45 years ago, the Louisiana congressional delegation experienced perhaps their most turbulent year in history. Many events of 2017 – the attempted assassination of Rep. Steve Scalise, investigations into the Trump administration and major congressional showdowns, have harkened back to the monumental events of that year. In 1972, amid Watergate and Vietnam, the state saw the loss of two of the delegation’s most influential members, Allen Ellender and Hale Boggs. The tragic events of that year would shape the way we, as a state, would be represented in the U.S. Congress, and set the stage for two of the most notable political careers in Louisiana history.
On July 27, 1972, Louisiana lost one of the most powerful members ever to serve in the state’s Congressional Delegation. Sen. Allen J. Ellender, 82, President Pro-Tempore of the U.S. Senate and Chairman of the Appropriations Committee, died at Bethesda Naval Hospital in Maryland. A politically savvy Cajun from Houma, Ellender served a total of 35 years, six months and 24 days in Congress.
Sen. Ellender had spent the sweltering day campaigning in Monroe, attempting to fight off a primary challenge from J. Bennett Johnston. Johnston, then a state senator from Shreveport, was trying to unseat the incumbent by capitalizing on the name recognition and support he had garnered in a razor-thin loss to Edwin Edwards in the previous year’s race for governor. This was the first formidable threat that Ellender had faced since his initial election in 1936, and it had forced the elderly senator to take up an active campaign schedule.
While flying back to Washington D.C., Ellender complained of stomach pains and discomfort. After a check-up in the Congressional Infirmary, doctors admitted him to Bethesda Naval Hospital. Shortly afterwards, he suffered a massive heart attack. President Nixon’s personal physicians desperately attempted to save the senator, but their efforts were in vain. Ellender died at 7:15 p.m.
President Nixon, informed of the news while dining with friends at Mount Vernon, was shocked. The White House issued a statement in which the President called Ellender “a good friend, a fine Senator, and a splendid American.”Nixon went on to talk about seeking Ellender’s counsel before foreign visits, and expressed the “profound sorrow and deep sympathy”of himself and Mrs. Nixon. The President also ordered all flags at half-staff to honor the senator.
According to tapes of President Nixon’s conversations, he spoke with top aide H.R. Haldeman at length about Ellender’s funeral in an Oval Office meeting the next morning. According to the President, Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield had encouraged him to attend the funeral rather than a small memorial service at the Capitol. Nixon, in classic form, went on say that the funeral “would be a good way for us to get to Louisiana,”and further his re-election efforts in the south. Haldeman offered to find an excuse for Nixon to miss the funeral, but he insisted on attending. In the meeting, the President also explicitly instructed Haldeman to invite Sen. Russell Long and Reps. Hale Boggs, F. Edward Hebert, and Otto Passman to join him aboard Air Force One for the flight to Louisiana.
7/31/1972 President Nixon and a bipartisan group of Senators and Representatives aboard Air Force One en route to funeral of Sen. Allen Ellender (D-LA)
For the next few days, Sen. Ellender’s body lay in state at the Capitol in Baton Rouge. As Speaker of the Louisiana House of Representatives, Ellender had presided over the first legislative session held in the “new” capitol in 1932. It was during that session that a group of anti-Long legislators had attempted to remove him as Speaker, but he was saved by last-minute maneuvers from Sen. Huey P. Long and his brother Earl. 40 years later, statewide elected officials, legislators, and Gov. Edwin Edwards packed the rotunda for a farewell to Ellender. Edwards, noting the Senator’s Francophilia, finished his eulogy in French as a poignant tribute. Ellender’s body was then moved to Houma in preparation for the following day’s funeral services.
On the morning of the services, July 31st, President Nixon boarded Air Force One for the flight to Belle Chase Naval Air Station. The President was joined by the First Lady, Haldeman, Press Secretary Ron Zeigler, and Treasury Secretary George Schultz. Senate Minority Leader Hugh Scott (R-PA) along with Sens. John McClellan (D-AR), James O. Eastland (D-MS) were on the flight, in addition to Reps. Boggs, Passman, and Waggonner from the Louisiana delegation. Cloistering himself with staff for most of the flight, Nixon finally emerged to take a photo with the Congressional representatives on board and then met with Rep. Waggonner briefly in his office before landing.
Upon landing, the President was greeted by Rep. F. Edward Hebert and the military commanders from Belle Chasse. After exchanging pleasantries on the tarmac, Nixon boarded Marine One for the 24-minute flight to Houma. In Houma, the Nixons were met by Sen. Russell Long and Gov. Edwin Edwards before motorcading to St. Francis de Sales Catholic Church. Ellender’s pastor, Fr. John Newfield and Archbishop Phillip Hannan of New Orleans presided over the service, while the Nixons joined the senator’s son and daughter-in-law in the front pew.
Also attending the funeral services were Vice President Spiro Agnew, Sen. Ted Kennedy and the Democratic nominee for President, George McGovern. Since Nixon did not consent to any joint appearances or debates during the 1972 campaign, Ellender’s funeral marked one of the few occasions in which both major candidates were together at an event.
After the Mass, Gov. Edwards spoke briefly with the President outside the church about appointing a successor to fill the six months remaining in Ellender’s term. Nixon did not indicate a preference, but said that no major legislation would be before the Senate this close to the election. Edwards, barely 18 months into his first term as governor, had been inundated by calls while press reports were speculating that he would appoint Johnston to the seat.
The President posed for a photograph on the steps of the church with the Ellender family, before departing for Belle Chasse. On board Air Force One, he met briefly with Lindy Boggs and Rep. Passman, who presented him with a watch.
Returning to Baton Rouge after the services, Gov. Edwards floated the idea of appointing his wife, Elaine, to fill Ellender’s seat. She consented and the governor made the announcement the following day from the press room on the fourth floor of the state capitol. It was not the first time that this type of appointment had been made in Louisiana. Gov. O.K. Allen had actually appointed Huey Long’s widow, Rose, to his seat in the U.S. Senate after the Kingfish’s assassination in 1935. Coincidentally, Rose Long’s successor was Allen Ellender. As part of the arrangement, Elaine Edwards would resign the seat following the November election, so that her successor could gain seniority over the new senators that would take office in January.
Since party qualifying for the Senate race had already closed, former Governor John McKeithen jumped in as an Independent. He was actively supported by the Ellender family, who were resentful of Johnston’s challenge to the late senator. However, McKeithen failed to pick up major endorsements and his fundraising stalled. He was also dogged by constant press reports of corruption and cronyism in his administration. On October 1, McKeithen’s home in Caldwell Parish burned to the ground while the candidate was eating Sunday dinner there. Unable to stop the blaze, the family was only able to grab a few relics and escape before the fire completely consumed the house.
On October 16th, 1972, Rep. Hale Boggs, the House Majority Leader, disappeared while campaigning for a Democratic Congressional candidate in Alaska. Boggs had represented the metro New Orleans area since 1947. A master of the legislative process, he had quickly risen through the ranks in Congress. Boggs also had a reputation as smooth operator. For instance, he had sponsored legislation for the NFL-AFL merger and landed New Orleans a professional football team in the process. Boggs also had become the subject of controversy, however, when he publicly criticized FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover for tapping the phones in his office. By 1972, Boggs was attempting to build support for a bid for Speaker of the House, and had been campaigning with Democrats across the country. While flying from Anchorage to an event in Juneau, Boggs’plane disappeared without a trace. Within hours, Coast Guard search vessels were searching waterways while military planes and helicopters scanned the sky looking for any sign of the aircraft in a dense fog.
At the White House, President Nixon was briefed on the events unfolding in Alaska by Gen. Alexander Haig, his military aide. Nixon called Lindy Boggs to express his concern and condolences. A massive search party conducted by both civilians and military personnel proved fruitless. With no hard evidence, commanders abandoned the search after 40 days, speculating that Boggs had been killed in a plane crash. Rep. Thomas Phillip “Tip”O’Neill of Boston, Boggs’deputy, assumed his duties in Congress.
The first resolution passed by the new Congress in January of 1973 declared Hale Boggs legally dead and set a special election to succeed him. A funeral for Boggs – without a casket – was held at the St. Louis Cathedral, presided over by Archbishop Hannan. President Nixon was visiting the Soviet Union at the time, so Vice President Agnew represented the White House along with former President Lyndon B. Johnson and his wife, Lady Bird. It was one of Johnson’s last public appearances, as he died three weeks later at the LBJ Ranch in Texas.
Lindy Boggs handily won the special election to succeed her late husband. She would serve in Congress until 1991. President Bill Clinton, who as a young congressional staffer had driven Hale Boggs to National Airport for his fateful trip to Alaska, later appointed her Ambassador to the Vatican. In the race to succeed Ellender, J. Bennett Johnston trounced John McKeithen, 55-23%. Johnston would serve in the Senate until 1997, including a stint as Chairman of the Energy Committee and an unsuccessful attempt to become Senate Majority Leader in 1988.
It is worth nothing that had Hale Boggs lived and successfully won the Speakership, in addition to Allen Ellender surviving and winning re-election, that by January 1973, Louisiana would have had two of itsmembers of Congress serve simultaneously as Speaker of the House and President Pro-Tem of the Senate.
It would have been one for the history books.
“Of course I’m dangerous. I’m police. I can do terrible things to people with impunity.” – Rust Cohle (character), True Detective, Season One.
In the small town of Jennings, the seat of a Louisiana parish (or county) renamed after the president of the Confederacy, a string of unsolved murders, beginning in 2005 and now including at least a dozen victims, has ignited explosive allegations that suggest much more than law enforcement incompetence; instead, there are tomes of records, statements, and evidence that point to widespread collusion and corruption among the very agencies tasked with protecting and serving the community, the police.
On Monday, The Bayou Brief spoke with author Ethan Brown, whose most recent book “Murder in the Bayou” is the result of an extensive, five-year-long investigation into the true story of the unsolved homicides in Jefferson Davis Parish. It is a riveting and exhaustively researched book that offers the most definitive explanation of a story that has eluded detectives since 2005. Brown had been warned by people in Jennings that his book would “disappear in a black hole,” and it almost did, largely because of some salacious details at the tail end.
Last year, Brown dropped his book and, in it, a bombshell during the middle of a crowded and contentious campaign to replace U.S. Sen. David Vitter: One the men vying for the job, Congressman Charles Boustany, was employing Martin Guillory, the co-owner of a well-known brothel in Jennings, a nondescript motel off of Interstate 10 called The Boudreax Inn and, for a time, the epicenter of a narcotics and prostitution ring directly implicated in the murders of eight women.
Collectively, these women became known as the Jeff Davis 8, and to this day, with the exception of the location of Huey P. Long’s deduct box, their murders remain the most significant and most astonishing unsolved mystery in the state of Louisiana. It may also be the biggest cover-up in Louisiana’s history, which is saying something.
The case had already drawn substantial national attention: feature-length articles in The New York Times, Vice, and Rolling Stone.
When “Murder in the Bayou” was first published, the state and national media focused almost entirely on the allegations against Rep. Charles Boustany. After all, David Vitter, the man he sought to replace, was eventually brought down because of his associations with sex workers. The story about Boustany, however, is more like a footnote; he could adequately be described as a minor character.
Martin Guillory, also known as Big G, was the Congressman’s field director; he had a phone number in Boustany’s D.C. office. That wasn’t all: Brown learned that, in the fall of 2012, a witness alleged to the FBI that the Congressman had been sexually involved with at least one of the murder victims, claims that were considered credible and serious enough to necessitate several days worth of interviews with the witness.
But again, it would be a gross simplification to define Ethan Brown’s years of research around this particular aspect of the story as the story. For his part, Brown politely declined to speak about the allegations against Boustany, and The Bayou Brief was happy to oblige: That was never the real story.
Neither was the story in HBO’s True Detective.
