Showdown In Desire: More Attendees with Stories to Tell

A Look Back at a Powerful Moment in New Orleans’s History

By Orissa Arend
Foreword by Charles E. Jones
Introduction by Curtis J. Austin

Showdown in Desire portrays the Black Panther Party in New Orleans in 1970, a year that included a shootout with the police on Piety Street, the creation of survival programs, and the daylong standoff between the Panthers and the police in the Desire housing development. Through interviews with Malik Rahim, the Panther; Robert H. King, Panther and member of the Angola 3; Larry Preston Williams, the black policeman; Moon Landrieu, the mayor; Henry Faggen, the Desire resident; Robert Glass, the white lawyer; Jerome LeDoux, the black priest; William Barnwell, the white priest; and many others, Orissa Arend tells a nuanced story that unfolds amid guns, tear gas, desperate poverty, oppression, and inflammatory rhetoric to capture the palpable spirit of rebellion, resistance, and revolution of an incendiary summer in New Orleans.

Thursday, May 7, 2009

More Attendees with Stories to Tell

Upper photo: Attorney Robert Glass, who successfully defended the Black Panthers, along with Lolis Elie and others, against all charges, has his copy of the book signed.

Lower photo: Left, Robert Glass; right, Brod Bagert, whose grandfather, then Judge Bernard J. Bagert, evicted the New Orleans Black Panthers from their first headquarters near what was then the St. Thomas Projects. Brod tells the audience a family story of his father having to clean up the sand from sandbags the Panthers left spilt.