learn about at a young age in other states? What is it?
DB: No, maybe it’s not the water.
Maybe it’s the spices. Maybe it’s the trinity.
Perhaps maybe it’s just the weather. We are better at forecasting the future than most people.
The Bayou Brief is a non-profit news publication that relies 100% on donations from our readers. Help support independent journalism about the stories of Louisiana through a monthly or one-time donation by clicking here.
Thirty years before Bernie Sanders turned “free college” into a Democratic party platform, a conservative billionaire oil magnate saw free tuition as the cure to Louisiana’s inner-city ills.
Nearly two dozen states offer some form of free tuition today. But after three decades, Louisiana lawmakers aren’t sure their program is worth the annual $300 million the state spends on it. The accomplishments and shortcomings of Louisiana’s program may help other states get free tuition right – or at least a little more right.
Yes, the Taylor Opportunity Program for Students helps send 50,000 kids to college every year. Louisiana’s post-secondary graduation rates have climbed. Fewer of Louisiana’s “best and brightest” leave the state to study. But the program is not accomplishing its original purpose: helping more kids, especially poor kids, get to college. In fact, only 29 percent of all Louisiana adults have bachelor’s degrees, the second worst rate in the country behind West Virginia. Louisiana still has the worst rate of black college graduates in the country.
Gov. Buddy Roemer signed the Taylor Plan into law on July 10, 1989.
Perhaps most striking: The scholarship may be helping to widen the socioeconomic gap in Louisiana. Today, nearly half the kids who use it come from families who earn $100,000 or more a year.
Lawmakers are meeting this fall to decide the program’s fate. After 30 years of setbacks and successes, is free tuition still the best way to promote college in a cash-strapped state?
***
The stakes have never been higher for states to incentivize college completion. A high school graduate today cannot expect to earn middle class wages through blue collar work. Dozens of studies have found that people with bachelor’s degrees earn $800,000 more in lifetime income, on average, than people with only high school degrees. College graduates are less likely to smoke or be obese. They are more likely to vote and contribute to political campaigns.
Social scientists today spend considerable energy analyzing what leads poor students to graduate from college. But in 1988, Pat Taylor had no vetted theories to guide him. He had only his own Horatio Alger story.
He grew up in Beaumont, Texas, “a penniless, scared, scrawny kid.” A full-ride scholarship to Louisiana State University, where he earned a degree in petroleum engineering, changed his life. Taylor started his own oil company and eventually made the Forbes list of world’s richest men.
Patrick F. Taylor
By the late 1980s, though, few others in Louisiana were replicating his success. More than half of the state’s college students were enrolled in remedial courses. Only one in five students made it to graduation.
When Taylor visited an inner-city middle school in New Orleans, he asked how many kids planned to attend college. Only a few students raised their hands. Their parents couldn’t afford tuition, they told Taylor. Because of that, most of the 11- and 12-year-olds had already given up on school.
Taylor, who died in 2004, was dismayed, his widow said.
Phyllis Taylor
“These were children who had been written off, children who had failed, at least once, many twice, and the system was not going to address their needs,” Phyllis Taylor told lawmakers this fall.
Taylor believed money would inspire the students to work harder. He told the kids if they earned a B average, he would pay for their college. To help them achieve that benchmark, he created a college preparatory program at their high school. He brought in a naval commander to lead a summer program that was part boot-camp, part academic training.
Nearly all of those 183 kids graduated from high school, Phyllis Taylor testified in September, and many went on to graduate college.
Louisiana soon expanded the program. Because Taylor had envisioned it as a scholarship for poor kids, lawmakers initially limited it to children from families who earned $25,000 a year or less.
Then, nearly a decade later, Louisiana removed the income cap. Any student, theoretically, could earn a free ride.
***
After 60 Minutes broadcast a special documenting Taylor’s success, other states rushed to replicate his effort. Today, nearly half of the country offers students some form of free tuition. In many of those states, though, most of the students who qualify bear little resemblance to the inner-city class that first inspired Taylor.
In Oregon, where legislators earmarked $10 million for free community college tuition last year, education leaders acknowledged that most of the money will go to students from middle-class families with incomes above $60,000, not to those with the greatest financial need.
In the Oregon program’s inaugural year, enrollment at rural community colleges dropped. Not a single campus reported an increase in racial diversity. And Portland Community College, the state’s largest system, reported a decrease in African-American enrollment.
Researchers also have found that the Georgia Hope Scholarship, which helps students who earn at least a 3.0 grade point average pay for college tuition, has widened the socioeconomic gap between students as a greater number of upper- and middle-class students take advantage of the program.
The gaps in Louisiana are especially stark. Black students make up 44 percent of the state’s elementary, middle and high school classes. But only 17 percent of the students who won the scholarship last year were black. Nearly 70 percent were white.
Nationwide, researchers have found the gaps in enrollment between high- and low-income students is higher now than it was for those born in the 1960s.
What went wrong? How did programs intended to level the economic playing field between students exacerbate the problem?
“There’s more than one barrier,” said Judith Scott-Clayton, an associate professor at Columbia University’s Teachers College. “There is pretty strong evidence that financial constraints are a part of it. If you can relax those constraints, more people do go to college. But money is not a complete magic bullet.”
Researchers have found several disconnects. First, free tuition doesn’t mean what it did in Taylor’s day. Student fees, textbook and transportation costs have all risen.
Dr. Sujuan Boutte, the executive director for Louisiana’s office of student financial assistance broke it down for lawmakers in September. A student attending Louisiana State University can earn $7,462 a year from TOPS, she said.
Once that students pays the $10,814 tuition, though, “you’re already in the hole,” Boutte said. Add in the cost of books, room and board, transportation and personal expenses, and that bill balloons to $32,174.
There are other government-funded scholarships, such as the Pell and Go grants, available for needy students, but those still cover the full tuition. The neediest students – the “po instead of poor, they can’t afford the o and the r to be poor,” Boutte said – can’t afford to attend.
Other researchers say money isn’t the only barrier for disadvantaged students. Just as often, a lack of information and know-how hinders their success.
Susan Dynarski, a professor of education and economics at the University of Michigan, has found that the more complex a financial aid program’s application is, the less likely it is to benefit poor students.
Most free tuition programs require students to fill out the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, a form that Dynarski has written is “longer and more complicated” than most families’ tax returns. The application, which asks 116 questions, deters some poor families from applying for federal aid.
“Parents in these families have typically not gone to college themselves, so cannot draw from their own experiences to help their children,” Dynarski wrote.
Money won’t fix that, but researchers have found solutions. In 2012, some poor families who visited a tax preparation site were randomly selected to receive help completing and submitting the FAFSA. The intervention took less than 10 minutes and cost less than $100 a family. Students who received the help were 8 percentage points more likely to attend college.
Even students who complete the application can get lost between high school and college, Scott-Clayton found, if the matriculation process is too overwhelming. Researchers call it “the summer melt.” After they graduate but before college starts, students are left on their own to fill out “voluminous institutional paperwork, sometimes exacerbated by a lack of regular Internet access,” Scott-Clayton found.
“As a result,” Scott-Clayton writes, “a surprisingly large share fail to transition successfully to college in the fall.”
***
What, then, can well intentioned state lawmakers do? First, they might do as educators in Tennessee did, and create a simplified application process.
Students didn’t have to meet any financial or academic benchmarks to qualify for Knox Achieves, a precursor to the Tennessee Promise “free community college” program. All they had to do was sign up for a mentor. Throughout the students’ senior year, volunteer mentors talked to them about college. They helped them fill out financial aid forms and college applications. Over the summer, the mentors texted the students to keep them on track.
Researchers have found the program led to substantial gains in college enrollment. Students in the Knox Achieves pilot program were 29.6 percentage points more likely to go to a community college and 24.2 percentage points more likely to go to any college than matched peers who did not participate in the program.
State lawmakers facing budget cuts might note one crucial aspect of Tennessee’s program: Half of the students who enrolled didn’t actually use the state’s money. After the volunteer mentors helped students fill out financial aid applications, many found they qualified for a Pell Grant, a federal aid program that offers nearly $6,000 a year to students from poor families. The grant covered the cost of community college.
The program succeeded with those students, researchers found, because the promise of free college was made more manifest. The Pell Grant was always there for the taking, but students didn’t know how to access it. The volunteer mentors helped them navigate the path.
Lawmakers also might learn lessons from the City University of New York, where the Accelerated Study in Associate Programs led to “massive graduation improvements,” Scott-Clayton said. Within three years, the school nearly doubled its graduation rate from 22 to 40 percent.
The program covers tuition, but it also offers students a book voucher and a Metro card. It also offers extensive wraparound services that few other states do. Students in CUNY’s program attend 34 tutoring sessions and meet with advisers 38 times a year. Counselors help students find classes that fit students’ work schedules. Later, they help students transfer to four-year colleges or into the workforce.
Researchers have widely praised the program with one caveat: It’s relatively expensive.
Nearly every state has cut the amount it spends on higher education. None has done so more than Louisiana. Still, the state next year faces a $1.5 billion shortfall. Lawmakers aren’t sure they can make the program better or more equitable. They’re not even sure they can afford to keep it at all.
