Mayor, faith leaders call on community to change culture of violence

By Mason Harrison
Contributing Writer

Faith leaders and elected officials gathered at Dillard University Nov. 6 to join forces in the city’s ongoing effort to combat violent crime and its appending causes. But what separates the event from previous efforts is the method organizers used to forge an alliance between communities of faith and local politicians.

The NOLA Interfaith Peace Initiative is the product of a yearlong effort by local religious leaders, city officials and the Urban League of Greater New Orleans to outline the role faith communities have in crime reduction strategies, which produced a covenant signed by dozens of ministers, politicians and area activists.

The five-point agreement tasks faith leaders with “assisting our youth to become peacemakers of our time” and with “promoting solidarity within our communities of faith.” The plan also calls for supporting the mayor’s office through the city’s NOLA for Life campaign and developing “place-based community peace strategies.”

A variety of religious leaders were on hand to sign the covenant, including Catholic Archbishop Gregory Aymond; Rabbi Ed Cohn, of Temple Sinai; and Imam Rafeeq Nu’man, of the Masjid Ur Raheem mosque. Aymond said ending violence in New Orleans “won’t be easy, but it is possible and that’s why we’ve signed this covenant.”

Mayor Mitch Landrieu, speaking before a crowded auditorium, began his remarks by saying, “I am a sinner. If there’s anyone in this room that I may have offended, I’m sorry.” He called reconciling individual differences the first step on a long road toward ending the city’s stubborn murder rate. “We are facing a relentless drumbeat of death,” he added, “and it doesn’t matter who’s the president or the mayor.”

Andrea Samuels, the mother of one-year-old shooting victim Londyn Sa­muels, spoke about the importance of emotional restraint. Samuels implored those in attendance to think before acting or responding in anger. Samuels, whose daughter was killed in late August, even encouraged young attendees to “think before you tweet,” referring to Twitter, a popular social media platform.

Landrieu acknowledged the city’s culture of violence, but said New Orleans residents are not destined to be victimized by that culture. “Culture,” Landrieu said, “is nothing but learned behavior practiced over and over and over again to produce a certain result. But the wonderful thing is that culture can be changed. John Lewis,” the mayor added, “didn’t take a beating so that black men could die this way.”

Organizers of the peace initiative will release a report in the coming months outlining how faith communities can work with elected officials and other stakeholders to collectively address the city’s crime rate. Erika McConduit, the local Urban League’s interim president and CEO, stressed the importance of bringing together the city’s “long-standing anchor institutions” to foster peace and violence reduction. “We want to work with faith leaders to help them learn how they can be part of this process,” McConduit said.

“As a community we are supposed to live as a family,” said Musbashir Maqbool, a member of the Masjid Ur Raheem mosque. “It’s time for young people to be more productive and to have more going on in their lives than just violence and I believe that if they have the love of God in their hearts they will do well.”

This article originally published in the November 11, 2013 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.