*A version of this post originally appeared on Medium*
By Michael Quess? Moore
Remember when JFK marched with MLK in the Birmingham Campaign of 1963 and helped him overthrow Bull Connor’s racist regime? Neither do I.
What I do know is that the May before that bloody summer, many of King’s cohorts, including young activist Jerome Smith from New Orleans, sat down with Kennedy’s brother, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy. (RFK did not invite King, whom he deemed too radical at the time.) During the meeting, Jerome indicated to Robert that if Black folks didn’t start getting some protection from racist terrorism in the South, they would start taking matters into their own hands.
It has been said that not long after that meeting, RFK ordered J. Edgar Hoover to heighten the already intense FBI surveillance on the Civil Rights movement. None of this, of course, stopped JFK from delivering a seemingly heartfelt speech lauding the cause of Civil Rights for black folks.
New Orleans mayor Mitch Landrieu has recently attempted similar co-optation and false alliance with Black-led resistance via his new book, In the Shadow of Statues. The same man who consistently surveilled and policed the efforts of Take Em Down NOLA—the coalition that picked up a long running baton of struggle for Confederate monument removal in New Orleans—is now claiming to be an ally of our work. Meanwhile, he’s taking nearly all the credit for removing the monuments by his valiant self.
This is all painfully reminiscent of America’s darling boy Kennedy spewing PC jargon about the Civil Rights Movement as he simultaneously had his brother ramp up monitoring of it.
When Take Em Down NOLA was co-founded by myself, Angela Kinlaw, Malcolm Suber and other organizers in July of 2015, we were responding to the national outcry against racial terrorism on Black people in America. Violence rooted in the ideology of white supremacy. That outcry was in direct response to the Charleston church massacre of June 2015, but also responsive to slain Black folk as far back as Trayvon Martin, if not Emmitt Till.
Unlike the mayor, our passion for this struggle reaches much farther back than the immediate present. We had already staged two Confederate Flag burnings in May and July of 2015 under the banner of BYP100 NOLA, the New Orleans branch of Black Youth Project 100.
Prior to that, I issued a petition for the removal of the Robert E. Lee statue in a highly publicized march for Mike Brown (also organized by BYP100 NOLA) in November 2014. We never asked for a permit for the march and only promoted it by way of social media and digital platforms.
But word apparently got to the city because police were fully present at least an hour before we assembled, with cops at every corner of Lee Circle where the Confederate general’s statue once stood. Our actions were clearly under scrutiny by the mayor’s office from the embryonic start.
Seven months later, we formed Take Em Down NOLA. We named ourselves in response to the trending hashtag of the moment, #TakeEmDown, which resulted from activist Bree Newsome’s courageous climb up the South Carolina state flagpole to remove the Confederate flag after the Charleston massacre. In response to that historical moment, Mayor Landrieu had just made a nice speech calling for the removal of 4 Confederate monuments—he hadn’t learned to call them white supremacist yet—in New Orleans.
Take Em Down NOLA at “Action Jackson II” photo by Christine “CFreedom” Brown
But senior organizers like Malcolm Suber had been calling for the removal of all white supremacist symbols since the 70s. Malcolm and his cohorts had even succeeded in changing the names of some 31 schools in the 1990s. When they did so, they used an ordinance that calls for the removal of any statue or monument that suggests the supremacy of any group over another.
When Mitch made his speech, he cited that same ordinance. He did not cite the activists who had set the precedent for using it in this way. Be that as it may, as a coalition continuing the work of our ancestors and elders, we too decided to make the call for all monuments to be removed.
When the issue seemingly disappeared from public discourse, we riled people back up again in November of 2015. This time targeting other statues like the one of Trail of Tears architect Andrew Jackson, Supreme Court Justice and Crescent City White League member E.D. White, and New Orleans’s founder and own personal Christopher Columbus, Bienville. In short, we expanded the conversation beyond just four.
“Justice” ED White was missing a piece of his outfit. We gave it to him. Photo by Christine “CFreedom” Brown
Eventually the city caved to the pressure that our organizing and a powerful collective narrative had applied. Yet for the following 15 months, the mayor caved to a different type of pressure. He allowed the process to be stalled by monument defenders as they sued the city on specious charges that allegedly prevented monument removal for over a year.
This is the same “strong mayor” that spent $40 million on a surveillance camera project that he planned to expand despite public pushback. The same mayor that endorsed the further perpetuation of the charter school system that has privatized 99% of public schools, after firing 5,000 public school teachers with no public hearing following Hurricane Katrina. The same mayor that supported AirBnB contracts that further displace local residents in a city already being aggressively gentrified.
