Jack McGuire met then-Governor Earl K. Long during Long’s 1959 campaign for Lieutenant Governor (in those days, Louisiana governors were barred from seeking re-election to successive terms). McGuire was a senior at Newman High School in New Orleans. He’d been assigned a paper on the state elections that year, and chose to look at Long despite the fact that Jack’s father David McGuire had been kicked out of LSU in the 1930s (along with six other journalism students) for refusing to apologize to Huey Long for calling for him to stop interfering with the coaching of the LSU football team. By 1959, David McGuire was chief administrative officer for New Orleans Mayor Chep Morrison — who had run against (and lost) to Earl Long in the 1955-56 governor’s race (primary elections then were late in one year with runoffs early the next. Governor’s were inaugurated in May then). “I didn’t think I had too much to learn from the anti-Longs, so I talked to my father about following Earl,” Jack recalls. They first connected in New Orleans during that campaign. Earl, who’d suffered a breakdown while addressing the Legislature in April of that year, was subsequently committed by his wife Blanche to a mental hospital in Galveston, TX, and then Southeast Louisiana Hospital in Mandeville. Jack actually attended the hearing where Earl was released from Southeast Louisiana Hospital after firing the director of the hospital system and then having the new director fire the head of the hospital itself. Earl ran third in the race for Lieutenant Governor. His political career seemed finished. Uncle Earl, as Long was called, decided that he was not done. He chose to challenge incumbent Democratic Congressman Harold McSween for the Eighth District Congressional seat that Earl’s brother George had held for eight years until his death in 1958. Earl was all in. Jack and a couple of high school friends decided to follow Earl on the campaign trail for a couple of weekends during the summer of 1960. What Jack saw in the desperate campaign that Earl Long waged moved him in a fundamental way. He spent a significant amount of his adult life working to claim Earl’s essence from the sensationalistic, often tawdry press coverage and academic writing that portrayed the three-time Governor and brother of Huey Long as a crazy man. Jack gathered an incredible collection of articles, photographs, memorabilia, and interviews with people who knew Long and/or were involved in that 1960 campaign, which ultimately took Uncle Earl’s life. Flooding from Katrina in Mandeville claimed much of Jack’s collection of material on Earl Long. But, because he had shared it with so many people in an effort to get them to write the story of that last campaign, he was able to reassemble his materials and even added to the collection. It became clear that Jack was going to have to write the book on Earl’s last campaign if it was going to be written. University Press of Mississippi sent the original manuscript to readers. One liked it; one hated it. UPM said that if Jack would take into consideration the comments from the readers, they would be willing to take another look at it. Jack and the late Water Cowan had written an earlier book on Louisiana governors that UPM published. Jack turned to me to help him edit the book and get it into shape for reconsideration. We worked together on it for about seven months in 2014 and 2015. We sent off the revised manuscript in April 2015, the weekend before Jack went in for knee replacement surgery. The UPM editors loved the new approach and committed to publish the book. Jack left it to me to deal with the New York copy editor UPM chose to work with us, and to track down many of the photos that ended up in the book. Jack’s son Barrett helped cover the cost involved with printing the additional photographs that contribute to much to the quality of the book. The book, Win The Race Or Die Trying: Uncle Earl’s Last Hurrah, came out in late August, 2016, just ahead of Earl’s birthday. Shortly after that, Jack conducted a series of book signings and radio interviews across the state to publicize it which stretched into 2017. In this interview, Jack talks about Earl’s tumultuous last years and the campaign into which Earl ignored doctor’s warnings and poured every last bit of energy he had into it to defeat McSween. The book has been well received. The interview covers some ground not in the book, particularly dealing with his father David.

Brian Pope was elected Lafayette City Marshal in December 2014, after defeating  Kip Judice in the runoff to succeed longtime incumbent Nickey Picard, whom they'd both defeated in the primary election. The late J.B. Cormier was the fourth candidate in the primary election.

Picard's time had passed. Pope's had barely begun when he leapt into the 2015 race for Lafayette Parish Sheriff in support of Scott Chief of Police Chad Leger. It was a fateful decision that might end up ending Pope's political career with the possibility of jail time ahead of him.

