THE REV. MELANIE MOREL-ENSMINGER
OCTOBER 11, 2008
I want to start by telling you a little about myself. My name is Melanie Morel-Ensminger, I am a 5th-generation New Orleanian, and I serve as the minister of the First UU congregation, which ordained me 15 ½ years ago. Eighteen years, I was administrator of this church, and used to help Jack Gillespie organize and publicize this Breakfast. After ordination I served Unitarian Universalist churches in Ellisville, MS; Chattanooga, TN; Auckland, New Zealand; and most recently, suburban Philadelphia, where I was involved in anti-racism work, same-sex marriage rights, support for inner-city Camden, and rallying for a group of Palestinian-Americans who sought to build their own mosque in the face of bigoted neighborhood opposition. I came home 2 years after Hurricane Katrina, which was to me 2 years late.
The Morel part of my name comes from my father, the late Barney Morel, who at the time of his death in 1991 was retired as the subdistrict director of the United Steelworkers. He had been a union man, specifically Congress of Industrial Organizations, since before World War II. His other activities in New Orleans included serving as the labor representative on the Save Our Schools Committee, set up by Mayor Morrison in 1960 to bridge the issue of Orleans Parish public school desegregation. He was also active in the Urban League, and I guess, needless to say, the Democratic Party, for which he was a delegate at the convention in Atlantic City in 1964. My political life and my idea of strategy begins with my father and the stories he told me about organizing unions and civil rights work in south Louisiana in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s.
As a teenager, I organized local boycotts of lettuce, protested the war in Vietnam, organized Moratorium Day at my high school, worked to change the form of government in St. Bernard Parish, and volunteered for Bobby Kennedy for President. As an adult, I protested against nuclear power, served on the board of the local Health Systems Agency, known as a HSA, and worked hard in Dutch Morial’s campaign as the first black mayor of the city.
It was Dutch who gave me my second most important political lesson. In a fight on the HSA, a group of Dutch’s allies on the board met in the Mayor’s Office to seek his help and advice. To our surprise, Dutch got mad. He hollered, he shook his finger. “Don’t ask me to do your politics for you! Line your own ducks up! Do your own politics!” I never forgot that.
At my father’s funeral, my siblings and I were astonished at the diversity of the crowd who attended. There were black and white working men with hard, calloused hands, who told us, over and over, “Your daddy got me my job” or “Your dad saved my job.” And then there were men in sleek expensive suits and shiny cufflinks, clearly of the management and even owner class, who told us, “I respected your father so much” or “I never knew another union rep I trusted as much as your father.” This, too, was a lesson – that it was possible to do good work for justice for working poor people and still be respected and admired by people on the “other side.”
As I said, my father came up through the ranks of the historic “non-skilled” unions, the Congress of Industrial Organizations, or CIO. Unlike many other union leaders, my father dropped completely the sense of rivalry and turf when the CIO merged with the American Federation of Labor (AFL). “We’re on the same side,” Barney insisted, “The fight is over.”
I think of all these lessons when I see New Orleans progressive organizations reverting to self-destructive and self-defeating “usual and customary ways” of operation. It’s especially discouraging to me when there’s so much work to be done after Katrina.
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I feel downhearted when I see New Orleans progressives dissipating a lot of energy infighting amongst themselves over tactics and turf and over who’s more right or more moral. In my imagination, I see New Orleans’ corrupt elected leaders and the oligarchy that really runs things rubbing their hands together in glee. “Oh goody, they’re fighting each other again.”
•As a white person struggling all the time with my own internalized superiority, I feel embarrassed and frustrated when I hear progressives patronizing the black and white working class and poor, telling other folks what’s good for them, because after all “we’re the experts” and “we know better.” This is no way to be in solidarity with the workers and the poor.
•It drives me bonkers when progressives try to make their case to the public in massive overstatement that only alienate potential allies and supporters. If every single thing done by our political and ideological opponents is the end of the world as we know it, we just become the political equivalent of the Y2K scare. Y’know, y’all, I just don’t believe we’re on the brink of martial law and the mass internment of white leftists.
Before Hurricane Katrina, there were members of my immediate family who were regularly on the outs with each other. One sibling not speaking to another sibling, and vice versa; this one not close to that one; that one feeling like they were adopted. Before the Storm, we could go months without seeing or even speaking on the phone to one another. But after Katrina, every-thing changed. Suddenly, “you were Daddy’s favorite” and “mom liked you best” and some little slight that had been remembered forever all faded into the unimportance they had always really been. We see each other now every month for a regular family dinner, and we usually see each other several times outside of the monthly Morel dinner. We’re closer now than ever – Katrina taught us what’s really important.
My point, and I do have one, is that progressive organizations of the New Orleans area should learn these same lessons. We should minimize differences and unite to work for a better Crescent City. We should learn to play politics with the Big Boys, line our own ducks up, and avoid as much as possible techniques that are both outmoded and self-defeating. I personally am not aware that calling City Council members names ever got one of them to change a vote.
There have to be ways to work for justice for New Orleans’ most oppressed citizens and make the city a better place that still leave us with our self-respect and our principles intact. Certainly, real work that challenges the status quo and seeks to change systems causes conflict – but we progressives ought not, I think, to be the ones throwing the insults, using verbal violence to get our points across. A little humor can go a long way. My friend Vivek Pandit in India once organized a protest of schoolchildren begging for money for the Indian government, which had said they had no money for schools for rural “Untouchable” students. The kids carried signs which said, “Our poor government has no money – please contribute to the government.” Y’know, somehow after that, the government found the money.
We should also remember the way activists were trained at the Highlander Folk School. “The more radical the views you espouse, the more conservative you should dress.” Think of the well-dressed black civil rights protestors, some of whom had also gone to Highlander. If we really want our message to get across to regular folks in the mainstream, then maybe our public persona shouldn’t look quite so outré and bohemian. We don’t have to look like we live on Audubon Place, but we ought to look like folks who have to be taken seriously.
Not since Reconstruction or the Huey Long era has New Orleans been in so much trouble – racially, socially, physically, financially – as we’re in today. The progressive community in New Orleans would be much more powerful and influential if we banded together, found common cause, lined our ducks right and cared how we came across to other people. New Orleans needs us.
