Sheriff Harry Lee dead at 75

From the AP via the Houston Chronicle:

It was his clashes with black leaders as sheriff of the mostly white New Orleans suburb that often made news during his nearly three decades as sheriff.

The most recent such disagreement came after Hurricane Katrina devastated the region on Aug. 29, 2005. Lee's agency faced an upsurge in crime, blamed largely on the illegal drug business that had been dislodged from neighboring New Orleans.

Lee prompted outrage by suggesting his deputies could randomly question young black men in high-crime areas. Lee later abandoned the plan, but made no apologies for it.

In 1987, he was blamed by many for putting up temporary barricades between mostly black New Orleans and mostly white Jefferson Parish. The barricades were actually ordered up by the Jefferson Parish Council, according to news reports. However, Lee was quoted as saying at the time that the controversy might help his re-election bid that year.

In another incident, following a rash of robberies in white neighborhoods, he ordered his deputies to arbitrarily stop "young blacks in rinky-dink cars" driving in white neighborhoods. He later backed off.

Click here for the rest.

So Harry Lee was my sheriff these brief few weeks I've been living in Jefferson Parrish, and while I don't yet know much about the notoriously wild, weird, and woolly politics down here in the Big Easy's metropolitan area, his obit serves as an opening primer. I've written recently about racial attitudes here in Louisiana, more specifically about Jena, which included my surprise at how a number of whites here in the New Orleans area took what I see as a racist position on the nooses-in-the-whiteboy-tree scandal. In short, despite the fact that we are now decades past the civil rights era, racism appears to bubble and seethe beneath a calm veneer of civility here in the Deep South. You just know such a situation factors heavily into local politics.

I don't think Lee was a racist per se, especially because as a minority himself, a Chinese-American, he might have had some sensitivity on the subject--of course, bigotry is not exclusive to any ethnicity, so who really knows? But it is utterly clear that he used racist attitudes to his political advantage. Metairie, the community in which I now live, takes up a large part of Jefferson Parrish: it is a white flight community, largely populated by individuals who left New Orleans because of desegregation, and their offspring. That is, many of my community's families moved here because they were or are now racist. It is interesting to note that Lee seemed to always back down from his legally questionable stances against African-Americans. Okay, fine. In the end he did the right thing. But only after he sent the good white folk of Jefferson Parrish the unambiguous message that he was on their side.

Politics. It's almost as though he pulled a page from the Republican Party's "Southern Strategy" play book. It's all about sending coded racist messages to white racist voters who understand that you can't just come out and say we ought to put all the black people in jail. It's all about "I'm no racist, but..."

So he was beloved by the people of Jefferson Parrish. I think I now know why.

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$