Showdown in Desire
ISBN: 9781610753807
Platform/Publisher: Project MUSE / University of Arkansas Press
Digital rights: Users: Unlimited; Printing: Chapters; Download: Chapters
Subjects: Public housing; Police-community relations; Violence; African Americans; African Americans; African Americans;

Showdown in Desire portrays the Black Panther Party in New Orleans in 1970, a year that included a shootout with the police on Piety Street, the creation of survival programs, and the daylong standoff between the Panthers and the police in the Desire housing development. Through interviews with Malik Rahim, the Panther; Robert H. King, Panther and member of the Angola 3; Larry Preston Williams, the black policeman; Moon Landrieu, the mayor; Henry Faggen, the Desire resident; Robert Glass, the white lawyer; Jerome LeDoux, the black priest; William Barnwell, the white priest; and many others, Orissa Arend tells a nuanced story that unfolds amid guns, tear gas, desperate poverty, oppression, and inflammatory rhetoric to capture the palpable spirit of rebellion, resistance, and revolution of an incendiary summer in New Orleans.


Orissa Arend is a mediator, freelance journalist, and psychotherapist in private practice in New Orleans. She has written for the Louisiana Weekly, the New Orleans Tribune, and the Times-Picayune.
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