[MUSIC - TBC Band: I Want to Dance with Somebody]

Brian Lehrer: No, that's not the Brian Lehrer Show theme. That's the TBC Brass Band playing a kind of New Orleans-type version of the Whitney Houston song, I Want to Dance with Somebody. Recognize it? Why are we playing that? Our guest Now, Mark Hertsgaard sent us a link to that clip because it was the song that was playing at a parade in New Orleans on Mother's Day 11 years ago, just before Mark and a group of other people were hit by gunfire in a mass shooting, a Mother's Day mass shooting during a parade in New Orleans.

Mark went back to march in that same parade yesterday, for this year's Mother's Day. Some of you know the name Mark Hertsgaard. He's usually on with us as environment correspondent for The Nation Magazine. He's founder of the Covering Climate Now media consortium that inspired our Climate Story of the Week series on this show. This time, he'll tell us about his experience of being wounded himself in that mass shooting, and the new book that it inspired, called Big Red's Mercy: The Shooting of Deborah Cotton, and a Story of Race in America.

Mark, always good to have you on. I never imagined it would be on something like this, but now I know. Welcome back to WNYC.

Mark Hertsgaard: Thank you, Brian. It's always a pleasure to be with you all.

Brian Lehrer: Honestly, for all we've talked, it's only ever been about climate issues, really, and I had no idea you were shot in a mass shooting. Before we get into the shooting and the larger issues you explore in the book, would you set the scene for us? What was this parade, and what was happening as that brass band was playing that Whitney Houston song?

Mark Hertsgaard: Sure. This was a second-line parade here in New Orleans, and second-line parades are an iconic ritual, even a sacred one, I would say. They go back to the burial rights that enslaved Africans brought with them when they first started arriving in Louisiana back in 1722. Over time, those burial rituals have evolved into what today are called second-line parades.

Second-line parades are also one of the key incubators of jazz music, which has been praised as the single greatest artistic achievement that the United States has given to the world. Second-line parades are so critical part of the culture of New Orleans, and in particular the African American culture here in New Orleans, so for that ritual to be blasphemed, really, by what was the biggest mass shooting in the city's modern history, there were 19 people shot that day, 20 counts of attempted murder.

One woman was trampled. Of course, the book is about the most important person there, Deborah Cotton, who was a local racial justice activist, who then, famously, from her apparent deathbed, went on to excuse and urge forgiveness for the young alleged gunman.

Brian Lehrer: We'll talk primarily about Deborah Cotton in the context of her forgiveness, but would you describe the experience of the shooting beginning, and your own experience of being shot in a mass shooting?

Mark Hertsgaard: Sure. Although, I want to emphasize that my own experience is not the reason for this book. It's really because of this mass shooting. As Americans, we know that mass shootings are this horrible plague that has been afflicting our country for a long time, but the reason that I wrote a book about this particular mass shooting is because of its setting. It happened at a second-line parade, it didn't happen at a supermarket, as ghastly as that is.

It happened at this sacred ritual that really goes back to slavery days, and indeed, you could argue, helped enslaved Africans to maintain their identity and culture throughout all of these years, and then, of course, gave rise to jazz. These parades happen in New Orleans every Sunday afternoon, with the exception of summertime when it's just too hot, but there's 40 different so-called Social Aid and Pleasure Clubs, second-line clubs across the city.

Every Sunday, one of them marches for four hours, between one o'clock and five o'clock in the Sunday afternoon, through their neighborhood, accompanied always by at least one brass band. You heard the To Be Continued Brass Band at the top of this segment, with the Whitney Houston tune. There's usually one or two brass bands, and then dancers with them, wearing plumes, feathers, and brightly colored clothing.

Then there is a huge contingent of spectator participants, and I emphasize participants, that is the second line of the parade. Those are people mainly from that particular neighborhood, or here in New Orleans, the Ward, this was the 7th Ward parade, and they marched through their neighborhood in the numbers of hundreds. That morning of Mother's Day 2013, we were marching through the 7th Ward, about a 10-minute walk from the French Quarter, but this was a very impoverished part of New Orleans.

You're really juxtaposing there, the huge inequalities, both economic and racial, that exist in New Orleans. We were about-- I'd say 45 minutes into the parade, and we had just stopped at an intersection for the band to play a tune, and that's when the gunshots rang out. The shooter was about 10 feet behind my left shoulder. You could hear the bullets-- It was funny because I've been around gunfire as a reporter in Africa, but these bullets, they made like a zip, zip, zip sound as they went through the air.

Very humid air down here. Of course, then you saw people fleeing because the gunman was shooting at point-blank range, right into a crowd of people who were overwhelmingly African American. I was one of the very few white people who were there.

Brian Lehrer: The book isn't called The Shooting of Mark Hertsgaard, it's called Big Red's Mercy: The Shooting of Deborah Cotton. Would you introduce us to Deborah Cotton?