On Jan. 12, 2014, HBO debuted the very first episode of True Detective, a staggeringly evocative and brilliant series written by Lake Charles native Nic Pizzolatto. The show, which starred Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson, won massive critical acclaim, transporting viewers into the seedy underworld of law enforcement in the petrochemical dystopia of southwest Louisiana, a place haunted by unsolved murders, rumors of Satanic cults, and amoral men of power who built fiefdoms by leveraging corruption.
Ethan Brown
Eighteen days later, on Jan. 30, Ethan Brown published “Who Killed The Jeff Davis 8?” on the web publication Medium, and almost immediately, the Internet lit up with speculation about the connections between Pizzolatto’s show and Brown’s research and sensational story. The sheriff of Jefferson Davis Parish took to Facebook and dismissed Brown as an “out of town” fiction writer who was attempting to sell a story to HBO, purposely conflating Pizzolatto’s fictional television show with Brown’s true crime expose.
Pizzolatto and Brown have never met one another and have never spoken.
“I was stunned by the similarities between the first season of True Detective and this case,” Brown told The Bayou Brief. “Not at all that this is the same story, but it’s the same milieu. When the trailers dropped, it captured the milieu of the place so well, I thought it was a remarkable coincidence.”
We also reached out to Pizzolatto (full disclosure: his brother, Nath Pizzolatto, is a paid contributing writer for The Bayou Brief). “Ethan’s work had absolutely nothing to do with my work on Season One,” he stated via e-mail. “All one could say is that I must have succeeded in an authentic portrayal of the psychology of a place, which was validated in part by a crime journalist’s work. It seems like he (Brown) does worthwhile and important work.”
That milieu, the psychology of that place is rife with, as Brown puts it, “institutionalized corruption.” Jennings is situated directly off of Interstate 10, in between Houston and New Orleans and in the center of one of the biggest drug corridors in the country. “This specific area is sort of a drug tunnel. It’s a major trafficking route,” Brown said. “That creates a big problem in and of itself. The second thing is: The drug war is so inherently corrupt that it leads to (this).”It also helps to explain why all of these murders remain unsolved.
“It seems like there’s a feeling that this thing is an impossible mess. You can’t trust anyone. The witnesses are crap. There’s a lack of physical evidence,” Brown said. “On the other hand, you start looking at this, and it leads to power. It leads to people in the Sheriff’s office, people who are prominent in the community.”
For nearly a decade, law enforcement in Jennings and in Jefferson Davis Parish have pursued the theory that these eight murders were all committed by a single serial killer, a theory that is methodically and expertly debunked in Brown’s book.Frankie Richard
The much more likely explanation is that at least four of these women were probably murdered by or at the behest of Frankie Richard, a white man from Jennings who is sometimes called Cajun Country’s John Gotti, and that at least two others were probably murdered by a former Sheriff deputy, Danny Barry, who died in 2010. Barry was never charged with a crime, but Richard has faced numerous charges, all of which eventually collapsed after witnesses recanted or evidence was mishandled.
Richard, surprisingly, spoke with Brown on multiple occasions during the course of his investigation, often making claims that were self-incriminating and contradictory. When asked why Richard was willing to be so candid, Brown offered his working theory.
“I wrote a book called ‘Queens Reign Supreme.’ When I was working on that book, there was a tertiary character named Jimmy Henchman, and Jimmy had been implicated in all sorts of things, including having Tupac (Shakur) shot in New York shortly before Tupac’s murder. And I spent a lot of time talking with Jimmy,” he said. “After spending a lot of time with him, I realized there are certain people who get away with things for so long, their defenses get completely dropped. Frankie, to me, is the white version of Jimmy.”
In Brown’s telling, it is impossible not to conclude a cover-up.
“These women witnessed other murders. Not all of them. But most of them,” he explained. “And these women witnessed police misconduct. Nearly all of them.”
Still, bafflingly, the Jefferson Davis Sheriff’s Department is the lead agency involved in the investigation, a fact that Brown cannot comprehend. “Some of their former employees are suspects,” Brown stated. “The former sheriff, Ricky Edwards, said that no law enforcement officers were suspects. That’s completely false.”
Brown was initially drawn to the story after reading a report in The New York Times by Campbell Robertson. “One specific part of it drew my attention,” he said. “There was a glancing mention of a high-ranking member of the sheriff’s office, Warren Gary, who had been disciplined for selling a truck allegedly involved in one of the murders. That piqued my interest.”
A year later, he visited Jennings for the first time. “While I was out there, the boyfriend of at least two of the Jeff Davis 8 victims was murdered, David ‘Bowlegs’ Deshotel,” he said. “This has never happened to me in my career, but I had met David hours before he was murdered. What was even stranger is that I went out to the crime scene hours later, and there were no investigators. People told me that this was normal.”
Deshotel’s murder remains unsolved.
In addition to the Jeff Davis 8 and Deshotel, there at least three other homicide victims connected to the investigation whose murders also remain unsolved.
Shortly before Thanksgiving last year, Warren Gary, the deputy who bought and then sold a truck that was evidence in one of the homicides, was also murdered, shot in his sleep by his grandson. That case is closed.Buy “Murder in the Bayou” here.
In a New York Times op-ed in May, New Orleans author Michael Tisserand wrote about the Confederate monuments that at the time were yet to be removed. They remained a discordant focal point of the city’s civic life since before the City Council voted six months earlier to remove them from their places of reverence. The Crescent City, he wrote, needed to pull them from the public sphere, and to reconcile the upheaval born of white supremacy in one of America’s great and venerable cities.
Tisserand also wrote about his first brush, three decades earlier as a fresh Midwest transplant to NOLA, with what he called “just between us” moments, — those winking, non-verbal transactions among whites that convey without words a sense of racial superiority, often under the assumption that other white people naturally share such prejudices.
Those monuments to white supremacy are now warehoused in New Orleans, plucked from their pedestals last month, but it took the city 130 years — five generations — to do it. The post-Reconstruction era when those monuments were erected, beginning in 1884 with the granddaddy of them all — the towering statue of Gen. Robert E. Lee, whose visage gazed north 75 feet above the traffic circle that ultimately bore his name — represented a roiling return of white supremacy in a city that had once mostly made peace with its complex, New World racial nuances. New Orleans had at least learned to live within, if not revel in, its fine gradients of color before the Civil War and Reconstruction upended that balance and rendered life, once again, in black and white.
Into this last gasp of the Confederacy, in 1880, was born one of New Orleans’ greatest if not least-known-today sons. He wasn’t a jazz musician or culinary trailblazer. He was a doodler who turned a keen and sometimes warped sense of humor into what became an institution of twentieth century newspapers: the comic strip.
George Herriman was born into a prosperous Creole family of merchants and artisans, a mixed-race stratum of New Orleans society that thrived, that valued classical education, training in the arts, and other leisure pursuits of the mercantile class. But when the racial protections of Reconstruction, thin though they were, gave way to the animus of white supremacy, many families like the Herrimans abandoned New Orleans for the industrial north or the fruited plains of the west. Herriman’s parents chose the latter, settling in Los Angeles a decade before the dawn of the twentieth century.
His most famous strip, Krazy Kat, was hailed by contemporaries like modernist poet e.e. cummings as well as modern comic strip artists like Bill Watterson (“Calvin & Hobbes”) as not only the crucible into which was poured the raw materials that would become the modern and quintessentially American art form known as the comic strip, but one of the best strips ever set to ink and newsprint.
Oh, and George Herriman spent most of his life, which ended in 1944, passing as a white man. He was fair-skinned and appeared, according to friends and colleagues, to maybe be Greek. A fluent Francophone, Herriman usually preferred to say he was born to French parents. Sometimes he omitted the New Orleans part of his biography, probably out of an intimacy with New Orleans’ racial nuances that no outsider could ever know, and simply started his autobiography in L.A.
But his profound and lasting impact on the art of the comic strip can’t be underestimated, and Tisserand, the author of Midwestern extraction who fell in love with New Orleans and has written about it with pride and passion, has ensured that no one will forget that impact.
Tisserand’s latest work, Krazy: George Herriman, a Life in Black and White, (HarperCollins), is an engrossing, richly researched and often intimate portrait of the artist and his estimable influence on generations of comic artists who followed.
Tisserand tells a great story built on deep research, but the narrative dances blithely along on its scholastic armature. Even at 500-plus pages, “Krazy Kat” is read that never dulls. And as the monuments that were erected at the start of Herriman’s life cool in the shadows of a warehouse, Herriman’s story remains relevant.
The Bayou Brief reached out to Tisserand via email to discuss the book and its import for current-day New Orleans.
Bayou Brief: We learn early on in the book how short-lived civil rights gains by people of color could be in post-Reconstruction New Orleans. Do you see any parallels with today?Michael Tisserand: Certainly nobody knew better than the members of George Herriman’s family just how tenuous a grasp on equal rights and opportunities in this country might become. Family friends sat across from Abraham Lincoln in the White House, delivering a petition for voting rights. Within a short time Lincoln was assassinated and his successor, Andrew Johnson, turned his head while Confederates regained power in New Orleans and across the South. (This was illustrated most dramatically by the cartoonist Thomas Nast in his masterpiece “Amphitheatrum Johnsonianum,” about the 1866 New Orleans massacre.) It seems to have become inevitable that such backlashes accompany even a modicum of social and political progress, as we seem to be seeing today. I think that the art that emerges from such times, including “Krazy Kat,” can help us to draw the line from one historical moment to another, which is crucial to self-understanding and moving forward.
It’s especially interesting to think how shifts in social identity that were endured by Creoles of Color in New Orleans might be compared to shifts in gender and sexual identity in our contemporary culture, and then look at both in the light of the frequent changes of color and constant changes of gender of Krazy Kat. One of my favorite essays on “Krazy” and Krazy Kat did just that, by a wonderful mixed-race transgender woman named Gabrielle Bellot, writing in the New Yorker.
BB: Why do you think the term Creole has so many often competing meanings, and will we ever settle on a definition of what it means to be Creole?MT: There are several recommended books on that subject, including the classic Creole by Sybil Kein, and the anthology Creole New Orleans, edited by Arnold Hirsch and Joe Logsdon. I also learned much from the more recent “Exiles at Home” by Shirley Elizabeth Thompson. And my first book, The Kingdom of Zydeco, is about Creoles in rural Louisiana, which is an identity very different than what is seen in New Orleans.
The word “Creole” has always been contested and has always been politically charged. In fact, I can’t think of a better illustration for Krazy Kat’s assertion that “lenguage [sic] is that we may mis-unda-stend each udda,” an idea that Herriman seems to have developed, in part, from his reading of Mark Twain. Of course, our terms “black” and “white” are just as problematic and just as bound up in history. I think Herriman’s early life gave him a gut understanding of how identity is far from a natural and normal phenomenon, and is entangled in language and changing cultures.
BB: We had no idea that the term in comics for symbols that convey profanity are known as “grawlixes.” How much did you know about comics before embarking on the book? MT: I was a fan of comics since childhood, when I discovered the “741.5” section of the library. Most of those books were anthologies of old comics, so I would read “The Katzenjammer Kids” or “Dick Tracy” and revel in their weirdness. When I was editor of Gambit, I brought as much comics into the paper as I could, including working with Harvey Pekar on original comics about Louisiana musicians. But “Krazy” was the first time I’d attempted to write seriously about comics, and as I was starting out with one of the most revered figures in comics, there was of course a great responsibility to understand the field in which he worked. I admit I fell in love with the life of the art room of those old newspapers, the various pranks and misbehaviors, and the incredible comics that emerged from those rooms day after day.
The word “grawlix” is from a book about comics by “Beetle Bailey” cartoonist Mort Walker. His son, Brian Walker, is a comics scholar who gave me much help along the way, and has become a friend. One of my most enjoyable days of research was a long lunch that included Mort Walker and the late, great cartoonist Jerry Dumas, whose meta-comic “Sam’s Strip” is one of the most wondrous and least-known comic strips of modern times.
