Mayor Marc Morial
Marc Morial is the current president of the National Urban League. He served as the Mayor of New Orleans for two terms from 1994 to 2002, as the President of the United States Conference of Mayors in 2001 and as a Louisiana State Senator from 1992 to 1994.
He had strong ties to Father Harry which began as a student at Jesuit High School. Father Harry gave the prayer of invocation at his mayoral inauguration and officiated at his wedding to Michelle Miller in 1999.
Father Harry is featured prominently in Marc Morial's recent book The Gumbo Coalition - 10 Leadership Lessons That Help You Inspire, Unite and Achieve.
The Compassionate Jesuit Priest
Excerpt from The Gumbo Coalition
Many years before Katrina, I saw what strength through compassion looked like close up. While integrating a Christian Brothers School in New Orleans’ City Park and then later attending Jesuit High School, I witnessed this powerful combination through the leadership of Father Harry Tompson.
At Jesuit, there were fourteen black students out of roughly one thousand. One year, we were moved to create a Black History Week display to share with our fellow classmates and teachers the pride we had in our culture. I approached Father Tompson with the idea. To his credit, he was very open and supportive of our idea and suggested we see the librarian for assistance.
Father Tompson also supported our desire to create an organization, the Student Organization of Black Achievement, of which I was the first president while at the same time playing varsity football and basketball.
My interest in black history was piqued when I began to read books that were on my parents’ bookshelves. A sampling of these great works includes The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s From Chaos to Community, W.E.B. DuBois’s The Soul of Black Folk, and so many more
My brother and I, while youngsters, also discovered a brand-new bookstore called the Ujamaa Market on St. Bernard Avenue in the Seventh Ward founded by activist and community leader Sekou Fela, who stocked books of black authors, poets, and the like. My brother, Jacques, frequented the Ujamaa Market buying a book here and there. The store contained a treasure trove of material on black history and politics.
While the Ujamma Market lasted for only a few years, the books I purchased remained on the shelves of my mother’s home until they were washed away by Hurricane Katrina. My impetus to start a black history program at my high school was born out of my time reading my parents’ books and my time garnering and consuming literary works made available at the Ujamaa Market.
With the librarian’s help, we created a really impressive display featuring books, photographs, and quotes that celebrated black people’s sojourn in America.
Despite the kudos and positive comments we received from some, however, there were those who were not only unimpressed but angered that black students would dare create such a display. The result: our work was defaced with the letters KKK painted over it and KKK literature pasted on top. And, of course, I was called to the principal, Father Tompson’s office, along with two other students.
The reason was not to hold us accountable for the vandalism, but rather to direct my advisor and principal on how to move forward. We shared the criticism he’d received from students and some parents for allowing Black History Week to exist. “They’re asking the question, ‘Why do blacks need their own special week?’ What should I tell them?” he asked of us. As was my habit, I responded on behalf of all three of us.
“Tell them to organize and Italian History Week and an Irish History Week,” I said. “They don’t know their own history, and that’s why they’re mad.”
As a teenager I was looking for ways to build coalition, responding out of compassion rather than anger. I looked at things from their perspective and realized ignorance was the real culprit. But my response was also a show of strength – not backing down from our right to celebrate our story and our culture, while offering a solution, an action to address the issue.
I certainly had powerful examples in this regard, including Father Tompson, who became a real mentor and close family friend. In response to this racial “controversy,” Father Tompson did not lord his position over us but rather compassionately invited us in to discuss ways to confront the situation and move forward.
I went back to my high school a few years ago to help celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the school’s integration. To my surprise, one of my former teachers was still on staff. He told me that the faculty members weren’t ready for integration at the time. He said they viewed us simply as brown-skinned whites, not recognizing that we came from different backgrounds and experiences than the school’s white students. All they wanted were no incidents.
When I was in school, a faculty member asked me – the only one who was not too afraid to ask – why all the black kids always sat together during lunch. In the moment, some fifty years ago, I responded, “All the blacks, musicians, nerds, weed heads sit together – there’s stratification in high school that you adults are often unaware of, and race it just one.” It was technically an honest answer. But my adult answer during that anniversary fifty years later revealed the heart of the matter: “We sat together because we were in fear of being bullied and called names. And we needed each other’s emotional support to survive in a tough, sometimes unwelcoming environment.”
Father Tompson’s living example of strength and compassion made us feel welcome. It made all the difference in the world. We knew he was genuine and that he cared about our well-being. That’s what showing compassion can do – it gets people to buy into you as a human being and welcome you inside their walls of doubt or suspicion. As a leader, compassion moves your team to trust that you have their well-being in mind and that you are willing to see them as human beings – not just cogs in an organization’s machine.
Father Tompson also displayed strength. In those challenging years, he gave the black students room to express our ideas and concerns while dealing with the complaints of those who were much less comfortable with our presence at Jesuit. But Father Tompson went a step further. Under his leadership the school hired its first wave of black instructors. He also allowed us black students to actively recruit more black students, a move that effectively tripled the number of black students at Jesuit.
And his strength through compassion didn’t stop there. Father Tompson later founded the Good Shepherd School, an academy that primarily served black students. Additionally, he opened a business, Café Reconcile, that gave formerly incarcerated individuals the opportunity for gainful employment. Both institutions he founded still operate and keep Father Tompson’s legacy of strength through compassion alive decades after his passing.
That’s what leaders who pair strength with their compassion do – they act with strength and courage to make sure their people have the opportunity to experience positive, winning, and profitable personal and collective outcomes.
I kept in contact with Father Tompson long after my high school days, until he passed away. He took part in my wedding, gave the prayer of invocation when I became mayor, and regularly came over to my home for breakfast. Certainly, not all bosses, organizational heads, elected officials, and leaders of various stripes will have such a personal connection with everyone under their care. But any leader willing to leverage these twin towers of leadership will win at building consensus, collaboration, creativity, and commitment in and from their charges.
— Marc Morial, President of the National Urban League, Mayor of New Orleans 1994-2002