Moon Landrieu, the path-breaking former mayor of New Orleans who died Monday at age 92, got the big things, including the biggest thing of all, absolutely right.
Landrieu pushed for and oversaw the racial integration of public life in the Crescent City. He did so when being for integration took moral courage. Whatever else Landrieu did wisely or unwisely in terms of policy, his example of a strong conscience is one that more politicians, conservatives and liberals alike, should emulate.
Yes, conservatives of a certain age in New Orleans grew up chafing at some of Landrieu’s liberal policy preferences and at some results of the left-of-center political dynasty (daughter Mary, the senator, and son Mitch, the lieutenant governor and mayor) he spawned. Some of the people he appointed to help service the then-new Superdome got embroiled in scandal. The rate of major crimes exploded in New Orleans on his watch (to be fair, it grew somewhat nationwide as well).
Yet the city, by most measures, made progress under Moon Landrieu’s leadership. And when the demands of economic development sometimes clashed with historic preservation (a crucial need for a city with New Orleans’s rich cultural and architectural uniqueness), Landrieu at various times aggressively pushed both. While critics carped at the choices he made between those competing considerations in individual cases, the simple fact is that the city’s downtown grew under Landrieu’s stewardship even as most of its important landmarks and character remained intact.
In sum, Landrieu was in many ways a good mayor, even in tough circumstances. And on the toughest issue of all, racial integration in the South, Landrieu not only took a moral stand but also engineered a relatively soft landing.
Landrieu’s stand for racial fairness began long before his mayoralty. In the 1950s, while he was a student at New Orleans’s Loyola University, he traveled in the South to an integrated conference. In the early 1960s Louisiana legislature, he voted against widely popular segregationist bills. And as a city councilman and mayor, he pushed to desegregate public accommodations as he also integrated all levels of city government.
Some of his appointees and contractors were better than others (some were truly excellent), and some of the black political organizations jump-started by Landrieu’s integration efforts instituted spoils-system “machine politics” that were as equally self-serving as some of the old, white racist ones. But the essential reality was that before Landrieu, black people remained second-class citizens. When Landrieu became mayor in 1970, the city population was 45% black, but only 19% of municipal employees were black, and almost all of them were at low levels of authority. By the time he left office in 1978, black people comprised 43% of the city workforce.
In employment, in public accommodations, and more broadly, Landrieu, without quotas, brought black New Orleanians as equals into public life while enlisting some elements of the white social establishment to help ease the transition.
That mission of Landrieu’s was good and right and fair and just.
It was good and right in more ways than one. Of course, there is the platonic, “all created equal” ideal of the Declaration of Independence, which should itself be enough. Yet, for New Orleans particularly, there is an uber-practical sense in which general integration is fair and just. It is a city whose international renown owes a vast debt to its black inhabitants through the years: the mixed-race “Creoles of color” who built a once-thriving black middle class, the black cooks who added zesty spices to the rich mix of Cajun and Creole cuisine, a New Orleans black intellectual tradition that spurred literature, early newspapers, schools, and benevolent societies, and, of course, the music (jazz, R&B, soul) that is virtually synonymous with the Big Easy.
If any city should have a fully integrated public life, it is New Orleans.
Landrieu recognized all this on both moral and practical levels. And Landrieu had the mettle, long before most white politicians did and even when subjected to death threats, to start making it happen.
Granted, Landrieu was a savvy enough politician to turn convictions into action by building winning coalitions. But it took moral fortitude to assert the convictions even before he could find victory with them.
More politicians need to learn from Landrieu that principles come first, political tactics second — and that the tactics serve the principles, not the other way around.
