This week, the director of the Travis Hill School inside of New Orleans’ jail, Christy Sampson Kelly, was arrested for an allegedly inappropriate relationship with an 18-year-old imprisoned man. Evidence supposedly included over 700 recorded phone calls of a sexual nature, and Kelly depositing hundreds of dollars in the young man’s account.
I worked under “Miss Christy,” as we called her, for almost two months in summer 2019 at Travis Hill. And though I can’t say I knew her, definitely not enough to defend her, I find this news unbelievable. It’s tough to imagine anyone crossing that dangerously stupid line, much less Miss Christy.
Travis Hill School, a charter run by the non-profit Center for Educational Excellence in Alternative Settings since 2016, remains a beautiful example of the way America should handle young people, or really any people, who’ve broken serious laws: At the jail, recently renamed the Orleans Justice Center (OJC), any imprisoned person 21 years old or younger is forced to attend high school, with the goal of earning not a GED but a real diploma.
At last summer’s end, I watched two students walk across the stage in their cap-n-gowns.
Named after a New Orleans musician who spent time in jail as a youth before becoming a beloved local trumpet player and bandleader, Travis Hill is one of very few in-prison schools in incarceration-addicted America.
The school provides a rare opportunity for men to leave jail a little “better” than they came in–when usually jails manufacture only sociopathy. Until all jails are bulldozed and replaced by a better system, at least Travis Hill School exists.
These young men have plenty of time for school, since most will wait in purgatory at OJC for literally years before a judge finally decides to either set them free, or bus them to Angola to serve a long bid. One of my students received a 25 year sentence and all he had to say about it to me the day before he left was, “At least Angola got a real exercise yard.” (OJC, a “temporary” holding facility, does not).
Every day at school, some imprisoned student would tell me, “I’m going to trial today! You won’t see me anymore!” I’d congratulate him, and then next day have him back in class, catatonic with angry despair.
Working in such an environment, for me, at least that first time, often felt impossible–while Miss Christy not only made her difficult job look easy, she seemed to me the righteous leader of a righteous cause. The imprisoned students came to us each day, their wrists and ankles shackled, and Miss Christy made them feel cared about, and human, and like they did in fact have futures. She treated those students, some of them accused of truly heinous crimes, like regular kids at a regular school. She showed them the type of real respect and compassion that only the best teachers are able to sustain.
Or, she seemed to.
I admit that when I first walked into Travis Hill and met Miss Christy, I wondered why the jail would hire an attractive woman to work among imprisoned men. Of course, that’s a sexist thought, and whoever can do the job best should work the job. And she seemed to be the best. But during my music class, the students told me many times that being kept away from women was the worst part of their punishment. Jails divide inmates up based on their sex, so it seemed as if, to keep the peace, they would also hire men to work with men.
By that same token, posting female jail guards, some of them quite small, at Travis Hill, did not seem to me like a good idea either, at first. But I soon realized that female guards had the potential to break through the imprisoned men’s toxic masculinity–whereas the male guards and teachers might just enflame it. I watched female jail guards shout curses in stubborn student’s faces, and in some cases slap the young men upside their heads very hard. To which the men would just laugh, “OK, OK Miss Lady, damn…” and then do what they were told. Whereas a male guard’s similar behavior might cause a riot.
Similarly, when any student threatened me or otherwise acted up, Miss Christy would pull them into the narrow hallway and pour on the kindness, and put them back on track. When my entire class’s pitch would rise and the mood felt truly volatile, she and Travis Hill’s other bosses would swoop in and call a “circle.” Just her presence seemed to calm the students, who would begin dragging chairs around the room to form a circle, wherein Miss Christy would lead them in discussing their gripes and feelings. Miss Christy’s circles always ended better than they began.
And so, it’s hard for me to imagine her creating chaos. And impossible to picture her being so dumb, breaking Rule Number One.
My mind wants to believe she simply fell into a bad situation; any teacher at any school puts themselves in a vulnerable position. The wrong small mistake, for any teacher, can easily unravel into a big problem. The jail especially, is full of landmines.
Some of the training sessions that Miss Christy helped lead centered on recognizing the manipulation tactics the imprisoned men might try to run on us jail employees. “First they talk you into passing a harmless note to a family member,” another of my Travis Hill bosses chuckled during those trainings, “and the next thing you know you’re smuggling pills in your ass for them, and you don’t even know how you got there.”
In our mandatory Title IX sexual harassment training, we learned that sex with an imprisoned person is always considered rape, because an imprisoned person cannot consent. An imprisoned man can beg and persuade a female guard for years, and if she ever gives in she is a rapist.
Still, we also learned in that training that, in the adult sections of the jail, sex between guards and the imprisoned represents a mini-epidemic. No one in the class could believe it. ‘How could anyone be so dumb?’ we new hires all wondered amongst ourselves.
And now a year later, I’m left wondering not How could anyone be so dumb?, but, How could the smartest person be so dumb? How could our righteous leader not only break Rule Number One, but bring shame upon the amazing Travis Hill School? How could she work in the jail every day, watching all that misery, and ever risk ending up inside?
I am not defending Miss Christy. It’s just, imagining our former leader wearing the same wrist and ankle handcuffs that our students wore brings but one word to my mind: Unfuckingbelievable.
Featured image: Travis Hill School’s other campus at the New Orleans Youth Study Center, which specifically works with students who have “experienced school failure” (typically due to repeated absences, suspensions, or expulsions). The school’s main campus is located inside of the Orleans Justice Center, the parish jail.
“The only excursion of my life outside of New Orleans took me through the vortex to the whirlpool of despair: Baton Rouge.”
Red Stick Forward, a new political action committee opposing the reelection of Baton Rouge Mayor-President Sharon Weston Broome, a Democrat, recently launched a TV commercial that would have surely been appreciated by Ignatius J. Reilly. The ad presents Louisiana’s capital as a city under siege, but not by the devastating pandemic that has claimed more than 510 lives and infected nearly 20,000 residents in East Baton Rouge Parish.
“Our city is not safe,” the narrator declares in a generically Midwestern dialect. Baton Rouge, viewers soon learn, is now paralyzed by the fear of getting murdered. A whirlpool of despair.
As it turns out, Red Stick Forward is primarily funded by the spouse of Weston Broome’s Republican challenger, according to documents filed with the Louisiana Ethics Administration, the Louisiana Secretary of State, and the Texas Secretary of State.
Gloria Solomon Carter and at least two limited liability companies associated with her have donated a total of $105,000 to Red Stick Forward, including a $30,000 donation that seeded the PAC on Oct. 8. Her husband, former state Rep. Steve Carter, will square off against Weston Broome in the Dec. 5 runoff. Weston Broome fell only 4,000 votes short of an outright victory on Nov. 3, capturing 48% of the vote. Carter, who lost a bid for the state Senate last year, received 23% of the vote in the primary.
All told, Gloria Solomon Carter and family-held LLCs have provided Red Stick Forward with more than 60% of its total funding. There is at least one indication that Ms. Carter and the PAC’s director, Kyle Ruckert, recognized the need to obscure her role in funding the operation: In addition to utilizing two out-of-state LLCs controlled by Ms. Carter and members of her family, she also personally donated $15,000. However, the PAC lists her contribution under the name “Gloria Solomon,” her maiden name, despite the fact that her legal surname has been Carter for more than 40 years. (She also donated to her husband’s campaign, under the name “Gloria Carter”).
State campaign finance law prohibits contributions by anonymous donors as well as contributions given under someone else’s name, and while the law is silent on contributions listed under a person’s maiden name, the decision to list Ms. Carter as Ms. Solomon instead appears to have been undertaken in a deliberate effort to obfuscate the connections between the candidate Carter and the “independent PAC” supporting him.
A day before the Nov. 3 election, an article in conservative-leaning Baton Rouge Business Report briefly mentioned that Red Stick Forward had received a $30,000 contribution from LUBU Productions LLC and noted that Gloria Solomon Carter was listed as a member of Six G’s LLC, one of the two entities named as officers of LUBU Productions. Gloria is one of the late movie theater titan and philanthropist Teddy Solomon’s six children: George, Gloria, Gladys, Glenda, Gary, and Glenn; hence, the “six G’s.”
If this seems somewhat convoluted, that’s not by accident.
The other two leading contributors are Eddie Rispone, the Baton Rouge Republican and electrical contracting magnate who spent more than $14 million of his personal fortune on an unsuccessful campaign for governor in 2019, and another mega-wealthy contracting tycoon Art Favre. Conspicuously absent from the PAC’s reports is Lane Grigsby, the most profligate political donor of the trio that the Bayou Brief’s Sue Lincoln dubbed “the Erector Set.” Last year, when it had briefly appeared as if Carter would be headed toward a rare three-person runoff election for a seat in the state Senate (a preliminary count showed Carter tied in second place with fellow Republican Franklin Foil, while Democrat Beverly Brooks-Thompson finished solidly ahead of both men), Grigsby became the subject of considerable controversy when it was revealed that he had attempted to essentially bribe Foil to drop out of the race in exchange for Grigsby’s pledge to financially support him in a future election. A recount subsequently determined that Carter had finished four votes behind Foil, who went onto win in the runoff.
****
Louisiana law does not affirmatively prohibit a candidate’s spouse— or, for that matter, the candidate himself— from contributing to an independent political action committee, and thanks to a 2014 court decision, you can give a PAC as much money as you want.
This all sounds pretty clever, right?
Red Stick Forward seems to have figured out a way to take unlimited amounts of money to support Steve Carter’s candidacy, including more than a hundred thousand bucks from Carter’s wife.
The PAC can hide behind a generic name, an out-of-town mailing address, and the simple recitation of the standard language about its “independence” to protect the people actually running and funding the operation from public scrutiny, and meanwhile, whenever the PAC levels an attack against one of Carter’s opponents, Steve Carter can say, “That didn’t come from my campaign. I had nothing to do with that!”
We all know that American campaign finance laws are pathetically broken, but you may be thinking, “Who do they think they’re fooling? It’s brazenly obvious that this PAC is really just an extension of Carter’s campaign. Is this really legal?”
The answer to that question hinges on the answer to another one: Is there any reason to believe Red Stick Forward is what it claims to be?