BB: Is there an equivalent in 21st-century news media to the comics of the 20th?
The early cartoonists had an enormous amount of page space and editorial freedom. You see in the early sports cartoons of Herriman and others that the rest of the type flowed around the cartoons, which were drawn in any shape that the cartoonist believed best conveyed his or her (at that time almost always his) idea. If there was a gag about someone in a cellar, the drawing might dip down to the bottom of the page, and the editor just flowed the type around it.
Newspapers haven’t offered that kind of space or freedom to cartoonists in years. This is why the art in comics such as “Peanuts” is so much more minimalist. The best of them manage to look nice and read well and tell good jokes even when shrunk to an abysmally small size.
There is much more freedom to both explore content and play with format in web comics and book-length comics, sometimes called graphic novels. Recently we seem to be in a golden era of nonfiction or historical fiction in book-length comics. I think Krazy Kat, as a deeply personal, allegorical work that speaks in beauty and mystery today, pointed the way to this era. As opposed to the days when someone like George Herriman could make a good living as a newspaper artist, much of the work today is being done by independent or freelance cartoonists. This means it’s more important than ever to support their work and buy their books!
BB: How did you discover George Herriman? MT: I had read Krazy Kat along with most other old comics as a kid, but I have to admit that it didn’t grab me at the time. As an adult I first re-discovered Krazy Kat, as did many, through the book Krazy Kat: The Comic Art of George Herriman, which was compiled and written by Patrick McDonnell and Karen O’Connell. Patrick and Karen would later offer invaluable help on my book. Patrick is also the cartoonist of “Mutts,” which in its own lovely way carries the spirit of Krazy Kat into modern newspaper pages.
BB: Did you come at this from an interest in Herriman himself, comics as a news medium, racial identity, a combination of some or all?MT: I began this project in 2005 and figured it would be a cover story for Gambit Weekly, when I was serving as editor. Fantagraphics kindly sent me their box of Krazy Kat reprints and I was just trying to figure out where Herriman was born. I knew at that time that Herriman was a New Orleans native, that his story seemed to involve racial passing, and that the topic of his identity was still controversial, depending only on a single birth certificate that had been located in the 1970s. Then Katrina. The next year, I was living in Evanston, a northern suburb of Chicago, when the “Masters of American Comics” exhibit toured to Milwaukee. Walking into a room filled with Herriman originals, I immediately knew that I wanted to learn everything I could about the artist behind those works.
BB: To what degree is “Krazy” a “New Orleans book”?MT: At the time I wrote the proposal for “Krazy” and received the contract from HarperCollins, I’d become kind of a pain in the ass about New Orleans. Although I was living in Evanston, I was only writing about New Orleans, for everything from The Nation to The Chicago Reader. I’d wear my “Make Levees Not War” shirt to the kids’ school’s playground and compare everything in front of me to New Orleans. “Nice music teacher but the music teacher back in New Orleans plays Fats Domino.” That sort of thing. Personally, it was my hope that with this new book, I could move forward a bit and write a New Orleans story that also took place in multiple locales.
Then, as it turned out, we found a way to move back to New Orleans. By doing so, I was able to extend and deepen the New Orleans section of the book. It took months at local civic and church archives to tell the story, as well as in the wonderful Louisiana Division at New Orleans’ downtown library. It was certainly risky to go into the Herriman family story to the extent that I do, but it seems to have connected with readers, including readers not from here. Plus, I think the Herriman story offers some fascinating clues to the enduring mystery that is Krazy Kat.
BB: Tell us a little bit about what drew you to New Orleans 30 years ago?MT: I was a college drop-out. Now they call it a gap year, but then it was dropping out. I had visited New Orleans as a kid and sat on the floor at Preservation Hall listening to Kid Thomas Valentine and Sweet Emma Barrett, and I wanted more. And I’d read George Orwell’s “Down and Out in Paris and London” so I decided I could see a different side of life by working in French Quarter restaurants. So I bussed tables at Court of Two Sisters, which was a miserable experience, and washed dishes at K-Paul’s, which was difficult but also kind of wonderful. I ultimately moved away but kept coming back, each time sinking a little bit deeper into the city.
BB: You wrote of “just between us” moments — coded, dog-whistle racism that many whites still feel free to share among themselves — in a May op-ed in the New York Times. Do you see a day in our lifetime when such moments will lose their currency?MT: I don’t, actually. I should add that it isn’t limited to the South. I encountered such moments as a child growing up in Indiana, and I’ve experienced them pretty much anywhere I’ve lived. Currently, the primary difference I see is that we have a president who has devoted much of his life to creating a climate that emboldens people to express racial hatred openly. Personally, I’m still learning how to recognize such moments and reject them when they appear, and I expect that to be a lifelong project.
BB: The NYT op-ed was written before the three Confederate monuments had been removed, for which you expressed support. What should New Orleans do with them now that they’re warehoused?MT: To be honest, I really don’t care what civic bookshelf those knick-knacks of white supremacy wind up on, although I hope they don’t go into a place that suggests they represent anything about our ideals, as they had in their previous locations. I’m more concerned that New Orleans, like Montgomery, establishes civic reminders of the struggles for civil rights that took place here in the Nineteenth as well as Twentieth Centuries. It’s ridiculous that we have no major Civil Rights museum here, as opposed to cities like Memphis and Atlanta and Birmingham. The Rosa Parks museum in Montgomery is wonderful, and that’s a city with half our population. Instead, our prime real estate is occupied by the Confederate Memorial Hall, which I’ve visited, and which weeps nostalgia for the Confederacy.
There are efforts underway that deserve support. I’m very excited by the work that my friend Mark Roudané is doing to call attention to his great-great grandfather, Charles Roudanez, who founded this country’s first black-owned daily newspaper, the New Orleans Tribune.
BB: We’ve read plenty of biographies, and “Krazy” is as richly and exhaustively sourced as any. How did you approach the project at the outset and was it daunting? How long did it take to research and write, and where did that research (physically) take you?MT: I followed the advice of one of my writing mentors, David Carr, whom I heard speak several times at alternative weekly conferences. He advised to start out by availing yourself of all knowledge of a topic, which I did, and which was not easy in this case. I travelled more than once to Arizona as well as to New York and Los Angeles. One of the most magical evenings was spent in George Herriman’s former home in the Hollywood Hills, accompanied by Herriman’s granddaughter, who hadn’t returned to the house since Herriman died in 1944.
The biggest and most unexpected research challenge turned out to be locating Herriman’s newspaper work, most of which was only on microfilm and only at certain archives. Thanks to invaluable help from historian Larry Powell, I was able to use Tulane University’s resources to obtain, view and save those files. That process alone took more than a year. In all, it was about a ten-year project, with some time off to work on a few smaller writing projects and to run the chess program at my kids’ school.
BB: Your research for “Krazy” spanned the brief national fixation with Rachel Dolezal, the Pacific Northwest white woman who identified as black and was largely excoriated for doing so. What was your take on that? Can passing go both ways? Should it?
MT: One of my favorite writers on race is my old University of Minnesota professor George Lipsitz, who in books such as The Possessive Investment in Whiteness explores how race might be an anthropological and biological fiction, but is very much a social fact. Lipsitz does a great job itemizing the benefits received by we who get to be seen as white.
Bliss Broyard’s book One Drop tells a very personal story of her father’s racial passing, and was useful to me in understanding the emotions involved. I’m most looking forward to the anthology We Wear the Mask, coming out this fall from Beacon Press, which has fifteen stories about passing in America.
Of course, Dolezal, who in my opinion is a minor figure whose story was blown up way out of proportion, isn’t the first person to pass as black. And she’s far from the most interesting. For a better tale, I’ll again recommend George Lipsitz, in this case his book Midnight at the Barrelhouse, about the musician Johnny Otis.
Racial passing is, thankfully, becoming an antiquated notion. When I talk about my book on college campuses, students seem puzzled by the notion. But I hope that “Krazy” contributes to the literature about people who, for whatever reason, can’t say out loud just who they are — yet as in Herriman’s case are able to find beautiful and mysterious ways to communicate these ideas and so much more.
BB: If there’s any city in America where racial identity is embedded in daily life, it’s New Orleans. Yet Herriman often said he was born in California and omitted his NOLA genesis. What effect do you think his first ten years of life had on him?MT: I ask myself that all the time. I often think of Randy Newman’s songs from “Land of Dreams” in which his childhood in New Orleans is seen as a kind of a dreamscape. Of course the jazz sensibilities of Krazy Kat would seem to emerge from his childhood here. Also, his intellectual curiosity reflects the very cultured upbringing he would have received as a New Orleans Creole of Color.
BB: A white author writing a biography about a black artist who passed as white seems like a tricky undertaking. Have you experienced any pushback over Krazy? MT: I wondered about that and steeled myself for it, and hoped that my blind spots would not be too glaring. I was writing about racial topics that are far from settled, including passing and minstrelsy. But I had to trust my research and ability to tell the story truthfully and with clarity.
The only criticism I’ve really heard came from Nelson George, a black writer and critic whom I’ve read for decades. His review of the book for the New York Times wasn’t all negative, but he wished I had written more about the racial meaning of various Krazy Kat strips in light of the biographical material I’d uncovered. For better or worse, I’ve always tended to tell stories rather than interpret them for the reader. Absent of much direct insight from Herriman himself, I never wanted to go too far into what was in his head. Instead, I set out to present the work and the life and then offer the reader the opportunity to find the connections. Of course, my own judgments are pretty clear by what material in both his life and his work that I’m selecting and highlighting.
BB: What, for you as both the author and a reader of books, is the takeaway from Krazy?MT: Art is long, life is short.
As a quick follow-up to yesterday’s story on The Bayou Brief about Supt. John White (which, as we had anticipated, made some folks upset with us):
The allegation that he “falsified” documents in order to receive his Level Three certification rests on the assumption that he only has three- and not the requisite five- years of classroom teaching experience in his area of certification.
We made a very deliberate effort to keep the piece short and to the point, but perhaps we were too pithy.
We put this question directly to Sydni Dunn, Communications Director at the Louisiana Department of Education.
“As we discussed last week, Superintendent White has eight school years of classroom experience as a teacher and a teacher coach in New Jersey and Illinois,” she wrote via e-mail. “That’s in addition to more than a decade of administrative experience in New York and Louisiana.”
We can find no evidence contradicting this assertion, made on the record and which, if false, would allow for the state to remove his certification, per Section 909 of Bulletin 746.
The case against him is largely built on an interview he conducted in 2011 with the publication EducationNext, which refers to his three years as an English teacher at Dickinson High School in Jersey City, New Jersey and the assumption that he stopped teaching after Teach for America sent him to Illinois to lead recruitment and mentorship (hence the title “teacher coach”).
According to his office, however, he taught- in the public school classroom- for another five years, more than satisfying the requirement. Presumably, he was not teaching Calculus, though I know that some people will not be satisfied unless he discloses what he taught.
So we asked.
“During the years he served as a teacher coach and mentor, Superintendent White taught both English exclusively and English as part of a mix of subjects,” Dunn responded.
There you have it.
****
During the last two months, The Bayou Brief has looked into numerous public allegations suggesting that Louisiana Superintendent of Education John White fabricated his resume in order to inaccurately claim two different educational credentials during the 2015 election cycle. We have consulted with several education professionals, lawyers, citizen watchdogs, and Supt. White’s office. We have also reviewed numerous public records and applicable statutes. On Monday, The Bayou Brief exclusively obtained a copy of Supt. White’s PRAXIS examination results, which, until now, have never been published.
The case against White, first articulated by teacher and education blogger Mercedes Schneider, seemed compelling and credible. She alleges that the Superintendent was ineligible to receive a Level Three certification, the highest certification possible, due to gaps and discrepancies in his teaching record. Schneider and others, including blogger Ganey Arsement, have repeatedly made this allegation, pointing to a string of documents that they allege reveals White’s deceit and the complicity of sympathetic members of the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education.
