A few months back, me and my boy were talking about the movie Phone Booth — that one about a sniper who watches your every move and eventually takes you out. In the middle of the convo, he asked his mom:
“What would you do if there was a sniper on Canal Street while you were walking around?”
That’s when she dropped it: there actually was a sniper in New Orleans in the ’70s. He killed about 16 people downtown at a hotel near Canal. She couldn’t remember his name, so I went and asked my mom and dad.
They told me it was Mark Essex, a Black Panther. My dad was in the Air Force with one of Essex’s relatives back then. They said Essex posted up on top of the Howard Johnson Hotel (today’s Holiday Inn across from City Hall on Loyola Ave).
He worked his way through the building — killing people, setting fires — and then made it to the roof. From up there, he opened fire on white folks, killing a firefighter, a police officer, and more. My mom remembered the news reports, the blocked-off streets, the whole city locked in fear.
The standoff ended with a bullet from a helicopter straight to his head.
I looked it up later and found pictures of him lying dead on the roof. The wall he used for cover was marked with graffiti and rage.
It’s wild ... a “what if” story turned out to be real.
There’s more to the story than what I was told. Search “Mark Essex” yourself, you’ll see the pictures, the history, even books written on him.
This is New Orleans Black History. Not a “good” history, but one that still demands to be studied.
3 comments:
There is a book written about it, A Terrible Thunder, its worth checking out. You can buy it or go to Tulane's Jones Library or Loyola's library to read it. The Old HoJo is now the Holiday Inn on Loyola downtown (the one with the clarinet painted on the side). Read the book, it'll help you to make your post more accurate. Im glad you know about this huge event in NOLA history, you should see if you can understand where he was coming from, or see if you totally disagree. Mark Essex lived a good life that turned bad.
Yeah, when I was researching that Information last year i saw the book posted on a site similar to amazon. yeah, At First I thought it was the city hall building from what i was told. and when i thought about the Height and location i said that it's gotta be the Holiday Inn. later on that year i wrote this, while passing up the that area I'd look up and everywhere else just to get a feel of how this all went down.
since history is always written by the conquerors, we may never in our time know if mark essex will be remembered as a martyr or a hero. but one thing is fa sho, he put it on everybody's mind at that time that sometimes, people buck back.
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