Officially, Red Stick Forward says it was established to support multiple candidates, but on the PAC’s website, it also makes clear that it is exclusively targeting the race for East Baton Rouge Mayor-President.
Source: https://www.redstickforward.com/about
So, we are led to believe that Red Stick Forward seeks to promote multiple “candidates” for an office that only one person can win. Well, aside from merely reciting this as its mission, is there any evidence that it’s actually doing what it claims?
During the primary, the PAC sent out a direct mailer criticizing Republican Matt Watson, who polling indicated would be Carter’s most significant intraparty opponent. Watson, who would finish in third, had actually attempted to alert the public about Gloria Solomon Carter’s contributions to Red Stick Forward in a series of posts on his campaign Facebook account. After the election, however, he nonetheless endorsed Carter’s candidacy. Regardless, though, the PAC’s decision to oppose Watson was done in order to increase support for Carter, much like its recent ad opposing Weston Broome is intended to benefit her opponent.
There are two other critical pieces of evidence that indicate Red Stick Forward was created not to support multiple candidates but to specifically support only one: Steve Carter.
Remember that $30,000 contribution from LUBU Productions LLC, the company owned by Gloria Solomon Carter and her siblings? That donation was given on the same exact day Red Stick Forward officially registered as a political action committee; it was its very first contribution.
And did you notice this address in Prairieville, Louisiana at the bottom of its ad?
It’s actually the home address of Amanda Guidry Maloy of the firm Burland & Maloy. Amanda specializes in helping candidates and PACs with reporting and compliance issues. Not only did she provide her services to Red Stick Forward through her consultancy, the Guidry Maloy Group:
Source: Louisiana Ethics Administration
But in what must seem like an amazing coincidence, she also worked for Steve Carter’s campaign at the same time:
Put another way, the person whose home address is used in the “PAID FOR” disclaimer at the bottom of Red Stick Forward’s commercial just so happens to also be a paid consultant of the Carter campaign. In fact, she has made nearly ten times more from Carter’s campaign than from the PAC with her address on it.
This certainly appears to be strong circumstantial evidence that Red Stick Forward is really just a —what’s the word?— a subsidiary of the Carter campaign, and lo and behold, Louisiana law actually anticipates an arrangement just like this. See La. R.S. 18:1491.3, specifically paragraphs C and D:
click to zoom
I will leave it to others to determine whether or not Red Stick Forward should be classified as a subsidiary committee of Carter’s campaign, but from my vantage, the answer seems obvious.
****
Finally, it deserves asking: Is Red Stick Forward’s commercial opposing Sharon Weston Broome truthful? The ad makes two central points—that there have been more violent crimes and homicides than ever before and that thousands of people and businesses are leaving— and both of those points are presented as statements of facts, with references to an objective source where, presumably, one will find the underlying data.
Believe it or not, this is from the report the PAC cites when making the claim about thousands of people leaving:
With respect to the claim about crime, it’s true that this year there have been a record number of homicides in East Baton Rouge Parish, but it is also true that overall crime is down. Homicides include any death caused by another person, whether justified or not, and criminologists and sociologists attribute this year’s spike to domestic and economic upheavals caused by the coronavirus pandemic; similarly, a spike in early 2017 was largely believed to be correlated to displacements caused by the devastating floods the previous year.
Importantly, historically, crime reporting can be notoriously unreliable, but regardless, the notion that the past four years have been the worst in the city’s history is especially dubious considering Baton Rouge’s long record of systemic discrimination against and mistreatment of Black residents. Like it or not, the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the Jim Crow era are indeed part of the city’s history.
Red Stick Forward claims its data comes directly from the East Baton Rouge Coroner’s Office, and helpfully, they also include a website address where, presumably, one can find the source material.
But the Coroner’s Office does not and has not published any data or assertions on the parish’s “homicide rate.” I asked the Coroner’s Office if the PAC’s claims and their attribution were accurate. Shane Evans, the office’s Chief of Investigations, told me that their “news” website only includes a running count of the total number of homicides (in other words, not a “rate”), noting that the page would be updated soon to include “a few more homicides” that have occurred this year.
“We have not been specifically contacted by, nor have we commented to any PAC involved in the mayoral campaign on any topic,” Evans wrote.
On Nov. 5, Le Petit Théâtre du Vieux Carré broadcast online a live performance of poetry, which was originally curated by Arna Bontemps, a prominent Harlem Renaissance writer and a native of Alexandria, Louisiana, in his 1954 spoken word album An Anthology of Negro Poets. Bontemps’ collection was adapted for the stage by director Kenna Moore of New Orleans.
Thomas Edison is said to have conducted over 6,000 unsuccessful experiments before landing on the material most optimally suited as filament in what would become the incandescent electric lightbulb. By contrast, it took Kenna J. Moore, associate artistic director of Le Petit Théâtre du Vieux Carré, and her honor roll of ingenious collaborators, exactly one try to rekindle the lights of live theatre during the COVID-19 pandemic with a formal innovation described by her as a “theatre/cinema hybrid.”
Inside Le Petit, the historic playhouse that’s been a mainstay of live theatre in New Orleans since 1922, two Ninja-like cameramen trail five actors on the stage, into the pit, the house, up and down the stairwells, to the Romeo and Juliet balcony and the alleyway leading to the street. The spatial exploration reminds us, if we’ve forgotten, that the theatre, however we can access it, is vital for our communion with the essential human work of the dramatic arts.
Because of the show’s witty pleasures and skillful performances, our longing to return to the bricks and mortar theatre becomes intertwined with another longing— that the truths of Black experience be waiting for us whenever we do get back inside.
A half hour in duration, this show begins with a youthful Langston Hughes hovering over a turntable, languidly spinning a jazz fanfare in a shadowy upstage corner of the proscenium, placing and lifting the stylus on the vinyl, starting the trumpets and silencing them to allow the words of his poem to take up where the music leaves off.
He recites The Negro Speaks of Rivers into a standing microphone with a shock mount attachment, giving voice to “Negro poetry” as a bold speech act. As he orates, thinking and smiling as the words form on his lips, this lover of wordsmithery seductively invites us to wade and float into this material, to let it lift and carry us.
LeBaron Thorton as Sterling Brown
Constance Thompson as Gwendolyn Brooks
Tommye Meyrick as Margaret Walker
Brooks approaching Walker in the Le Petit alley
The set brightens from sienna and ochre earth tones to the amber of crystallized fossils containing ancient DNA, which in the instance of the poem, holds the memory of the watery transfer of Black bodies from the African continent to the diaspora, and specifically to New Orleans. Our journey has begun at the beginning and landed us where we actually are.
The adaptation for the digital moment was dictated by the necessity of a still advancing pandemic,* which has been so tragically lethal to Louisiana’s Black communities. Offered as medicine for healing, Moore’s hybrid delivers much of the experience, excitement and unpredictability of live performance, but with the enhanced visual intimacy and framing made possible by cinema.
She says she was inspired by Birdman, a film by Alejandro G. Iñárritu, in which cameras follow Michael Keaton around a theatre where he’s rehearsing a farce that becomes a fiasco. Earlier in the season, Goat in the Road Productions presented The Uninvited, an immersive theatrical experience in which audience members followed the actors in and around the historic Gallier house, located not far from Le Petit. In that experimental production we were both the camera and camera operator, directing our own participation, entrusted with the exercise of our own autonomy to define our vantage point and level of engagement: A rare and liberating experience in a theatre or any public space for that matter.
Lit with densely saturated jewel-toned color designed by director of photography Nick Shamblott, and undergirded by an original soundscape composed by Ghazi Gamali–by turns exuberant and hauntingly unsettling–Moore’s staging of the Anthology channels the intellectual prowess of revered and beloved writers in the Black literary pantheon, five urbane poets of the Chicago and Harlem Renaissances.
Langston Hughes (born Feb. 1, 1902?, Joplin, Missouri—died in New York City, May 22, 1967)
Claude McKay (born Sep. 15, 1889, Nairne Castle, Jamaica, British West Indies—died in Chicago, May 22, 1948)
Sterling Brown (born May 1, 1901, Washington, D.C.—died Jan. 13, 1989, Takoma Park, MD)
Gwendolyn Brooks, the first African American to win a Pulitzer Prize for Literature in 1950 (born June 7, 1917, Topeka, Kan.—died in Chicago, Dec. 3, 2000), and
Margaret Walker (born July 7, 1915, Birmingham, AL, U.S.—died in Chicago, Nov. 30, 1998)
The production also structures their work in a narrative theatrical expedition, both supple and open-ended, which as it progresses becomes a dialectic getting at the relationships between metaphor, motion and movement building as Black American history continues to be uncovered and freed from white nationalist mythologies. It’s an urgent project.
People die in these poems, lives are lost; we’re told of a British soldier who falls on the Russian front in 1944 with one of Claude McKay’s poems in his uniform’s pocket. On his knees, in a Jamaican lilt, McKay reads:
If we must die, let it not be like hogs
Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,
While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,
Making their mock at our accursèd lot.
If we must die, O let us nobly die,
Breaking down, he tears up the poem and collapses in grief for his lost reader and for a human race so easily programmed toward its own destruction. Moore says she understood actor Renaldo McClinton’s bold choice as McKay repudiating a “success” he would rather not have had. It is an emotional climax of the play.
Arna Bontemps. Image credit: Bayou Brief
Moore luckily found Arna Bontemps’ 1954 album of curated recordings made during the 1930s, 40s and 50s, a Smithsonian Folkways release, at an estate sale in Uptown New Orleans. It’s hard to resist an almost metaphysical sentiment that the treasure was waiting for her, that the record itself wished to exert its agency in order to go home with this very filmmaker: an LSU graduate with a degree in theatre, who holds a coveted artistic leadership role in one of the South’s most distinguished professional theatres, and who also brings to this work a keen and unapologetic sensibility in matters of racial justice.
Arna Bontemps’ childhood home in downtown Alexandria, Louisiana now operates as a museum dedicated to the late Harlem Renaissance writer..
Bontemps, who was himself a poet from Alexandria, Louisiana turned Harlem librarian, writes in his instructive liner notes that the poems seemed to him “written for the ear rather than the eye.”
