Mark Essex’s campaign of terror against the New Orleans police climaxed on Jan. 7 in an 11-hour rampage at the Howard Johnson’s hotel on Loyola Avenue, where he killed seven people, including three police officers, and wounded eight. Essex was spurred on by racism he allegedly encountered while enlisted in the Navy. He was also a one-time Black Panther.
- The Times-Picayune, 1973
FACTS:
On New Year’s Eve, 1972, Mark Essex gunned down two police officers outside Central Lockup. A week later, on January 7, he broke into the Downtown Howard Johnson’s Hotel. As he marched through the hallways, setting fires, he told the black maids to run, that he was “only shooting white people.” He ran up to the roof and made himself a hunting blind out of a concrete bunker, from which he shot at police responders. He had sightlines down into Duncan Plaza across the street and the buildings on either side. Civilians showed up with their own guns. A marine made off with a Sea Knight airship from his base so police could strafe the roof. The siege went on all night.
The next day, Essex ran from his bunker, fist raised above his head, and the police emptied everything they had (9mm, .357, .458, revolver to automatic, deer rifles and elephant guns). Essex floated mid-air from the force of the bullets fired from almost two hundred guns. His right leg came almost clear off. His tongue was cut free and hurled all the way to the stairwell. Gravity finally brought the shell of his body back down onto the roof. Police searched the building for hours afterwards, as there had been reports of more than one gunman.
FICTION:
This is how white people—the victors—told the story: Mark Essex was an unstable, dangerous racist who waged a week-long campaign of terror against the New Orleans police until they put him down with their superior firepower. The marine who stole the airship would be heralded a Hero of the New Orleans Massacre and publicly thanked even forty years later. To this day, some still insist Essex had not acted alone.
White people diagnosed Essex’s hatred of white people as a delusion or psychosis. His mother had described him as a quiet boy who smiled a lot. So somewhere, he must have gone wrong. They cited his dishonorable discharge from the Navy for striking a superior officer, and of course, his connection to the Black Panthers. Essex had scrawled all over the walls of his New Orleans apartment: Shoot the devil like you shoot a dog or pig; My destiny lies in the bloody death of racist pigs. He referenced a Mata, the taut bow, in Swahili. White people took this reference to be of some ancient African god, thirty feet tall with three mouths, muscles as long as the entire body of a man, with arrows as thick as parking meters to skewer white people five at a time. The ravings of a maniac who took out his delusions on innocent white people who had done no harm to him.
MORE FACTS:
The reason Mark “Jimmy” Essex smiled was because his mother had taught him to. Look happy, she instructed him back in Nebraska. Show them those pretty teeth. Show them you don’t have a violent bone in you. He smiled when gangs of white boys crowded him off the sidewalk, beamed at the clerks who studied his every move and sometimes frisked him before they kicked him out of their stores. Even in the Navy, sentries searched his car every time he returned to base while he stood off to the side, toothy and wide-eyed. White shipmates shooed him from their chow tables as though he were a pesky crow, and still he smiled and laughed. Eventually, he broke through his smiling and struck an officer.
He moved to New Orleans, where he met proud black men who preached Black Power, who had long ago extinguished smiles they had constructed to fruitlessly appease white people. They gave Jimmy literature to read–DuBois, Malcolm X and Nkrumah–and they helped him get a gun license.
The Black Panthers had armed themselves because the New Orleans PD had formed into a militia with a tank dubbed the War Wagon. Their superintendent had given them orders to kill any suspect deemed dangerous, “to make the streets and home safe again,” and protect “good people.” Among the first black men killed under those new orders were two students at a campus protest. No charges filed.
FICTION(ALIZED):
White people’s version of the Essex shooting spree ignores a major contributing factor, of course: their own rage. Take their interpretation of Mata. An ancient African god of vengeance? Thirty-two feet tall? Five mouths? Twelve men impaled on an arrow at a time? Mata didn’t stoop to such corporeal limitations. Jimmy never had to conjure up Mata; white rage did that.
Mata rode into the world the moment white people believed they ruled it. Mata, the taut bow, didn’t fire shafts five feet long and thick as drainpipes. His arrows merely spelled out the casualties of white rage, which came to an instant boil at the slightest incursion into their occupied territory.
And Jimmy’s mother wanted him to smile to keep him from being a target. Jimmy’s body lay on the roof a full day as the pigs searched for more snipers. They gaped wide-eyed as they searched the hotel. They shot at each other, hit themselves with their own ricochet. Reports came in from all over the city of black men marching with guns, chanting ‘Kill whitey’. White people all over New Orleans trembled at the thought of more black men out for their blood.
There were black people in the street, all right. But these were ghosts carried in the shafts of Mata’s arrows: lynched black men, their necks stretched, their bodies burned; slaves—men and women—flogged to death for running off, for dropping too many eggs, for picking too little tobacco leaf or indigo. Black men beaten to a pulp for staring too long at a white woman in a grocery store, for voting or helping others to vote. Mata’s arrows enumerated the crimes to come as well: black men gunned down for knocking on a white man’s door late at night after a car accident. Women beaten in jail cells and ruled suicides. Dragged behind a car for carrying a booming radio through a nice neighborhood. Choked for selling cigarettes and wanting to breathe. For selling CDs on the street. For wearing a black hoodie in front of the wrong neighborhood watchman. For getting pulled over the 49th time. For wanting to matter, their necks crushed. Black families left behind in flood waters, no aid in sight.
These arrows didn’t howl or spew venom but stood quiet, deathly quiet, agog at their own numbers and the timeline they stretched along. And now Jimmy’s pierced spirit stood with them.
They may have been invisible arrows to white people, but the weight of all that guilt thickened the New Orleans humidity into a soup. While the shell of Jimmy, lightened despite the added weight of bullets, rocked in the January breeze, the right arm extended, the hand still a fist.
FACT:
I talked to some black schoolchildren not long after the sniping…And one of them told me, ‘You know, I think I could do what the sniper did. But I don’t hate enough yet.’ That scared the hell out of me. It still does.
–Clarence B. Giarrusso, New Orleans Police Superintendent, 1970-1978