***
The TOPS taskforce spent nearly two dozen hours this fall examining every facet of the program. Today, it bears only a passing resemblance to the scholarship Taylor first created. Students no longer attend summer school and boot camp. Still, the program costs $150 million more a year than it did three decades ago.
Something has to change, lawmakers say. Louisiana is broke, and the scholarship eats up a quarter of the state’s higher education allowance.
Last year, legislators tried cutting the program entirely. Families across the state protested. Lawmakers then tried raising the GPA or ACT requirements. Others proposed restricting the program to families who earn less the median income. Both efforts failed.
This fall, the president of the Louisiana Community and Technical College System reminded the task force that though 200,000 students attend college in Louisiana, only 50,000 benefit from the scholarship program.
“What do we do for the other 150,000?” Monty Sullivan asked the panel. No one answered.
The task force will make its recommendation to the state legislature in February. But lawmakers say they worry the biggest question remains unanswered. What, ultimately, is the scholarship’s purpose?
Is it to help those who wouldn’t attend college otherwise? Or is it to keep the best and brightest in Louisiana?
Patrick Taylor meets with a group of Louisiana high school students.
Phyllis Taylor said her husband would want both to be true. The only way to accomplish that, she told the taskforce, is to offer mentoring and help with the application. That may come with a pricetag, she allowed.
“But it also comes with benefits,” she said. “If Louisiana is to make gains in literacy, poverty, economic development, there is only one avenue. And that avenue is the education of our population.”
***
Publisher’s Note: The Bayou Brief is proud to introduce the journalist Casey Parks, a native of West Monroe and a graduate of Alexandria Senior High School who launched her career as youth correspondent for The Town Talk sixteen years ago.Since then, Casey has worked and written for The Jackson Free Press, serving as its associate editor, The New York Times, chronicling her experiences traveling across Africa with Nicholas Kristof, and, for the past eleven years, as a reporter for The Oregonian, earning regional and national awards for her writing.Casey is currently enrolled in Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism’s Masters of Arts program, where her scholarship is focused on the effects of poverty, education, and mass incarceration in Louisiana. She can be contacted at casey@bayoubrief.com. The Bayou Brief is a non-profit news publication that relies 100% on donations from our readers. Help support independent journalism about the stories of Louisiana through a monthly or one-time donation by clicking here.
New Orleans’ winning streak ended in Los Angeles, but a return home seemed like it might be just the thing the Saints needed to get back on track. The Saints had an important division matchup against Carolina; the two teams were tied at 8-3, but New Orleans had the advantage in the division after winning week 3 in Carolina 34-13. This was also a reason to feel optimistic, as the rematch would be at home.
Unfortunately, the team wouldn’t be as healthy for the rematch. Marshon Lattimore missed the first Carolina game and was out again; starting free safety Marcus Williams missed the game as well. Left tackle Terron Armstead dressed, but didn’t play a single snap. (This on top of the season-ending injuries the Saints have carried on their roster.) The team didn’t play their best game of the season, but from the opening drive, the Saints seemed to be firmly in command, eventually winning 31-21.
Once again, the offense was carried on the backs of the running backs. Mark Ingram broke a 72-yard run to open the Saints’ second-down drive, later scoring a touchdown, as well as adding six catches on the day, totaling 122 yards. Human highlight film Alvin Kamara carried the ball nine times for 60 yards, adding five catches for another 66, rushing for two touchdowns, and once again providing us with a delightful selection of GIFs.
(These aren’t the best quality GIFs I’ve made; the first one is sped up for some reason, and the video started chopping up at the end of the second one, but better to just imagine that Alvin Kamara distorts space-time.)
Michael Thomas hasn’t been the focal point of the offense like he was last year, but he’s seeing even more targets and in line to finish with similar numbers. He’s got a lower catch rate, but his depth of target is further downfield, averaging 10 yards per target instead of last year’s 8.4. (10 still isn’t particularly high, but the difference has been noticeable on several passes this year where Thomas was open deeper and Brees missed him.) Even though Drew Brees is on pace to finish with “only” 4,397 passing yards, which would be the second-lowest total (by nine yards) of his time in New Orleans, Thomas is currently tenth in receiving yards, after finishing ninth last year.
Michael Thomas catches a touchdown pass after easily separating from Carolina’s coverage.
Despite missing Alex Okafor (the Saints decided to start the game with Sheldon Rankins out at end, and Tyeler Davison and David Onyemata the starting defensive tackles), the Saints’ pass rush was, I thought, proving capable today after I had some questions about its effectiveness last week. The Saints notched two sacks and four QB hits on Cam Newton, and forced him to scramble, running or throwing away the ball, a few more times on top of that.
That said, there were a few plays where the missing personnel stood out, often due to a miscommunication. On Christian McCaffrey’s touchdown reception, nobody was near him; this seems like it was a failure of the linebackers and safeties to communicate their responsibilities in zone. On Devin Funchess’ touchdown, Crawley went for the pass breakup and just missed, allowing Funchess to run into the end zone. Crawley mostly played well on the day, most notably with a terrific breakup of a deep ball, but it was the kind of play that makes a viewer wonder if Marshon Lattimore would have successfully prevented the score.
Coby Fleener also went on IR last week, and though I’ve considered him a disappointing acquisition, I can’t overlook how clutch he’s been in the fourth quarter. Without him available, the team turned to Josh Hill for its tight end receiving needs. Up 21-7 late in the second quarter, Hill fumbled a reception at New Orleans’ 45 that the Panthers turned into a touchdown drive, making the game close again and preventing the Saints from potentially putting the Panthers away by halftime. Though the Saints did even the turnover score recovering a muffed punt in the fourth quarter, this example speaks to one of the other strange quirks of the Saints’ season: They’re at 9-3 with a turnover differential of only +3, having only 15 takeaways in 12 games (a figure tied for 19th; the Baltimore Ravens lead with 29 takeaways). As well as the defense has been playing, one might expect them to generate more turnovers than they have. If that begins to straighten out down the stretch and into the playoffs, this team could play even better than expected.
The special teams unit seems to be turning around as well. After having one of the weaker special-teams units in the league by many measures (if not enough to be a liability), the Saints hired legendary special teams coach Mike Westhoff to shore up the unit. This week, the Saints managed to disrupt a punt and force Carolina punter Michael Palardy into a desperate pass which fluttered incomplete. Perhaps the most fun part of the unit (at least based on announcers Joe Buck and Troy Aikman’s reactions to him) was Taysom Hill, the team’s third-string quarterback– who got snaps on coverage teams, making two tackles, and who also rushed Palardy when he was prevented from successfully executing a punt.
Taysom Hill (7) turns the corner as Carolina’s Michael Palardy fumbles away the ball before he can punt it.
The Saints have a short week this week, and I suspect that was one reason Lattimore was held out. The Panthers’ top wide receiver is Devin Funchess; the Falcons have Julio Jones. Getting Lattimore healthy for Thursday’s game in Atlanta was far more important than rushing him back against Carolina, even given the stakes. If the secondary is at full health this week (Lattimore, Crawley, and both Williamses were on the early injury report) then the Saints’ fortunes are a lot brighter for Thursday night.
The latest report has Lattimore and Williams still listed as questionable, with everyone else in the secondary ready to go. Unfortunately, Andrus Peat will be out, and Terron Armstead will be questionable; the Saints can probably survive with Senio Kelemete in Peat’s place, but the line could be in for trouble if they have to go much deeper. Mark Ingram is also questionable with a toe injury; this could be the chance for Kamara to display how good he can be in a full-time role.
Even though Atlanta is at home, the Saints are still a 1.5-point favorite according to Vegas. Looking at their schedule beyond Thursday (home against the Jets and Falcons, then at Tampa Bay) this is likely the smallest margin they’ll be favored by. New Orleans is in a great situation to run the table, especially if they can clear Atlanta on Thursday. Fortunately for the Saints, the schedules of the other contenders get more difficult. (The 10-2 Eagles play at the 9-3 Rams this week; the 9-3 Vikings visit the now 8-4 Panthers.) If the Rams, Panthers, and Saints all win this week, New Orleans would now be in position for home field advantage (which could change, since they lose head-to-head tiebreakers with Minnesota and Los Angeles). The week 14 game against the Falcons could very well be the critical item to determine whether the Saints get a bye week to rest (and possibly home-field advantage in the playoffs) or whether they have to play on Wild Card Weekend.
The Bayou Brief is a non-profit news publication that relies 100% on donations from our readers. Help support independent journalism about the stories of Louisiana through a monthly or one-time donation by clicking here.
Former Congressman Dollar Bill Jefferson is back in the news. After seven counts of his 2009 conviction were thrown out, Jefferson’s lawyers cut a deal with the Feds to reduce his sentence to time served. I have no problem with that: He’s served five years and he’ll never learn his lesson anyway. So why not let him out at age 70?
Like fellow convicted felon Edwin Edwards, Dollar Bill, the nickname presciently bestowed on him by former New Orleans mayor Dutch Morial, will never put the penitent in penitentiary.