The poems function theatrically like monologues in a pared down play that we ourselves can supplement and embellish in our imaginations. In mine, The Anthology of Negro Poets became in part a play about an irrepressible theatre in the French Quarter, too long shuttered by a pandemic, where past productions echo, reverberate and inform each other, like it or not. Where we’re in the presence of an augmented reality in which our attention is the only technology required to trip the invisible waves and activate other less obvious dimensions that become newly apparent and accessible.
Though Sterling Brown’s character is the only one about to board a train with a loosened necktie and an open bottle of hooch, Tierra Patterson’s beautifully tailored period costumes suggest comfort, ease and freedom of movement, suitable for travel between states but also states of mind—curiosity, transgression, accursedness. Thoughtful attention to sartorial details is rewarded with potential clues to the characters’ psychology, motivations and preoccupations: Was a beige beret for Brooks a nod to the self-described Chicago housewife’s desire to discover the European capitals or bohemian lifestyles in the world beyond her front porch? Were the suspenders for Hughes meant to draw attention to the broad shoulders on which contemporary poets like Carl Williams and Jericho Brown so stolidly stand? Were the wide cuffs on McKay’s trousers a visual pun commenting on how his poems in particular fold us back into memory, while cuffing to puncture a prevalent willful blindness to Black experience?
The kind of obliviousness that affords a white arsonist in Landry Parish a privilege of deep ignorance so profound that he can burn three Black churches and absurdly assert he did it because they were made of wood, and not because they were houses of worship for Black Lousianians?
Justin William Davis as Langston Hughes
The poems are from two generations ago; their work to verbally crystallize and cauterize the many wounds not yet allowed to heal is clearly not complete. Their creators were closer to the historical experience of the Jim Crow South, the Great Black Migration to the North, and the precursory beginnings throughout American cultural discourse that Black is indeed beautiful, an irrefutable aesthetic fact furthered by the production of this remarkable show by Black makers.
Moore makes us aware, in a video montage that begins after the first stanza of the final poem, Walker’s For My People, of the ways in which the atrocities and triumphs of the past have shaped the current context of the Floyd rebellion and the unstoppable movement for Black lives. The klieg lights fade to dark on a powerful stage picture of all five poets standing together (proximate, but safely at a distance) as Walker unveils her face as well as her innermost self to declaim her secular prayer, which ends:
…Let a second generation full of courage issue forth; let a people loving freedom come to growth. Let a beauty full of healing and a strength of final clenching be the pulsing in our spirits and our blood. Let the martial songs be written, let the dirges disappear. Let a race of men now rise and take control.
If you missed the live broadcast of the show on Nov. 5th, tickets to screen the video recording are still available at the theatre’s website.
The honor roll:
CAST
Justin William Davis as Langston Hughes
Renaldo McClinton as Claude McKay
Tommye Myrick as Margaret Walker
Constance Thompson as Gwendolyn Brooks
LeBaron Thorton as Sterling A. Brown
CREATIVE TEAM
Original Curation by Arna Bontemps
Directed by Kenna J. Moore
Production Manager: James Lanius III
Stage Manager: Kit Sternberger
Director of Photography: Nick Shamblott
Camera Operator: Zuri Obie
Sound and Video Design: Ghazi Gamali
Props and Costumes: Tiera Patterson
*A COVID officer monitored the health and safety of the participants over the three day rehearsal period ensuring that no theater artists, essential workers to a one, were harmed in the show’s making.
Images from the production courtesy of Le Petit Theater
In Part One of our “Best of the Fest” film picks for the 31st New Orleans Film Festival, I chose four of what I believe were must-see selections, whether they’re seen in-person or online. For this follow-up, we have an interesting combination of scenarios.
On one hand, we have reached the point of the festival where all outdoor screenings have ended. On the other, award winners have been chosen by juries in various categories. So yes, if you plan on watching any of these movies, now is the time, and now has to be virtual.
And so, the following brief covers four winning films that come highly recommended.
You may not be able to count on Father Time being in your favor, but we can always count on the movies:
Umbilical, winner of the Helen Hill Award for Animation
Directed by Danski Tang
In the scribbled down notes from watching the cartoon short Umbilical, this critic had written “imaginative animation.” In retrospect, this film is more “animated imagination.”
It’s a combination of emotional memory and laid bare abstract interpretations of hard truth, layered on top of a calming if forward conversation between a Chinese mother and her daughter. That talking element alone couldn’t be considered “cut & dry” by anyone, as even it breathes as a form of life unbound by the confines of its medium.
This paternal talk between generations goes from tragic revelations to shared love in split seconds, bouncing back and forth as easily as the animation melts and morphs into one another. We witness the equivalent of brain synapses firing to visualize what’s being said, interpreting the information as quickly as possible and from what experiences either woman has undergone. These perspectives shift around too, depending on who is listening and who is talking. It’s stunning, if a bit confusing. This confusion however feels built in, making the multiple memories that are shown and the connection of mother and daughter much stronger on an emotional level.
By no means is this easy to watch, but the journey is absolutely rewarding. There’s sadness spoken in friendly tones, but also strength in their own hindsight and in their mutual confrontations with societal darkness. Pregnancies out of wedlock, sexual orientation, and just “being different” may be taboo in some cultures, but from generation to generation, they’re learned as being completely natural. Umbilical feels totally natural, no matter how deep the women get with each other and within their minds. Clever colors and complete honesty make this short a class act.
Pillars, winner of the Best Cinematography for a Louisiana Short Film Award
Directed by Haley Elizabeth Anderson
Returning to cultural taboos, Pillars is a tale of innocence clashing with harshness in as profound a manner as can be described. To take away the joy of youth and the wonder of natural discovery is all too horrid of a person to do, especially a father to his daughter.
We see a young teen girl and her interactions with her parents as being pleasant and average. Her father plays practice boxing with her in a rather playful and safe way, while the mother is loving if stern. A trip to church proves the dismantling of this family dynamic, when a very innocent practice kiss in a bathroom stall is found out by the father, who responds with sad shock and dismissive anger. It may have been at church when this harmless incident happened, but why make her feel such guilt? Such shame? What does this accomplish?
Pillars reaches such great heights when the daughter attempts to play with her father again, only to go through a traumatic physical confrontation that slowly burns and escalates with grand rising tension. A pillar of fire forms, one that may never burn out.
The use of light and intimacy in the cinematography is especially impressive, making something as simple as a kiss and something as emotionally big as a fight all the more internally felt and realized. Pillars is a true tour de force and ought to be appreciated by all who come across it.
In Sudden Darkness, winner of the Best Short Feature Award
Directed by Tayler Montague
If there’s one thing about In Sudden Darkness that can be stated, it’s how the title belies its story. Images of bleak horror hit our minds when this is read, but when the film plays and unfolds, we understand how it’s truly meant. The movie takes place in the Bronx, circa the widespread blackout in 2003. It’s hot, it’s uncomfortable, it’s dark.
We follow a small family unit from the perspective of their young daughter, who sees things in simple tones and from simple angles. Her parents will argue at the flip of a switch (no pun intended), and usually over something as quotidian as groceries. Of course, food is not really what they’re getting fired up about, and to a kid, this is very much understood. Nothing is minced. Somehow though, another switch will flip, and the parents change their language and feelings a bit, lightening the mood greatly.
We get shots throughout that too are pretty simple, but more special than average. Sometimes it’s static, unfolding in one take. Sometimes it moves down a dark sidewalk. It’s always as if from the mental processing of the little girl, who in turn sees things as they are to how they feel, from conversations to chaos to care.
In Sudden Darkness ends on a wonderfully positive and inspiring note, but with an asterisk that every new day carries new possibilities, from good to bad. It appears oh so effortlessly, how this film conveys such a scope in a small-sized package. It’d be nice to use the saying of “the eyes were bigger than the stomach” here in a more eloquent and appropriate way, and without the suggestion of filling up too fast, but let’s leave that up to y’all.
Inspector Ike, winner of the Best Narrative Feature Award
Directed by Graham Mason
Probably the cutest and most fun film of 2020 (though we still have another month to go), Inspector Ike is an instant classic of spoofs and goofs, taking the 1970’s TV Movie of the Week concept and using it to stylistic ends in a not so mysterious mystery of tomfoolery and oddball shenanigans. To make it all the more excellent, this is a film of true blue craftsmen and performers, who all know their roles, how the roles fit with one another, and how to deliver the funny in droves.
An “avant garde” theatre troupe in New York has suffered a tragic loss at the hands of fate, or so it seems. Inspector Ike, who makes a point of raising a glass of champagne for every arrest he makes and every case he cracks, is called in to find out what happened to the troupe’s lead thespian, why, and maybe who. From the get-go, Inspector Ike reveals itself to not be our modern understanding of a spoof, as obliterated with awfulness by the likes of Epic Movie. Nor is this really anything like Airplane!. It’s a comedy for the post-Adult Swim/current No Budge crowd, those who enjoy great filmmaking of weirdness, as made by weirdos. It’s a film of awkwardness and oddities that isn’t afraid to take bold chances, whether it’s breaking the narrative for a Chili recipe course or a mundane and coy explanation of date night plans.
Inspector Ike, through sincerity and earnestness and conviction, makes even the most unusual and foreign of behaviors and responses to be universally hilarious. It’s a blast of pure cheeriness that’ll cause a smile on the face of any downbeat party-pooper around, and it can’t be recommended nearly enough.
In A Portrait of Louisiana 2020, social scientists define and measure the state’s “human development index.” Their findings provide a blueprint for ensuring a more equitable future.
In the late 1970s, when the federal government began considering where exactly to construct the final original stretch of Interstate 49 in Central Louisiana, it first had to answer a daunting question: Should the highway loop around the city of Alexandria and be built on cheap farmland 15 miles outside of town? Or should it instead cut directly through the city’s downtown, the option favored by the mayor and the Chamber of Commerce crowd?
On May 1, 1980, officials announced their decision. 16 years later, when the ribbon was finally cut on a 16.6-mile section of I-49 named after Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., taxpayers had spent more than $44 million to build the single mile that was expected to result in the revitalization of Alexandria’s sleepy downtown.
The working theory, put simply, was If you build it, they will come.
