Baton Rouge: Amid racial tensions, economy hums along

by Dante Chinni | The Christian Science Monitor

BATON ROUGE, LA. - On the eastern banks of the Mississippi, the capital of Louisiana is a city of contrasts.

By many measures, times are good here, but the lingering effects a longstanding racial divide are real and can be felt in day-to-day life in Baton Rouge.

The city's population is split almost evenly between whites and blacks. As a result, "[race] is the quiet undercurrent of everything that goes on in this area," says Carl Redman, managing editor of The Advocate, the city's daily newspaper.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the city's poor education system. Blacks make up 80 percent of students in the public schools here. The state has threatened to take control of 11 schools listed as failed, failing, or in danger of failing. Most students in the district come from poor families, with some 80 percent qualifying for subsidized school lunch.

Whites and wealthier black families have either left the city for better-performing suburban schools or opted for private education. Nearly 50 private K–12 schools can be found in this city (pop. 230,000).

"You have the 'haves' who are sending … their kids to private schools, and then you have a lot of folks in the inner city who are in the public schools," says Ed Pratt, an assistant to the chancellor at Southern University here. "There's an idea that there is some magic that the state is going to come up with to fix the schools. When a kid leaves school a lot of times he's ducking bullets, he's ducking bullies, he's going hungry."

The dropout problem in the public schools is reaching into younger grades, Mr. Pratt says. It used to be confined to 16- and 17-year-olds. Now, 14- and 15-year-olds are often dropping out of school.

Some argue that the weak public schools are affecting more residents than ever. Because the children in private schools have no bus service, their parents must drive them to school on roads that are already congested. The miserable traffic problems here are often cited as the No. 1 concern in the business community. The city, meanwhile, is opposed to taxing, and has not passed a measure to build new roads in decades.

Popular mayor, low unemployment
But some of Baton Rouge's racial divisions have eased in the past four years. The city's first African-American mayor, Melvin "Kip" Holden, is coming to the end of his first term this year. He is an extremely popular figure here, and may be unopposed in his reelection bid.

And in other ways the picture in Baton Rouge is fairly sunny. The worst effects of hurricane Katrina are behind the city now. The tens of thousands of new residents here are nothing close to the population swell the city experienced immediately after the storm in 2005.

The bad news that has shaken the US economy of late hasn't hit here – at least not yet. The unemployment rate is under 4 percent, close to full employment, and a slew of fast food joints have help-wanted signs in the windows. The downtown skyline shows construction cranes are plentiful. The city's diversified economy also includes the petro-chemical industry, state government, and two universities – Louisiana State University as well as Southern University, a historically black college.

But decent jobs for those who are uneducated are scarce. Most are low-wage service jobs in restaurants and hotels.

By some standards the city is not considered poor. At $41,000, the median household income in the Parish of East Baton Rouge (Louisiana has parishes instead of counties) is higher than the national county median of about $37,000. However, 13.2 percent of families live in poverty here, above the US county average of 10.7 percent.

Poor residents are concentrated in the city's downtown and in North Baton Rouge, in places like the Scotlandville neighborhood, which is overwhelmingly black. These sections have also seen the biggest spike in violent crime in recent years.

At the Bounce Back Barber Shop in Scotlandville, owner "Big" Bob Ruffin trims the top of a customer's head, and chuckles at talk of whites and blacks socializing outside work. "This is the dirty dirty down here," he says, using a slang expression for the South. "Blacks and whites don't spend too much time together. If I see white folks walking around down here, I'll be like (he mimics an exaggerated double-take) what's that?"

Apathy among black voters
A city with a large black population struggling with poor schools and a high poverty rate is typically thought to be Democratic territory. But that hasn't been true in the past few elections. President Bush carried East Baton Rouge parish in 2000 and 2004. And he carried the Minority Central group nationwide in both elections, too.

That's mostly because turnout among minorities is so low. In Baton Rouge, apathy among black voters runs high, in part because the same problems have plagued the city and the state year after year, people here say.

Low African-American turnout has been a fact of life in Baton Rouge for so long that years ago a Republican white state senator, who lost his district in reapportionment, worked with the state to draw a new district that was majority black, figuring that he could carry it, says the Advocate's Carl Redman. He was right.

Most people here say the Democratic Party's best hope of carrying Baton Rouge, this parish, or Louisiana would be to energize African-American voters here by putting Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois on the presidential ticket – preferably at the top.

Beyond African-Americans, most voters in Baton Rouge are fiscally and socially conservative.

In 2007, the city failed to pass a mild tolerance resolution stating that it recognizes all people, races, and lifestyles. The mayor backed the measure, but it didn't get through city council.