Ray Nagin: The Mayor Who Faced the Storm and Lost His Way

The Mayor Who Faced the Storm and Lost His Way

Clarence Ray Nagin Jr. was born on June 11, 1956, in New Orleans. He wasn't a career politician — he was a cable television executive at Cox Communications and the founder of the New Orleans Brass hockey team. When he ran for mayor in 2002, he positioned himself as a reformer, a businessman who would clean up City Hall. He won with 59 percent of the vote against Police Chief Richard Pennington, and for three years, he was a popular mayor in a city that desperately needed functional government.

Then the storm came.

Hurricane Katrina

On August 28, 2005, Nagin issued a mandatory evacuation order for New Orleans — the first in the city's three-hundred-year history. It was the right call, but it came late, and the execution was catastrophic. Tens of thousands of residents who couldn't evacuate were directed to the Superdome, which was woefully unprepared to shelter them. The levees broke. The city flooded. And Nagin was at the center of the most visible government failure in modern American history.

In the chaos that followed, Nagin's emotional radio plea for federal help humanized the crisis for a national audience. But the criticism was devastating and largely deserved. The delayed evacuation, the lack of preparation, the Superdome nightmare — these failures cost lives.

Chocolate City and After

In January 2006, Nagin gave his infamous "Chocolate City" speech on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, declaring that New Orleans would remain majority Black because it was "God's will." The remark sparked outrage across racial lines. He was reelected anyway in 2006, narrowly defeating Mitch Landrieu.

The final chapter was the worst. In 2014, Nagin was convicted on twenty of twenty-one corruption counts — wire fraud, bribery, money laundering. Prosecutors proved he took more than five hundred thousand dollars from businessmen in exchange for city contracts. He was sentenced to ten years in federal prison. Ray Nagin's story is a New Orleans tragedy: a reform candidate who faced the worst natural disaster in American history, survived politically, and then destroyed himself with greed.