Today, 40 years after that fateful decision, people are finally showing up again (at least they were, before the pandemic), but whether that’s because of the interstate or in spite of it remains a matter of dispute. Like many American cities at the time, Alexandria spent its own capital to prop up suburban sprawl and predominately white, ticky-tacky neighborhoods.
During the past four decades, the city more than tripled in geographic size despite its population remaining essentially the same. Meanwhile, the federal government bulldozed through majority-Black neighborhoods to make way for the interstate. By one estimate, the city lost nearly 90% of its historic inner-core as a consequence.
That said, it could have been worse: Alexandria could have easily repeated the mistakes made 110 miles north, in Shreveport, where I-49 created an impenetrable and permanent barrier, a living monument to segregation. But because of the stubborn insistence of Union Pacific, unlike what occurred in Shreveport, the federal government reluctantly agreed to construct a series of underpasses in Alexandria, which didn’t necessarily make things better, only less bad.
Aerial of Downtown Alexandria, La. and I-49 on the day the new interstate officially opened with the completion of the Jackson Street Underpass, Aug. 31, 1995. Credit: The Town Talk, transformed: Bayou Brief.
In the 187-page report A Portrait of Louisiana 2020: Human Development in An Age of Uncertainty, Kristen Lewis and her colleagues at the Social Science Research Council, an independent nonprofit organization, highlight the construction of I-49 through Shreveport to illustrate the ways in which public policy can result in vast inequities, even between people who live directly across the street from one another.
The section on Shreveport is titled after the Charles Dickens classic “A Tale of Two Cities,” but in fairness to Shreveport, the full report makes it abundantly clear that this is really a tale of two Louisianas.
Read the full report here.
A Portrait of Louisiana 2020, which was published only a few days before this year’s election, is a part of the SSRC’s Measure of America program, made possible with funding from the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation and J.P. Morgan Chase. This year’s report is actually a follow-up to a similar study about Louisiana from 2009. (Measure of America has also published a pair of national reports as well as two reports on California and another about Mississippi). There’s a lot to unpack, but first, it’s important to understand what makes its methodology different.
“(The report) uses the human development approach and the American Human Development Index (HDI) to explore well-being and access to opportunity among different groups of Louisianans,” Measure of America explains on its website. “It examines a range of critical issues, including health, education, living standards, incarceration, youth disconnection, residential segregation, and inequality. And it makes recommendations about how to expand people’s opportunities, build greater human security, and help communities recover from the Covid-19 pandemic.”
The underlying premise is simple: Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is an imprecise and unreliable metric in defining a community’s health, well-being, and educational and economic opportunities; it can be especially misleading when making comparisons. Even though this seems obvious—the enormous income inequality gap in the United States means that a state like Louisiana can be both a rich state and a poor state— our conception of “quality of life” is too often informed almost exclusively by GDP. HDI measures “three fundamental human development dimensions: a long and heathy life, access to knowledge, and a decent standard of living.”
Money is a factor, but it’s not the only factor.
Louisiana has made some gains since the previous study in 2009, improving from a score of 3.92 out of 10 on the HDI to 4.35, which is largely due to improvements in educational attainment.
Courtesy: Measure of America
11 years ago, one out of every five adults in Louisiana lacked a high school diploma or GED; today, the number is closer to one out of seven. Preschool enrollment in Louisiana is above the national average, and notably, Black children are more likely to be enrolled than white children, which the study attributes to the success of “Head Start and other publicly funded preschool programs in low-income Black communities.”
Importantly, however, Louisiana’s HDI score is still a full point under the national average. There are a few reasons: The state lags behind the rest of the nation in its share of adults who have attained a bachelor’s degree (24.3% in Louisiana, 32.6% nationwide). Women in Louisiana earn an average of $16,000 less than their male counterparts and $5,000 less than the national average, despite the fact that their “Education Index” score is higher than men. After briefly relinquishing the title to Oklahoma, Louisiana is now once again the prison capital of the world. Put another way, Louisiana incarcerates more of its residents per capita than anywhere else on the planet. Louisiana also has the fourth-highest “youth disconnection” rate in the country; the rate approximates the proportion of those between the ages of 16 to 24 who are neither enrolled in school or otherwise employed in a full-time job. Access to health care, particularly mental health, is woefully deficient.
The study’s key findings are unlikely to be surprising to most Louisianians, though it is instructive to know with some degree of specificity how the state compares with the rest of the nation. (Not good).
That said, the most significant and insightful portions of A Portrait of Louisiana 2020 concern the historical and policy underpinnings of the gaps between Blacks and whites, which brings us back to the construction of I-49.
A Portrait of Louisiana 2020 mentions the development of Shreveport and the way the city is bisected by I-49 to underscore the staggering differences between two historic neighborhoods, the majority Black Caddo Heights neighborhood on the west side of the interstate and the majority white South Highlands on the east.
“South Highlands has a life expectancy of 83 years, 72.3 percent of adults have a bachelor’s degree, and the typical worker makes $60,980. Over 85 percent of residents are white,” Lewis writes. “Across the highway in Caddo Heights, the average life expectancy is 70.5 years, 7.8 percent of adults have a bachelor’s degree, and median personal earnings are just $16,853. Over 90 percent of residents are Black.”
Used with permission of Measure of America.
The only way to “cross between these two neighborhoods,” the study explains, “(is) on roads marking their northern and southern edges, about two miles apart.”
The construction of the interstate in Shreveport in the 1980s only explains part of the story. After all, as Shreveporters know, I-49 largely traced the existing footprint of the railroad lines, as it did in Alexandria as well.
There’s another insidious reason for the vast differences in quality of life between Caddo Heights and South Highlands.
“These deep disparities,” the report explains, “are a consequence of residential segregation and are often aligned with features of the built environment like Interstate 49.” Residential segregation
“Residential segregation” doesn’t happen by accident. While the term “redlining” didn’t become a part of the lexicon in 1960, it’d already been in practice for decades.
From the passage of the National Housing Act of 1934 until the enactment of the Equal Credit Opportunity Act in 1974, it was a function of federal law and of policies that effectively prevented Black families from securing a home loan insured by the Federal Housing Administration. In 1938, the FHA enshrined the practice in its underwriting manual. “FHA appraisal manuals instructed loan originators to steer clear of areas with ‘inharmonious racial groups and recommended that municipalities enact racially restrictive zoning ordinances as well as covenants running with the land that prohibited Black owners,'” Michael Schill of New York University and Susan Wachter of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania explained in a 2002 report.
The staggering discrepancies in Shreveport were not the consequence of the free market. This didn’t happen organically. It’s the result of decades and decades of disinvestment and neglect in one neighborhood and investment and infrastructure improvements in another, all done at the direction or with the blessing of the government.
Here’s a redlining map of the City of Shreveport shortly before the Second World War (reds and yellows signify “Not Desirable;” greens and blues are “Desirable”).
Redlined map of Shreveport (circa 1935-1949). Used with permission of Measure of America.
This wasn’t inevitable. As Lewis and her team repeatedly emphasize, the state’s woes are all the result of choices, usually by those in positions of power. Whether or not Louisiana acts to fix what’s broken is also a choice.
Shreveport’s tale of two neighborhoods illustrates the connections between multigenerational poverty and a community’s access to capital and political power, and there are similar stories that can be told about cities across the state. Before the government bulldozed through inner cities to make way for the interstate, it codified ways to protect the property interests of whites, while preventing those interests for Black Louisianians. And before there was redlining, there was the horrific injustice and systematic exploitation of slavery.
The lasting legacy of slavery is slightly more difficult to illustrate on a map, but it’s not entirely impossible. Lewis and her team at Measure of America looked at which parishes in Louisiana have the lowest HDI scores and which had the highest per-capita enslaved populations.
The correlations were hard to ignore.
This is a map from 1860 identifying the parishes in black with the highest enslaved populations:
Today, East Carroll Parish’s HDI score ranks at the very bottom among the state’s 64 parishes (well, technically, it ranked 63rd, because the study was unable to obtain enough data on Webster Parish), earning an abysmal 1.49 out of 10. Lake Providence—the tiny town that serves as the seat of East Carroll Parish—was once named “the most unequal place in America” by CNN. Approximately 73% of children in East Carroll Parish live below the poverty line. Its Education Index score, 1.28 out of 10, also ranks dead-last in Louisiana.
“As life expectancy decreases, the poverty rate tends to increase,” Lewis notes. “(The) five parishes with the shortest life expectancies—LaSalle, Caldwell, East Carroll, West Carroll, and Catahoula—all have poverty rates above 20 percent.” Claiborne Parish ranks the lowest in median personal income ($19,470).
I decided to put together a map of the parishes with the lowest HDI scores (in yellow), and while obviously there were fewer parishes in 1860 than there are today, the region of Louisiana that once had the highest enslaved populations just so happens to be the same one identified by A Portrait of Louisiana 2020.
Three weeks ago, I spoke with Lewis about the report, and, among other things, I told her I was somewhat surprised that none of the parishes that comprise the corridor of South Louisiana known as “Cancer Alley” were in the bottom tier. After all, as the 1860 map illustrates, those parishes had similar proportions of people living under slavery, and there’s no question that Cancer Alley continues to struggle with extreme poverty. (To be clear, the report does contain a brief section on Cancer Alley).
What makes the Delta parishes unique?
There are a few reasons, she explained, and they all relate to the methodology used in determining a place’s Human Development Index score. Both regions are plagued by poverty; that’s undeniable. But the Delta parishes in northeast Louisiana are significantly more rural and isolated, and that means its residents have less access to healthcare, fewer educational opportunities, and a much more limited job market.
Although I’ve focused on the report’s findings on systemic racism and the legacy of slavery, that’s just one of many aspects that inform Measure of America’s analysis.
Read the full report here.
Policymakers, elected officials, and social and civil justice advocates should take the time to read the full report. There are also a handful of Republican state legislators in particular who need to be reminded that the checks they receive from the government carry a work requirement. For far too long, the state legislature has been dominated by those who would rather play politics than work on policy. Years from now, no one will remember the names of legislators who cared more about saving high school football than about saving lives.