In our judgment, none of these allegations are true, and they are based on a fundamental misapprehension of the law, a creative interpretation of the requisite qualifications for certification (in which only teaching experience in a public school is sufficient), and a misunderstanding about the ways in which states grant reciprocity to teachers certified elsewhere.
Although we admire Schneider’s work greatly, Supt. White is and always was qualified to take the examinations necessary for both the Level One and a Level Three credentials. We disagree with many of John White’s policy positions. However, we cannot find any logical justification as to why the 41-year-old Superintendent of Louisiana schools should not be allowed to take two tests from which BESE had previously exempted him. Like his predecessor, Paul Pastorek, BESE provided White with a waiver, which is their right. Similarly, had they wanted to, BESE could have instructed Supt. White to take a test, but that was not necessary.
When The Bayou Brief asked why Supt. White nevertheless took these examinations, his office replied, “Because he wanted to.”
On June 24th, the day Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry announced to The Advocate that he had quietly disbanded his controversial and likely unconstitutional Violent Crime Task Force, I filed the following public records request to the Louisiana Department of Justice:
June 24, 2017
Louisiana Department of Justice
PO Box 94005
Baton Rouge, Louisiana 70804
To Whom It May Concern:
Pursuant to La. Rev. Stat. Ann. 44:31, I am writing to request copies of all documentation in the possession and/or the maintenance of the Office of Attorney General Jeff Landry regarding the decision to “disband” or suspend the operations of the Violent Crime Task Force established on or around July of 2016 to augment law enforcement in the city of New Orleans. I request all relevant records regarding the timing of this decision and any and all legal memoranda upon which the Attorney General relied in making this decision.
In addition, I request records concerning the employment status of the fifteen (15) “special agents” assigned to the task force, including both the individual and aggregate compensation provided to these agents during the course of their tenure with the Violent Crime Task Force.
I also request any and all records regarding the total financial expenditure incurred by the Office of Attorney General Jeff Landry in both the creation and the operation of the Violent Crime Task Force, including but not limited to expenses paid to third-party communications or media consultants, lawyers or law firms, and any other political subdivision or agency of the federal, state, parish, or city government.
Based on information and belief, these records should be easily and readily obtainable, and these records are not subject to any statutory exemptions. Based on information and belief, these records are not and cannot be protected by a deliberative process exemption, as they all are now considered “post-decisional.”
As you know, the right to access public records is fundamental. See: La. Const. art. XII, § 3. Louisiana law does not require the requestor to disclose the nature or the intention of the request. If this request is denied, the state has the burden of proving the justification for denial. This request is not vague, overly broad, or unreasonably burdensome.
The cost of reproduction should be minimal. I do not require physical copies of these records; electronic copies are sufficient to meet this request. If the cost of production exceeds $500, please advise.
Per Louisiana law, if this request is denied for any reason, I must be notified no later than Wednesday, June 28, 2017.
All the best,
Lamar White, Jr
The request, I thought, was pretty straightforward and rather pedestrian. For those of you unfamiliar, a year ago, Jeff Landry announced the creation of a special unit of his department, which he called the Violent Crime Task Force, and he charged it specifically with tackling crime in the City of New Orleans. It was a high-profile initiative. Landry repeatedly promoted his efforts online and in the media.
The Task Force was immediately controversial. First and perhaps most importantly, Jeff Landry, as the state’s Attorney General, does not have the statutory authority to direct or oversee a law enforcement agency, and most, if not all, of the so-called “special agents” he assigned to the task force lacked the jurisdictional authority to make arrests in New Orleans. It was, to put it mildly, nothing more than a shameless publicity stunt intended to undermine the Mayor of New Orleans, Mitch Landrieu, a fact that became crystal clear once Landry reported on its efforts. The Violent Crime Task Force had not solved or arrested anyone accused of a violent crime. Instead, for the most part, his agents were arresting people in the French Quarter for smoking marijuana, which is a civil penalty under New Orleans city ordinance and a criminal misdemeanor under state law.
Only July 12th, Luke Donovan, an assistant Attorney General, responded to my request. It’s worth a read and then a re-read. If you prefer, you can download the document here.
The Louisiana Department of Justice is asserting, presumably with a straight face, that the only expenses it incurred as a result of launching and operating the Violent Crimes Task Force were used to purchase monogrammed t-shirts. That’s it.
They are also asserting, presumably with a straight face, that the Attorney General of Louisiana has no documentation at all that relates to the decision to disband this task force, which, to me, underscores the idea that this man never cared about the law in the first place. They searched diligently too!
That said, what is most egregious about this response is the attempt to conflate my second request for records with my third request. Even if the Louisiana Department of Justice cannot provide employment expenses for officers on assignment from other agencies, the third request is crystal clear: “I also request any and all records regarding the total financial expenditure incurred by the Office of Attorney General Jeff Landry in both the creation and the operation of the Violent Crime Task Force….,” a request that inherently includes any and all expenditures and compensation paid to “LBI agents employed by the LADOJ.”
I will send Mr. Donovan a clarification, inform him that his interpretation was in error, and ask how I can possibly purchase one of those t-shirts.
During the last month, I’ve taken The Bayou Brief on the road. For lack of a better term and at the risk of sounding like a clueless politician, I was on a “listening tour.” Deliberately.
The Bayou Brief is a statewide publication, and from the very beginning, I understood that in order to be statewide I’d have to actually bestatewide. I’ve heard from hundreds of people, and I’ve collected enough field notes to keep things interesting for several months.
I’ve met with numerous elected officials and candidates, dozens of Democratic and progressive activists and advocates, several Republican and conservative activists and advocates, business leaders and economic development specialists, historic preservationists, environmentalists, three people who plan on challenging Clay Higgins for Congress, and, most importantly, working-class Louisianians with a story to tell.
Thus far, I’ve been to Shreveport, Alexandria, Lake Charles, Lafayette, and New Orleans, and in August and September, I plan on either hosting or participating in events in Baton Rouge, Monroe, and Abita Springs (with additional stops back in Shreveport and Alexandria).
It has already been an incredible experience, and I am immensely thankful to all of the people who have shown up and participated in these events.
Part One: Shreveport and Alexandria
I began in Shreveport on June 14th, six days before the website’s launch, at an event sponsored by the New Leaders Council of Louisiana. Eight years ago, I helped found Louisiana’s chapter of the NLC, though my friend Matt Bailey deserves all of the credit. Their very first meeting occurred in the breakfast room of my mother’s old home in Alexandria, and since then, the NLC has provided, for free, nearly 150 young, progressive Louisianians an $8,000 crash course about the mechanics behind community leadership. It’s an extraordinary organization, and I was honored to be invited to speak to the Shreveport group by Jesse Gilmore, the chapter’s director and the newest member of The Bayou Brief‘s Board of Directors.
Three dozen people showed up on a weekday night in Downtown Shreveport, including Steven Jackson, President of the Caddo Parish Commission, and former City Councilman Calvin Ben Lester, and for more than an hour and a half, we all had an engaging conversation about local politics, the media, messaging, and race relations, among other things.
Caddo Parish Commission President Steven Jackson Addresses the New Leaders Council in Downtown Shreveport. Photo credit: Calvin Ben Lester.
Shreveport’s progressive community may be small, but they are an incredibly well-informed, civic-minded, and passionate group of people.
I learned, for example, that the anti-tax sentiment that swept across the country during the last five years has imperiled the parish’s ability to provide for essential services. In late April, Caddo Parish voters narrowly rejected four tax renewals and one sales tax re-dedication. Importantly, these were not new taxes; they were merely renewals of existing streams of revenue, a fact that many believe was intentionally misrepresented to voters. As a result, the Caddo Parish Commission will likely be forced to close parks and other public facilities.
After the discussion, I met Clay Walker, the administrator of Caddo Juvenile Services, who told me that the failure of one of the renewals coupled with last year’s passage of a statewide law that raises the age of criminal jurisdiction from 17 to 18 means that next year, when the law goes into effect, their facilities will likely be inundated with hundreds of 17 year olds without any way to pay for additional beds or staff. It’s simply untenable, which is both alarming and dispiriting to Walker, whose program produces the best outcomes in the entire state.
The situation unfolding in Caddo Parish is a stark reminder of the real-life consequences that can occur when public sentiment is guided by reflexively anti-tax ideologues instead of those promoting actual fiscal responsibility, something that Louisianians should have already learned during the eight years of the Jindal administration. It is also symptomatic of the decline of local media institutions in Louisiana (more on that later).
There is, however, a reason to be optimistic about Shreveport’s future: Nearly every single person who attended the event in June was a leader who truly believes in their community.
On July 6th, I hosted the very first official launch party for The Bayou Brief at the Mirror Room in the historic and recently-reopened Hotel Bentley in my hometown of Alexandria. It was a particular honor to be able to be back home and to be joined by Mayor Jacques Roy and Jim Clinton, the President and CEO of the Central Louisiana Economic Development Alliance, for a wide-ranging panel discussion that covered everything from Greek philosophy to the emerging opioid epidemic.
More than 60 people attended, including State Sen. Jay Luneau and nearly two dozen members (from six different parishes) of the newly-created organization Indivisible Cenla.
A panel discussion with Alexandria Mayor Jacques Roy and Jim Clinton, President and CEO of CLEDA.
But before we got started with the panel discussion, I wanted to say a few words about my friend and former boss, Alexandria Mayor Jacques Roy, which I think is relevant to the larger statewide discussion. Quoting an excerpt (emphasis added):
Other than being named after my late father, the second greatest privilege of my life was being able to work for this man right here, Jacques Roy. Your mayor.
Jim Clinton and Jacques Roy at The Bayou Brief launch event in Alexandria.
After I finished college, I moved back here, just like my dad had done, and I plunged head-first into this community: Unlike my dad, though, I found a way to make absolutely no money: I became a blogger. Jacques somehow read something I had written, and he reached out to me, on his AOL e-mail address, which continues to be absurd to this day.
I joined his first campaign for Mayor. And then his administration, for nearly five years, as his special assistant or publicist or, frankly, I never knew what my actual title was.
But I know this: We, the whole team, kicked ass. Mainly, it has been Jacques, but for the purposes of this event, I want to share a little credit.
Jacques believes in this city. This region. It was inspiring to work for him. Truly. Alexandria currently has one of the best mayors in the entire country.
And though he may not describe it the same way I do, what we did- what he is still doing- is progressive policy in action.
One of the very first things we realized about Alexandria was that the city had expanded more than three times its geographical size since the 1960s, yet its population remained stagnant. So, we all became acolytes of smart growth policies.
Jacques launched the largest infrastructure redevelopment project in the city’s history. We sent out all of these RFPs- Requests for Proposals- and we were stunned to hear back from internationally award-winning architects and engineers. One of them told us that he had only responded because he assumed we were Alexandria, Virginia.
That felt good, actually.
We did two different summits on smart growth and sustainability, right down the street at Coughlin-Saunders, and all told, more than 400 people here in Alexandria were there, voluntarily, to listen to a series of lectures and watch a bunch of PowerPoint presentations on best practices in city planning. No lie.
We won the largest grant in the state for resiliency planning. We launched an innovative crime prevention program that empowers neighborhood leaders.
Alexandria, we’re the real deal.
Sen. Landrieu called Jacques a national leader in smart growth policy. And she wasn’t exaggerating.
It is astonishing to me to be back here, after nearly six years away, and see what has been accomplished. This hotel, for one.
A spectacular view of the lobby of the Hotel Bentley.
And the hotel across the street. And the restaurants across the street. And Bolton Avenue. And North MacArthur Drive. And even the waste of money spent out at the Coliseum. If you’ve been here the entire time, it may be difficult to see the dramatic difference, but I see it. There is a sense of pride and a spirit of advocacy in this community that we haven’t had in a long time. Look at River Fete and Winter Fete.