I’ve been pondering Dollar Bill’s political career and the fact that he *used* to be one of the most important politicians in New Orleans as well as the leading African-American elected official in the Gret Stet of Louisiana, after Marc Morial, Dutch’s son, became the Urban League honcho.
This 2006 attack flyer spoofs Dollar Bill’s influence at that time. Like Savoir Faire the cartoon mouse, he was everywhere. In 2017, to quote John Lennon, “he’s a real nowhere man” with no chance of a political comeback.
How and why was Dollar Bill’s political power swept away? It’s important to go into excruciating detail because all some NOLA newbies know about Dollar Bill is that he was caught with cold hard cash in the freezer of his DC area crib.
I hope those folks have at least seen this period piece:
In August 2005 when Hurricane Katrina and the subsequent Federal Flood devastated New Orleans, Jefferson’s influence was at its zenith. He was in his 8th term in Congress and widely respected in Washington. His political organization the Progressive Democrats were experts at filling the streets with canvassers and a veritable forest of signs. The group’s name is, of course, ironic given its focus on patronage and power but they were effective, especially Uptown. I’ll call them by a more accurate name, the Jefferson machine, since they were Democrats but not particularly progressive.
When Katrina struck, Jefferson’s daughter, Jalila Jefferson-Bullock, was my State Representative, his sister Betty Jefferson was an elected tax assessor, Dollar Bill protégé Eddie Jordan was District Attorney, ally Ellenese Brooks-Simms was School Board President, and Rene Gill Pratt was my city council person.
The woman I dubbed Gill Pratfall was a rather dim former school teacher whose primary qualification for office was her relationship with Mose Jefferson, Dollar Bill’s brother was the group’s organizer and bag man. Like Dollar Bill, Mose was one smart cookie but his girlfriend was not.
The Jefferson machine may have been successful politically, but they were greedier than the wolves of Wall Street. Dollar Bill wasn’t the only one to spend time in the slammer. There was an elaborate bribery scam at the School Board that led to jail time for Brooks-Simms, the bribee, and the briber, Mose Jefferson, who died in prison in 2011. Along with Mose, Gill Pratfall and Betty Jefferson were also involved in a scam that bilked charities set up by the Jefferson machine to be bilked. That’s a whole lotta bilking. One scam involved Gill Pratfall’s Bronco. No, not that Bronco….
Only two of Jefferson associates listed above escaped jail time. Jalila Jefferson-Bullock was defeated in a bid for the State Senate in 2007 and is out of politics. Eddie Jordan was an epic disaster as District Attorney. When he took over, he put one of Dollar Bill’s most trusted aides, Stephanie Butler, in charge of patronage, and there were mass firings including many experienced lawyers and investigators. This purge led to endless litigation that distracted attention from what DAs are supposed to do: prosecute crimes. Jordan’s bumbling continued after the storm, and he hung up his signature bowler hat in 2007. He left the DA’s office financially and morally bankrupt.
Thanks, Dollar Bill.
I’ve been writing about New Orleans politics since 2005, but I met all these Jefferson associates (accomplices?) in my capacity as an Uptown neighborhood leader. None of them was remotely as clever as Dollar Bill or Mose, which is another reason for Dollar Bill’s non-legacy in New Orleans politics.
As an early Clinton supporter, Dollar Bill had enough clout with William Jefferson Clinton to get Eddie Jordan and his hat appointed US Attorney. (I couldn’t resist using the Big Dog’s full name because it turned up every time I googled Dollar Bill.) Jordan appeared to be successful in that job, but the credit belonged to the career prosecutors and staff. Jordan was in over his hat as District Attorney.
In many ways, William Jennings Jefferson is a tragic figure. He’s a brilliant and able man. He was one of the people who ran the State Senate during his time there. He was the first black Congressman from Louisiana since reconstruction and was an influential member until his legal troubles began in 2006.
Politically, his candidates lost their share of races, but Dollar Bill defeated Marc Morial in 1990 in a battle of political heavyweights to take over the Boggs family seat in Congress.
In 2017, Dollar Bill is a living, breathing cautionary tale.
He rose from an impoverished childhood in East Carroll Parish to attend Harvard Law School. His hardscrabble upbringing left him always wanting more even though he did well in life. The African phone scam that led to his incarceration came at the time he had multiple daughters in private schools. He needed the money, and his avarice kicked in and later kicked him in the ass and into the pokey.
Dollar Bill’s political legacy was swept away in a tide of graft, greed, and corruption. He got away with it for so many years that he thought he was bulletproof. He was not. It’s a shame because he could have been a great man instead of what he is: a convicted felon who was so disgraced that he lost his final race in 2008 to a Vietnamese-American Republican who had never before held a political office, Joseph Cao.
In 2017, New Orleans definitively turned the page on the pre-Katrina political era. Dollar Bill’s last close associate in elected office, Councilman James Gray, was defeated for re-election by a Vietnamese-American Independent, Cyndi Nguyen. Do you detect a pattern? The old alphabet groups are diminished in stature and importance with the exception of BOLD.
And the Jefferson machine is dead and buried, swept away along with the non-legacy of Dollar Bill Jefferson.
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According to reports by both The Daily Beast and Roll Call, John Mathis, a relatively obscure political operative from Baton Rouge, is the key figure in both financing and operating a political action committee supporting the U.S. Senate campaign in Alabama of Republican Roy Moore, the former judge and alleged child molester.
In 2015, Mathis launched a 501(c)(4) nonprofit organization named Solution Fund, Inc to support the candidacy of Jeff Landry for Louisiana Attorney General, leading some to question the appropriateness of forming a nonprofit with the expressed intention of helping or hurting a specific political candidate. Unlike political action committees, 501(c)(4)s are not required to disclose their donors, and Mathis had already raised a substantial sum of money, nearly $200,000 and all from unknown contributors. But he vowed he would soon launch a PAC to ensure compliance with the rules governing electioneering by non-profits, and he did. Sort of.
The PAC, also named Solution Fund, was initially formed by Mathis on August 26, 2015, and the organization still remains closely connected to Landry. Indeed, the second donation the PAC received was from a man named Benjamin Landry, who, coincidentally shares the same surname as the candidate and also served as the chairperson of Landry’s campaign. But the PAC struggled to raise money. Its single largest donation was a $25,000 loan provided at no interest by their non-profit organization. In other words, Mathis loaned $25,000 in funds from sources he did not disclose from his nonprofit organization in order to bankroll a PAC that otherwise is required to disclose its donors.
This may not be against the letter of the law, but it’s certainly against the spirit.
Mathis may not be known nationally, but during the last few years, he has worked with or on behalf of a litany of Louisiana Republicans. In 2014, he helped Garret Graves win a seat in Congress.
John Mathis and Steve Bannon
Two years later, 2016, Mathis created another political action committee, Warrior PAC, in order to support the failed Senate campaign of Rob Maness, a retired colonel who recently lost a race for state representative. Mathis loaned the PAC $50,000 and was also able to court financial support from a California trailer park developer named Robert San Luis, who donated $70,000 and was listed as the PAC’s treasurer. Warrior PAC’s largest financial donor, however, was the billionaire Robert Mercer, who has also contributed prolifically to Donald Trump.
Although Mathis vowed in 2015 that Solutions Fund, both the non-profit and the PAC, would focus almost entirely on elections in the Baton Rouge area, he has since expanded his scope nationally, and he has been aggressively involved in supporting the campaign of Roy Moore in Alabama, already spending more than $300,000 through his PAC and likely much more through his associated nonprofit.
This year, his Louisiana PAC became a federal PAC, now registered to his friend Robert San Luis.
On August 8th, Mathis issued the following press release, touting his organization’s involvement and its Christian bona fides. He also directly connected the work he was doing in Alabama to Jeff Landry of Louisiana:
Solution Fund is a 501(c)4 nonprofit organization that supported Pro Life Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry in his victory over the incumbent in 2015. The organization has committed six figures toward getting out the Evangelical Christian vote in the election to replace Jeff Sessions in the US Senate in Alabama.
Over 2,000 volunteers that participated in the presidential campaigns of Ben Carson and Ted Cruz in Alabama are distributing cards featuring a photo of Franklin Graham and former Chief Justice Roy Moore. Automated calls are also going to Evangelical Christian voters beginning 8/9.
This was, of course, prior to the primary election and before any of the women who alleged Moore of sexually assaulting and harassing them when they were young teenagers had been published. At that point, of course, most people, particularly those who claim to believe in “God’s moral laws,” would have abandoned ship.
It appears, however, that Mathis and his organization are doubling down, and according to Roll Call, there is strong circumstantial evidence that he is also operating another “mysterious” political action committee, Club for Conservatives, which appears to have used Solution Fund’s mailing list to send out e-mails excoriating the women accusing Moore of sexual assault and molestation. Quoting:
On Oct. 17, (Brooke) Pendley filed a statement of organization for Club for Conservatives PAC with the Federal Election Commission, listing herself as the treasurer. Over the course of less than three weeks, Pendley has sent out at least 10 fundraising emails.