Quoting from the report’s conclusion:
Every Louisianan deserves an equal chance at a freely chosen life of value. Our findings suggest that for a host of reasons—residential segregation, poverty, health inequities, slavery’s enduring legacy, persisting racial and gender discrimination, among others—many of Louisiana’s residents are deprived of that opportunity. These problems did not arise by chance, nor were they unavoidable—instead, they are the result of the choices people in power have made, over time, to create and maintain the inequalities that exist today. The good news is that through better choices, real progress is possible: this report details various policies—some of which the state has already put in place—to expand opportunity and close the gaps in health, education, and income. Ultimately, A Portrait of Louisiana is a guide for the state’s communities, advocates, and elected officials to learn exactly where those gaps—and opportunities—exist.
Easily, Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets is the best feature to screen at this year’s New Orleans Film Festival.
It helps to understand that the movie takes place on Nov. 8, 2016, Election Day, which coincides with the closing of a Las Vegas dive bar (It’s an interesting set dressing, considering the film was actually shot in New Orleans).
The day of Trump’s eventual ascent is something I’m sure many remember with either fondness or despair; we all knew where we were and what we were doing. In Bloody Nose, the results of the election pour out in a trickle onto the TV above the bar, but not nearly as fast as drinks and sorrow are poured out on the ground floor.
For the patrons and dedicated denizens (mostly denizens), this night isn’t about Hillary or Donald or America even; it’s about one last hurrah at home.
Or… maybe it is about America. At that time. In that moment.
The film needs not that lagniappe of thematics or allegory to be excellent, mind you. In fact, if it did, it wouldn’t care for it all that much. Bloody Nose— a Sundance Film Fest favorite— isn’t really about the bar itself, but the people who made the bar one of their own and who the bar helped bring together.
All throughout, the New Orleans-based filmmaking duo The Ross Bros and their intimate crew criss-cross between conversations and unseen gestures not so much with a fly on the wall technique, but a barfly passing by approach.
The photography is oh-so-casual that occasionally the cameramen catch one another in mirrors or just walking around and observing. Or mingling. For them, it would just be a mingle, as the odds & sods of characters who appear, disappear, and reappear know each other far past the point of mere mingles.
Official Trailer
New Orleans’ own actor of film and theatre, Michael Martin, has gotten the brunt of the acting praise for the film, and rightfully so. Not an expression nor a line goes to waste from his exhausted visage or his wiser-than-himself, kindly attitude. Martin plays himself here, or rather a version/alternate timeline variation. He practically lives out of the establishment, what one can only imagine as the stable force in his life.
It’s closing time, but he’ll be the last of the krewe to leave. And when he does, he’ll leave with a goodbye quote to end all others. One that’s said for himself, and underheard by the last bartenders there.
If these stools could talk, you know.
The main thread of the film is the clock winding down on the place, from morning to morning. There might be an election going on, there might be restless kids hanging around the parking lot, but there are things that need to be said and done inside. For those many who aren’t even in the “Middle Class” of the country— the one that needs all the rebuilding, it seems— camaraderie is an essential necessity. It takes a village, so to speak.
Peter Elwell & Michael Martin in a clip from the Official Trailer
One of the more profound scenes exemplifies this notion. It’s between Michael Martin and the late Peter Elwell.
Elwell plays (and I’m certain was) a promising young man whose happy-go-lucky behavior and enthusiasm perks up anyone he’s nearby. Even Martin’s character who, in this bit, is lying face-up on the bar’s couch. Elwell is crawled on top, and they’re looking right at one another. Martin, perhaps tipsy or perhaps just taken by Elwell’s joy, tries in earnest to provide some advice: Don’t spend your life in bars, essentially. They smile into each other’s eyes as Martin maintains his fatherly tone.
Then, we’re on to the next conversation. The jukebox changes records, and a new song plays.
The hands at this keyboard are shaking a bit, just recalling these wonderfully resonant moments from this incredible exercise in community.
Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets is the kind of film that has such a great sense of what feels reel and what is real. You almost could reach into the screen and grab a smoke, as it beats 3D every day of the week and then some.
Long-ish-ly typed, this is the best feature filmat this year’s New Orleans Film Festival.
Like everyone else in the country, I’ve had the presidential election on my mind so that will be the focus of this edition of the 13th Ward Rambler.
As seen from New Orleans, the Gret Stet election results have been neither interesting nor surprising. Double Bill Cassidy won in the first round. Yawn, we expected that. The awful anti-choice ballot measure won. Horrible but no surprise given Louisiana’s toxic combination of conservative Catholics and Protestant bible bangers.
In Orleans Parish, Joe Biden got 83% of the vote, there will be a runoff for DA, and Sidney Torres’ candidate won her judicial race. The Trashanova’s hat size has increased but he needed space for his man-bun in there anyway.
Taking the bitter with the sweet was one of the themes of the 2020 election. I was among those hoping for a national Democratic wave that did not materialize. I’m inclined to believe that COVID denialism was one of the main factors in the GOP’s down ballot successes. People are tired of the pandemic. I don’t blame them but pretending a problem doesn’t exist never helped anything.
Another factor was white Republican nostalgia for a time that never really existed. Life in the 1950’s was not like Leave It To Beaver, Father Knows Best or Happy Days. Neither Eddie Haskell nor the Fonz was real. In his great book The Fifties, the late David Halberstam argued that it was a time of ferment, upheaval, and social change. But Halberstam also acknowledged that white men were in the saddle. That’s why Trumpers dig the Fifties.
Let’s turn to the main event, Joe Biden’s defeat of Donald Trump. It was a long week of waiting, watching, and worrying. I knew Biden would eventually win the arcane and outmoded electoral college but I still awaited every swing state vote update from Steve Kornacki with bated breath. I realize that some folks don’t care for his somewhat frantic style, but I’ve been a Kornacki fan since his time hosting UP on MSNBC from 2013-2015. He even had his own game show within the news show, Up Against The Clock. I am not making this up.
Kornacki is something of a toon but he’s a damn smart toon. I even created a meme in his honor:
The meme is a variation on the venerable saying: “Cut off my legs and call me Shorty.” I saw that in an old Jimmy Cagney movie. I clearly watch too much TCM.
You’re probably wondering about the column title. It’s a baseball history reference. In 1946, then Brooklyn Dodgers manager Leo Durocher mused about arch-rival New York Giants and their manager Mel Ott who was from Gretna, Louisiana. Durocher, who was not a particularly nice guy, said, “the nice guys are all over there in seventh place.”
Over the years the phrase has been condensed to “nice guys finish last.” Durocher’s 1975 memoirs were titled Nice Guys Finish Last because it had become one of the most famous lines in baseball history. In other words, Leo misquoted himself. I am, in turn, paraphrasing the misquote. So it goes.
In this instance, the Mel Ott-type nice guy is Joe Biden who defeated the Durocher-type jerk, Donald Trump. The noted baseball writer and historian Bill James wrote something about Leo the Lip that also applies to the Impeached Insult Comedian:
“Durocher didn’t give a shit what you thought about him. He didn’t make any pretense to being a nice person. Until the 1950’s, he didn’t make any pretense to being a family man. He was a rogue. He dressed in flashy clothes, drove flashy cars, drove too fast, took a punch at anybody who crossed him, made a pass at every woman he took a liking to, and bragged when he scored.”
That quote comes from The Bill James Guide To Baseball Managers. There’s no link because I typed it out old school style from the book itself. I guess one could call it throwback quoting.
I should briefly expand upon this baseball analogy. Mel Ott was a great player but a mediocre manager who treated his players well. Leo Durocher was a mediocre player but an excellent manager. As a manager Durocher was a theatrical dictator who screamed at his players. Leo was, however, a smart albeit uneducated man. Trump is a screamer and an idiot.
A final baseball history note. Mel Ott is, hands down, the greatest baseball player to hail from the Gret Stet of Louisiana. Leo Durocher succeeded Ott as Giants manager in 1948 and joined him in the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1994. So it goes.
One thing Ott and Durocher have in common with Joe Biden is that they’ve all been on the cover of Time Magazine:
Back to the Biden-Trump race.
This was Joe Biden’s third run for the presidency. His 1988 campaign crashed and burned over accusations that he plagiarized a speech from then British Labour party leader Neil Kinnock. It was less plagiarism than forgetfulness: Biden usually attributed the quote to Kinnock but forgot to do so once when the cameras were on. So it goes.
Biden’s 2008 run collided with the Obama phenomenon and he departed the race early. Biden became Obama’s running mate and was one of the few Veeps in history to have his stature enhanced by the office. In a brief history of the Vice Presidency I wrote for First Draft I quoted FDR’s first Veep: “Most past Veeps agree with Cactus Jack Garner who said, “This job isn’t worth a bucket of warm piss.” The quote was cleaned up for many years with spit replacing piss. It was still an apt analogy.”
Joe Biden has been counted out more times than a piss-poor pugilist, but he always gets up and keeps fighting. It happened again in 2020.
Biden fared poorly in the early debates, primaries, and caucuses. Then came South Carolina where he received one of the most important endorsements in American political history. It came from House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn. It ignited the Biden candidacy, especially among Black voters.
There *is* a Louisiana connection to this part of the story. Clyburn is New Orleans Congressman Cedric Richmond’s rabbi; figuratively, not literally as Joe Biden would say. There are conflicting stories about Richmond’s future: some say Clyburn wants Richmond to be the first black Speaker while others say he’s promoting Richmond for a cabinet position. I hope it’s the latter. I’m not a Cedric fan.
There’s a baseball connection to this part of the story too. Richmond pitches for House Democrats in their annual game against House Republicans.
Via The Undefeated.
Neither 1988 nor 2008 was Joe Biden’s time. 2020 most emphatically was. Joe Biden’s human qualities offered a perfect contrast to the monstrous behavior of the man I call President* Pennywise. Trump is erratic, irascible, impatient, and angry. Joe Biden is steady, kindly, patient, and calm. Trump is Durocher, Biden is Ott.
The 2020 election is confirmation of what I’ve always believed: In a presidential contest, the character and personality of the candidates is what matters most. Should people vote based on the issues? Yes, but they don’t. In this election, that contrast favored the Democrats. I look forward to removing the asterisk from president when Joe Biden is inaugurated as the 46th POTUS. Thank you, sir.
