Fade to Black

Hurricane Katrina and the Disappearance of Creole New Orleans

Bibliographic Data

ID10034591
AuthorsA R Hirsch (University of New Orleans, corresponding author)
Year2007
Volume94
Issue3
Pages752-761
Publication date2007-12-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of American History (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0021-8723 • E-ISSN: 1945-2314
PublisherOxford University Press (OUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/25095136
OpenAlexW2319399304
LanguageEN
Citations received10
References cited1

How could you have reelected Ray Nagin? More accusation than query, it was a question frequently put to New Orleanians after the mayor's successful campaign in the months following Hurricane Katrina's devastation of the Gulf Coast. Mayor C. Ray Nagin had been overwhelmed—as had every other public official regardless of race, gender, or political affiliation—by what was only in part a “natural” disaster. The scenes of suffering and degradation outside the Superdome and the New Orleans Convention Center testified to the city's callous incompetence and to a mind-numbing sloth that seemed to have taken up permanent residence in city hall. Reelect Ray Nagin? How, indeed. On the surface, Nagin's close victory over the white liberal Mitch Landrieu in a May 2006 runoff following a twenty-three-candidate nonpartisan primary seemed easy to explain. Nagin was the only African American among the three major candidates in what had been a majority-black city. Landrieu, his most dangerous challenger, was the state's lieutenant governor and the son of Maurice “Moon” Landrieu, a former mayor of New Orleans who had orchestrated the civil rights revolution in city government and politics in the 1970s. Ron Forman, a civic leader and head of the Audubon Nature Institute, which includes the city's world-famous zoo and aquarium, emerged as the favorite of the old, conservative elite, much of which had backed Nagin in 2002.1 Queasy at the thought of a liberal Landrieu victory in 2002, members of the elite then found Nagin, a black executive for Cox Cable (a tv, Internet, and phone provider) who mouthed familiar “reform” slogans, preferable to a traditional Democrat. The conservative realists who flocked to Nagin's successful 2002 candidacy abandoned him four years later for a revived white hope. The mayor thus found his 2006 campaign hemorrhaging white voters and alienating the black masses, who not only offered a strong critique of his performance, but had never warmly embraced Nagin himself

Creole language · Elite · Political science · Politics · State (computer science · Victory · White (mutation · Caribbean history, culture, and politics · Disaster Management and Resilience · History · Law · Rhetoric and Communication Studies

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