BREAKING! Roy Moore’s Accuser is a Complete FRAUD (Nov. 13)
Senator’s sexual assault caught on film (Nov. 16)
ANOTHER sexual assault victim? (Nov. 20)
Al Franken PERV caught on film groping victim (Nov. 21)
Why is Al Franken smiling in this picture? (Nov. 22)
BREAKING: New victim fingers Al Franken-stein (Nov. 22)
Rev. Franklin Graham: “Shame on those hypocrites.” (Nov. 26)
I started worrying about this game early last week, when I heard Marshon Lattimore was in a walking boot (a pretty good sign he wouldn’t play). And then on Saturday I heard Ken Crawley had an abdominal injury and would miss the game. Being down two starting cornerbacks (really three, but I’ve pretty much written off Delvin Breaux for the season) was a tough place to be, on the road against a Rams offense that had gone from incompetent and unwatchable to one of the most explosive in the league with a few offseason player additions and the replacement of Jeff Fisher (the avatar of NFL mediocrity) with Sean McVay (another example of NFL nepotism, but also a pretty damn brilliant coach).
And while the Rams didn’t score as much as I thought they might have, my fears were well-founded. Even with leading receiver Robert Woods out, the Rams targeted the Saints’ cornerbacks early and often, with P.J. Williams and De’Vante Harris starting in place of Lattimore and Crawley. (Harris, who began the year playing ahead of Crawley, has been the most-frequently burned member of the Saints’ secondary; he was eventually benched for Sterling Moore, who was cut earlier in the year and brought back last week.) Cooper Kupp was the biggest beneficiary, with 8 catches for 116 yards on 11 targets. Sammy Watkins only caught 4 of his 9 targets (82 yards and a touchdown) but also drew two pass interference penalties for 63 more yards. Even seldom-used rookie Josh Reynolds got in on the action, with four catches on six targets for 37 yards and a score, and a defensive holding penalty drawn. (He had one career catch before the game.) Even though the Saints periodically stopped the Rams, aided in part by Jared Goff’s continuing scattershot accuracy, it wasn’t enough; the Rams had a touchdown lead they extended to 13 in the fourth quarter before hanging on to win 26-20, running up 415 yards of total offense en route to the win that snapped the Saints’ eight-game winning streak.
The Saints may have struggled even more on offense on Sunday. Wade Phillips has coached tremendous defenses wherever he’s gone, and Los Angeles is certainly no exception. Trumaine Johnson was effective in covering Michael Thomas. Drew Brees was sacked three times; Aaron Donald and Robert Quinn would be difficult for any line to block, but when the Saints were without Terron Armstead for a period of time, that only made it more so. Brees had some uncharacteristic struggles (well, uncharacteristic depending on how much you buy the rumors that he’s slipping– I don’t, yet), as he missed an open Ted Ginn on a deep ball he almost certainly would have taken in for a touchdown, a play that could’ve changed the course of the game.
The only really successful player on offense was Alvin Kamara, who continues to make his case for Offensive Rookie of the Year. Kamara continued to display the same outstanding receiving ability and explosiveness that led the Saints to target him in the draft. In particular, his elite body control and integration of quickness and balance were on display, as he repeatedly made Rams defenders miss tackles and made something out of nothing over and over. (And that means, once again, Kamara will be the focus of our highlights.)
(We didn’t even include Kamara’s 71-yard touchdown run, another sensational feat worth watching. If anything, the biggest criticism from this game is that Kamara wasn’t used enough; he had 188 yards on only 11 touches. By comparison, Mark Ingram had 36 yards on 13 touches.)
Unfortunately, it’s hard to say we learned much from this game. We learned the Saints struggle at cornerback without Marshon Lattimore and Ken Crawley, but we already knew that. (In the last two weeks, where Lattimore was almost entirely absent, the Saints pass defense ranked 31st according to ESPN Stats and Info. From weeks 4 to 10, it ranked 4th.) We learned the pass rush and run defense are a little weaker without Alex Okafor; we learned Kamara is really good; we learned the Rams’ defense is really good. All things we knew already.
It’s an unfortunate loss for the Saints, because the NFC is particularly top-heavy this year, and the races for home-field advantage and playoff byes will be tight. By losing to Los Angeles, the Saints are still 8-3, a terrific record, but only in line for the fourth seed in the playoffs, behind 10-1 Philadelphia, 9-2 Minnesota, and the 8-3 Rams– and they have lost the head-to-head tiebreaker to the Vikings and Rams. On top of that, they’re still in a tight race for the division, as they host Carolina, also 8-3, this Sunday, and Atlanta is just one game behind at 7-4. This team, at full strength, might actually be better than the 2009 Super Bowl team, but the conference is much stronger this year, and the path to the Super Bowl may be even tougher. As long as they stay in reasonable health, New Orleans will likely only be an underdog in one more game this year, their week 14 Thursday night match at Atlanta. Unfortunately, the Saints finishing 12-4 isn’t likely to get them a first-round bye, and may just set them up to host round three with either Carolina or Atlanta on Wild Card Weekend. That may be a big hurdle for them to clear, but if anyone can do it, it’s this team:
All they can do from here is try to keep winning. The good news is, Lattimore and Crawley returned to practice on Wednesday, so the defense should be much more stout for Sunday’s matchup. (Crawley seems on track to go; Lattimore missed Thursday’s practice, so his status remains in doubt, but the Saints beat the Panthers handily without him in week 3.) I still believe this team is capable of 12 or 13 wins; I just hope that’s enough for them to get Wild Card Weekend off before hosting a Divisional Round playoff game. The chase begins anew Sunday in the Superdome against Carolina, where once again the Saints have been chosen for the 3:25 national game.
Trivial statistic of the week: New Orleans is 8-0 this season when Ken Crawley is active on game day.
The Bayou Brief is a non-profit news publication that relies 100% on donations from our readers. Help support independent journalism about the stories of Louisiana through a monthly or one-time donation by clicking here.
When he was 19, Louis Michot of Pilette, Louisiana, a tiny community in between Lafayette and Broussard, decided he wanted to learn French. In many ways, it is surprising he didn’t already know the language. He was born and raised in the heart of Acadiana, a region in Southwest Louisiana named after the people of Acadie, French settlers who migrated to Louisiana after being exiled from their home in Canada.
His paternal great-grandparents spoke French, though they insisted their children only speak English in the home. His paternal grandfather, also named Louis Michot, became a successful businessman and prominent politician, and when he served as Louisiana’s state superintendent of education in the 1960s, he helped spearhead the creation of CODOFIL, the Council for the Development of French in Louisiana.
So, at 19, Louis enrolled in an intensive, five-week French language immersion program in Nova Scotia. He also made another life-changing decision that year: He taught himself how to play the fiddle. About a year later, he and his brother Andre formed the Lost Bayou Ramblers.
Earlier this week, the brothers and their bandmates were nominated for their second Grammy Award. In 2008, their album Live: A La Blue Moon received a nomination for Best Zydeco or Cajun Music Album, a category that has since been eliminated and replaced with Best Regional Roots Album, which means the Lost Bayou Ramblers are competing against a Native American powwow band and Josh Tatofi, a singer known as “the Polynesian Luther Vandross,” among others.
In Louisiana, we would call the category “lagniappe,” which seems more fitting for a band like the Lost Bayou Ramblers.
Louis sings exclusively in French. He plays the fiddle. His brother plays the accordion and a lap steel guitar. Technically, they’re a Cajun French band, first cousins with zydeco, a genre that is more associated with and informed by African-American culture. But the Lost Bayou Ramblers also feature a bassist, an electric guitar player, and a drummer. They’re not merely a Cajun French band or, if you prefer, a Cajun band that plays French music. They’re genre-defying, in many ways. One of their bandmates now plays with LCD Soundsystem, a rock band known for their electronic dance music. They’ve opened up for the Arcade Fire and jammed with the Violent Femmes and the Pogues and Scarlett Johansson (yes, you read that correctly).
At a recent show at Tipitina’s in New Orleans, they had an audience of hundreds of people, the majority of whom in their twenties, dancing like they were at high-octane rock show, and then, just as easily, stunned the crowd into silence with an incredible version, sung in French, of Ledbelly’s “Where Did You Sleep Last Night?”
A few weeks ago, I sat down for an hour-long interview with Louis. We talked about everything from family genealogy to the similarities between their music and the music of Hawaii and the Caribbean. We also spoke, at length, about his influences and the ways in which Louisiana history and culture informs his craft.
But the first thing I wanted to know is how often they surprise their audiences by only singing in French, especially when they’re performing outside of Louisiana. “In any other state, there will always be a handful of people who know what Cajun music is,” he says, “but (for most), I’m sure it’s quite a shock when I open my mouth and start singing.”
Occasionally, he will encounter someone who also speaks French but has never heard the way it’s spoken and sung in Louisiana. “I call it lyric poetry,” he says. “It’s partly improvised, but it’s definitely it’s own kind of language, the sung Cajun French. Most Cajun French people can speak to a Frenchman or a Parisian and get along just fine, but in music, we have a difference cadence. There are certain words we stick in, just for the sake of rhythm, and it can confuse people. Sometimes, I’ll meet someone after a show who will ask ‘parlez–vous français?’ Because they don’t even know what I’m saying. They don’t recognize it. It’s strange to them. Because, yes, it is definitely a very unique singing style.”
