Looking for more? That is impossible. Former New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu (D) Wednesday poured cold water on speculation that he might run for president in 2020. “I don’t think so. We also had peer intervention, designed to deal with the exact same thing that the young officer needed to know who was standing next to officer Chauvin, which is, if you saw another officer violating a policy, you take action, and you would be praised for it in the department, not punished. When he took over as mayor of New Orleans in 2010, recovery from Hurricane Katrina was still painfully slow. Black male unemployment fell to about 43 percent in 2016. Policing, jail, housing and infrastructure needs remained intense. No. That was terrible. Lots of other people say, “All you politicians are a bag of bad apples, but Trump is giving me what I want in tax cuts or conservative judges, and he’s giving me at least lip service that he cares about me and sees me.” I’m a little bit chastened by the fact that his public-approval numbers still stubbornly remain around 42, 43%, after everything that he’s done and how much he’s abused his power. The country is lionizing men who killed Americans to maintain slavery, he said. The Civil War is over. Next year, New Orleans will celebrate its 300-year anniversary, and Mayor Mitch Landrieu has an ambitious vision that has been relatively unheard of in the South. The work shaped a 2019 report by Landrieu’s organization E Pluribus Unum Fund titled, "Divided by Design.". Today, the younger Landrieu emphatically describes Martin Luther King Jr.'s admonition for white moderates, an often overlooked part of the King oeuvre, as a prescription anti-racists need right now. When Landrieu became mayor in 2010, New Orleans was a city with the usual problems, in addition to the myriad that remained five years after Hurricane Katrina. Come on, white people, help us out a little here.” And I think when a lot of white people saw George Floyd laying there, they thought, “Wow. I’m encouraged that the protesters have been doing what I think is a patriotic duty to call the country to our promise to each other. Among the things Landrieu and his 11-person team found was that when asked about the community impact of racism, more than one-quarter, 28.7 percent, focused on personal experiences with acts of racism. The debate surrounding Confederate monuments revolves largely around the question of why they were erected and dedicated in the first place. To revist this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories. It is painful for a mayor to assume the operations of a government and see that 60% or 50% of a city’s budget is spent on police or jails. Some of what followed was difficult or, at least, complex. 323 talking about this. "Law enforcement alone will not make us safer.". Then he hijacked the credit in a systematic way, wrote a book promoting the idea that he was brave.". But to others, Landrieu may be effective in the long term in a country with a history of racial progress followed by backlash. When I saw the video I was enraged, just really infuriated, about how unnecessary and how violent and how wrong that was. "We, particularly white Americans, have been putting off all but the emergency work needed to wind up anywhere else.". The 1619 Project’s reframing of slavery is central to understanding our past and present. I think the diversity of the protesters is good. "We've been headed towards this moment, this situation, for a long, long time," Landrieu said in an interview from his home in New Orleans. Like “They were erected purposefully to send a strong message to all who walked in their shadows about who was still in charge in this city.” Janell Ross is a former reporter for NBC BLK. "Just one example. That was so controversial that a teenage Mitch Landrieu needed a bodyguard, and father and son sometimes traded dark stories about foiled threats. In the aftermath of the 2015 Charleston church shooting, Mitch Landrieu, then the mayor of New Orleans, decided to remove a prominent public … Landrieu talked with or surveyed 2,600 people on race, equality and opportunity, wrapping up months before the pandemic began. And then we had to have much more robust supervision, with an early warning system so that if any officer had an innumerable amount of complaints, we would flag them. And the coronavirus' toll on Blacks, Latinos and Native Americans reflects who is hired for high-risk work (as opposed to the C-suite) and who lives in conditions that help disease spread, he said. He changed the bail system, cutting what was then the nation's largest jail population by more than half. Mississippi lawmakers voted last month to remove Confederate elements from their state flag. "Mitch is a nice guy. Mitch Landrieu rushed the construction of the airport in the vain hope that it would be done before he left office. The specific spark to the recent toppling of Confederate monuments and to the mass protests against racism and police abuses was the killing of George Floyd. Vanity Fair: Your removal of the Lee statue in New Orleans helped set the stage for the wave of Confederate monuments torn down in the past few weeks. In the aftermath of the 2015 Charleston church shooting, Mitch Landrieu, then the mayor of New Orleans, decided to remove a prominent public statue of General Robert E. Lee. In the end, what Mayor Landrieu chose to do was issue the most direct public statement against the Lost Cause narrative of the Civil War to date. My great, great grandmother was an African American who was enslaved in Mississippi.". Now, with Mitch Landrieu stepping down as mayor on May 7, the long-running political dynasty is coming to an apparent end. Well, Mitch, I still love you for the positive things you have done in the past for our city. I did think that there was nothing that we were seeing that is any different than what I have witnessed since the day I was born in 1960. Today, Morial is president of the National Urban League, a civil rights organization that produces the State of Black America, an annual statistical analysis of Black well-being. Mitch Landrieu: No. History cannot be changed. We saw this after Katrina," the hurricane that killed more than 1,500 people in Louisiana in 2005. Still, it was the statue removals that brought national attention. Black people get it, of course. Mitch Landrieu, mayor of New Orleans, stands in the lobby of Trump Tower in New York on Dec. 15, 2016. "But instead of saying to ourselves what might be wrong with a system that has only produced one top-level Black competitive driver, the vast majority of white Americans assume one of two things: Wallace is special, exceptional, or African Americans are