There are lessons to be learned from Alexandria and from what Mayor Roy and his team and all of the other stakeholders here have accomplished.
Again, it is progressive policies in action, on the street.
We need more of that in Louisiana. People who champion good government and community pride and smart, data-driven, and compassionate policies.
Alexandria recently won an international award in best practices in city budgeting. I bet most of you didn’t know that. It also won an award for best new festival, Winter Fete. But let’s consider the international award for the city’s budget.
Remember, your chief executive here is a Democrat. A real Democrat.
State Sen. Jay Luneau and Lamar White, Jr., Publisher of The Bayou Brief.
And while Bobby Jindal was running for President from the Governor’s Mansion in Baton Rouge, while Bobby Jindal was leaving Louisiana with a structural deficit of over $1.3 billion and a downgraded credit rating, here in Alexandria, there was a Democrat winning an international award in budget practices.
You see, Democrats, as it turns out, actually believe in fiscal responsibility. When you meet a self-identified Republican who says they are “socially liberal but fiscally conservative,” tell them that they’re a Democrat. Tell them that they are a progressive.
The Republican Party is not fiscally conservative, whatever that term actually means, but right now, they are morally bankrupt.
Progressives, on the other hand, understand that a rising tide lifts all ships.
We understand that it is impossible to cut our way to prosperity; that social programs are not extravagances, they’re investments in human capital; so are public schools and health care.
We recognize that the success of places like England Air Park and the Lakes District, for example, were not a direct result of the private-sector alone, that they are a consequence of tens- if not hundreds- of millions of dollars in public money. And that the plight of those who live in our most economically-depressed and vulnerable neighborhoods can be dramatically improved with simple fixes: Better roads, brighter lighting, vibrant parks, community centers, public schools, the basics of government.
The progressive model must be guided by pragmatism, and when it is, we see massive returns on investment.
Louisiana cannot afford any more of the Republican Party’s failed experiment. We cannot be a laboratory for disaster capitalism.
I am here to ask for your help. Our media- the Fourth Estate- is failing Louisiana. And it has nothing to do with Donald Trump’s definition of “fake news.” It’s simply failing as an institution.
We need to reclaim the narrative. We need to take the plot-line away from merchants of propaganda and hate. We need to tell our stories.
Arguably, no other city in Louisiana has been more affected by media consolidation and the decline of local news more than my hometown. Only a decade ago, The Town Talk was the dominant media force in Central Louisiana, employing dozens of reporters, editors, and photographers from its sprawling campus in Downtown Alexandria. Today, The Town Talk is a shell of its former self. Its publishing and distribution warehouse sits empty, and currently, it operates out of a second-floor office in a building it had once owned and occupied entirely. After more than a century of publishing a daily newspaper, The Town Talk now rents its former headquarters and prints only three issues a week.
As a direct consequence, the local news media is now dominated by KALB-TV, an affiliate of both NBC and CBS, which means a market that includes more than 300,000 people largely receives their daily local news from a 22 minute nightly television show, half of which is dedicated to sports and weather. For Mayor Roy and other elected officials, this means it has become increasingly challenging to provide the public with pertinent information and more complete stories about policy decisions, which, as I learned in Shreveport, can result in a poorly-informed electorate voting against the community’s best interest and imperiling essential services. To the mayor’s credit, he has attempted to mitigate against this by hosting a weekly and often robust press briefing, which is then broadcasted repeatedly on government access television.
Although many believe that the Internet has dramatically increased the public’s ability to instantly become informed on almost any issue under the sun, we are still ultimately reliant on the credibility of journalistic institutions. When those institutions fail or scale back, the vacuum is too often filled by organizations that care more about clicks than ethical reporting.
The solution is for local entrepreneurs to invest in an innovative 21st century model of community-based journalism, according to Jim Clinton. “People don’t read the sports section of the local paper to find out the score of the last Astros game,” Clinton said, as an example. “They read it to find out the scores of the last Little League games.” His hope, which I share, is that locals reclaim their local news institutions from national corporate conglomerates not merely out of civic pride but because they realize, when it’s done right, the local news can be an enormously profitable business.
The Bayou Brief’s launch at the Mirror Room in the Hotel Bentley.
Part Two: Lake Charles and Lafayette
The day after the event in Alexandria, July 7th, I headed down to Lake Charles for a smaller and more intimate discussion at Sloppy’s, a newly-opened restaurant downtown. I was joined by Michael McHale, the Vice Chairman of the Louisiana Democratic Party, and more than a dozen of Calcasieu Parish’s brightest and best progressive leaders, including John O’Donnell, the leader of Healthier Southwest Louisiana, Carl Murphy Ambrose, the publisher of EverythingLakeCharles.com, and Janet Allured, a history and women and gender studies professor at McNeese University who has edited several books about Louisiana, including Louisiana Legacies, which, by pure serendipity, I happened to be reading that very day. (I also recommend Prof. Allured’s book Louisiana Women. Amazon says it’s currently unavailable, but I found several copies at the Lafayette Barnes and Noble).
Carl Murphy Ambrose, Jr., publisher of Everything Lake Charles, and Lamar White, Jr., publisher of The Bayou Brief.
Because the event was smaller than any of the others, we were all able to have a really extensive and in-depth conversation about the past, present, and future of Lake Charles. Much like Shreveport, I learned that voters in the Lake Charles metro region had also recently rejected two tax renewal initiatives, which would have funded more than $3.3 million in school construction projects and paid for the operation and maintenance of several parks and public buildings.
I also learned there are widespread and legitimate concerns that the local economy is currently a bubble just waiting to burst. The tens of thousands of new, high-paying jobs promised by Big Oil are almost entirely temporary. These workers are not settling in Lake Charles with their families. They are renting homes they share with colleagues. The expectation of thousands of new children enrolling in local schools has yet to materialize.
Last month, according to a report by the U.S. Census Bureau, Lake Charles is currently the “fastest-growing city” in the state. That may sound great, especially if you’re in the business of promoting the region’s tourism and economic development, but I was told it almost certainly belies the truth: The Census is counting workers who have absolutely no intention of making Lake Charles their permanent home.
Several people said that, for all of the hype, they have yet to meet a single person from Lake Charles who has actually gotten rich off of the $45 billion in projects the local Chamber of Commerce claims is currently underway.
Meanwhile, the industry continues to sell its grandiose projections as gospel truth, and local elected officials and, to a certain extent, members of the local media have been more than willing to sell that message to the public. Sue Lincoln of WRKF, the Baton Rouge affiliate of NPR, is a notable exception. Three weeks ago, she filed a report titled “Where Are The Jobs? And Who Is Filling Them?,” which revealed that several thousand of these newly-arrived workers are living in so-called “man camps,” large dormitories built near the construction sites.
The next morning, July 8th, I headed over to Lafayette for an event co-hosted by Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, Blue Acadiana, and the Lady Dems of Acadiana. I joined Kelly Garrett of Louisiana Prison Alternatives, Julie Schwam Harris, the award-winning progressive activist from New Orleans, Amy Irvin, the executive director of the New Orleans Abortion Fund, and Camille Moran, the Louisiana Pay Equity lobbying director, for a nearly two hour long panel discussion about criminal justice reform, health care, equal pay, and messaging strategies.
Hot Topics and Spicy Jambalaya panel discussion. Photo credit: Melissa Gilbert.
All told, throughout the course of the afternoon, more than 100 people attended, including State Sen. Gerald Boudreaux and State Rep. Vince Pierre, an impressive turn-out for a Saturday in Lafayette during an off-cycle year.
I’ve always had a special affinity for the people of Acadiana, particularly those who count themselves as members of its progressive community. They may be outnumbered, but almost universally, they are relentlessly dedicated and fiercely smart. And despite the odds, they have won a number of important policy battles that should serve as a template for organizers across the state.
I learned several things at the event in Lafayette, but my main takeaway is that people are largely satisfied with the work being done by Gov. John Bel Edwards and completely mortified by the man who currently represents them in Congress, the viral video star who continues to refer to himself as “Captain” Clay Higgins. As I mentioned earlier, I met at least three Democrats who intend on running against Clay Higgins, and I am friends with a fourth challenger, who, believe it or not, is a Republican. (I spoke with the three Democrats off-the-record, and I will respect their decision to roll-out announcements in due time).
Higgins may be a national celebrity and the very first Trumpian member of Congress, but back in his district, he is increasingly viewed as an embarrassment. The buyer’s remorse is palpable. In Shreveport, there is a general recognition among progressives that their conservative Congressman, Mike Johnson, conducts himself professionally, even if the policies he promotes are too often informed by Christian dominionism and a brazenly anti-LGBT agenda. They understand that Rep. Johnson takes the job seriously, and therefore, any opposition to him must likewise be serious.
It’s a lesson that the people of Acadiana should consider, because, despite the volumes of damaging opposition research against Higgins, he still won his seat in Congress against a well-funded, well-known, hometown boy who had already served for several years in the highest levels in state government and who would have faced John Bel Edwards in the 2015 run-off for governor if he had only peeled away 21,000 votes from David Vitter. Moreover, there is evidence that Higgins’s provocative antics on social media, in particular, could attract significant outside financial support from national Republicans who understand the importance of heavily investing in any district that could threaten their hold on the Speaker’s gavel.
Turning back to Gov. Edwards’s agenda: Most of the people I spoke with during the last month, in all five cities so far, appreciate the governor’s incremental and pragmatic approach to policy-making, which is essential in passing commonsense reforms through the state’s majority Republican legislature. In other words, right now, we are not going to get the Creationism in the Classroom law repealed, but we may be able to negotiate a way to fund and build community college campuses. And if we are lucky, maybe we can convince President Trump to follow through on the promise made in the previous administration to expand I-10 in Baton Rouge.
To be sure, there are legitimate criticisms about the governor’s willingness to endorse laws that create additional and, in some cases, punitive and potentially unconstitutional burdens against women who seek an abortion, which was a major topic of concern at the event in Lafayette among both panelists and audience members.
I admire this governor and the vast majority of his policy agenda, and like everyone else in Louisiana, I knew he was a pro-life Catholic. Here’s how former Vice President Joe Biden, also a pro-life Catholic, described his policy position on the issue in 2012, which I think is a masterful way of framing the issue:
My religion defines who I am. And I’ve been a practicing Catholic my whole life. And it has particularly informed my social doctrine. Catholic social doctrine talks about taking care of those who can’t take care of themselves, people who need help. With regard to abortion, I accept my church’s position that life begins at conception. That’s the church’s judgment. I accept it in my personal life. But I refuse to impose it on equally devout Christians and Muslims and Jews and–I just refuse to impose that on others, unlike my friend here, the congressman. I do not believe that we have a right to tell other people that women can’t control their body. It’s a decision between them and their doctor, in my view. And the Supreme Court–I’m not going to interfere with that.
It’s the same basic message that former Louisiana Gov. Edwin Edwards would give on the stump, but the numbers have changed since the heyday of EWE. According to an internal poll conducted on behalf of the Obama campaign in 2012 (and unfortunately, no longer available for download), there are approximately 225,000 pro-life Louisiana Democrats, or, said another way, 15% of Louisiana Democratic voters are pro-life. Those numbers square pretty well with a 2013 Pew survey that revealed 52% of Louisianians oppose abortions in all cases, making our electorate one of the most extreme on the issue in the country.
It is also a stark reminder of the need to reclaim and reframe the narrative. To paraphrase one of the panelists in Lafayette, “We have tried for many years to convince people with the language of ‘rights,’ and maybe we should have always focused on what this is ultimately about: Health care.”