It may be unique, but it certainly is not a gimmick. With the Lost Bayou Ramblers, Louis is doing much more than introducing audiences across the world to the peculiar way Cajun French music is sung; he is also rescuing songs that threaten to be forgotten forever, and in doing so, he is helping to preserve critical stories in Louisiana’s history.
“There are hundreds and hundreds of songs that need to be rescued from obscurity,” he says. “There are way more songs that have not been revitalized than have been, and that’s largely because this is a very prolific art. But in all of our albums, you’ll always hear songs that we have dug up from old 78s or even field recordings, songs that you’ve probably never heard anyone play.”
Although he can name a litany of musicians and songwriters that have influenced him, his biggest influence was, in his words, “completely unknown,” a woman who lived across the Vermillion River from his family’s camp named Ethel Mae Borque. “She taught us so many songs, some that she wrote, some standards that she put her own style on. She had so much knowledge about the language and the depth behind the music.” The band honored Borque, who passed away in 2011, by putting her picture on the cover of their second album.
The Lost Bayou Ramblers are not just rescuing or revitalizing music; they are reinventing it and introducing it to an entirely new generation of music lovers who may have never even heard of Cajun French or zydeco before. “That’s the beauty of it to me,” he says. “There’s not just so much material; there’s so much profound material.”
I mention to Louis that his music, to me at least, sounds more like rock n’ roll than what I’d always thought of as Cajun. “It’s actually a natural Cajun band tendency, being from the era we’re from. There aren’t many bands that don’t have an electric guitar or a drum set,” he says. “Cajun music has continually borrowed from and allowed itself to be influenced by the music around it, whether it’s country or blues or rock.”
Still, though, Louis readily acknowledges that he and the Lost Bayou Ramblers are doing something different than their contemporaries in the genre. “There aren’t many of us who are pushing to advance this music,” he says, as a way of explaining why the Grammys decided to drop the Best Zydeco or Cajun Album category.
The band’s latest album, Kalenda, for which they received their latest Grammy nomination, is perhaps their greatest work to date, and Michot is particularly proud of the album’s title track. “There’s so much information and history in it,” he says. “It has the African Congo Square rhythms; it has the dance call; and then it has a whole story about a man from New Orleans- a royalist aristocrat who was anti-Napoleon. And all of the anti-aristocrats would sing this song about him- and that’s in the middle of the song. The words, though, are line for line from a guy in Lafayette named Vavasseur Mouton. What is great, I think, is how all of these pieces of the Louisiana cultural pie come together in this one song.” Michot provides more background on the song and its history in this interview published by Band Camp Daily.
Despite the fact that they maintain almost constant touring schedule, Louis and his bandmates handle all of the band’s business themselves, which means they don’t have a manager or a publicist or the kind of support staff upon which most Grammy-nominated musicians rely.
“We also don’t rely on Cajun or zydeco venues,” he says. They deliberately seek out venues and opportunities to introduce their music to new audiences. “We want to play for the general public. We want to be appreciated by everyone who is a music lover. That’s why we’re in it. Because we love music. And although we will always consider ourselves a traditional Cajun French band, we love music no matter what genre it is in.”
The Bayou Brief is a non-profit news publication that relies 100% on donations from our readers. Help support independent journalism about the stories of Louisiana through a monthly or one-time donation by clicking here.
On Tuesday, Kristen Crain and Jesse Manley of the Judicial Reform for Sex Crimes organization and Victoria Coy, a victim’s advocate and rapid responder for the Community Justice Reform Coalition, joined me at my home for a conversation about sexual assault crimes and the role of Orleans Parish District Attorney Leon Cannizzaro’s office in prosecuting those crimes.
* You can hear bounce music in the background. There was a neighborhood block party at the park across the street from my home, and for better or worse, it was impossible to scrub the background music.
** Also pictured: My golden retriever, Lucy Anna, who, at some point, decides to bring out a squeaky toy, which you can also hear.
Prologue
I am seventy-four, and I had a stroke July 2014. The stroke affected my fine motor skills and weakened my right side, but with physical therapy I’ve managed to regain my physical abilities enough to return to work in an investment bank that my son, Chas, started seven years ago. And although the stroke causes me to slur my words occasionally, the biggest enemy to my good health is diabetic-neuropathy.
Neuropathy is an affliction of your nerves causing you to lose feelings in your legs and other nervous connections. It is the result of Type 1 diabetes—in my case, a disease that I’ve had since I was twenty-nine. As a result of my neuropathy, I walk with a cane.
My stroke occurred when, as my wife Scarlett and I were leaving Sunday School one July morning, I slurred three words in talking about going to eat lunch.
Scarlett, a registered nurse, and I decided to go quickly to India’s Restaurant to eat and avoid the onset of a diabetic attack (due to low blood sugar). We didn’t have the testing meter for blood sugar with us, and Scarlett thought that if we ate I would be alright. So we did, and things were fine at the restaurant, but while we stopped at a gas station on the way home, I slurred several words, and Scarlett decided to rush me straight to the emergency room at the local hospital.
She called ahead, and they were ready for me. I was former governor of Louisiana and was well-known by most people, so I waved at a couple of folks on my way into the hospital. As a nurse, Scarlett was trained to let the doctors know what was happening with me.
I was feeling no pain but I noticed that my face was drooping and that the hand motions that they wanted me to do were not going well. I couldn’t touch the end of my nose with my right finger-tips, for example. They decided to do an MRI and, as they suspected, discovered I had suffered a stroke that affected me in my small motor skills and right side of my body. They kept me for several days, and finally released me to go home with a cane, recommending physical therapy on a daily basis.
About nine months after the stroke, I was struck with the on-set of neuropathy, a nerve disorder common to many people as they age, but particularly pronounced among people with Type 1 diabetes. People with neuropathy lose feelings particularly in their feet, but all nerves are affected. As a result, people affected often walk haltingly—like a person older than their age. While my speaking and walking had improved in strength for a year after the stroke, my neuropathy has decreased my walking abilities to about 50 percent of my former self.
So I have had a challenging two years with a stroke and operations on my right and left carotid arteries as a result, surgery on my prostate unrelated to the stroke, two cataract surgeries, and neuropathy. I have survived, and I have started thinking about my childhood and growing up on a cotton farm in north Louisiana—Scopena. My parents had both died recently, so I started remembering my childhood, how different it was from most people’s, how I was the oldest child and the natural one to tell about the events at Scopena, and how it might be of interest to new family members.
For years I have resisted writing about my growing up on Scopena in south Bossier Parish in the far northwest corner of Louisiana. I’m not a writer. Never wrote a book in my life. But Dad died on July 7, 2012, after a twelve-year bout with Alzheimer’s at the age of eighty-nine, and Mom died at ninety-two in bed at home in February 2016, and, in effect, I was free for the first time to write my own personal account of the events on Scopena in the 1950s, when I was growing up. Plus I felt a need to tell about events of which only I knew.
Despite my stroke, I count myself lucky not to be handicapped in my thinking and writing skills. I wish I could speak better—clearer and stronger and in my old rhythm, but it is a miracle that I speak at all. In the past my ability to speak well has always played a role in my success. Now, the premium is on listening. Dad always told me it would be that way—“Listen, Butch. Listen,” he would say, when I hadn’t paid attention to some important instruction. He was right, as usual.
So, unable to be as physically active as before, and with more time on my hands, my thoughts began to turn to writing about my Dad, my Mom, and our life at Scopena. It’s something that others have asked me to do over the years. Why have I resisted? Writing seemed something that somebody else did. Besides, to write about one’s father and mother is something that I hesitated to do. The damage to the perceptions of the living is always a danger. People might have different memories of events or they might have been told a skewed version of the truth that they have come to believe. Plus, it seemed almost arrogant to me for a man to write about himself, although when friends would write a book of memories or of some event, I would read it with pleasure. It was not something that I would do myself, I thought. But I was wrong, and worked for more than two years on this memoir of my early life and growing up on Scopena.
Dad and Mom were wonderful parents: careful, loving, protective, so I don’t write to expose a flaw I found in them. Any flaw is in me. What can I add to their legacy? Mom was a wonderful mother of five, smart as a whip, and beautiful as a spring morning. Dad was a leader in everything he did: Bossier Rural Electrification Cooperation, Bossier Farm Bureau, Louisiana Generation and Power Cooperation, National Democratic Party, and Louisiana State Commissioner of Administration, not to mention the father of five children who spent countless hours with each child when they needed it most.
Any flaw or fault that someone finds in these pages is a result of my experience. These are my perceptions and no one else’s.
So too, it’s hard for a son as close to his father as I was, to write about his father—particularly a father who is well-known in political circles, but not well understood; a father who never ran for political office himself, yet raised a son who ran eleven times and won seven, including races for congressman and governor, and lost for president. Dad never ran for political office so he never had to disclose his inner-self or his private records. He could appear to be one thing, but in reality he was something completely different.
