A time against race: last year Mitch Landrieu became the first white mayor of New Orleans in three decades. He did so by garnering majority support from citizens of both races--the rarest of achievements in American politics. How long can he hold it all together?

• Author: Vogt, Justin

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In the wake of Hurricane Katrina--after all the survivors had been evacuated from the Superdome, plucked from a rooftop, or rescued from one of the city's squalid highway interchanges--a new fear began to grip the black population of New Orleans. Recognizing that the emptiest, most ravaged parts of the city were predominantly African American neighborhoods, they worried that the storm's most lasting toll would be demographic: the demise of the city's black majority and the political voice that came with it.

It was that anxiety that the city's then mayor, Ray Nagin, addressed when he delivered his infamous "chocolate city" speech in January 2006. "This city will be chocolate at the end of the day," he told a crowd on Martin Luther King Jr. Day. "It's the way God wants it to be."

But as it happened, the precipitous downfall of black New Orleans did not come to pass. Before the storm, African Americans made up around 68 percent of the city's population; today they make up closer to 61 percent--a drop-off, to be sure, but the black majority remains solidly intact. Instead, a rather more unexpected transformation has taken place.

When Katrina struck in 2005, the city had a black mayor, a black police chief, and a black district attorney. The city council and the school board were majority black, and the area was represented in Washington by a veteran black Democratic congressman. Today, New Orleans has a white mayor, a white district attorney, and a white police chief. The city council and the school board are majority white. And the city's congressman for the past two years has been a Vietnamese American Republican. The elected leadership looks almost like a photo negative of the pre-Katrina government.

It is an unprecedented reversal. Other American cities have seen black mayors rise and fall. But in no other city has the racial contrast between the population and its freely elected leaders become quite so stark, quite so quickly.

No one really believes anymore that the election of Barack Obama signaled the dawn of a "post-racial" era in American politics. But as a majority-black city that has suddenly elected a predominantly white government, New Orleans is charting unfamiliar territory, carrying out an experiment in a form of politics that might be post-racial--but looks distinctly retro-racial.

At the center of this transformation stands Mitch Landrieu, the first white politician to serve as mayor of New Orleans in more than thirty years. Last February, he was elected in an astonishing landslide to succeed Nagin, who had reached his term limit. In a primary field that included three black candidates and two other white contenders, Landrieu avoided a runoff by winning 66 percent of the vote--including an estimated 62 percent of the black vote. Landrieu's election was hailed locally and nationally as a harbinger of unity in a city that, since Hurricane Katrina, has come to epitomize America's lasting racial divisions.

Before becoming mayor, Landrieu spent sixteen years in the Louisiana state legislature and seven years as the state's lieutenant governor. A youthful fifty years old, he is a compact, energetic man. His intense gaze and closely cropped buzz cut lend him a vaguely military bearing, but up close, he is an expert flesh-presser, chatty and quick to smile. His technocratic talk of "budgeting for outcomes" and "efficiency optimization" is bathed in a bayou drawl that belies just how fast he's speaking. He's charming, and he knows it.

Over the summer, as the fifth anniversary of Katrina approached, Landrieu announced a series of public meetings, ostensibly to gather input on his agenda, but also to gauge the depth of his support. And so on a brutally humid night last August, close to a thousand New Orleanians--almost all of them African American--came to see Landrieu at the Household of Faith church, a hulking concrete structure on an interstate service road in eastern New Orleans. He had been mayor for three months.

With his entire senior staff arrayed behind him, Landrieu stood to address the crowd. "We're doing the first of these meetings in New Orleans East," Landrieu said, "to honor the frustration, and anxiety, and uncertainty that exist in the East about whether you're a real part of the city of New Orleans."

A sprawling patchwork of suburban-style subdivisions and cul-de-sacs, the East is the most typically American-looking section of a city beloved for being so different from the rest of the country. Long regarded as a haven for the black middle class, the East suffered some of the most severe flooding in the storm's aftermath. Most of the area took on at least six feet of water, with the levels rising to more than ten feet in many places.

