One last way Leander Perez screwed Louisiana.

Ol’ Leander was one of the first political figures I was ever interested in — he seemed to be about as pure a distillation of evil imaginable. He ran the two most southeastern parishes of Louisiana, Plaquemines and St. Bernard, as a dictatorship for a half century.

Through it all, he had two overarching goals: enriching himself and keeping the black man down. The two intertwined; hating blacks built the support that made the theft possible, and the money funded the decades of payoffs and dirty elections that kept him in power.

He accomplished the first by setting up shell companies that milked mineral-rights money that should have gone to the government, becoming an extraordinarily rich man. He did the second by becoming one of the South’s most virulent segregationists, in an era where competition for that title was fierce.

Nationally, he was a great ally of Class-A bigots like Wallace and Thurmond; in Louisiana, he teamed up with racists like Willie Rainach and John Rarick to play the Longites against the reformers and keep segregation institutionalized. You can read for yourself some of the astounding things he said about blacks and Jews, but his actions spoke louder than words — pushing mobs to burn desegregrating schools, or repurposing an old Civil War prison for any outside “troublemakers” who dared to argue for civil rights.

He was so bad that the Catholic Church ended up excommunicating him for being too racist — in the South, in 1962! (Praise to Archbishop Rummel for that, although the Church got cowardly after he died and let ol’ Leander back in.)

When Perez died, his fiefdom passed down to his two sons, Chalin and Leander Jr. But in Shakespearean style, they ended up feuding with each other and finally lost control around 1980 — sixty years after their dad took power. The main throughfare in the area is still named for him — in popular perception if not in reality.

The Perezes may have lost political power, but they still have all that money. Plaquemines and St. Bernard were essentially destroyed by Hurricane Katrina, but my colleague Scott Parks tracked down the family in the days after the hurricane. Leander III and his wife apparently evacuated to the Dallas area.

Their daughter was marrying a young banker with the impossibly New Orleans name of Clé Dabezies. Scott quotes Clé talking about he had become desensitized to the racial divide in the city. “I think everyone has just ignored the crime problems and racial divisions. That’s a big part of the equation. Do I want to go back to that? It’s all come to fruition.”

I have no reason to doubt that Mr. Dabezies is a decent fellow. But you’ll excuse me if, when looking for racial wisdom, I turn to someone other than a man marrying into one of the greatest fortunes ever generated by southern racism. It’s all come to fruition, indeed.

18 December 2006

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