He appeared to be in command of whatever situation he was thrust in, but that wasn’t always the case. He was good at appearing in control, but, in truth, he was often ill at ease and asked for guidance from my mother, and from his own mother. The things that confused him at times, that made him seek guidance from someone he trusted, were “people” problems. The people problems weren’t a phobia for him. He wasn’t a head case. He just wasn’t as comfortable with people as he was with the “problems” they caused. He wasn’t a glad-hander, a slap-on-the-back kind of guy. He was quiet, and many considered him a “loner.” He wasn’t a mixer, to put it in a collegiate or political way. He was an “intimidator” in his approach to people. His tone; his attitude; his bluster were all designed to keep people away; to keep people ill at ease; to intimidate them. He would take the position that it had to be done his way or nothing would get done.
“People” problems were something that Dad at times needed help with. His mother, “Mine,” often would advise him about reaching out to people to solve a problem, but Mom was the real champion in quietly talking him into seeing the other person’s point of view. Many a time on the farm I can remember waiting for Dad to listen to Mine or Mom to decide how to implement a strategy that affected people. He was so sure on hedging or planting strategies, yet so uncertain in trusting a foreman to supervise an operation out of his sight.
This flaw was to bedevil him when he found himself, years later, in the turmoil of Louisiana politics—a politics that were “people,” not “performance,” oriented. He didn’t suffer fools well, and he had no patience with people. This was a thicket that Dad wanted to tame—he wanted the challenge—but he tried to do it by himself and without the help he needed from Scopena, including Mom or Mine. In fact, he left Scopena behind for this new challenge. It was a mistake, because he wasn’t prepared to handle the world by himself.
* * *
It has been relatively easy for me to avoid writing about when I was governor. A professional writer called me up after my term ended and made the case for me to write a book under his tutelage that would set the record straight on what I had done and why. I could care less what people think, although there is a story or two to tell about how we had pulled Louisiana back from the brink of bankruptcy and put the state’s finances on a stable path; how we had battled the teacher unions over my efforts to bring greater accountability to Louisiana’s schools; how we had attempted to create a single board to oversee the state’s colleges and universities to bring coherence and coordination to their budgets and planning; how we had gone to the mat with state legislators over my view that they had passed unconstitutional acts to restrict the right of women to abortion; how we had passed the first tough campaign finance disclosure bill in Louisiana history; how we had been the first administration to insist on tough standards to protect Louisiana’s air and water. The writer thought these issues would be most interesting if written from my point of view. Boring, it seemed to me. Too self-serving, I thought.
My problem as governor, looking back after twenty-five years, was often just the opposite of my father’s. He wouldn’t waste (his word, “waste”) any time with people working out a problem. Just do it his way, and everything would be fine. I wanted to hear opinions opposite mine from the people who were most involved. Maybe that’s what made me a “politician,” unlike Dad, who never was described as “political” in any of his dealings with people.
* * *
One thing that I took the lead from Dad on was the suspicion of money and politics. Dad always had a deeply felt belief that Washington, D.C., was too heavily influenced by people with money. He thought that money interests controlled Washington and kept it from representing Americans in general and the average man in particular.
When I ran for president in 2012, I expressed my concern about political action committee (PAC) money and influence-peddling in the presidential campaign of that year. That is what Dad believed, and that is what he taught me. He just couldn’t turn a political phrase with it. He couldn’t run a political campaign with it, because for a man deeply mired in politics—eight years as commissioner of administration of Louisiana—and never elected to a political office, he was the most anti-political animal on the planet. In fact, “politics” was a thing of derision to him. It was a game that he didn’t take seriously.
From Dad I got my cynicism of politics. From Mom, I got my idealism. Both can be valuable traits to have. Mom’s political idealism shone in 1978 when I lost my first race for Congress by two thousand votes in the midst of 100,000 cast ballots because I said a local project was a “boondoggle” with a couple weeks before the election; saying that we should balance the budget before building a “boondoogle.” After dropping to fifth place in a sixteen person field, I struggled to finish a close third in a losing election. Mom said she was proud of me for taking a stand, and the people would come to understand. (I won the next election for Congress two years later in 1980.) Dad said I ought to learn to keep my mouth shut during the two weeks before the election, although I could tell he was proud of me too.
In 2012, a New York publishing company tried to interest me in writing a book about my campaign for president that year under my signature issues: limiting contributions to no more than $100 per individual, not taking PAC or super PAC money, and reporting every penny contributed to the campaign. Let’s shine a light on money in politics, I thought. People now are clueless on where political money comes from and the influence over the politician and the politics that comes with it.
My ideas didn’t get much of a hearing, however. I got a good reception when I appeared on cable TV shows like Morning Joe, but the Republican Party established rules that shut me out of the debates. They set a minimum percentage in the latest poll for a candidate to qualify for the debate. I never qualified. I was always a point too low. If four percentage points were needed to qualify in South Carolina, I had three. If five were needed in New Hampshire, I had four. The highest I got was Florida at nine percentage points. They set the bar for entry at 10 percent, of course.
It was very difficult to gain in the polls if you didn’t participate in the debates because that was the way that you gained name recognition with the masses. And if you didn’t gain name recognition with the masses, you didn’t climb in the polls and earn a right to be in in the next debate. As Dad would have expected, since I had no money of my own, I ended my campaign for president after getting only a handful of votes in New Hampshire. Donald Trump four years later was to prove the power of my campaign stance. He didn’t know anything about politics except one important fact: money controls everything in Washington, D.C. I just couldn’t get the publicity he could, and he had wealth of his own and cut right to the chase: he didn’t care what the insiders felt, because they were the problem.
The idea of writing a book about running for president was a good one, but I was too frustrated with the result of the campaign. I was fed up with the sham the general election campaign had turned out to be. It was too painful, too recent for me to want to do it, given the difficulties of the effort. What seems so obvious to me—important elections are too often bought by the special interests—wasn’t so obvious to everyone else, or, if it was obvious, they didn’t want to acknowledge it. I was too close to the race, and too upset to write unemotionally about my race for president.
* * *
My thinking has changed about a book about my childhood and my Mom and Dad now that they are gone, and now that I’m over seventy and realize that I probably won’t be so lucky on my next stroke. I warmed to an idea I had been thinking about for a long time: writing an account of what it was like to grow up on Scopena—our farm where I lived as a boy from 1950 until 1960, when I went away to college at age sixteen—and what lessons my Dad taught me about family, hard work, race, and life; and Mom, about love and people. Dad was a wonderful father. He raised me to be independent in all my interactions with people and with groups. And Mom—she was the best.
From the very beginning, I was an unusual politician, an independent-minded congressman in a highly charged partisan atmosphere who refused to take PAC money. Because of my independence, I stood out from other Democratic congressmen in joining Republicans to work for what I thought was the good of the country. For example, I joined some forty members of Congress—all Democrats and out of 535 house members—to form the “boll weevils” caucus to support the initiatives of President Reagan, a Republican. But no colleagues joined with me to prevent the purchase of Congress by PACs by not taking their money. Many were good, decent members of Congress, but they were compromised by taking the PAC money. I see it now; I didn’t see it then.
I decided it would be important for me to go back to my roots at Scopena and try to gain an understanding of why my views were so different than those of the typical politician. Was it an accident of time and place, or did it have to do with my upbringing?
I grew up during a time when “family” meant security and sharing more than it does now. There are many examples of lessons learned that can still be relevant in twenty-first-century America, but they are seldom taught these days. My Mom and Dad were extraordinarily devoted parents who had unusual ideas about childrearing that led them to raise five gifted children. This book is about my mother and father, mostly my father, because of the tragedy that befell him when he dared stick his head into Louisiana politics. But most of all, it is about the farm that we grew up on in the 1950s. It is about Scopena.
In those ten years that I lived at Scopena, I formed my views of the world based on the value of individuals rather than on the color of someone’s skin, and I learned the keys of success that I carried into the world far from there, keys like hard work, team effort, honesty in reporting what you saw. The truth is that the highest hurdle I had to jump in life and the thing that prepared me the most for politics, Louisiana-style, were the demanding standards set by my father years ago—at Scopena.
Scopena is a place. You can see it from Highway 71 South, and see its cotton gin, tennis courts, swimming pool, shop, its big front yard, and its tall pecan trees. But the heart of Scopena—the life of Scopena, the magic of Scopena, the uniqueness of Scopena—was Mom and Dad, raising five kids under a philosophy that ignored what the rest of the world thought and that emphasized individual effort. With Dad and Mom gone, I want to tell the story of Scopena before it too is gone or unrecognizable.
Race relations in the 1950s were relatively progressive at Scopena, unlike what was happening in the rest of the South. This is not to say that black people had no problems at Scopena, many of their rights as people were not protected, but Mom and Dad ensured that on Scopena they counted as much as white families—in pay, in housing, in opportunity for advancement, even in voting. Regardless, to be black, even on Scopena, was to be a second-class citizen.
* * *
In the 1950s, when the bulk of this tale takes place, Scopena was a big, and getting bigger, farm, far away from the city and what was happening in Louisiana and in the nation. It was far from Louisiana politics. It was a scene of political discussions to be sure, but it was the type of place to which politicians came to seek support and money, not a place that grew politicians. For a long time when I was growing up, Scopena meant farming, not politics. For me, Scopena was the most important place in the world, but to most people in the city, it was where we country-people lived.