I’d also like to thank Joe Biden for selecting Kamala Harris as his Veep. She’s brilliant, charismatic, and eminently qualified. Senator Harris will make history as the first Black, Asian-Pacific woman Vice President. Thanks again, Mr. President-elect. I like the sound of that.
Leo Durocher was wrong. Nice guys don’t always finish last. In 2020, Joe Biden was elected because he’s a nice guy whereas his opponent is an asshole. There’s no subtle way of putting it. Ain’t nothing subtle about the Kaiser Of Chaos.
Finally, it’s been a long hard year for the Bayou Brief and our readership. I believe in Lamar’s vision for the Bayou Brief. We need your support to keep doing what we do. If you enjoy my column, please consider making a donation. Thanks in advance.
Let’s close on a celebratory note. The last word goes to Philadelphia native Todd Rundgren:
Burning Cane film cast & crew after the film’s screening at the 2019 New Orleans Film Festival, photo credit Noé Cugny.
Times are unusual, to say the least. We’re wearing masks, we’re social-distancing, and more of us are working from home. An unusual election season was followed by a protracted count, and as of today, although Joe Biden is officially the President-elect, the current occupant of the White House hopes to ignore his eviction notice.
At least we can count on the movies.
The 31st New Orleans Film Festival started on Nov. 6 and will continue through the 22nd. This time around though, things have gone outdoors and virtual.
The vast majority of the programming has been made available for purchase through the online platform on the New Orleans Film Society website, with some films being showcased on a few screens out in the open.
Below, we have a “brief” list of film selections that don’t just represent some of the best Hollywood South has to offer, but also what you should definitely spend your time on. Take your mind off the worst of times and remind yourself of the good ones all around us:
The Offline Playlist
Directed by Brian C. Miller Richard
In the opening credits, the words “A New Orleans Tourism Film” appears as a musical beat becomes audible. This is a concert film, shot in 2019, at our iconic Preservation Hall. Directed and shot by the Lost Bayou team of Brian C. Miller Richard and Natalie Kingston respectively, Offline is both a stage performed album of diverse performers and a talking heads interview series on the importance of music and culture to this city.
Artists from Irma Thomas to Mannie Fresh to Amanda Shaw to Boyfriend to Curren$y stack the deck, all backed up by the Preservation Hall Jazz Band in what I can only best describe as a fusion piece. Offline proves just how universal music can be, not just between genres but between people. Each artist speaks in front of the camera, giving bits of who they are, why they do this, and how it all makes them feel. While all do pour their hearts out for us, it was Curren$y’s segment that resonated greatly.
Curren$y describes his career in the underground of his industry with truth in loneliness and vulnerability, and excitement in discovery and freedom. When it’s his turn on stage, this critic became blown away. The jazz backup to his lyricism and beats just floored every notion of what music is and what music is “allowed” to be. It can be anything, quite frankly.
While The Offline Playlist does dip into being more NOLA than New Orleans in a few moments – this comes with the tourism territory – it maintains a fun and uplifting rhythm throughout. It’s the right kind of infectious for a year so sick.
It’s Me, Sarah
Directed by Fabiola Andrade
Local filmmaker Fabiola Andrade’s It’s Me, Sarah is quite a surprise of a short. Telling the tale of a mysterious trauma suffered by a young creative woman, Sarah unravels breathlessly and boldly with strong performances and stronger direction. For its twenty-minute runtime, the film never feels rushed or bothered with the constraints to reach a quick finish. While its main character struggles against the clock, the movie thrives under similar pressure.
We follow this young woman some months after being found beaten most brutally, scarred for life, and without much memory as to what happened. One night, she escapes her sadness and climbs through her bedroom mirror, where she meets a friendly guide who, with some prodding will help her recollect and restart.
It’s in these alt-world scenes where Sarah truly shines with a colorful atmosphere and a brightly empathetic smile. Passing through the mirror, the film contrasts the stark reality before it with playful conversation and a visual palette that blends well with the concept of memory and PTSD. Surely, director Fabiola Andrade isn’t one to miss whatsoever, with a work that suggests many more cinematic efforts of high drama and higher artistry.
To Decadence with Love, Thanks for Everything!
Directed by Stuart Sox
The phrase “gender-fuckery art” came as a shock to the system when said off-camera in this film essay-documentary on drag and burlesque performance art, set during Southern Decadence 2019. To Decadence carries a hot torch for a kind of theatrical stage show that this critic has never witnessed in person, but now wishes to explore some more. Combining “day in the life of” structure with a very intimate perspective, this movie feels like a hybrid of conventions, mixing traditional documentary style with an inquisitive approach that follows around everyone as if a standard narrative is playing out. It’s pretty inventive.
We see the festival through two performers, Franky and Laveau Contraire who, in their own individual ways, are breaking norms within an already tight-knit community of stage and dance performers. We get a behind the scenes-like glimpse at them getting ready, explaining their routines, and finally putting themselves out into the world for all to see and enjoy. On the night of the Colors programming block, tension fills the air with uncertainty and second-guessing, which ultimately falls away once the lights turn on. This segment nearly brought the tears out.
To Decadence’s thesis on cultivating an open and inclusive community and culture of expression for all is indeed noble and right. With its type of “fly on the wall” view and all too close attitude towards highlighting the emotional and the vulnerable aspects of performing, this film will likely make everyone cheer loudly and proudly.
Distant Mardi Gras
Directed by Alejandro de los Rios
Glitch art meets super-8 home filmmaking and Zoom-based interviewing in this experimental document on the pre-pandemic Mardi Gras. We start with the pleasures and fun of the event, before becoming trapped in the brick-hitting reality of illness and quarantine. This is a movie of off-camera interviews over grainy footage of parades and street photography, splashed with abstract color patterns and datamoshes intricately cut into a collage of what was, what is, and what could be.
Distant is an incredibly exciting exercise in mind-melting (and perhaps mind-altering) paintings of fondness and sadness upon a canvas of joy before a storm. It all punches rather hard, before coming back with a rallying “tomorrow is another day” optimism that’s punctuated by the constant assault of colors.
It’s not really an endurance test, but there are times when one will want a break. However, it’s good to just let yourself wash-away with it, and consider/re-consider your thoughts on new normals and old ways. ____
The year, because of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, organizers with the New Orleans Film Festival have been forced to adapt to the “new normal” and have decided to screen the majority of its lineup on a virtual cinema, offering its audiences the opportunity to stream more than 160 films online.
We think this is a spectacular and innovative idea that will allow a much broader audience the opportunity to watch a collection of independent features and documentaries, many of which were either filmed right here in Louisiana or were created, directed, acted, and produced by Louisiana talent to a much wider audience.
To that end, during the next week, the Bayou Brief will publish a series of reviews of films that caught our attention. Film critic Bill Arceneaux, who is “Rotten Tomatoes-certified,” will write the bulk of our reviews, including a review of the film he considers to be the festival’s very best, and publisher Lamar White, Jr. will share his reviews of the festival’s Louisiana Short Documentary selections and a feature-length documentary about a trio of famous civil rights lawsuits in the 1960s involving notorious segregationist Leander Perez.
On Friday, two hours after officials in Pennsylvania announced the batch of votes that secured the White House for a native son of Scranton, a smattering of red hats padded across the front lawn and clambered up the steps of the Louisiana state Capitol in Baton Rouge.
The MAGA loyalists—estimated to number around 200, almost none of whom wore face masks— were there to protest an election they believe had been stolen from incumbent President Donald Trump, alleging a rambling mess of baseless, bizarre, and often contradictory claims.
A middle-aged white man in overalls got choked up when talking about how much Trump had given up in order to pursue a career in politics. He urged the crowd to recall elected officials who accepted the results of the election. Timothy J. Gordon, a conservative talk radio host and far-right provocateur who, in June, was fired from his teaching job at a Catholic high school after publicly asserting that the Black Lives Matter movement was a “terrorist organization” that had “prearranged piles of weapons, rocks” to incite violence at protests, drove in from California.
Gordon, who appeared alongside handmade “Catholics for Trump” signs, warned of an impending “color revolution” against Trump, parroting a theory most commonly associated with authoritarian regimes like Vladimir Putin’s Russia and Xi Jinping’s China. “The term color revolution was coined in the early aughts to describe four political revolutions in post-Communist Europe and Central Asia, in which repressive regimes tried to hold on to power after losing an election,” Thomas Wright, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, explained in The Atlantic in September.
In short, Gordon believes that the opposition to Trump is a creation of a cabal of “deep state” actors and NGO funders like George Soros.
“The original color revolutions occurred when the perception of clear and massive electoral fraud was widespread and protesters were angry about having democratic rights taken away. The demonstrations were directed at illegitimate regimes with a history of rigged elections, endemic corruption, and repression of political opponents,” Wright noted.
“STOP THE COUNT!” Trump tweeted Thursday morning.
While Gordon may have not been well-known among the crowd gathered outside of the House that Huey Built, there was at least one familiar face in the audience.
Whitney appeared at the 2020 RNC as Louisiana GOP National Committeewoman.
A former state representative from Houma named Lenar Whitney, a mousy blonde woman who is perhaps best known for once bizarrely asserting that she could disprove climate change with a thermometer, was also there.
This year, Whitney served as the Louisiana GOP’s National Committeewoman; she appeared in the Republican National Convention’s video montage of the ceremonial roll call, standing alone in front of Jackson Square in New Orleans and pledging Louisiana’s delegates to Donald Trump.
Lenar Whitney. Source: Facebook. Click to zoom.
At the event in Baton Rouge (and on her Facebook page), she promoted a comically stupid theory involving President Trump surreptitiously planting a watermark on ballots that would expose voter fraud.
“She said the gathering was an outlet for Trump supporters to express that they ‘are standing with our president,'” reported Sam Karlin of The Advocate.
Whitney learned of the event through Facebook, she said.
After amassing more than 350,000 followers, Facebook banned the group “Stop the Steal” once members began posting calls to incite violence at planned protests across the country.
The protests were the brainchild of Ali Alexander, a controversial far-right operative who boasts more than 140,000 followers on Twitter, where he’s simply @ali.
