LSU Manship School Statehouse Bureau

Published: Aug. 23, 2021

By: Robert Mann

As the 16th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina approaches, the following is an excerpt from Robert Mann’s new memoir: “Backrooms and Bayous: My Life in Louisiana Politics,” looking at how the late governor handled the crisis.

Governor Kathleen Blanco’s administration had two periods. There was pre-Katrina, during which she devoted herself, among other things, to creating jobs and reforming education and juvenile justice. Post-Katrina, there was nothing but recovering from Katrina and Rita. After the searchand-recovery phase, the work of restoring south Louisiana began.

To secure the billions in recovery aid Louisiana needed from the federal government meant Blanco would be forced to testify before congressional committees investigating the errors and missteps by officials at every level of government. She also would have to make a dozen or so trips to Washington to lobby congressional leaders and Bush administration officials for the money, especially after the initial appropriations bill awarded much more per capita to Mississippi than Louisiana.

For Blanco, the job was grueling and often humbling. On virtually every trip, she went to the White House to plead for funding from officials who attacked her or who doubted that Louisiana government was honest or efficient enough to spend properly the rebuilding dollars we requested. In these visits, she showed her steel, once threatening to blast President George W. Bush in a press conference on the White House driveway if his aides did not give Louisiana what it needed. They quickly relented when they realized she wasn’t bluffing. Then, she would trudge over to Capitol Hill for meetings with Democratic and Republican leaders.

The stress on Blanco was clear. The suffering she witnessed weighed on her constantly. She had to know that Katrina would be her legacy, for good or bad. And bad it was, at least in the early months. During this time, I think she looked for and treasured moments when she could forget about Katrina and Rita for a few hours.

Read more at 318 Forum

In 1960 5 Black men arrived at their white boss’s home. Within minutes, 3 were dead & 1 mortally wounded. The killer walked, & the survivor went to jail.

Published: Aug. 23, 2021

By: Liz Ryan, LSU Manship School News Service

MONROE, La. — In the rural neighborhood around Ticheli Road, the sound of multiple gunshots erupted in the early morning quiet of July 13, 1960.

Sam Brooks wasn’t sure why shots were being fired, but peeking out the front window of his home, the nine-year-old looked across the street where they came from. Brooks wanted to go outside and see what was going on, but his mother kept him inside.

Nearby, 34-year-old Patricia Sherman, sleeping soundly, was awakened by her 13-year-old son. Exhausted from a late-night drive home from Arkansas, she had not heard her husband Richard, a decorated World War II veteran, leave for his job at a nearby mill.

“Mama, Mama, wake up!” her son shouted. “Mr. Fuller has shot his men.”

At first, Sherman told her son to let her sleep, not understanding what he was saying. But she sensed the urgency in his voice. She got up and looked out the bedroom window. Just below the sill, she saw the lifeless body of a Black man on the ground.

Sixty-one years later, Sherman, now 94, vividly remembers walking out onto her front porch. Less than 100 feet away, she saw her next-door neighbor, Robert Fuller, standing under his carport, and near him lay the bodies of three more young Black men. All appeared dead except one. Fuller held a shotgun over that man’s head.

Fuller’s wife was crying and screaming.

“Robert,” Sherman shouted, “what in the world is going on?”

Read more at 4WWL

Published: Aug. 15, 2021

By: Rachel Mipro, LSU Manship School News Service

First in a four-part series.

During the 1950s in northeast Louisiana, future Klansman Robert Fuller was a familiar face to law enforcement.

He lived on the outskirts of Monroe. Local police considered Fuller a thug, and the FBI opened a file on him because of his involvement in prostitution. Fuller then started a sanitation business that employed his sons and several young Black employees. Their job was to empty human waste from septic tanks.

In July 1960, five of the Black employees showed up at his home, their normal gathering spot, one Wednesday morning. Minutes later, three were dead, a fourth mortally wounded. A fifth, also wounded, would survive.

Fuller would later claim he shot all five in self-defense. He said he grabbed a double-barreled shotgun from his truck — reloading three times — to fend off men swarming him with knives.

The horrific event was reported in newspapers, but two versions of the events would emerge.

One was Fuller’s self-defense claim — that he was simply saving his family from his attackers.

The other, in the Black press, was a story of mistreatment, of tensions over employees forced to beg for paltry wages and of racial animosity against Black employees. Black newspapers reported that Fuller owed the men money. By these accounts, there was no way Black men would attack a white man in an all-white neighborhood at a time when Blacks around the Jim Crow South were still struggling to secure their civil rights.

Even the FBI, in a statement released for this story, compared the scope of the killings to the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama, that came just three years later in 1963. In that bombing, one victim was permanently blinded while four girls, ages 11 to 14, were killed.