We were twelve miles from Bossier City. Dad was the boss man. And there was nothing to challenge his dominance. He didn’t have to put up with backtalk from anyone, because we lived in a special world, in which he was in charge.
Scopena: A Memoir of Home is available for purchase from Octavia Books in New Orleans and in print and digital versions on Amazon.
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LW: So, the name of your book Hacks is sort of a double entendre. It has two meanings. On the one hand, it’s about Russian interference, and on the other hand, Hacks probably refers to a number of people who were involved in the political campaign.
One character stuck out to me in particular in your book. It’s this young man named Brandon, who you referred to quite a bit, and I also thought he was one of the most fascinating characters in your book. First of all, who did he work for exactly? Did he work for the Clinton campaign, or did he work for the DNC?
DB: He was actually paid from the Joint Victory Fund. Brandon Davis was hired months before I became chair of the party to lead the general election on behalf of the Joint Victory Fund. So he was never a member of the DNC staff.
He had strange powers to control the party at a time I believe the party should have been exercising its own independence. Remember, we were fighting the Russians. And the party is not just responsible for the turnout for the electoral college. We had down ballot races across the country, including some Senatorial races that were not funded by the presidential nominee. So, I wanted to make sure there were sufficient resources for all of the candidates.
In fact, when the election was over, I was able to send resources home because there was still a Senatorial race in Louisiana, and I wanted to contribute to the success of the mayoral race in Baton Rouge as well.
LW: Yes, and I appreciate that. I know that the mayoral race in Baton Rouge was sort of overlooked by a lot of folks, even in the state of Louisiana. But back to Brandon. With the arrangement he had, when you were interim chair before, was there any analog to Brandon then? The idea of being employed by a joint fundraising committee seems like a relatively new development, and it seemed like no one really had firing power over this guy.
DB: No, he reported to Brooklyn. That’s why I called him the clerk. But this is not about individuals. It’s about the addendum to the joint fundraising agreement, which was made the chief of staff of the DNC, Amy Dacey, and Mr. Robby Mook, who was the campaign manager of the Clinton campaign.
As I mentioned in the book, I found this arrangement to be unethical because it prevented me from doing my job, even when I went out and raised money. Finally, I had to go out and raise more money so that the DNC could compete everywhere and to provide resources for those down-ballot races.
LW: You mention Robby Mook. I was also struck by your criticism of his strategy, which seemed to value metrics and data analysis over actual human interaction. I could sense your real frustration when you wrote about constantly negotiating with Brooklyn for funding outreach in minority communities.
Hillary won the popular vote by nearly 3 million. In any other advanced democracy on the planet, the candidate who won by 3 million votes would be the real winner.
Still, you’re from a state where yard signs are a way of life. Pundits now like to say, “Signs don’t vote. People vote.” But you made the case for yard signs, arguing that the Clinton campaign failed to utilize them effectively. Why?
DB: I come from a time when if people put out signs, it was not just a sign of commitment but also that was a sign in the neighborhood that there was some form of grassroots activity. Perhaps the person who put up that yard sign was also the person responsible for going door-to-door, the person who was responsible for calling undecided voters, or the person who reminded voters to vote on election day.
It’s a sign of the health of a campaign. It’s a sign of the vitality, visibility, and viability of a campaign, so I believe yard signs play a role.
But look, they’re not the most important thing in an election. Clearly, I would list cybersecurity as more important than that, but I still believe it’s a sign that the campaign has active support in the area, especially in rural areas. When you go out to rural areas and communities and you see big signs, that’s a sign that somebody there takes interest in that election and in that campaign.
LW: Expanding on that, do you think that maybe that gives other people permission to consider voting for a candidate they otherwise would not or that their support of a candidate is something shared by their neighbors?
Everyone has their own way. Some people like to post pictures on Facebook. Others tweet out their support. But others are like me. They like to put out yard signs. There are many ways to show your support for a candidate. I just think it’s one that shouldn’t be forgotten.
LW: In your book, you mention some radio ads on stations that reached minority communities in Florida that you were lobbying to purchase and that weren’t purchased. Even though the audience was limited, you said it was worth it because the people who listen to stations like this one listen to it all day long.
How influential do you think decisions like these were in the end? Because obviously, although Hillary Clinton won the popular vote, she lost some of the swing states by a really close margin. Do you think it made a difference?
DB: Donald Trump wanted to challenge Secretary Clinton in parts of the country where Democrats have done well, and one of the areas he was trying to challenge us in was in the African-American community. He pointed out in August- I believe it was August 19th- “What the hell do you have to lose?”
Well, I think you have to respond to a candidate who was quite effective in dominating the news media day by day. So I wanted to ensure those voters in Little Haiti and other places what Secretary Clinton was offering and what the senatorial candidates were offering, because in a close election, you have to go after every vote, not just the traditional people but the nontraditional people who need what I like to call “lead time” before they make up their mind on who to support.
LW: Tomorrow there is an election in Alabama that many people are comparing to the 2015 Louisiana gubernatorial election between John Bel Edwards and David Vitter. Obviously the moral issues are much more severe in Alabama, where there’s an accused child molester on the ballot. What do you make of this election? The latest polling has Doug Jones ahead by ten points. What do you think will happen on Tuesday?
DB: No one can predict a race like this in Alabama, because we don’t have any recent data other than the presidential where Donald Trump, as you know, carried the state by a substantial margin.
But Donald Trump didn’t compete with anyone. The Democrats didn’t play.
The difference in Louisiana is that at least we’ve had Sen. Landrieu for a long time. We’ve had John Bel Edwards. We’ve fertilized the ground. We’ve had local elections.
In Alabama, all they’ve had is for the last two decades are local elections, and I don’t want to make a prediction until the voters decide. I’m hoping that turnout will be above normal and that people will understand that Doug Jones is refreshing and that he is going to lead the entire state and not just one faction of the state. He’s a man of character, and hopefully, the voters of Alabama will see through all of the smoke and all of the bluster of Donald Trump and decide not to send someone who, at one point, was banned from the mall to the United States Senate.
I think that would send an ugly message to the country and a terrible message to women, and besides that, I just think that Doug Jones is what Alabama needs.
LW: Turning back to Louisiana for a moment. You spoke about the election of John Bel Edwards and how Democrats here fertilized the ground to make his victory possible, and I agree. But at the same time, there were other Democrats on the ballot, including Chris Tyson, an African-American candidate for Secretary of State who did not win. In fact, there has been no African-American elected to statewide office since Reconstruction and that was P.B.S. Pinchback, who was actually appointed. What do you think the future of the Louisiana Democratic Party is?
DB: I think the future is going to be bright. Now, we have a lot of work to do in the state, and it continues to have a significant red pocket. But I think it is important that we continue to elect good people, men and women of valor across our state. I’m hopeful for our future.
I don’t have a shortlist yet for 2019 or beyond, but I’m just hoping that we are able to continue to celebrate our diversity, to encourage a new generation of Louisianians to run for office, and to hopefully embrace more than just conservatives.
I think the party is strong; it’s vibrant. But I would hope that we continue to elect Democrats from the local sheriff’s office all the way up to the governor’s office, but we need to continue to branch out and embrace the diversity in our party, our state, and our country.
LW: I have one final question. You’re from here, and there seems to be this strange concentration of political pundits who have Louisiana connections. Andrew Breitbart and Newt Gingrich went to school here. The editor of The New York Times is from here. So are Erick Erickson, Charles Blow, and Don Lemon.
Oh, and so is James Carville, who says you’re like an aunt to his daughters.
DB: I am. And you forgot Charlie Cook.
LW: That’s right. Charlie Cook from Shreveport, Louisiana.
DB: I love my state. I love everyone there. I learned recently that one of my great, great, great grandfathers might have been Congressman Thomas Butler from the Butler Greenwood Plantation in the Feliciana parishes. I’m proud of my state. I’m proud of the history that we’ve made, and I’m proud of the progress we’ve made. And I just hope that we continue to hurry history because we’re going to need Louisiana and Louisianians to become more innovative, to advance a new spirit of entrepreneurship, and I’m looking forward to coming home this weekend to celebrate my birthday. I was born in Charity Hospital 58 years ago this week.
I’m proud of the work that we did on the Louisiana Recovery Authority and the new hospital that has come into existence. And I’m looking forward to coming home next year as well, not just for Mardi Gras but also for the 300th anniversary celebration of New Orleans and also the inaugural of our first female mayor, LaToya Cantrell. I’m excited about the future.
LW: I was going to ask if you think there’s something in the water here in Louisiana that creates all of these political pundits. Is there something you learn about in Louisiana that you don’t learn about at a young age in other states? What is it?
DB: No, maybe it’s not the water.
Maybe it’s the spices. Maybe it’s the trinity.
Perhaps maybe it’s just the weather. We are better at forecasting the future than most people.
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(These aren’t the best quality GIFs I’ve made; the first one is sped up for some reason, and the video started chopping up at the end of the second one, but better to just imagine that Alvin Kamara distorts space-time.)