The same mayor that approved a city budget that spends 63% of 647 million dollars on cops, jails, and reactive measures, while spending only 3% on children and families, and 1% on job development. The same mayor that presided over an economy that doles out $3 to every white family for every $1 to Black families, and 53% of city contracts to white men and a measly 29% to Black people in a city that is 60% Black.
The same mayor that has responded to the crime rates that result from impoverished, disenfranchised communities with more policing. That ramped police militarization up through a back- door deal with CIA venture capital firm Palantir that surveilled city residents for some 5 years unbeknownst even to City Council.
This same strong mayor with government backing up to the clandestine federal level was allegedly so scared of some racist white folks, that all but one Confederate monument he ordered moved was done so in the wee hours of the night (at Mitch’s request, not the contractor’s).
The same mayor that spent more than half of the 2 million dollars slated for monument removal in New Orleans on hiring a Texas security company to surveil the process and gather intelligence on all sides of the issue, one of those sides ostensibly being Take Em Down NOLA.
This is a page taken right from the Kennedy playbook of policing Black activists while publicly praising them.
This all made for fine political theater, heightening Landrieu’s national spotlight as a well-intentioned Southern white man. But behind the curtains, he had his communications director meet me to dissuade us from our public actions during those 15 stagnant months. He also had his police chief privately meet with Take Em Down NOLA leadership to stop us from moving on the Andrew Jackson statue when we put over 700 people in the streetsto remove the racist symbol ourselves.
Depicition of a Chitimacha First Nations Chief slumped in defeat beneath Bienville’s crusty ass racist feet. Photo: Christine “CFreedom” Brown
These are but a few of the stories that Mitch’s three frail mentions of Take Em Down NOLA in his shortsighted book fail to tell. The ones that, despite his failing to ever meet with us directly, he is all too cognizant of. After all, his first words to me when I confronted him at his New Orleans book signing last month were a cynical, “Oh yea, I know you. You can thank me for protecting you!”
While his benevolent public face may conceal the far less praiseworthy wizard behind the veil, true organizers know that such duplicity is commonplace amongst well posturing politicians. Like the Kennedy brothers in their quest for the Black vote in ’63, Mitch has opted to use his platform to bolster his national spotlight for whatever self-promotional end he seeks. (Presumably the 2020 presidential run he soy coyly denies in every interview on his present book tour.)
If this is who we’re relying on to spearhead national narratives around race, then I have about as much faith in Mitch or any white “progressive” (aka moderate liberal) as King did in that Alabama jail.
When I finally met Mitch at his New Orleans book signing, I told him that his self-promotion perpetuates the very system of supremacy he claims to be against. I told him he would do better to establish a platform for the grassroots activists that had been doing this work for 40 years. His response: “You not even 40 years old!”
All I could think of later was how King wasn’t even 40 when he was taken from us. How neither was Malcolm X, nor Patrice Lamumba, nor Steve Biko, nor Thomas Sankara, nor Che Guevara. And how painfully repulsive is the naïve arrogance of the condescending white liberal.
I thought of Hillary’s “super predator” comments cursing a whole generation of Black boys to damnation as her husband ramped up mandatory minimums that traumatized my generation. And he did it all while crooning his way into Black America’s heart with a saxophone.
I thought of how Black folks have played into the hands of white liberal manipulation and how dangerous their deceptions have been—even for them. I thought of how this has left both sides unable to join in productive solidarity, and what a shame it is that the very people that proffer themselves as our allies so often end up aiding in Black folks’ oppression.
I thought of all my brave comrades that stood with me to call out Mitch’s offenses that day, and the countless activists across the nation—who have stopped Bill Clinton mid-speech, taken over Bernie Sanders’s stage, or changed the climate of a meeting with a Kennedy by merely stating their unfiltered truths. And how, if we have any chance of giving power to our oft-erased narratives, it’s only going to happen one disruption at a time.
Suggested Reading:
Martin Luther King, Jr., Why We Can’t Wait, 1964
Naomi Klein, Shock Doctrine, 2007
Albert Thrasher, On to New Orleans!: Louisiana’s heroic 1811 slave revolt, 1996
Michael “Quess?” Moore is a poet, educator, actor, playwright and activist/organizer in that order. He is a two-time national poetry slam champion, two-time author, Urban League Courage Awardee, and co-founder of Take Em Down NOLA, a coalition committed to the removal of all symbols of white supremacy in New Orleans. Follow him on Twitter here!
