By Malcolm Suber
The residents of New Orleans are being battered by the omnipresence of New Orleans’ ruling class promoting this city’s tricentennial. For the white supremacist ruling class it has been 300 years of consolidating their rule by every scheme available. They have grown fat, rich and comfortable in their mansion sized homes and glittering office towers. Vacations in the summer. Good education for their kids. Eating at the famous restaurants . Attending a constant round of balls and business luncheons. Clearly the rich white ruling class of New Orleans has much to celebrate.
But what do we working people, especially the Black working class people of New Orleans, have to celebrate? Not much! Although the working class does all the work and are the creators of New Orleans food and culture, the ruling class almost exclusively benefits from the culture we produce. We are assigned to the bottom rungs of society. We struggle to keep a roof over our heads. The city which fleeces us with sales taxes, parking fees and red light cameras provides little for us. Rent and daycare are too high; police terror and incarceration are too frequent We have little time for ourselves or our families.
The ruling class is salivating about the extra tens of thousands of tourists that will come to New Orleans to celebrate the tricentennial. Profits are anticipated to grow by hundreds of millions of dollars. Ask yourself, will New Orleans workers be better off?
The tricentennial celebrations reinforce the complete mastery of the racist white ruling class which has ruled New Orleans since its founding. The ruling class waged war to remove the indigenous peoples from this land and imported kidnapped Africans to come to the colony to do the heavy work of felling the cypress trees and draining the swamps. The plantation owners and the apparatus created to perpetuate the chattel slave system accumulated great wealth from the unpaid labor of the enslaved Africans.
When New Orleans and Louisiana experimented with a multi-racial democracy based on legal equality for the freedmen during Reconstruction, the planter class organized the White League to overthrow the reconstruction government. The terrorist atrocities include the 1866 massacre of hundreds at the Mechanics Institute and the September 1874 coup against the Reconstruction government. This counter revolution ushered in the Jim Crow period and the virtual re-enslavement of Black freedmen and women into the share cropping system.
Black people and their allies struggled to maintain the gains of emancipation but were overwhelmed by the forces of reaction and white supremacy. The US government withdrew federal troops from the south who had been there to guarantee the political rights of the freedmen. The state of Louisiana adopted a white supremacist state constitution and passed all types of laws curtailing the rights of Black people; especially their right to vote.
When the Civil Rights and the freedom struggle of the Black nation reemerged in the 1950s, the white supremacist ruling fomented a mass racist movement to support racial discrimination and segregation. This forced separation was entirely in the interest of the ruling class to keep all workers in the South poorly paid and super exploited.