I’m writing this less because I have any conclusions to draw from it, but more because I’ve been seeing a lot of comments on social media suggesting that the murders of police in Dallas represent a terrifying new reality, or that “race relations” are at an all-time low, or something similar. Of course that’s not the case. Things like this have happened before. Historical patterns, or echoes, aren’t determinative, but I do think knowing our history helps us have a broader sense of scope.
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In January 1973, Mark Essex murdered five police officers (and four civilians) and died in a standoff on the roof of a New Orleans hotel. He was armed with a .44 Magnum carbine and told passersby he was only interested in killing white people.
Look at what was happening in the country. A few months before, Nixon had swept the presidential election through peak application of the Southern Strategy. 1972 was the year George Wallace was shot, Shirley Chisholm ran for president, Angela Davis was acquitted of being an accessory to murder, and three Confederate generals were etched onto Stone Mountain in Georgia. Much of the country was still exhausted from widespread riots in the late 1960s and the recent assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy. This isn’t even touching on Vietnam, much less what was happening in the rest of the world: terrorist hijackings, assassinations, and outright massacres.
New Orleans was in no way isolated from these trends. The city’s civil rights record was never particularly good, from its growth as the major port in the Atlantic slave trade to the site of Homer Plessy’s attempt to ride in a whites-only train car that led to the landmark pro-segregation ruling. At the beginning of the 1960s, it was the city where Ruby Bridges was pelted with eggs by white housewives (“The Cheerleaders”) after forced desegregation of the public schools, and sites around the city, like the Woolworth’s lunch counter, were targeted for sit-ins and boycotts. By the mid-60s, the area’s reputation for mistreatment of African Americans was so bad that AFL players led a boycott of the entire city. When the Black Panthers arrived in 1970 and eventually set up shop in the city’s worst housing projects (Desire), they exchanged gunfire with the police department on at least three separate occasions. Underlying all this was the impending demographic shift: by the late 60s, New Orleans was on the cusp of becoming a majority-black city.
On November 6, 1972, Denver Smith and Leonard Brown, two students participating in protests at Southern University in nearby Baton Rouge, were killed by police gunfire. No shooters were identified. No one was held accountable.
Mark Essex was born in Kansas in 1949, and later ended up on the West Coast during an abbreviated stint in the Navy: he went AWOL over racial abuse, which was openly acknowledged during his discharge hearings. After meeting the Black Panthers in New York, he relocated to New Orleans in late 1972 and, apparently enraged by the two deaths at Southern, began a one-man campaign against local police.
It was more than just a single event. He killed his first police officer on New Year’s Eve and wounded another, then killed his second officer a few hours later. After a week of hiding and near-misses from police investigators, he reemerged on January 7th by shooting a grocer, stealing a car, and driving to the site of his fatal showdown, the old Howard Johnson’s in New Orleans’ Central Business District. His goodbye note to a local television station began with “Africa greets you.” In his rampage through the hotel, he set diversionary fires, murdered white guests, spared black workers, and sniped at police officers as they gathered below. Eventually he was trapped on the roof, and the Marines sent in a military helicopter to help end the standoff.
You can watch video of the standoff here, but I’m not embedding it. In the end, it was estimated that Essex’s body had taken around 200 bullets. He had killed nine people and wounded another dozen. The police officers he killed were named Alfred Harrell (a 19-year old black deputy), Edwin Hosli, Sr., Phillip Coleman, Paul Persigo, and Louis Sirgo. The civilians he killed were named Robert and Betty Steagall, Frank Schneider, and Walter Collins.
As a result of the Essex rampage, the NOPD began rapidly militarizing in training and equipment. Meanwhile, just two months after the shooting, a black police officer who was on the scene (and who saved the life of another wounded officer) filed suit against the NOPD citing widespread racial discrimination, harassment, and use of excessive force. He won.
I don’t know if there are any productive parallels we can draw re: Dallas from this, but it’s worth knowing the story.
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In addition to the links above, a major source for this diary is a recent Master’s Thesis by Derrick W.A. Martin, "From the Desire to Mark Essex: The Catalysts of Militarization for the New Orleans Police Department" (2016). University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations. Paper 2174. Available online here.