Michael Thomas hasn’t been the focal point of the offense like he was last year, but he’s seeing even more targets and in line to finish with similar numbers. He’s got a lower catch rate, but his depth of target is further downfield, averaging 10 yards per target instead of last year’s 8.4. (10 still isn’t particularly high, but the difference has been noticeable on several passes this year where Thomas was open deeper and Brees missed him.) Even though Drew Brees is on pace to finish with “only” 4,397 passing yards, which would be the second-lowest total (by nine yards) of his time in New Orleans, Thomas is currently tenth in receiving yards, after finishing ninth last year.
How and why was Dollar Bill’s political power swept away? It’s important to go into excruciating detail because all some NOLA newbies know about Dollar Bill is that he was caught with cold hard cash in the freezer of his DC area crib.
I hope those folks have at least seen this period piece:
In August 2005 when Hurricane Katrina and the subsequent Federal Flood devastated New Orleans, Jefferson’s influence was at its zenith. He was in his 8th term in Congress and widely respected in Washington. His political organization the Progressive Democrats were experts at filling the streets with canvassers and a veritable forest of signs. The group’s name is, of course, ironic given its focus on patronage and power but they were effective, especially Uptown. I’ll call them by a more accurate name, the Jefferson machine, since they were Democrats but not particularly progressive.
When Katrina struck, Jefferson’s daughter, Jalila Jefferson-Bullock, was my State Representative, his sister Betty Jefferson was an elected tax assessor, Dollar Bill protégé Eddie Jordan was District Attorney, ally Ellenese Brooks-Simms was School Board President, and Rene Gill Pratt was my city council person.
The woman I dubbed Gill Pratfall was a rather dim former school teacher whose primary qualification for office was her relationship with Mose Jefferson, Dollar Bill’s brother was the group’s organizer and bag man. Like Dollar Bill, Mose was one smart cookie but his girlfriend was not.
The Jefferson machine may have been successful politically, but they were greedier than the wolves of Wall Street. Dollar Bill wasn’t the only one to spend time in the slammer. There was an elaborate bribery scam at the School Board that led to jail time for Brooks-Simms, the bribee, and the briber, Mose Jefferson, who died in prison in 2011. Along with Mose, Gill Pratfall and Betty Jefferson were also involved in a scam that bilked charities set up by the Jefferson machine to be bilked. That’s a whole lotta bilking. One scam involved Gill Pratfall’s Bronco. No, not that Bronco….
Only two of Jefferson associates listed above escaped jail time. Jalila Jefferson-Bullock was defeated in a bid for the State Senate in 2007 and is out of politics. Eddie Jordan was an epic disaster as District Attorney. When he took over, he put one of Dollar Bill’s most trusted aides, Stephanie Butler, in charge of patronage, and there were mass firings including many experienced lawyers and investigators. This purge led to endless litigation that distracted attention from what DAs are supposed to do: prosecute crimes. Jordan’s bumbling continued after the storm, and he hung up his signature bowler hat in 2007. He left the DA’s office financially and morally bankrupt.
Thanks, Dollar Bill.
I’ve been writing about New Orleans politics since 2005, but I met all these Jefferson associates (accomplices?) in my capacity as an Uptown neighborhood leader. None of them was remotely as clever as Dollar Bill or Mose, which is another reason for Dollar Bill’s non-legacy in New Orleans politics.
As an early Clinton supporter, Dollar Bill had enough clout with William Jefferson Clinton to get Eddie Jordan and his hat appointed US Attorney. (I couldn’t resist using the Big Dog’s full name because it turned up every time I googled Dollar Bill.) Jordan appeared to be successful in that job, but the credit belonged to the career prosecutors and staff. Jordan was in over his hat as District Attorney.
In many ways, William Jennings Jefferson is a tragic figure. He’s a brilliant and able man. He was one of the people who ran the State Senate during his time there. He was the first black Congressman from Louisiana since reconstruction and was an influential member until his legal troubles began in 2006.
Politically, his candidates lost their share of races, but Dollar Bill defeated Marc Morial in 1990 in a battle of political heavyweights to take over the Boggs family seat in Congress.
In 2017, Dollar Bill is a living, breathing cautionary tale.
He rose from an impoverished childhood in East Carroll Parish to attend Harvard Law School. His hardscrabble upbringing left him always wanting more even though he did well in life. The African phone scam that led to his incarceration came at the time he had multiple daughters in private schools. He needed the money, and his avarice kicked in and later kicked him in the ass and into the pokey.
Dollar Bill’s political legacy was swept away in a tide of graft, greed, and corruption. He got away with it for so many years that he thought he was bulletproof. He was not. It’s a shame because he could have been a great man instead of what he is: a convicted felon who was so disgraced that he lost his final race in 2008 to a Vietnamese-American Republican who had never before held a political office, Joseph Cao.
In 2017, New Orleans definitively turned the page on the pre-Katrina political era. Dollar Bill’s last close associate in elected office, Councilman James Gray, was defeated for re-election by a Vietnamese-American Independent, Cyndi Nguyen. Do you detect a pattern? The old alphabet groups are diminished in stature and importance with the exception of BOLD.
And the Jefferson machine is dead and buried, swept away along with the non-legacy of Dollar Bill Jefferson.
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Mathis may not be known nationally, but during the last few years, he has worked with or on behalf of a litany of Louisiana Republicans. In 2014, he helped Garret Graves win a seat in Congress.
(We didn’t even include Kamara’s 71-yard touchdown run, another sensational feat worth watching. If anything, the biggest criticism from this game is that Kamara wasn’t used enough; he had 188 yards on only 11 touches. By comparison, Mark Ingram had 36 yards on 13 touches.)
Unfortunately, it’s hard to say we learned much from this game. We learned the Saints struggle at cornerback without Marshon Lattimore and Ken Crawley, but we already knew that. (In the last two weeks, where Lattimore was almost entirely absent, the Saints pass defense ranked 31st according to ESPN Stats and Info. From weeks 4 to 10, it ranked 4th.) We learned the pass rush and run defense are a little weaker without Alex Okafor; we learned Kamara is really good; we learned the Rams’ defense is really good. All things we knew already.
It’s an unfortunate loss for the Saints, because the NFC is particularly top-heavy this year, and the races for home-field advantage and playoff byes will be tight. By losing to Los Angeles, the Saints are still 8-3, a terrific record, but only in line for the fourth seed in the playoffs, behind 10-1 Philadelphia, 9-2 Minnesota, and the 8-3 Rams– and they have lost the head-to-head tiebreaker to the Vikings and Rams. On top of that, they’re still in a tight race for the division, as they host Carolina, also 8-3, this Sunday, and Atlanta is just one game behind at 7-4. This team, at full strength, might actually be better than the 2009 Super Bowl team, but the conference is much stronger this year, and the path to the Super Bowl may be even tougher. As long as they stay in reasonable health, New Orleans will likely only be an underdog in one more game this year, their week 14 Thursday night match at Atlanta. Unfortunately, the Saints finishing 12-4 isn’t likely to get them a first-round bye, and may just set them up to host round three with either Carolina or Atlanta on Wild Card Weekend. That may be a big hurdle for them to clear, but if anyone can do it, it’s this team:
All they can do from here is try to keep winning. The good news is, Lattimore and Crawley returned to practice on Wednesday, so the defense should be much more stout for Sunday’s matchup. (Crawley seems on track to go; Lattimore missed Thursday’s practice, so his status remains in doubt, but the Saints beat the Panthers handily without him in week 3.) I still believe this team is capable of 12 or 13 wins; I just hope that’s enough for them to get Wild Card Weekend off before hosting a Divisional Round playoff game. The chase begins anew Sunday in the Superdome against Carolina, where once again the Saints have been chosen for the 3:25 national game.
Trivial statistic of the week: New Orleans is 8-0 this season when Ken Crawley is active on game day.
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The band’s latest album, Kalenda, for which they received their latest Grammy nomination, is perhaps their greatest work to date, and Michot is particularly proud of the album’s title track. “There’s so much information and history in it,” he says. “It has the African Congo Square rhythms; it has the dance call; and then it has a whole story about a man from New Orleans- a royalist aristocrat who was anti-Napoleon. And all of the anti-aristocrats would sing this song about him- and that’s in the middle of the song. The words, though, are line for line from a guy in Lafayette named Vavasseur Mouton. What is great, I think, is how all of these pieces of the Louisiana cultural pie come together in this one song.” Michot provides more background on the song and its history in this interview published by Band Camp Daily.
Despite the fact that they maintain almost constant touring schedule, Louis and his bandmates handle all of the band’s business themselves, which means they don’t have a manager or a publicist or the kind of support staff upon which most Grammy-nominated musicians rely.
“We also don’t rely on Cajun or zydeco venues,” he says. They deliberately seek out venues and opportunities to introduce their music to new audiences. “We want to play for the general public. We want to be appreciated by everyone who is a music lover. That’s why we’re in it. Because we love music. And although we will always consider ourselves a traditional Cajun French band, we love music no matter what genre it is in.”
The Bayou Brief is a non-profit news publication that relies 100% on donations from our readers. Help support independent journalism about the stories of Louisiana through a monthly or one-time donation by clicking here.