David Duke: The Stain That Won't Wash Out

The Stain That Won't Wash Out

You can't write honestly about New Orleans and Louisiana without writing about David Duke. Not because he deserves celebration—he doesn't—but because what he represents is a thread in the fabric of the state's history that ignoring would be dishonest. Duke is the reminder that the same Louisiana that produced Louis Armstrong and Leah Chase also produced one of the most prominent white supremacists in modern American history.

Duke was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1950, but his family moved to New Orleans when he was five. He grew up in the city's segregated neighborhoods and was radicalized young—joining the Ku Klux Klan as a teenager in 1967. At LSU in the late 1960s, he founded the White Youth Alliance and began the career of professional hatred that would define his life.

In 1974, Duke founded the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan in Louisiana and served as its grand wizard from 1976 to 1980. What made Duke different from previous Klan leaders was his understanding of image. He traded the robes and hoods for business suits and television appearances. He got plastic surgery. He learned to couch his racism in the language of populism and white grievance. He was, in the most disturbing sense, a modernizer.

In 1989, Duke won a seat in the Louisiana House of Representatives from a district in Metairie, and suddenly the national media descended on Louisiana with a mixture of horror and fascination. How could a former Klan leader win elected office? The answer was uncomfortable: because enough people agreed with him, or at least didn't disagree enough to stop him.

His 1991 run for governor was the moment Louisiana had to look in the mirror. Duke made the runoff against Edwin Edwards, the flamboyant former governor who was himself facing corruption charges. The election produced the famous bumper sticker: "Vote for the Crook. It's Important." Edwards won with sixty-one percent of the vote, but the fact that nearly forty percent of Louisiana voters chose a former Klan grand wizard was a number that couldn't be explained away.

Duke's political career faded after that—failed runs for Senate, failed runs for president, and eventually a guilty plea to mail fraud and tax evasion that sent him to federal prison in 2002. He served fifteen months and emerged diminished but not silenced, continuing to promote white supremacist ideology from the margins.

David Duke matters to the story of New Orleans and Louisiana not as a figure to admire but as a figure to reckon with. He didn't emerge from nowhere. He emerged from the same soil that grew everything else—the music, the food, the culture, the joy. The fact that Louisiana's soil also produced David Duke is part of the truth about this place, and telling the truth is what this project is about. You can't understand where you're going if you pretend about where you've been.