“Alexander appears to be involved with Stop The Steal both through his tweets promoting it and through his links to one of the websites boosting it,” Mother Jonesreported Friday. “Stopthesteal.us’s domain is registered to Vice and Victory, a possibly defunct political consultancy he’s affiliated with. After clicking the site’s donate button, visitors are prompted with the option to donate money to one of several cryptocurrency addresses associated with Alexander, or given links to his Paypal, CashApp, and Amazon wishlist.”
Here in Louisiana, Alexander is better known by his legal name, Ali Akbar. Although he now lives in Texas, for the past four years, Alexander resided in Baton Rouge, a fact that has gone virtually unnoticed in the torrent of coverage he’s recently generated.
In June 2019, Alexander made national headlines for a racist tweet that asserted Kamala Harris was not “an American Black” because her father was Jamaican. His comment was retweeted and then later deleted by the president’s son, Donald Trump, Jr. The next month, Alexander was one of several controversial figures invited to the White House’s “social media summit.”
There’s more.
“According to a 2018 Politico report, the night before the 2016 election, a PAC advised by Alexander received a $60,000 donation from hedge-fund billionaire Robert Mercer, the pro-Trump billionaire,” Right Wing Watch’s Jared Holt reported in September. “Alexander has associated with far-right figures including Unite the Right white supremacist attendee Matt Colligan, and made a habit of noting when members of the media he criticizes are Jewish, according toThe Observer.”
In an August profile of Alexander, the Daily Dot reported that he had “found a niche among the likes of anti-Muslim activist and Republican Florida congressional candidate Laura Loomer and blundering political fraudster Jacob Wohl….The trio went to Minneapolis in June 2019 to film a documentary called Importing Ilhan, which was severely mocked online for lacking credibility. The video they produced was aimed at proving Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) had married her brother. While filming, they also wore bulletproof jackets only to turn out to report fake death threats against themselves to authorities.”
Ali Akbar aka Ali Alexander. Image source: Twitter. Transformed by Bayou Brief.
Earlier today, he confirmed his role in the Stop the Steal protests to me via text message. He was not present at the event in Baton Rouge; instead, he attended a protest in Austin, alongside Infowars founder Alex Jones.
Although he tells me that the event in Baton Rouge came together in only 23 hours, he previously announced plans for the event—and similar events across the nation—nearly two months ago. (He says he abandoned these plans some time in October).
“In the next coming days, we’re going to build the infrastructure to stop the steal,” Alexander said in a Periscope video posted in early September. “What we are going to do is we’re going to bypass all of social media. In the coming days, we will launch an effort concentrating on the swing states, and we will map out where the votes are being counted and the secretary of states. We will map all of this out for everyone publicly and we will collect cell phone numbers so that way if you are within 100 mile radius of a bad secretary of state or someone who’s counting votes after the deadline or if there’s a federal court hearing, we will alert you of where to go. We’re going to bypass all of Twitter, all of Facebook, all of Instagram, OK? We’re going to bypass it all.”
A few days prior, Alexander claimed to be at least partly responsible for organizing an armed mob outside of the Maricopa County Election Center, and when it started to become clear that Joe Biden would pull off an upset in Georgia, the Trump campaign filed a lawsuit seeking to halt the count, based solely on an affidavit provided to them by Sean Pumphrey of South Carolina, who the Bayou Brief has discovered to be connected to Alexander via Facebook. The lawsuit was quickly dismissed.
A similar lawsuit was recently filed in Pennsylvania, after a postal service “whistleblower” alleged he overheard colleagues discuss back-stamping mail-in ballots. The whistleblower first brought his claims to the attention of James O’Keefe, who has been friends with Alexander for more than seven years.
From left to right: U.S. Sen. Bill Cassidy, former Louisiana state Sen. Elbert Guillory, Ali Alexander. Nov. 2014.
I’ve known Ali since 2015, when he served as the Digital Director of Republican Jay Dardenne’s gubernatorial campaign. We’ve appeared opposite of one another at least twice on Jim Engster’s statewide talk radio show, where the conversations were always civil and substantive, which is one of the reasons I’ve been so surprised to discover how dramatically different the “Ali Alexander” of social media stardom is from the Ali Akbar I knew through Louisiana politics. (After learning that he was the owner of the Twitter handle @louisiana, I also unsuccessfully lobbied him at least twice to let me take over the dormant account).
Engster’s impression of the young activist was similar to mine. “Ali was a passionate and true believer of conservative politics, not an opportunist like many of his cohorts,” Engster recalled.
To those who know him exclusively through his work in Louisiana, Ali’s evolution into full-blown MAGA diehard—and his transformation into an outspoken and notorious firebrand—seems remarkable for a few reasons, not the least of which being that he was initially a reluctant supporter of Trump. In hindsight, however, it now seems obvious that his ambivalence was largely performative.
“I think he destroyed my party, and I hate the campaign he’s running,” Ali wrote on Facebook about Trump a few days before the final round of primary contests in 2016. He added, “But I’ll gladly choose him over Hillary Clinton and the violent leftist mob.”
The two had actually met well before Trump descended down the golden escalators. According to Ali, he had been “the only person sitting in the room” when an unnamed Republican candidate sought Trump’s support at the 2014 Republican Leadership Conference in New Orleans. The future president was impressed by how much Ali resembled Sammy Davis, Jr., he said, and they ended up talking with one another for close to 45 minutes. Apparently, he’d left an impression. Years later, when Ali visited the White House, Trump remembered the Sammy Davis lookalike.
At the 2014 RLC, Ali also snapped a photo of the Donald being interviewed for a podcast hosted by the new head of Andrew Breitbart’s media empire.
Source: Facebook
Notably, Ali’s involvement in Louisiana predates the 2015 gubernatorial campaign. A few months after the RLC in New Orleans, a mysterious new political action committee, Black Conservatives Fund, announced they would be opening their first-ever state chapter in Louisiana. “It’s unclear who will be leading the group’s efforts in Louisiana or the scale of those efforts,” The Advocate reported at the time.
The Black Conservatives Fund, as it turns out, was Ali Akbar. (He has recently used the PAC’s Twitter account to amplify his other endeavors). Although it’s been dormant since 2016, according to the organization’s last FEC report, it’s still sitting on more than $200,000 in cash.
The Black Conservatives Fund appears to have largely been a proxy for former Louisiana state Sen. Elbert Guillory, a Black Republican from Opelousas. The PAC emerged during the 2014 Senate race between three-term incumbent Democrat Mary Landrieu and Republican congressman Bill Cassidy. At the time, Guillory was putting together what would be an ultimately unsuccessful campaign for lieutenant governor.
The PAC first made waves after releasing secretly recorded audio of Landrieu’s then-Chief of Staff, Don Cravins, Jr. (whose father, one of Guillory’s political nemeses, was then serving as Mayor of Opelousas) promising a gathering of Democrats that Landrieu would continue supporting President Obama “97% of the time” if reelected.
Cassidy’s entire campaign had been built on the message that Landrieu was merely a rubber-stamp for the Democratic president, who was deeply unpopular in Louisiana. The statistic, however, was grossly misleading. Landrieu was known for her independent streak, and using the same metric, Cassidy, as a member of the House, had also voted in support of bills that were later signed into law by President Obama 97% of the time.
To many, Cassidy’s message was nothing more than a dog whistle, and Cravins’ comments, which were delivered in front of a majority Black audience, were not a confession of anything duplicitous; rather, they were a statement of support for the nation’s first Black president. The Black Conservatives Fund’s other major play in the 2014 campaign was an expensive robocall targeting Black voters that selectively edited comments Landrieu made to conservative talk radio host Jeff Crouere about the Affordable Care Act in order to imply that she had voted against President Obama.
At the time, Alexander had still been living in Fort Worth, and when the Dardenne campaign hired him as a Digital Director, he hadn’t yet built an online persona. Even his role in the Black Conservatives Fund had been obscured; he called himself a “senior advisor” and, for the most part, preferred to stay behind-the-scenes. Privately, those involved in Dardenne’s campaign have expressed regret over hiring Alexander and claim to be appalled by the dirty tricks that have become a hallmark of his brand.
When I asked him about his Stop the Steal campaign, Ali provided what, to me, seemed like a perfectly reasonable argument in favor of free, fair, and transparent elections; he also distanced himself from the theories espoused by Whitney. “(The) only uniting message for StopTheSteal is that the election should be predictable and the counting should be transparent,” he wrote. “It’s not. And we feel like things are being hidden so open it up or we’ll assume the worst.” But the measured words and tone he expressed to me privately are belied by his online antics, and it’s impossible not to be alarmed and deeply concerned by the very real chance that Ali endangers himself and others with his reckless hyperbole. (He’s taken to wearing a bulletproof vest when he appears in public).
But more than anything else, Ali’s decision to begin planning the infrastructure for Stop the Steal long before the first ballot had ever been cast suggests that these protests were going to happen regardless of how the election actually shaped up.
Like Sammy Davis, Jr., Ali Alexander is one helluva performer, and the show must go on.
A Tale of Two Louisianas
In A Portrait of Louisiana 2020, social scientists define and measure the state’s “human development index.” Their findings provide a blueprint for ensuring a more equitable future.
In the late 1970s, when the federal government began considering where exactly to construct the final original stretch of Interstate 49 in Central Louisiana, it first had to answer a daunting question: Should the highway loop around the city of Alexandria and be built on cheap farmland 15 miles outside of town? Or should it instead cut directly through the city’s downtown, the option favored by the mayor and the Chamber of Commerce crowd?
On May 1, 1980, officials announced their decision. 16 years later, when the ribbon was finally cut on a 16.6-mile section of I-49 named after Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., taxpayers had spent more than $44 million to build the single mile that was expected to result in the revitalization of Alexandria’s sleepy downtown.
The working theory, put simply, was If you build it, they will come.
Today, 40 years after that fateful decision, people are finally showing up again (at least they were, before the pandemic), but whether that’s because of the interstate or in spite of it remains a matter of dispute. Like many American cities at the time, Alexandria spent its own capital to prop up suburban sprawl and predominately white, ticky-tacky neighborhoods.