not trying hard enough.". That is the kind of no-but-yes position that worries activists like Scott Roberts, senior director of criminal justice campaigns at Color of Change, a civil rights organization that has worked to reform bail systems and elect progressive prosecutors. Systemic racism also creates disparities in the environmental conditions of Black and brown neighborhoods. Confederate statues in multiple cities have been toppled or removed. Just 9.8 percent mentioned the historical impact of racism. Some white Americans are ill-informed or in a state of denial, Landrieu said. Landrieu's father, Maurice Edwin "Moon" Landrieu, who was secretary of housing and urban development in the administration of President Jimmy Carter, and mentors from the Catholic Jesuit order imparted the value of political and moral courage. School funding formulas and housing patterns have left schools segregated and unequal. "To suggest you can care about the rights and plight of Black Americans only if you are Black or have Black blood is insidious," Landrieu said. In the wake of the recent hopeful upwelling, the mayor talks about small increments of progress—and how much still has to be done. That's a position Landrieu said he was all but raised to take. "And it is rooted in racism. White people who participated really kind of rejected the notion that there’s institutional racism. What Mitch Landrieu Learned About Racism in the American South The former New Orleans mayor’s report back from his 11-month tour of the … We have to tell the real story. And we’re still stuck in a place that we should have gone past a long time ago. But don’t tell that to Verna Landrieu… "That is just upside down for our country and it is not working," Landrieu wrote in a follow-up email. Has seeing more statues banished left you feeling vindicated? The same day, Mayor Mitch Landrieu, who started the movement to take down the monuments in 2015, gave a speech explaining the reasoning behind their removal. "There are days when I think, my God, it is going to take a long time," Landrieu said. What are a couple of the key things you heard? What Mitch Landrieu Learned About Racism in the American South Last year, former New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu published a book , In the Shadows of Statues: A White Southerner Confronts History , a personal narrative built around his decision to bring down four city monuments dedicated to Confederate and white supremacist causes . A lot of the white people, not all of them, but many, say, “Look, I don’t have any connection to slavery. Removing Confederate statues has become a pretext for white supremacist and neo-Nazi activity, most memorably in Charlottesville, Virginia, a couple of weeks ago. "He believes the things he's been saying about this country," said Morial, who is also a member of the E Pluribus Unum Fund's advisory board. More Americans may better understand the racial dynamics of policing now, but they need help grappling with residential covenants, redlining, housing and mortgage discrimination and the role of each in the nation's widening racial wealth gap, Landrieu said. Do you honestly believe that Bubba Wallace is the only Black man in America who really knows how to drive fast?" Wealthy white people and elected officials warned Landrieu that they were prepared to make his life difficult. "I think you could easily say that Mitch is a man built for this moment," said Marc Morial, a former mayor of New Orleans who has known Landrieu since they attended the same Catholic high school. So that was kind of encouraging. But "if we are trying to address white supremacy, it is also important that Black voices are lifted, not just for symbolism, but included in the design and function of such a program," Hamilton said. Thank God. Crisis energy is, to Landrieu, the best explanation for the sudden attention paid to Confederate icons. It's about policy and social attitudes, he says. And it is painful for a mayor to take office, as he did, and discover that 50 percent to 60 percent of the city's budget is dedicated to policing, he said. And President Donald Trump has made defending the statues a priority. Or is he merely a voice of those with power seeking to adjust a few things? It is impossible for me to imagine a public official giving … He wrote a New York Times bestseller. It holds all of us back, not just African Americans. The furor also helped spur Landrieu to create a nonprofit, the E Pluribus Unum Fund, backed in part by money from the Ford Foundation and Laurene Powell Jobs’ Emerson Collective to study and tackle the legacy of slavery. — The Parallel Universe of Ivanka Trump, America’s Dissociated Princess— “No, I Am Not Okay”: A Black Journalist Addresses His White Friends— Why Bankrupt Hertz Is a Pandemic Zombie— Scenes of Fury and Mourning at the Minneapolis Protests— Civil Rights Advocate Brandi Collins-Dexter on Why Facebook Chooses Trump Over Democracy— Democrats’ Blue-Texas Fever Dream May Finally Become a Reality— From the Archive: Taking Stock of Melania Trump, the Unprepared—And Lonely—FLOTUS. Among other indicators of how much the removals vexed others, a rumor circulated that Landrieu was secretly Black. The city is on far sturdier ground financially than what he was handed after former Mayor Ray Nagin's eight years at the wheel, and there are four fewer Confederate monuments -- an accomplishment Landrieu has seen as his contribution to a "New South." That's what you are talking about.' Mitch Landrieu inherited a mess. Sometimes when something is so shocking, the public's mind is pried open and then is able to go to a new place. But let me just tell you one thing I’m sure about. I’m 60 and Anthony Fauci is my guy. City workers prepare to remove the statue of Col. Charles Didier Dreaux, the first Confederate officer from Louisiana killed during the Civil War, after it was pulled from its pedestal on South Jefferson Davis Parkway on July 10, 2020 in New Orleans. One of the most powerful things we heard in the African American community was, “Could we just please start with an acknowledgement that slavery was awful, and romanticized versions of it are offensive as hell? Mayor Landrieu… After negotiating a consent decree with the federal Department of Justice, you made major improvements. Then there's the slippery slope argument. On May 19, 2017, New Orleans, Louisiana Mayor Mitch Landrieu addressed an audience in his city as a backdrop and explanation of the city’s recent decision to remove statues of General Robert E. Lee and other Confederate military and political leaders from public squares in New Orleans. The whole point of reverential monuments in public spaces is to encourage people to be like that person.