Despite the criticism about this issue, Gov. Edwards’s recent enactment of a comprehensive criminal justice reform package, his immediate decision to accept federal Medicaid expansion funding (which has already saved dozens, if not hundreds, of lives and provided more than 470,000 Louisianians with health insurance for the first time), his commitment to increasing the minimum wage and ensuring equal pay for women, and his support for protections of members of the LGBT community against discrimination in the workplace are all hallmarks of a progressive agenda and a breath of fresh air in a state that had been smothered by Bobby Jindal’s failed audition for the White House.
One final note about the event in Acadiana: Even though Taylor Barras, the Speaker of the Louisiana House of Representatives, is from New Iberia and even though many consider him to be a very nice and personable man, most people in that particular audience (granted, they were primarily Democrats) believe he should be removed and replaced from the speakership and are incredibly disappointed by the dysfunction he has overseen as the leader of the state House. When I said that, based on my personal conversations with some of his colleagues, Barras could likely be removed in a voice vote next session, people cheered.
Part Three: New Orleans
The last and final stop of this leg of The Bayou Brief‘s statewide launch and listening tour was in the City That Care Forgot, my newly-adopted home, New Orleans. (On a personal note, I will be moving from Baton Rouge to a home in Gert Town, in the center of the city, in less than two weeks).
I hosted the event last Saturday night, July 15th. The launch was from the Boat House at the Mid City Yacht Club, mainly because I have a weakness for cheesy puns.
This time, I was joined by Lynda Woolard, the President of the Independent Women’s Organization and the former state director for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, Westley Bayas III, the chairman of the Young Democrats of New Orleans, among other things, and Matt Bailey, who, as I previously mentioned, was the original founder of the New Leaders Council-Louisiana and is currently serving as the regional director of Leadership for Educational Equity. We were also joined by four other members of The Bayou Brief team: Editor-in-Chief Katie Weaver, Contributing Editor Zack Kopplin (he’s moving into this position instead of the Board), Board member Dorian Alexander, and Board member Cayman Clevenger.
The Bayou Brief’s launch party in New Orleans.
It was a spectacular event that attracted nearly 100 people throughout the course of the night, including two candidates for New Orleans City Council, Drew Ward and Aylin Maklansky, former candidate for U.S. Senate Charles Marsala, Steve May, the legendary publisher of The Gris-Gris, The Times of Acadiana, and, most recently, The Independent of Lafayette, Kevin Allman of Gambit, Edward Branley of YatPundit and the author of numerous books about New Orleans history, and last but certainly not least, my favorite blogger in the entire state, Jeff Bostick, whose commentary on Twitter about Louisiana politics, under the pseudonym “skooks,” has won him thousands of fans and followers and multiple awards and whose blog Library Chronicles has continuously offered some of the best and most hilarious insight and analysis about Louisiana, New Orleans, and, of course, the Saints for more than fourteen years.
Lamar White, Jr. and Lynda Woolard address the audience as panelists at The Bayou Brief’s launch party in New Orleans.
Saturday was Jeff’s birthday, so I began by asking the audience to sing him “Happy Birthday.” Half sang the song to Jeff; the other half to “skooks,” which seemed perfectly appropriate.
Matt Bailey
New Orleans, to borrow from Dancing With The Stars contestant and current U.S. Secretary of Energy Rick Perry, is similar, in a few key ways, to how Austin fits in the cultural and political landscape of Texas. “Austin is kind of the blueberry in the tomato soup of the state,” Perry is fond of saying. To a large extent, the same metaphor can apply to New Orleans. Hillary Clinton carried Orleans Parish with 80.8% of the vote last year; Donald Trump won the state, however, with a resounding 58%. Westley Bayas speaks about upcoming local elections.
Despite the demise of The Times-Picayune, which, like The Town Talk, now only prints three days a week, the local media in New Orleans survived due to the types of entrepreneurial investments that Jim Clinton had outlined in Alexandria. When The Times-Picayune scaled down, John Georges of The Advocate scaled up, poaching many of the T-P‘s most talented writers and editors. And almost simultaneously, The Lens, the very first online-only, non-profit, and distinctively locally-focused publication opened its doors. Since then, they have published some tremendously important stories, including, recently, when it revealed that the Orleans Parish District Attorney’s Office allowed prosecutors to issue false subpoenas to people with the hope that they could coerce incriminating testimony.
The Lens does enormously important work, and my goal- *our goal*- with The Bayou Brief statewide involves partnering on stories and research with local institutions like The Lens and Gambitin New Orleans and Heliopolis in Shreveport, for example.
New Orleans City Council District A candidate Drew Ward.
During the last month, I learned from hundreds of people on all corners of this great state that the so-called progressive movement is stronger right now in Louisiana than it has been for decades. I met several people who had once declared that they were finished with political advocacy forever, and yet, here they are, re-enlisting.
Progressives in Louisiana are organizing throughout the entire state. There’s even a small group in Lincoln Parish that meets once a month. Once a week, more than a dozen of these leaders, from all parts of the state, conduct conference calls to discuss messaging, public policy, and outreach. It’s an effort that is being coordinated statewide, and it will make a difference. Last November, volunteers at Hillary Clinton’s headquarters in New Orleans on election day made more calls than almost any other office in the country, nearly 100,000 calls in a single day. Unfortunately, they were instructed to call voters in Florida.
But imagine, in 2018, if these same volunteers and activists decide, instead, to call voters here in Louisiana. That could be a game-changer in so many local and district and statewide elections.
During the last month, I rarely encountered people who were willing to give up. Instead, I met hundreds of Louisianians who are more ready than ever to reclaim our great state from the corporatists and the disaster capitalists who care more about turning a profit than improving quality of life and expanding opportunities for all people.
Well, if you want to sing out, sing out
And if you want to be free, be free
‘Cause there’s a million things to be
You know that there are.
– Cat Stevens
On June 26th, Congressman Garret Graves, a Republican from Louisiana’s 6th Congressional District, announced the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) Reform Act of 2017, a bill which seeks to introduce work requirements for certain adults, and remove exemptions from those requirements for others, in order to receive SNAP benefits (more commonly known as food stamps).
Put simply, Graves proposes treating families who rely on food stamps like convicted felons on probation.
While Graves, in a press release, claims that this bill will both “protect resources” and “get capable people off the sidelines and involved in building America’s future,” the likelihood it will do either seems scant.
This program will obviously need agents to monitor it and verify that recipients are sufficiently seeking a job, creating more unnecessary bureaucracy and wasting precious public dollars.
If the goal is to help people on food stamps find jobs, why not spend this money on job training programs, instead of on giving more hoops for our most destitute to jump through to get the help they need, and punishing them if they can’t do it?
This comes back to what “food stamp fraud” and “welfare reform” are really about: race.
Ever since Ronald Reagan decried the myth of “welfare queens driving Cadillacs,” Republicans have used public assistance as a dog whistle to their white voters, roughly meaning “lazy black freeloaders.” These programs have been under attack by the Republican Party ever since, despite the fact that they do genuine good for struggling individuals and families.
Bills that cut these programs or make their benefits more difficult to receive are always based in some premise that there is a group of people– almost always black, but occasionally this issue is used to scapegoat immigrants as well– who are unfairly receiving benefits they don’t deserve, and that this bill will stop that from happening.
Graves’ reasoning is as faulty as it is disingenuous. From his press release: “There are talented people across our country who aren’t pursuing the full potential of their capabilities largely because government incentives make it more profitable in some cases to stay home and collect welfare than to pursue personal growth and responsibility through work.”
The idea that people can only pursue “personal growth and responsibility through work” is fallacious; anyone who’s ever read a book or cared for a child or a sick relative disproves that. What’s more, by and large people want to work, want to do something they have pride in, and want to contribute to their communities. When Graves says in his press release, “It’s become a lifestyle for some to actively choose government assistance over work,” it’s another dog whistle: White conservatives take a kind of perverse and ignorant pride in their work and in their value as members of society. They would only take public assistance if they absolutely needed it.
But for others, it’s a lifestyle to actively choose not to. This plays into the idea that the poor and needy have morally failed somehow, that they choose their poverty– and therefore, it’s fair to disdain them, shun them, and make their lives more difficult by adding onerous requirements such as this one. (It’s no coincidence that the bill introduces requirements for SNAP recipients similar to probation: These requirements reflect a conservative belief that being poor is a moral failing that shows someone to be untrustworthy and of low character.)
This isn’t serious legislation. It is cruelty marketed as conservatism, Changes to federal law as part of the welfare reform of 1996 already prohibit anyone able-bodied, age 18-49, and with no dependents– the same people targeted in Graves’ bill– from receiving this benefit for longer than three months at a time.
Even if someone was deliberately avoiding work they were offered in order to exploit this program, they wouldn’t be able to do so for very long. This leads into another major problem with the bill: The food stamp fraud it claims to tackle simply doesn’t exist.
According to a 2013 USDA report cited in The New York Times, only 1.3% of food stamp funds were illegally traded on the black market, where EBT funds can be traded for cash or other commodities. Not only is this a much smaller percentage of fraud than any other federal program– the GAO estimates that the fraud rate of Medicare and Medicaid is around 10%, for example— but, as the Times article describes, these funds are often traded for gas, money for an electric bill, or other necessities which aren’t food. This market arises not out of corruption but out of necessity.
In his press release, Graves cites a similar program in Alabama which led to an 85% reduction in food stamp participation in 13 counties where the work requirements were instituted. Graves touts “common sense” in the headline of his press release; common sense tells me that a drop of 85% should not be cause for celebration. It should be concerning.
It is highly unlikely that the program was 85% populated by people who were capable of working jobs and chose not to– despite what Graves and others might have you believe. It is far more likely the drop is due to a combination of an improved economy offering more work opportunities, the difficulties involved in meeting the requirements preventing people who need those benefits from receiving them, or simply, the three-month federal limitation having run its course on many of the recipients.
Graves also cites “one of those counties [where] the jobless rate was down 11 points in April 2017 compared to April 2011.” From an article from AL.com which uses similar language, that county appears to be Wilcox County, which saw a drop in unemployment rate from 23.5% in April 2011 to 11.7% in April 2017.
What the article and Graves’ press release fail to mention, though, is that this employment trend reflects that of the United States in general. Unemployment in Wilcox County peaked in February 2010, at 31.0%. Nationally, following the financial crisis, unemployment peaked one month sooner at 10.6%. At the time of the bill, April 2011, the unemployment rate in Wilcox County was 23.5%; nationally, it was 8.7%. In April 2017, when Wilcox County’s unemployment rate had dropped to 11.7%, national unemployment was at 4.1%.
In other words, the unemployment rate in Wilcox County peaked at almost three times the national average in early 2010, was almost three times the national average in April 2011, and then fell… to almost three times the national average in April 2017. The drop in unemployment in Wilcox County is tied to the national trend more than any effects of this bill.
People on food stamps are not living lives of luxury; these are already the poorest, most vulnerable, and most marginalized in our society. Making their lives even more miserable, stressful, and burdensome doesn’t solve the bigger problem, which is that too many jobs don’t pay a living wage or provide the kind of benefits people need to really live.
Even at best, this bill will make life more difficult for the 96% of people who use their benefits honestly, in order to catch the 4%– and, as we’ve seen with similar programs (such as drug testing for welfare recipients), the cost of implementing the oversight is often greater than the fraud it seeks to stop.
This bill will serve no more function other than to waste resources and make the process of receiving government aid to buy food a little more difficult and a little more humiliating. It’s a bill that judges the poor, finds them morally wanting, and punishes them.
Shame on Garret Graves for spending his time on a mean-spirited performative gesture rather than a real solution.
In January, State Representative and Louisiana GOP Majority Leader Lance Harris announced his plan to eliminate $304 million in spending and thereby avoid the need for a special legislative session. His proposal, which he claimed did not represent any official position of the Louisiana Republican Party, was a one-page Excel spreadsheet. It was merciful for Republicans that their Majority Leader distanced his proposal from the party, because it was nothing more than an absurd stunt.