Read more at Shreveport Times

Published: Aug. 6, 2021

By: Josh Archote, LSU Reveille

BATON ROUGE, La. — LSU professors pleaded with the Board of Supervisors and upper administration Friday to allow faculty to teach remotely or at lower classroom capacity in the fall as COVID-19 spreads rapidly and strains hospitals in Louisiana.

President William Tate did not directly respond to any professors’ concerns. He said the university intends to mandate the vaccine once the U.S. Food and Drug Administration grants final approval.

The tension comes amid a fight between LSU administration and faculty over mandatory COVID vaccines. Although LSU has maintained that requiring vaccines presented legal challenges, Louisiana colleges need only Louisiana Department of Health approval to mandate them.

Professors are switching their focus to convincing the university to return to previous COVID-19 protocols that would allow them to teach their classes away from campus, where only around 26% of students have reported being vaccinated.

The 2021 COVID-19 protocols that LSU released Wednesday did not include a vaccine mandate or say what the school would do when the FDA start providing full approvals. News reports say that could come as soon as Labor Day for the Pfizer vaccine.

Gov. John Bel Edwards said Wednesday that he expected the state Health Department to add the COVID vaccines to its list of required student vaccines after the FDA gives its full approval. Tate told the supervisors Friday that LSU will announce its mandate as soon as the FDA acts and will not wait for the Health Department to update its vaccine list.

“We will move forward with that, and hopefully the FDA operates in an expedited fashion,” Tate said Friday.

Read more at KTBS3

Published: Aug. 4, 2021

By: Adrian Dubose, LSU Manship School News Service

BATON ROUGE–LSU said Wednesday that it will encourage but not require the 40,000 students on its campuses across the state to be vaccinated against the coronavirus before attending fall classes.

Instead, students can either submit proof of a COVID-19 vaccination or a negative COVID test when they arrive on campus for classes starting August 23. Students will have to wear masks to class, and unvaccinated students will be required to take monthly COVID tests.

Although an LSU safety and medical committee recommended last week that the school cut class sizes by 50% to slow the surging Delta variant of the virus, LSU plans to only make that reduction temporarily for classes with 100 students or more during peak infection periods.

The plan, announced by new president William F. Tate IV, is likely to anger faculty members, who have been seeking permission to decide whether to move other classes online or teach them in hybrid fashion, with half of the students alternating between attending in person or watching online to provide social distancing.

Dr. Ravi Rau, who has taught physics at LSU for 47 years, said waiting a month between COVID tests for students “is ridiculously too long.” He said the tests should be administered at least weekly to contain outbreaks.

He also noted that the nation’s premier science journal, SCIENCE, recommended mandating COVID vaccines for students.

Read more at BRProud

Published: July 29, 2021

By: Adrian Dubose | LSU Manship School News Service

BATON ROUGE–Although state health officials have approved student vaccine mandates at four private colleges, LSU and the University of Louisiana System do not plan to seek a similar mandate until federal regulators fully approve the COVID-19 vaccines now being distributed.

Federal approval is unlikely to come until well after classes begin next month, meaning that many of LSU’s 35,000 students and its faculty and staff members will depend on mandatory masking, air filters and some degree of social distancing to protect them from the surging Delta variant.

LSU’s new president, William Tate, said at an online forum Thursday that those mitigation measures were more substantial than at other Southern public universities.

“I hope that people will understand that it’s not even trivial getting to this point in this political climate,” he said.

But many of the hundreds of faculty members at the forum seemed dismayed by his comments and his unwillingness to push harder the vaccine mandate.

Dr. Jim Henderson, president of University of Louisiana system, said Thursday that his nine schools also planned to wait for the Louisiana Department of Health to add the vaccines to its college immunization schedules after they are fully approved by the federal Food and Drug Administration.

Henderson said that waiting for full FDA approval would help limit the number of exemptions requests from students who do not want to receive the vaccines for religious or other reasons. The UL System has more than 90,000 students.

The LSU meeting came shortly after the Health Department released records showing that it had taken only a few hours to approve exemptions and allow vaccine mandates at the four private colleges: Tulane, Xavier, Loyola and Dillard.

Read more at BRProud

Published: June 22, 2021

By: Adrian Dubose | LSU Manship School News Service

BATON ROUGE–LSU’s football and other sports programs lost $81 million in revenue during the COVID-19 pandemic, and the school cannot use federal aid funds to reduce that deficit.

The athletics department has offset some of the losses through salary reductions and job cuts. It has received $23 million in relief money from the Southeastern Conference, and it has tapped reserve funds from profitable years to try to close the rest of the gap.

It also is counting on its private fundraising arm, the Tiger Athletic Foundation, to keep bringing in major donations. The foundation just hired a new leader, Matt Borman, who had led athletic fundraising at the University of Georgia.