The East's population has rebounded to about 70 percent of its pre-Katrina size. But life is nothing like it was before. The nearest emergency room is a thirty-minute drive away. There is only one supermarket. Worst of all, thousands of abandoned properties have left the area stricken with blight, driving down already-depressed property values and offering refuge to squatters and criminals. Residents of the East feel they've been neglected, and they had come to let Landrieu know it.

For the next three hours, the new mayor listened while residents took turns at a microphone and poured out a stream of anger, sorrow, and fear. "We demand respect," cried one woman. "We are not coming to you with our hands out. We're taxpayers and homeowners." Another pleaded, her voice quavering, "We need your help, Mr. Mayor. I lay in bed at night thinking about that abandoned house next to me."

After Katrina, the loudest voices in the black community were those defending the right of the hundreds of thousands of displaced people to return to their homes and rebuild. Many feared that much-touted early efforts to "reinvent" the city masked a real desire to prevent them from coming home--to make the city smaller, wealthier, and whiter.

But five years on, concerns over the displaced have receded from view, supplanted in public debates by the grievances of those who made it back. In an inevitable reversal, their well-being is now compromised by the absence of those who didn't return. Some of them are now demanding the aggressive actions--inspections, seizures, demolitions--that had been anathema in the storm's immediate aftermath.

One woman spent nearly ten minutes pouring out her troubles, her voice growing hoarse with fury. "I'm not gonna wait another five years," she wailed. "I'm gonna move to Mississippi!"

Dozens of voices called out.

"Don't move!"

"Don't do it, girl!"

"That's what they want!"

Landrieu listened intently--biting his lip, raising his eyebrows, shaking his head. He filled a legal pad with notes. By the time he finally stood to respond, it was close to eleven o'clock, and the crowd had reached a kind of exhausted catharsis.

"A lot of you talked about blight. But I wanna talk about race for a second," Landrieu said, pausing to stroll further into the crowd. "If I start taking people's houses, who aren't back from Houston and Atlanta--our brothers and sisters--then people on CNN are gonna run up on me and say, 'Why are you trying to stop people from coming home? Why don't you want the brothers and sisters to come home, lil' mister Mitch, looking the way you do?'"

There was some laughter, but mostly the room was quiet.

"So I just want to make sure I heard you right," Landrieu continued. "Y'all are ready for me to say that on a certain date, we're gonna start inspecting? And we're gonna start enforcing? I just wanna make sure I heard you right. Because I promise you, as soon as I lay it down, somebody's gonna come down here, and there's gonna be a march, and somebody's gonna try to turn it into something it's not."

"We got your back!" a women's voice cried out, interrupting Landrieu. The crowd burst into a loud round of applause. Landrieu let the moment sink in.

The woman was Cynthia Bell, a retired telephone company employee. "It was a breath of fresh air," she told me the next day. "As you could tell, it's what we've been asking for. We've been asking for someone to pay attention. That's why African Americans voted for Mitch. He understands where we are coming from."

It is a perception Landrieu will have to work hard to preserve. When Nagin made his "chocolate city" speech in 2006, he was excoriated for what critics deemed an attempt to exploit the racial tensions Katrina had exposed and fueled. Yet it was difficult to take issue with his underlying point. In addition to comprising a supermajority of the city's residents, black New Orleanians have created a set of unique cultural traditions--second-line parades, jazz funerals, the Mardi Gras Indians--that are at the heart of the city's identity. Likewise, the many successes of the city's black politicians were the hard-earned fruits of decades of civil rights activism and grassroots organizing, undertaken by a deeply rooted African American community.

Nagin tapped into the fear that black New Orleans was at risk of falling to a storm-surge coup d'etat. Five years later, it is inevitable that some in the city will come to see the new political order as a fulfillment of that anxiety--and Landrieu knows it. His remarks at the Household of Faith church revealed a man deftly shoring himself up against a potential racial backlash.

It was a promising showing, but piloting New Orleans successfully will require all of Landrieu's political gifts and more. The Big Easy faces tremendous challenges. More than 40,000 abandoned properties fester all over the city. New Orleans boasts the highest murder rate in America. Its out-of-control police department is currently the subject of a massive investigation by the Department of Justice; a dozen officers have already been indicted. As a parting gift, former Mayor Nagin left behind an $80 million budget deficit. And although the city was not...