Death in Desire

The streetcar no longer runs on Desire Street, but New Orleans does have a housing project there named Desire. It is torn by frustrations and passions as brutal as anything in Tennessee Williams' play. It is also as dirty, crime-ridden and crowded as any black ghetto in the North. Of its 10,500 residents, 61% belong to families that earn less than $3,000 a year. Alarmed by the report of one of his black appointees, who described the area as "potentially explosive," Mayor Moon Landrieu was scheduled to make a tour of it last week. The slum erupted before he got there.

Two unrelated incidents touched off another of the all too familiar shoot-outs between black extremists and police. First, a meeting of the National Committee to Combat Fascism (N.C.C.F.), a Black Panther-allied organization, discovered that two members were police informants. Called "Bush" and "Legs," the two said they were grilled at gunpoint, hit with boards studded with nails and then, as one participant put it, pushed into the street to "let the people deal with them." They were attacked by a mob until one escaped over a fence and the other found sanctuary in a grocery store operated by Clarence Broussard, a black accused of exploiting project residents. Police conceded that Bush and Legs were undercover agents.

Through the Walls. A few hours later, two black police officers drove into Piety Street to see why a sports car was burning across the street from the N.C.C.F. building. Without warning, a bullet smashed through the windshield of the patrol car slightly injuring both men.

Assuming that the shot had come from the N.C.C.F. headquarters, police immediately planned a raid on the clapboard house. They alerted newsmen, then sent some 100 steel-helmeted officers to assault the building shortly after dawn. Shots of unknown origin were heard, and police opened fire with automatic rifles and shotguns. Some of the ammunition was powerful enough to rip through three rooms and emerge from the building's opposite wall. Police caught return fire, some from the building, other shots apparently from elsewhere in the project. The besieged were presumably saved from death or injury by sandbags they had piled against their walls. After 15 minutes of battle, the blacks were routed and arrested. Sixteen were charged with attempted murder. Police seized eleven shotguns, one rifle, two pistols, 887 shotgun shells.

Though the N.C.C.F. carries relatively little weight with most residents of the Desire project, the police tactics enraged many of them. Officers and residents exchanged curses and glares throughout the day. That night, four black officers hid in Broussard's grocery after hearing that it would be fire-bombed by black militants angry at the shopkeeper.

A mob did approach, some members carrying Molotov cocktails. Police and civilian witnesses differ on who opened fire first, but shooting broke out. Some of the firing apparently was done by Broussard and another jittery grocery-store owner, Sidney Forman. When the shooting was over, three blacks were wounded and a fourth lay motionless under a street lamp for more than two hours; both police and residents feared to present themselves as targets in the light. The man, Kenneth Borden, 24, was dead when residents finally reached him. Sporadic violence, mostly firebombings, continued nightly in and outside the project, as the death in Desire stirred racial passions throughout much of the Crescent City.

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