He was the right man at the right time
1st July 2024 · 0 Comments
By Mason Harrison
Contributing Writer
Marc Morial is used to being told “it’s not his time.” From his historic campaign for mayor of New Orleans, becoming the youngest chief executive in the city’s history, to his decision to bypass the city’s hospitality industry to spur the creation of the now multi-million-dollar Essence Festival, to assuming the helm and growing the influence of the National Urban League, his long career has been about defying the odds.
This year marks 30 years since Morial rode into City Hall on the promise to root out corruption “with a shovel not a broom” despite having an array of political forces aligned against him, including the late civil rights and culinary icon Leah Chase who – despite supporting the successful odds-long bid of his father Ernest “Dutch” Morial to become the city’s first Black mayor almost two decades earlier – appeared in a campaign commercial for rival mayoral candidate Donald Mintz to admonish Morial, an ingénu state senator to his critics, that the 1994 campaign for the second floor, east side of City Hall was simply not his time.
“We were up against a lot of powerful forces,” Morial said, recalling his bid for “the franchise,” the moniker he used to describe the economic importance of the mayor’s office to Black New Orleanians. “The Times-Picayune. Downtown business leaders. Political operators. We were definitely the underdog,” he said, checking off a partial list of the strange bedfellows whose ad hoc opposition to Morial ultimately failed.
He won the mayor’s race by a comfortable nine percentage points.
“The thing I remember about that night was all of the people who were gathered in the street chanting and celebrating as I arrived,” he said, discussing the throngs of supporters who crowded his entry to the Roosevelt Hotel where he celebrated the upset victory over Mintz and future New Orleans mayor, Mitch Landrieu. “We received a lot of support from the Black community and had an unprecedented get-out-the-vote effort for New Orleans at that time in which two to three thousand people were out knocking doors.”
Months after winning the mayor’s race, Morial met with representatives from Essence magazine who asked for his support for what was to be a one-time festival to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of the magazine’s debut in 1970. “I met with Ed Lewis, then the CEO of Essence; Susan Taylor, who was the magazine’s editor-in-chief; and George Wein, who was a music producer. They came to see me in my office.”
Plans were set to hold the event over the weekend preceding July 4, 1995.
Yet while Morial threw his support behind the celebration, the city’s hospitality sector was less than sanguine about the possibility of hosting a second large-scale Black cultural event. “They thought that Essence would be another Bayou Classic,” Morial said, referring to the annual gridiron rivalry between Grambling and Southern universities, two historically Black colleges, that draws thousands to the city each year.
Several downtown restaurants – despite being discouraged from doing so – closed their doors rather than serve Essence attendees, some under the guise of shuttering during the summer doldrums for the tourism industry. “The hotels were very stingy; they did not want to make a lot of rooms available for Essence, but the thing that changed their minds was the fact that Saks Fifth Avenue sold out of merchandise that weekend,” Morial recalled. “That’s when they finally understood the financial impact of Essence attendees and the event was so successful that the organizers decided to hold the festival each year.”
Morial said the lack of initial support for the gathering stemmed from a cultural blind spot on the part of the city’s business community. “What they did not know was that publications like Ebony, Jet and Essence enjoyed a special place on the coffee table in the homes of almost every middle-class Black family. Those magazines were like the chronicle or griot of Black America, but they did not understand that about us.”
Morial will join a panel discussion at the 2024 Essence Festival to mark the 30th anniversary of the jamboree’s inception and detail the origin story behind the largest Black cultural event in the United States, whose economic impact goes beyond the millions of dollars it injects into the local economy each year.
“I wanted to make New Orleans the number one city in the country for Black conferences and conventions,” Morial said. “We brought in meetings of the National Medical Association, a trade group for Black doctors; the National Dental Association, the trade association for Black dentists; and the National Bar Association, a trade group for Black attorneys. We also hosted the conventions for the Black Greek-letter organizations within the Divine Nine. All of these groups came to town after Essence, which paid incredible dividends as the catalyst needed to encourage them to view New Orleans as a viable conference site.”
Four words summate Morial’s tenure as mayor.
It was “a time of action,” he said. “We reinvigorated the recreation department. We revamped the police department and reduced crime. We created the commissions on film, music and the cultural economy. I brought the streetcar back to Canal Street. We created the Satchmo Fest. We built the arena and brought in a basketball team. We did all of these things because New Orleans needed a kick in the seat.”
After leaving the mayor’s office in the early aughts, Morial was tapped to lead the National Urban League, one of the largest civil rights and public policy organizations in the country. “I knew someone who was familiar with the people at the Urban League who were leading the search process for a new leader,” Morial said. “He told me that he thought I would be perfect for the role and that he had given them my name.”
Two decades later, he still relishes “fighting these buzzards” as president and CEO of the New York-based group founded in 1910 and is leading the herculean effort to construct a new $250-million-dollar national headquarters for the group in Harlem that will feature the first civil rights museum in New York City.
In 2020, Morial released his latest book, “The Gumbo Coalition: 10 Leadership Lessons That Help You Inspire, Unite, and Achieve,” which was adapted for the small screen in 2022 as an award-winning HBO documentary film detailing the ongoing fight for civil rights. The book contains the many pearls of wisdom Morial has accumulated over his three decades of service as a leader in the public, private and third sectors of society, a fitting nod to the nacre-containing pearls also used to mark 30 years of commitment and service.
This article originally published in the July 1, 2024 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