The lost revenue came after parts or all of the seasons for many sports, including men’s basketball and baseball, were canceled in spring 2020 and attendance at football games was limited to 25% of Tiger Stadium’s 102,000-seat capacity.

That came after a banner year for a sports program that usually brings in among the highest revenue and profit totals in the country.

The national championship football team led by quarterback Joe Burrow took in $95 million in revenue in 2019-20 and earned a profit of $53.7 million.

But all that changed in March 2020 when LSU had to send students home, switch to online learning and curtail its athletics programs.

Read more at BRPROUD

Published: June 18, 2021

By: Adrian Dubose | LSU Manship School News Service

BATON ROUGE, La. (LSU) – The LSU Board of Supervisors voted 9-2 Friday to urge the Louisiana Department of Health to add COVID-19 shots to a list of mandated vaccinations for college students once federal regulators give full approval to the vaccines.

The vote came after the board adopted an amendment to notify students that they could opt out of a mandate for health, religious or other reasons.

Students have long had the ability to opt out of other required vaccines, such as for measles or mumps, but few have realized that or done so. Faculty members fear that notifying students that they can ignore any COVID-19 requirement will undercut the school’s efforts to increase vaccination rates as more dangerous variants of the virus spread.

Tom Galligan, president of the LSU system, said 73% of the faculty and 57% of staff at the flagship campus in Baton Rouge have reported being vaccinated against COVID-19. However, only about 27% of the campus’s 35,000 students have reported being vaccinated.

According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, 522 college campuses around the country have required the vaccine, with 221 of them being public institutions. Private universities in Louisiana, including Tulane, Loyola, Dillard and Xavier, say they will require their students to receive vaccines before the fall semester starts.

The Louisiana Legislature passed a bill recently banning state agencies, including public universities, from discriminating against people based on their vaccination status while the vaccines are still approved only for emergency use.

Gov. John Bel Edwards, a Democrat, has expressed concern about the bill but has not said if he would veto it.

Pfizer and Moderna, two of the main COVID vaccine makers, have applied for full approval from the Food and Drug Administration, but that is not likely to come before school resumes in August.

Read more at WAFB9

Published: June 11, 2021

By: Matthew Bennett, Adrian Dubose and Ryan Nelsen | LSU Manship School News Service

BATON ROUGE–Buoyed by billions of dollars in federal COVID-19 relief aid, Louisiana legislators took on several big issues this spring and made progress in simplifying the tax code, supporting education and expanding criminal-justice reform.

Some public-interest groups praised the tax changes as important steps toward strengthening Louisiana’s economy, while others expressed concern that some of the changes could lead to a budget crunch down the road.

The Council for a Better Louisiana viewed the main changes—lowering state income tax rates for individuals and corporations and eliminating deductions for what they pay in federal income taxes–as “a positive step forward,” while noting that it was only the beginning of righting a complicated, messy system.

Gov. John Bel Edwards indicated after the legislative session ended that he would support this swap in the source of state tax revenues as long as it does not cost the state much in the short run. The changes would require adjustments to the state Constitution, and if he signs the bills, residents will have to vote on them in October.

The Public Affairs Research Council said that if voters approve, the state’s tax structure will become “simpler, fairer, more competitive, and better-ranked nationally.”

But the Louisiana Budget Project, which researches how state policies affect the poor and the working class, issued a statement warning that lawmakers were relying too heavily on federal relief dollars that will soon be gone.

The group’s executive director, Jan Moller, supported the “excellent premise” of the tax swap, but bemoaned the way it was executed.

Read more at BRProud

Published: June 11, 2021

By: Kathleen Peppo, LSU Manship School News Service

BATON ROUGE, La. — The chance to change police practices in Louisiana did not seem very good when Rep. Ted James presented a resolution to study them shortly after George Floyd was killed by a Minneapolis police officer.

James had to agree in advance to demands from Republicans to remove Floyd’s name from the resolution.

One Republican, Rep. Tony Bacala of Prairieville, was not privy to that conversation. And when the resolution came up for debate on the House floor, Bacala, a former chief sheriff’s deputy in Ascension Parish, said language in the resolution about blacks being three times more likely to be killed by law enforcement officers than whites addressed only one side of the issue.

“If we’re going to talk, let’s talk,” Bacala said. “Let’s don’t limit what we’re willing to speak about to things that only some people want to speak about,” he said. “Of 800,000 law enforcement officers in this country, in that same period of time, 584 were killed in the line of duty, which means that the rate that cops die in the line of duty is 40 times higher than blacks.”

“Tony,” James responded, “I was pepper sprayed in handcuffs by a police officer. A white one.”

James also described being questioned by law enforcement officers for standing with four other black men outside of a barber shop in Baton Rouge. The questioning only ended when James handed the officer a card that identified him as a state legislator.

Read more at westcentralsbest.com