During the past four decades, the city more than tripled in geographic size despite its population remaining essentially the same. Meanwhile, the federal government bulldozed through majority-Black neighborhoods to make way for the interstate. By one estimate, the city lost nearly 90% of its historic inner-core as a consequence.
Of course, it wasn’t the first place in Louisiana to bulldoze through majority Black neighborhoods and splice itself in half by building an interstate through town.
That said, it could have been worse: Alexandria could have easily repeated the mistakes made 110 miles north, in Shreveport, where I-49 created an impenetrable and permanent barrier, a living monument to segregation. But because of the stubborn insistence of Union Pacific, unlike what occurred in Shreveport, the federal government reluctantly agreed to construct a series of underpasses in Alexandria, which didn’t necessarily make things better, only less bad.
In the 187-page report A Portrait of Louisiana 2020: Human Development in An Age of Uncertainty, Kristen Lewis and her colleagues at the Social Science Research Council, an independent nonprofit organization, highlight the construction of I-49 through Shreveport to illustrate the ways in which public policy can result in vast inequities, even between people who live directly across the street from one another.
The section on Shreveport is titled after the Charles Dickens classic “A Tale of Two Cities,” but in fairness to Shreveport, the full report makes it abundantly clear that this is really a tale of two Louisianas.
A Portrait of Louisiana 2020, which was published only a few days before this year’s election, is a part of the SSRC’s Measure of America program, made possible with funding from the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation and J.P. Morgan Chase. This year’s report is actually a follow-up to a similar study about Louisiana from 2009. (Measure of America has also published a pair of national reports as well as two reports on California and another about Mississippi). There’s a lot to unpack, but first, it’s important to understand what makes its methodology different.
“(The report) uses the human development approach and the American Human Development Index (HDI) to explore well-being and access to opportunity among different groups of Louisianans,” Measure of America explains on its website. “It examines a range of critical issues, including health, education, living standards, incarceration, youth disconnection, residential segregation, and inequality. And it makes recommendations about how to expand people’s opportunities, build greater human security, and help communities recover from the Covid-19 pandemic.”
The underlying premise is simple: Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is an imprecise and unreliable metric in defining a community’s health, well-being, and educational and economic opportunities; it can be especially misleading when making comparisons. Even though this seems obvious—the enormous income inequality gap in the United States means that a state like Louisiana can be both a rich state and a poor state— our conception of “quality of life” is too often informed almost exclusively by GDP. HDI measures “three fundamental human development dimensions: a long and heathy life, access to knowledge, and a decent standard of living.”
Money is a factor, but it’s not the only factor.
Louisiana has made some gains since the previous study in 2009, improving from a score of 3.92 out of 10 on the HDI to 4.35, which is largely due to improvements in educational attainment.
11 years ago, one out of every five adults in Louisiana lacked a high school diploma or GED; today, the number is closer to one out of seven. Preschool enrollment in Louisiana is above the national average, and notably, Black children are more likely to be enrolled than white children, which the study attributes to the success of “Head Start and other publicly funded preschool programs in low-income Black communities.”
Importantly, however, Louisiana’s HDI score is still a full point under the national average. There are a few reasons: The state lags behind the rest of the nation in its share of adults who have attained a bachelor’s degree (24.3% in Louisiana, 32.6% nationwide). Women in Louisiana earn an average of $16,000 less than their male counterparts and $5,000 less than the national average, despite the fact that their “Education Index” score is higher than men. After briefly relinquishing the title to Oklahoma, Louisiana is now once again the prison capital of the world. Put another way, Louisiana incarcerates more of its residents per capita than anywhere else on the planet. Louisiana also has the fourth-highest “youth disconnection” rate in the country; the rate approximates the proportion of those between the ages of 16 to 24 who are neither enrolled in school or otherwise employed in a full-time job. Access to health care, particularly mental health, is woefully deficient.
The study’s key findings are unlikely to be surprising to most Louisianians, though it is instructive to know with some degree of specificity how the state compares with the rest of the nation. (Not good).
That said, the most significant and insightful portions of A Portrait of Louisiana 2020 concern the historical and policy underpinnings of the gaps between Blacks and whites, which brings us back to the construction of I-49.
A Portrait of Louisiana 2020 mentions the development of Shreveport and the way the city is bisected by I-49 to underscore the staggering differences between two historic neighborhoods, the majority Black Caddo Heights neighborhood on the west side of the interstate and the majority white South Highlands on the east.
“South Highlands has a life expectancy of 83 years, 72.3 percent of adults have a bachelor’s degree, and the typical worker makes $60,980. Over 85 percent of residents are white,” Lewis writes. “Across the highway in Caddo Heights, the average life expectancy is 70.5 years, 7.8 percent of adults have a bachelor’s degree, and median personal earnings are just $16,853. Over 90 percent of residents are Black.”
The only way to “cross between these two neighborhoods,” the study explains, “(is) on roads marking their northern and southern edges, about two miles apart.”
The construction of the interstate in Shreveport in the 1980s only explains part of the story. After all, as Shreveporters know, I-49 largely traced the existing footprint of the railroad lines, as it did in Alexandria as well.
There’s another insidious reason for the vast differences in quality of life between Caddo Heights and South Highlands.
“These deep disparities,” the report explains, “are a consequence of residential segregation and are often aligned with features of the built environment like Interstate 49.” Residential segregation
“Residential segregation” doesn’t happen by accident. While the term “redlining” didn’t become a part of the lexicon in 1960, it’d already been in practice for decades.
From the passage of the National Housing Act of 1934 until the enactment of the Equal Credit Opportunity Act in 1974, it was a function of federal law and of policies that effectively prevented Black families from securing a home loan insured by the Federal Housing Administration. In 1938, the FHA enshrined the practice in its underwriting manual. “FHA appraisal manuals instructed loan originators to steer clear of areas with ‘inharmonious racial groups and recommended that municipalities enact racially restrictive zoning ordinances as well as covenants running with the land that prohibited Black owners,'” Michael Schill of New York University and Susan Wachter of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania explained in a 2002 report.
The staggering discrepancies in Shreveport were not the consequence of the free market. This didn’t happen organically. It’s the result of decades and decades of disinvestment and neglect in one neighborhood and investment and infrastructure improvements in another, all done at the direction or with the blessing of the government.
Here’s a redlining map of the City of Shreveport shortly before the Second World War (reds and yellows signify “Not Desirable;” greens and blues are “Desirable”).
This wasn’t inevitable. As Lewis and her team repeatedly emphasize, the state’s woes are all the result of choices, usually by those in positions of power. Whether or not Louisiana acts to fix what’s broken is also a choice.
Shreveport’s tale of two neighborhoods illustrates the connections between multigenerational poverty and a community’s access to capital and political power, and there are similar stories that can be told about cities across the state. Before the government bulldozed through inner cities to make way for the interstate, it codified ways to protect the property interests of whites, while preventing those interests for Black Louisianians. And before there was redlining, there was the horrific injustice and systematic exploitation of slavery.
The lasting legacy of slavery is slightly more difficult to illustrate on a map, but it’s not entirely impossible. Lewis and her team at Measure of America looked at which parishes in Louisiana have the lowest HDI scores and which had the highest per-capita enslaved populations.
The correlations were hard to ignore.
This is a map from 1860 identifying the parishes in black with the highest enslaved populations:
Today, East Carroll Parish’s HDI score ranks at the very bottom among the state’s 64 parishes (well, technically, it ranked 63rd, because the study was unable to obtain enough data on Webster Parish), earning an abysmal 1.49 out of 10. Lake Providence—the tiny town that serves as the seat of East Carroll Parish—was once named “the most unequal place in America” by CNN. Approximately 73% of children in East Carroll Parish live below the poverty line. Its Education Index score, 1.28 out of 10, also ranks dead-last in Louisiana.
“As life expectancy decreases, the poverty rate tends to increase,” Lewis notes. “(The) five parishes with the shortest life expectancies—LaSalle, Caldwell, East Carroll, West Carroll, and Catahoula—all have poverty rates above 20 percent.” Claiborne Parish ranks the lowest in median personal income ($19,470).
I decided to put together a map of the parishes with the lowest HDI scores (in yellow), and while obviously there were fewer parishes in 1860 than there are today, the region of Louisiana that once had the highest enslaved populations just so happens to be the same one identified by A Portrait of Louisiana 2020.
Three weeks ago, I spoke with Lewis about the report, and, among other things, I told her I was somewhat surprised that none of the parishes that comprise the corridor of South Louisiana known as “Cancer Alley” were in the bottom tier. After all, as the 1860 map illustrates, those parishes had similar proportions of people living under slavery, and there’s no question that Cancer Alley continues to struggle with extreme poverty. (To be clear, the report does contain a brief section on Cancer Alley).
What makes the Delta parishes unique?
There are a few reasons, she explained, and they all relate to the methodology used in determining a place’s Human Development Index score. Both regions are plagued by poverty; that’s undeniable. But the Delta parishes in northeast Louisiana are significantly more rural and isolated, and that means its residents have less access to healthcare, fewer educational opportunities, and a much more limited job market.
Although I’ve focused on the report’s findings on systemic racism and the legacy of slavery, that’s just one of many aspects that inform Measure of America’s analysis.
Policymakers, elected officials, and social and civil justice advocates should take the time to read the full report. There are also a handful of Republican state legislators in particular who need to be reminded that the checks they receive from the government carry a work requirement. For far too long, the state legislature has been dominated by those who would rather play politics than work on policy. Years from now, no one will remember the names of legislators who cared more about saving high school football than about saving lives.
Quoting from the report’s conclusion:
Every Louisianan deserves an equal chance at a freely chosen life of value. Our findings suggest that for a host of reasons—residential segregation, poverty, health inequities, slavery’s enduring legacy, persisting racial and gender discrimination, among others—many of Louisiana’s residents are deprived of that opportunity. These problems did not arise by chance, nor were they unavoidable—instead, they are the result of the choices people in power have made, over time, to create and maintain the inequalities that exist today. The good news is that through better choices, real progress is possible: this report details various policies—some of which the state has already put in place—to expand opportunity and close the gaps in health, education, and income. Ultimately, A Portrait of Louisiana is a guide for the state’s communities, advocates, and elected officials to learn exactly where those gaps—and opportunities—exist.