Sidney Barthelemy: The Quiet Mayor Who Held the City Together

The Quiet Mayor Who Held the City Together

Sidney Barthelemy never got the credit he deserved. He was the second Black mayor of New Orleans, serving from 1986 to 1994, and he took office at the worst possible moment—when the oil bust was devastating Louisiana's economy, federal revenue sharing had ended, and the city was staring at a thirty-million-dollar budget deficit. He didn't have the flamboyance of his predecessor Ernest "Dutch" Morial or the charisma of the Landrieus. What he had was competence, and in a crisis, competence is worth more than charisma.

Barthelemy was born in 1942 in New Orleans' Seventh Ward, the heart of the city's Creole community. He attended St. Augustine High School and studied for the priesthood before turning to politics—earning a philosophy degree and pursuing theology studies before deciding that he could do more good in city hall than in a church. It was a path that gave him a contemplative, methodical temperament that contrasted sharply with the operatic style of New Orleans politics.

He was elected to the Louisiana State Senate in 1974, becoming the first African American in that chamber since Reconstruction. He served on the New Orleans City Council before winning the mayor's race in 1986, inheriting a city in economic freefall.

What Barthelemy did was unglamorous but essential: he cut costs, privatized services, laid off over a thousand city workers, and made the hard decisions that kept New Orleans solvent when insolvency was a real possibility. These were not popular moves. Nobody throws a parade for the mayor who fires people and cuts budgets. But without Barthelemy's fiscal discipline, the city might not have survived the economic crisis of the late 1980s.

He also brought major events to New Orleans—the 1988 Republican National Convention, the 1993 NCAA Final Four—continuing the city's tradition of using tourism and events as economic engines. He understood that New Orleans' economy depended on bringing people to the city, and he worked to maintain that pipeline even during lean years.

Critics pointed to rising crime rates and population decline during his tenure, and those criticisms weren't unfounded. New Orleans in the late 1980s and early 1990s was struggling with a crack epidemic and violence that afflicted cities across America. Barthelemy didn't solve those problems—nobody did—but he kept the city functioning while they raged.

Sidney Barthelemy was the mayor New Orleans needed but didn't want to celebrate. He was quiet when the city wanted loud, methodical when the city wanted dramatic, and fiscally responsible when the city wanted to spend. History has been kinder to him than his contemporaries were. The tough decisions he made kept New Orleans afloat during one of its hardest economic periods. That deserves more than a footnote.