Harris, the owner of a series of successful convenience stores, told reporters that his plan represented “how I would do it as if this was my business.” Without offering any details or explanation, Harris called for $147 million in cuts to health care and hospitals, $22.9 million to transportation, $28.7 million to the Department of Education, and, notably, approximately $37.7 million in capital outlay projects.
Lance Harris is from my hometown of Alexandria. So too is Richard Carbo, the spokesman and now deputy chief of staff for Gov. Edwards, who, at the time, called Harris’s proposal nothing more than a bunch of “vague recommendations.”
Carbo was being generous with his assessment. There isn’t a single banker in the state of Louisiana or, for that matter, a single economist in the entire country who would look at Harris’s one-page proposal and vouch for its credibility. As it turns out, you can’t run a multi-billion dollar state government like you’re running a convenience store that needs to quickly liquidate its inventory.
There is a special irony to Harris attempting to solve the budget crisis, because as the Republican Majority Leader, he is arguably more responsible than any other legislator in creating the crisis. As a direct consequence of Rep. Harris and former Gov. Jindal’s leadership, Louisiana continues to suffer from a budget on the brink of failure. Its credit rating was downgraded. Emergency rooms were shuttered. Tens of millions of dollars for public schools were siphoned off to fly-by-night operations that claimed, for tax purposes, to be religious charities. For years, Louisiana balked at receiving more than a billion dollars in funding for Medicaid expansion- not because the state didn’t qualify for the funding or didn’t desperately need the funding, but because we were led by men who put their own partisan interests above the public good.
Under the leadership of Lance Harris and Bobby Jindal, Louisiana became a laboratory for a failed experiment in disaster capitalism, rivaled only by the catastrophic tenure of Gov. Sam Brownback of Kansas. We outsourced our policymaking to national conservative think tanks that provided Republican legislators with readymade bills. We had a governor who wanted to be president, and a Republican legislature that thought they were elected to be politicians and not lawmakers.
A few days ago, Gov. John Bel Edwards announced a series of bills that he had signed into law and a series of bills that he had either vetoed entirely or decided to line-item veto. Among other things, Edwards vetoed Lance Harris’s HB 269, a particularly dumb piece of legislation, authored almost entirely by someone not from Louisiana. The bill, which is nearly identical to bills filed by Republicans in other states, sought to penalize universities who allowed students to engage in on-campus protests against speakers with whom they disagreed. Offered as an attempt to legislate civility, the bill was really a naked and shameless assault on our fundamental rights of freedom of speech and assembly.
To Jeff Sadow, the radically conservative LSUS associate professor hired by John Georges and Peter Kovacs as a columnist for The Advocate, Edwards’s veto was informed by nothing more than personal animus against Harris. According to Sadow, the bill was so milquetoast that it was essentially meaningless, which isn’t true at all. But, even if it were true, it’d still be more than enough of an adequate justification for striking down the proposed law.
Edwards didn’t veto the bill because Lance Harris sponsored it; he vetoed the bill because it was bad law, written by an outside interest group (likely someone from the Goldwater Institute or the Heritage Foundation) and handed to a conservative businessman from Alexandria who occasionally moonlights as a legislator. The same exact bill died in committee in New Jersey earlier this year.
I want to make this abundantly clear: Because we’re from the same hometown, I’ve known Lance Harris for several years, well before he ever embarked on a political career. We aren’t close friends, but he has always been willing to hear me out, politely and civilly. Years ago, I would have never anticipated that Harris would be such a force in statewide politics, but that’s not because I ever underestimated him. I just never realized how hyper-partisan he would become. Once upon a time, he hosted fundraisers for Democratic politicians at his home. I know, because I attended one of them. So, suffice it to say, it has been dispiriting to watch someone I know from my hometown become such a disruptive and, in many cases, destructive force in statewide policymaking.
I am making this disclaimer, because I know that my final point will likely be considered controversial to many in Central Louisiana.
HB 269 wasn’t the only piece of legislation with Lance Harris’s imprimatur that was vetoed by Gov. Edwards. Edwards also eliminated a proposed $10.8 million project for the England Authority, the unelected body that controls the property formerly known as England Air Force Base. Harris was once the Chairman of the England Authority. In fact, he still lists himself as Chairman on his official biography.
Remember how Harris recommended cutting $37.7 million in capital outlay? Well, he also recommended adding $10.8 million for the acquisition and development of property across the highway from his house, on behalf of the England Authority.
Gov. Edwards quietly vetoed Harris’s request, and he was absolutely right in doing so.
England Air Park is a jewel of Alexandria. It is immaculately landscaped. It features an award-winning golf course, a beautiful airport, the region’s best senior-living community, and an incredible office park.
Unfortunately, though, none of this is a part of Alexandria.
It should be.
Instead, it’s run by an appointed board of unelected commissioners, and although they have done a spectacular job, the England Authority should have been dissolved years ago.
During the last two decades, more than a hundred million dollars have been invested into England Air Park, public dollars, yet these investments have done almost nothing to increase the tax base of the municipality it serves. In fact, in some instances, the England Authority has directly competed against the City of Alexandria for state funding and business development initiatives.
Tyler Bridges of The Advocate (a hire that proves Georges and Kovacs aren’t always wrong) noticed that Edwards had vetoed the $10.8 million request for the England Authority, money they sought not merely to improve their existing infrastructure but to actually expand the domain of their unelected fiefdom, and he put the question directly to Harris, who refused to answer.
Bridges understandably wondered whether Edwards’ veto was motivated by political retribution.
No, it wasn’t. It was smart policy. I’ve written about this before. Most notably, in January of 2014, in a column titled “Louisiana Should Dissolve The England Authority.”
It would be absolute lunacy to give the England Authority another dime in state funding before it becomes a part of the tax base. No American citizen should live in a community in which they are represented by an unelected authority of commissioners. Make a deal with the federal government. An artful deal.
That’s how I would do it as if this was my business.
Before I bury the lede, here’s the link to become a sustaining sponsor.
During the next two months, I will host a series of events, along with other members of our team at The Bayou Brief, all across the state of Louisiana. Our purpose is two-fold: First, we want to let folks know, personally, what this publication intends to deliver, and second and more importantly, we want to hear from people on all corners of Louisiana about what they believe are their community’s most critical issues and what stories they believe have either been ignored or underreported by local and statewide media.
We’re beginning next Thursday, July 6th from 5:30PM-7:00PM, at an event in the Mirror Room in the historic Hotel Bentley in downtown Alexandria, and hopefully, within the next few days, we will announce additional events in Lake Charles, Lafayette, New Orleans, Baton Rouge, Shreveport, and Monroe. All events will be free and open to the public, and none of them will include a single PowerPoint presentation. We hope to make these events as interactive as possible.
We are also hoping to recruit new contributors and people interested in serving in either an advisory capacity or on our Board of Directors (we have room for four more members!).
I am also happy to announce that we now have the ability to accept monthly recurring donations, at the $10, $25, and $40 level.
Many of you have asked about this in the past, and frankly, setting up this feature wasn’t as easy as one would imagine it should be. It involved multiple e-mails and phone conversations with multiple agents at PayPal, one of whom, at one point yesterday, told me he had no idea how anyone could comprehend the code required to activate this option (he was a very nice man, but our web developer had fixed everything up within minutes).
The Bayou Brief is committed to remaining a free source of news and commentary. The stories we explore often require extensive and expensive research. We are juggling at least three different and equally fascinating stories right now, and that means conducting an awful lot of homework. We understand there are dozens of other publications to which you can turn for the latest news on the Associated Press wire, and there are countless bloggers who believe that reacting to a news story is the same thing as researching and reporting a news story. That is not what we intend to do here. That is not why we were created. And that is not why so many people have already contributed so much to help us turn this dream into a reality.
But we are not only committed to remaining a free source of news; we are also dedicated to remaining free of advertisements. That is why we decided to incorporate as a 501(c)(4) non-profit news publication. Since we launched only nine days ago, we have received more than $3,500 in donations, all of which were from people either from Louisiana or who have a deep connection to this state. Remarkably, we have been able to do all of that organically and through the magic of only two Facebook posts.
Again, here’s the link to become a sustaining sponsor.
Today, we’re publishing our first-ever “official” open call for donations, and while we are tremendously grateful to and reliant on those of you who are willing and able to make large, one-time contributions, we also recognize that our sustainability is perhaps even more contingent on readers who are willing to make smaller contributions once a month.
So, to that end, for a limited time, we’re offering anyone and everyone who pledges a sustained monthly donation of $25 for one year their choice of our first-ever Bayou Brief t-shirt or our first-ever Bayou Brief coffee mug. After you donate, you will need to send us a message at submissions@bayoubrief.com to let us know what you prefer and, of course, where it needs to be shipped.
If you pledge a sustained monthly donation of $40 for one year, you don’t have an option: We’re sending you both.
You’ll need to click here on the link to become a sustaining sponsor.
First, let me describe the t-shirt, which will be in limited production and, therefore, a guaranteed collector’s item.
Obviously, it was designed by a master graphic designer whose colleagues describe his style as “cluttered” and “wordy.” The shirt comes exclusively in royal blue; its front features our logo in yellow, and the back features our masthead and our slogan, “Nevertheless, we will progress,” in enormous, blaring, and tenacious lettering (we also included a reminder that, yes, it is our service mark). Sandwiched in between the masthead and the slogan is the line “Non-profit journalism for Louisiana, the land and its people,” an homage to the publisher’s great aunts, Manie Culbertson and Dr. Sue Eakin, who co-wrote the definitive textbook on state history, Louisiana: The Land and Its People. Eakin, who is best known for spending her entire adult life rescuing Solomon Northup’s book 12 Years A Slave, died only two years before the Oscar-winning film adaptation was released and is buried near Cheneyville, Louisiana under a headstone reading, “Sue Eakin loved Louisiana, the land and its people.”
So, yes, the back of the t-shirt is wordy and perhaps a little cluttered, but as we have made clear from the very beginning, The Bayou Brief champions long-form journalism (and t-shirts).
Here is the coffee mug. It was designed by an up-and-coming graphic designer who is already demonstrating tremendous promise.
It really is a fantastic mug; the detailing is all etched.
Neither of these items will be for sale. They are each exclusively available to recurring sponsors.
So act now, because, seriously, supplies are, in fact, very limited.
In case you missed it, here’s the link to become a sustaining sponsor.
* By “chance to win a luxury cruise,” we mean that we will lend our editorial expertise to one randomly-selected sponsor if they ever require assistance with the online application to become a contestant on the show “Wheel of Fortune.”
PS: For those of you familiar with the True Story of the CenLamar Tote Bag Fiasco, rest assured, neither these mugs nor these t-shirts will be inexplicably stolen prior to delivery. They will be kept in an undisclosed, heavily-fortified location.
Update: According to a report published by The Advocate tonight, June 24, 2017, Attorney General Jeff Landry “quietly” disbanded his special task force, though it is not clear when he made the decision or whether the fifteen special agents he hired are still on the public payroll.
On Tuesday, June 13th, U.S. District Judge Susie Morgan voiced concern that Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry has exceeded his legal authority by empowering “special agents” to make arrests in New Orleans, according to a court transcript obtained exclusively by The Bayou Brief.
Morgan, who oversees compliance with the consent decree between the city of New Orleans and the U.S. Department of Justice, fully agreed with New Orleans City Attorney Rebecca Dietz, who argued that Landry’s agents have no constitutional or statutory authority to act as law enforcement officers.
Morgan also revealed Landry’s office has refused to provide legal justification for the arrests made by his office, after more than seven months of repeated requests from the court. The Attorney General’s “representatives were unable to provide me any authority for some of these activities,” Morgan said, “I said, ‘Well, why don’t you, if you want to go back and think about this and do some more research, write me and tell me the authority that you have that supports your activities.'”
“That was in January, and I have not received anything else from them to date,” she said.