Pope used the power and authority of his office in an attempt to help Leger's campaign and to hurt Mark Garber's campaign. Garber won the election. Pope has been dealing with the legal repercussions of his acts since 2015.

Pope then refused to turn over emails believed to be related to his campaign activities on behalf of Leger which were being sought by The Independent. Emails were erased from the marshal's server but not from Lafayette Consolidated Government's backup servers. The emails were discovered and Pope was found to have violated the state's public records law by refusing to comply with the original request.

Later, a Lafayette Parish grand jury indicted Pope on seven felony counts — five counts of malfeasance and two counts of perjury. He's awaiting trial on those charges and has asked that his trial be delayed until next year.

The Lafayette City Marshal's office works primarily with Lafayette City Court to enforce bonds, subpoenas and collect fines and fees. Pope, then, is an officer of the court who has found him self being charged (and in some cases convicted) of law violations, has turned his once sedate office into something of a spectacle.

When it was revealed in a deposition related to the original email case that Pope has been personally pocketing fees and garnishments in apparent violation of a 2011 opinion from the Louisiana Attorney General, Aimee Boyd Robinson decided she had had enough of the shenanigans. She recruited Steve Wilkerson and together they decided to launch the campaign to recall Brian Pope.

On June 12, they filed their petition with the Louisiana Secretary of State's office to formalize the process. They have 180 days from that date (December 12) to reach their goal of  getting 1/3 of the voters in the city-wide district to sign a petition to force a recall election on Pope's tumultuous tenure. That's about 28,00o signatures. They are half-way into the effort.

If the recall campaign succeeds (signatures will be counted and verified by the Lafayette Registrar of Voters), a recall election asking voters whether they want Pope recalled or not will appear on the ballot in the spring 0f 2018. If voters oust Pope, there will be a special election in the fall of 2018 when anyone (including Pope) can run for what will by that time be the remaining two-plus years of his term.

During that time, Pope's legal battles will continue roll through the courts, ensuring that the Marshal's problems remain high visibility news in Lafayette. And there's still the matter of whether taxpayers can foot the bill for Pope's legal costs.

Aimee Boyd Robinson discusses the effort to recall Brian Pope in this podcast.

Dr. Rick Swanson is chair of the UL Lafayette Political Science Department. He was in the audience for the February 2016 LCG Council meeting when an hours-long public comment session regarding the Afred Mouton that sits in the point of a plaza in front of Lafayette’s International Center.

Swanson was struck by the inaccurate statements made by some defenders of the statue (Mouton was a West Point trained, slave-holding native of Opelousas whose father founded what became Lafayette) made to the council and the public regarding the origins of the Civil War and the nature of relations between blacks and whites in the area.

That launched a still-ongoing research project that sent Swanson scouring the records of the Library of Congress, the Center for Louisiana Studies, and public archives seeking to document the true history of the war and the true nature of the relationship between blacks and whites here.

It’s an ugly tale that the Mouton statue, erected by the United Daughters of the Confederacy in 1922, both symbolizes and distorts. The statue was one of hundreds the UDC erected across the country after the U.S. Supreme Court legalized segregation in its 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision.

As anyone who reads history knows, separate was never equal. It took 58 years before the Supreme Court reversed Plesssy with its Brown v. Board of Education decision outlawing segregation in 1954. The Civil Rights movement was the culmination of a decades long struggle to reverse the practices and local laws that flowed from Plessy.

Swanson says the Mouton statues and its cousins across the country were always symbols of white supremacy, erected to celebrate the Lost Cause and to reaffirm what whites then believed to be the natural order of the world with them on top and blacks relegated to second-class citizenship.

Recent events in Charlottesville, Virginia, have driven home for many the connection between these statues and white supremacies and ne0-Nazis, leading some communities to speed the removal of confederate monuments from public spaces.

Swanson is continuing to update his work and hopes to muster a book out of it as his schedule permits.

We discuss the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow in Louisiana and what all those statues symbolized — then, and now!