James Perry, executive director of the Greater New Orleans Fair Housing Action Center, dipped his toe into local political waters last week as he made it clear that he is considering entering the mayoral race.
“I write to you today as we inaugurate Barack Obama as the 44th President of the United States and celebrate a new direction for our nation,” Perry wrote in an email last Tuesday. “President Obama’s ascendancy fulfills the hopes of my parents, our grandparents and all who believe in America’s greatness and reject old patterns of division and hatred.
“Yet as we cheer America’s progress, we can’t escape our frustration with New Orleans’ slow recovery from Hurricane Katrina,” he continued. “We find ourselves wondering if the tide of hope that has lifted our nation can carry our great city along with it, too, and deliver us to the better future we envisioned for New Orleans so many months ago.”
Perry, a product of eastern New Orleans, graduated from McMain High School and the University of New Orleans. After graduating from UNO, Perry took a post with the Preservation Resource Center, a non-profit organization dedicated to preserving the diverse neighborhoods that make New Orleans unique.
That position taught Perry about the city’s struggles with urban blight and neighborhood disinvestment. He also became acutely aware of the challenges and bureaucratic red tape first-time homebuyers faced in the city. Ultimately, he learned lasting lessons about coalition-building and organizing in the struggle over the demolition of the St. Thomas housing development and its reinvention as River Gardens.
In 2000, Perry took a job as director of the Gulf Coast Fair Housing Center in Gulfport, MS, where discriminatory rental practices were denying residents access to safe, affordable housing. He put to use the leadership, managerial, and advocacy skills he had developed over the years to serve the twin causes of social justice and fair-housing access in the Gulfport community, even at a time when some advocates were receiving death threats for pursuing cases against landlords embracing illegal practices.
After earning a law degree from Loyola University in 2004, Perry became the executive director of the Greater New Orleans Fair Housing Action Center (GNOFHAC), a private, non-profit organization created to promote equal housing opportunity. Under James’ leadership and management, GNOFHAC has tripled in size, served thousands of residents and protected their housing rights. James led the GNOFHAC in battles over other rights-oriented community issues, such as fighting for fairer payouts by the Road Home Program.
GNOFHAC testers played a pivotal role in the pre-Katrina study of discrimination in the French Quarter at the request of the city’s Human Relations Commission. That probe, launched after the killing of Black college student Levon Jones by four white bouncers on Dec. 31, 2004, used Black and white testers and discovered that French Quarter bars and nightclubs routinely discriminated against African-American customers. Some of the bouncers and doormen who were filmed discriminating against African-American customers were Black themselves.
Since Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005, James has been a strong voice and a constant presence in the city’s revitalization efforts, working tirelessly to ensure fair housing opportunities for all returning residents. Recently, on behalf of residents displaced by Hurricane Katrina, James led his organization’s successful lawsuit against St. Bernard Parish, which passed an illegal ordinance mandating that landlords rent solely to blood relatives.
In recent years, James has testified before Congress six times about the critical importance of Gulf Coast recovery, a cause that he took up again in presentations to both the Democratic and Republican conventions in the summer of 2008.
This article was originally published in the January 26, 2009 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper
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