“Under state law, the division of state police is tasked with state law enforcement responsibilities and that division falls within the department of public safety under the governor,” Dietz told the court. Landry, she pointed out, has legal authority to make investigations, but not arrests.
Landry first announced the creation of a “Violent Crime Task Force” on July 1, 2016, ostensibly to assist New Orleans-area law enforcement officers during special events.
In January, Landry boasted his task force had arrested eleven people, all of whom were booked on drug-related offenses. Only two were charged with additional crimes. None of the arrests involved violent crimes, and three of those arrested were charged with simple possession of marijuana. The NOPD, who have the main authority for policing the city, typically does not arrest anyone possessing less than 2.5 pounds, per a 2016 city ordinance.
“It’s important that the policing is done by entities with the authority to do the policing for a number of reasons; for example, for the arrest to be valid and for any seizure of evidence to be constitutional,” Judge Morgan stated. “So these questions have real-life ramifications in the criminal justice system. It’s not a technicality. It’s very important.”
Landry’s controversial initiative won support from Orleans Parish Sheriff Marlin Gusman and District Attorney Leon Cannizzaro, both of whom are outspoken critics of Mayor Mitch Landrieu.
Two months ago, Charles Maldonado of The Lens revealed Cannizzaro’s office had frequently used fake subpoenas to pressure witnesses into testifying, leading to widespread calls for Cannizzaro’s recall or resignation.
Landry, a former Congressman, once served as a sheriff’s deputy in St. Martin Parish, during which time his roommate, a fellow deputy, was arrested for stashing more than $10,000 worth of cocaine underneath the home they shared. Shortly after being elected Attorney General, Landry hired GOP mega-donor Shane Guidry, the owner of a maritime transportation company, as his special assistant. Guidry, who is paid $12,000 a year, claims to be responsible for overseeing the division’s “criminal investigations unit.”
Both Judge Morgan and City Attorney Dietz underscored support for Landry’s cooperation with crime prevention efforts and investigations, provided he complies with the law. “It’s clear to me that the AG’s office has limited statutory authority to investigate crimes in certain areas,” Morgan said. “but it doesn’t have the ability to make statewide arrests for violations of state law.
“I will continue to do what I need to do to make sure that the integrity of the policing in the city of New Orleans is maintained,” she concluded. “By that I mean that only entities with authority to make arrests do that, but I also want to make clear I echo what Ms. Dietz said. There are many areas where the AG’s office has expertise and we welcome their assistance, particularly with investigating homicides, because we all know that that’s a concern and an area of emphasis for us right now.”
Last year, Brown dropped his book and, in it, a bombshell during the middle of a crowded and contentious campaign to replace U.S. Sen. David Vitter: One the men vying for the job, Congressman Charles Boustany, was employing Martin Guillory, the co-owner of a well-known brothel in Jennings, a nondescript motel off of Interstate 10 called The Boudreax Inn and, for a time, the epicenter of a narcotics and prostitution ring directly implicated in the murders of eight women.
Collectively, these women became known as the Jeff Davis 8, and to this day, with the exception of the location of Huey P. Long’s deduct box, their murders remain the most significant and most astonishing unsolved mystery in the state of Louisiana. It may also be the biggest cover-up in Louisiana’s history, which is saying something.
The case had already drawn substantial national attention: feature-length articles in The New York Times, Vice, and Rolling Stone.
When “Murder in the Bayou” was first published, the state and national media focused almost entirely on the allegations against Rep. Charles Boustany. After all, David Vitter, the man he sought to replace, was eventually brought down because of his associations with sex workers. The story about Boustany, however, is more like a footnote; he could adequately be described as a minor character.
Martin Guillory, also known as Big G, was the Congressman’s field director; he had a phone number in Boustany’s D.C. office. That wasn’t all: Brown learned that, in the fall of 2012, a witness alleged to the FBI that the Congressman had been sexually involved with at least one of the murder victims, claims that were considered credible and serious enough to necessitate several days worth of interviews with the witness.
But again, it would be a gross simplification to define Ethan Brown’s years of research around this particular aspect of the story as the story. For his part, Brown politely declined to speak about the allegations against Boustany, and The Bayou Brief was happy to oblige: That was never the real story.
Neither was the story in HBO’s True Detective.
On Jan. 12, 2014, HBO debuted the very first episode of True Detective, a staggeringly evocative and brilliant series written by Lake Charles native Nic Pizzolatto. The show, which starred Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson, won massive critical acclaim, transporting viewers into the seedy underworld of law enforcement in the petrochemical dystopia of southwest Louisiana, a place haunted by unsolved murders, rumors of Satanic cults, and amoral men of power who built fiefdoms by leveraging corruption.
Lance Harris is from my hometown of Alexandria. So too is Richard Carbo, the spokesman and now deputy chief of staff for Gov. Edwards, who, at the time, called Harris’s proposal nothing more than a bunch of “vague recommendations.”
Carbo was being generous with his assessment. There isn’t a single banker in the state of Louisiana or, for that matter, a single economist in the entire country who would look at Harris’s one-page proposal and vouch for its credibility. As it turns out, you can’t run a multi-billion dollar state government like you’re running a convenience store that needs to quickly liquidate its inventory.
There is a special irony to Harris attempting to solve the budget crisis, because as the Republican Majority Leader, he is arguably more responsible than any other legislator in creating the crisis. As a direct consequence of Rep. Harris and former Gov. Jindal’s leadership, Louisiana continues to suffer from a budget on the brink of failure. Its credit rating was downgraded. Emergency rooms were shuttered. Tens of millions of dollars for public schools were siphoned off to fly-by-night operations that claimed, for tax purposes, to be religious charities. For years, Louisiana balked at receiving more than a billion dollars in funding for Medicaid expansion- not because the state didn’t qualify for the funding or didn’t desperately need the funding, but because we were led by men who put their own partisan interests above the public good.
Under the leadership of Lance Harris and Bobby Jindal, Louisiana became a laboratory for a failed experiment in disaster capitalism, rivaled only by the catastrophic tenure of Gov. Sam Brownback of Kansas. We outsourced our policymaking to national conservative think tanks that provided Republican legislators with readymade bills. We had a governor who wanted to be president, and a Republican legislature that thought they were elected to be politicians and not lawmakers.
A few days ago, Gov. John Bel Edwards announced a series of bills that he had signed into law and a series of bills that he had either vetoed entirely or decided to line-item veto. Among other things, Edwards vetoed Lance Harris’s HB 269, a particularly dumb piece of legislation, authored almost entirely by someone not from Louisiana. The bill, which is nearly identical to bills filed by Republicans in other states, sought to penalize universities who allowed students to engage in on-campus protests against speakers with whom they disagreed. Offered as an attempt to legislate civility, the bill was really a naked and shameless assault on our fundamental rights of freedom of speech and assembly.
To Jeff Sadow, the radically conservative LSUS associate professor hired by John Georges and Peter Kovacs as a columnist for The Advocate, Edwards’s veto was informed by nothing more than personal animus against Harris. According to Sadow, the bill was so milquetoast that it was essentially meaningless, which isn’t true at all. But, even if it were true, it’d still be more than enough of an adequate justification for striking down the proposed law.
Edwards didn’t veto the bill because Lance Harris sponsored it; he vetoed the bill because it was bad law, written by an outside interest group (likely someone from the Goldwater Institute or the Heritage Foundation) and handed to a conservative businessman from Alexandria who occasionally moonlights as a legislator. The same exact bill died in committee in New Jersey earlier this year.
I want to make this abundantly clear: Because we’re from the same hometown, I’ve known Lance Harris for several years, well before he ever embarked on a political career. We aren’t close friends, but he has always been willing to hear me out, politely and civilly. Years ago, I would have never anticipated that Harris would be such a force in statewide politics, but that’s not because I ever underestimated him. I just never realized how hyper-partisan he would become. Once upon a time, he hosted fundraisers for Democratic politicians at his home. I know, because I attended one of them. So, suffice it to say, it has been dispiriting to watch someone I know from my hometown become such a disruptive and, in many cases, destructive force in statewide policymaking.
I am making this disclaimer, because I know that my final point will likely be considered controversial to many in Central Louisiana.
HB 269 wasn’t the only piece of legislation with Lance Harris’s imprimatur that was vetoed by Gov. Edwards. Edwards also eliminated a proposed $10.8 million project for the England Authority, the unelected body that controls the property formerly known as England Air Force Base. Harris was once the Chairman of the England Authority. In fact, he still lists himself as Chairman on his official biography.
Remember how Harris recommended cutting $37.7 million in capital outlay? Well, he also recommended adding $10.8 million for the acquisition and development of property across the highway from his house, on behalf of the England Authority.
Gov. Edwards quietly vetoed Harris’s request, and he was absolutely right in doing so.
England Air Park is a jewel of Alexandria. It is immaculately landscaped. It features an award-winning golf course, a beautiful airport, the region’s best senior-living community, and an incredible office park.
Unfortunately, though, none of this is a part of Alexandria.
It should be.
Instead, it’s run by an appointed board of unelected commissioners, and although they have done a spectacular job, the England Authority should have been dissolved years ago.
During the last two decades, more than a hundred million dollars have been invested into England Air Park, public dollars, yet these investments have done almost nothing to increase the tax base of the municipality it serves. In fact, in some instances, the England Authority has directly competed against the City of Alexandria for state funding and business development initiatives.
Tyler Bridges of The Advocate (a hire that proves Georges and Kovacs aren’t always wrong) noticed that Edwards had vetoed the $10.8 million request for the England Authority, money they sought not merely to improve their existing infrastructure but to actually expand the domain of their unelected fiefdom, and he put the question directly to Harris, who refused to answer.
Bridges understandably wondered whether Edwards’ veto was motivated by political retribution.
No, it wasn’t. It was smart policy. I’ve written about this before. Most notably, in January of 2014, in a column titled “Louisiana Should Dissolve The England Authority.”
It would be absolute lunacy to give the England Authority another dime in state funding before it becomes a part of the tax base. No American citizen should live in a community in which they are represented by an unelected authority of commissioners. Make a deal with the federal government. An artful deal.
That’s how I would do it as if this was my business. 
Obviously, it was designed by a master graphic designer whose colleagues describe his style as “cluttered” and “wordy.” The shirt comes exclusively in royal blue; its front features our logo in yellow, and the back features our masthead and our slogan, “Nevertheless, we will progress,” in enormous, blaring, and tenacious lettering (we also included a reminder that, yes, it is our service mark). Sandwiched in between the masthead and the slogan is the line “Non-profit journalism for Louisiana, the land and its people,” an homage to the publisher’s great aunts, Manie Culbertson and Dr. Sue Eakin, who co-wrote the definitive textbook on state history, Louisiana: The Land and Its People. Eakin, who is best known for spending her entire adult life rescuing Solomon Northup’s book 12 Years A Slave, died only two years before the Oscar-winning film adaptation was released and is buried near Cheneyville, Louisiana under a headstone reading, “Sue Eakin loved Louisiana, the land and its people.”
So, yes, the back of the t-shirt is wordy and perhaps a little cluttered, but as we have made clear from the very beginning, The Bayou Brief champions long-form journalism (and t-shirts).
Here is the coffee mug. It was designed by an up-and-coming graphic designer who is already demonstrating tremendous promise.
It really is a fantastic mug; the detailing is all etched.
Neither of these items will be for sale. They are each exclusively available to recurring sponsors.
So act now, because, seriously, supplies are, in fact, very limited.
In case you missed it, here’s the link to become a sustaining sponsor.
* By “chance to win a luxury cruise,” we mean that we will lend our editorial expertise to one randomly-selected sponsor if they ever require assistance with the online application to become a contestant on the show “Wheel of Fortune.”
PS: For those of you familiar with the True Story of the CenLamar Tote Bag Fiasco, rest assured, neither these mugs nor these t-shirts will be inexplicably stolen prior to delivery. They will be kept in an undisclosed, heavily-fortified location.