Mark Hertsgaard: Sure. With great pleasure. The opening line of this book is that Deborah Cotton and I met by getting shot together. That is the story we used to tell people. She did recover. She was not expected to live through the night, but she did. We got to know each other afterwards. People would say, "How do you two know each other?" "Well, we met by getting shot together," which was true.

I had read her stuff when I'd be passing through New Orleans, because I've done a lot of reporting in New Orleans, mainly about climate, actually. I covered Hurricane Katrina and then I covered the BP oil spill, and I would read her stuff because she wrote for the main music paper here in town, but I did not know her personally. She wrote for the main music paper, it's called The Gambit.

She covered second-line parades, second-line culture, because after Hurricane Katrina, she was very concerned that this absolutely vital part of African American culture in this country, I would say, was going to die out, because a lot of poor people, a lot of people of color, were not able to come back to New Orleans afterwards. They didn't have the money. They didn't have the insurance payments that they deserved. She started chronicling these parades and she was there at that time, and she was marching.

She also happened to be dating one of the two trombone players in the TBC Band. She was right next to him as the shots rang out, and she was hit. The bullet that hit her hit her in what the surgeons nicknamed the soul hole, that's S-O-U-L, soul hole, because generally when you're shot there, you're going to not be living. She was hit in the right hip and the bullet tore through her abdomen, shredding the internal organs, and ended up under her left rib cage, and as I said, she was not expected to live through the night.

The emergency medical techs who arrived on the scene told the cops that they expected out of these 20 people, that there would be three to four fatalities and Deb Cotton was right at the top of that list.

Brian Lehrer: Deborah Cotton forgave the shooters. That's key to this story, right?

Mark Hertsgaard: Yes. Again, I would not have written this book if that had not been the case. She issued a statement from the intensive care unit at the University Hospital here. I still, to this day, don't know how she did this, because in that first week, she was having a major surgery a day. Again, she was not expected to live through the night. The surgeons did an unbelievable job. They have the foremost trauma center in the United States.

If a president of the United States were shot in the American South, they would be flown to New Orleans to go to this trauma center. Why? Because New Orleans, very sadly, has so much experience with gunshot wounds. They have a murder rate that is a staggering eight times higher than the national average per capita. In between all of these surgeries, when she would have moments of lucidity, her friends briefed her on what had happened, the shooting.

By then, surveillance video had surfaced, showing a young Black man shooting directly into the crowd. Within about 48 hours, he and his brother were apprehended by the police, arrested, and charged with 20 counts of attempted murder. Deborah Cotton was briefed on all that, and then she gave a statement to a hastily called City Council Meeting in New Orleans. She said, "I've known from the moment this happened that I did not want these young men thrown to the wolves.

I want everybody in this city to stop and think about how disassociated you have to feel, to look into a crowd of people who look just like you, and to start shooting. These young men have been separated from us by so much trauma." She made a point of talking about, "There is a level of self-hatred there that is so profound. It's like they're trying to wipe themselves out." When I read that statement of hers, I was back at my home in San Francisco by then, because I only sustained a flesh wound.

I read that in the local New Orleans paper, and I said, "Wow, this woman is a saint and I have got to meet her."

Brian Lehrer: Did she actually mean to say that they shouldn't be prosecuted, or that she personally forgives them, even if she dies?

Mark Hertsgaard: I'm so glad you asked that question, Brian. That is the right question, because no, she was not some Pollyanna-ish person. She had spent the last eight years as a racial justice activist in New Orleans, fighting to reform the police department here, which had a long documentary record about corruption, violence, and racism. Indeed, the Obama administration had embraced her mission and put the NOPD under a federal consent decree.

At the same time, Deb recognized that, as she put it in a separate interview, not with me, before she was shot, that she said, "It grieves me to know that young men in this city hunt one another as if it's an urban guerrilla war. They hunt one another and they shoot one another, because they're fighting for various drug territory, and so forth." She said that, yes, of course, these young men have to be punished, and they have proven that, "They cannot live among us."

They had to be removed from society, but she wanted, above all, to say, "Do not see them as animals. Treat them as human beings. Yes, that young man who you see on the video--" who was the guy who shot me, the other shooter was the one who shot Deb. Says, "That young man did something reprehensible, and he has ruined his life by doing it, but he did not do that in a vacuum. This city and this country created that vacuum."

Then later, she said to me that part of the reason that she believed in forgiveness and so forth is that you have to see this in context. She specifically said, "Racism can kill Black people even when a Black finger pulls the trigger."

Brian Lehrer: You described Deborah Cotton as a saint because of this, but you also write that after you considered her a saint, you came to think of her as a prophet. How so?

Mark Hertsgaard: That took some years, Brian, of the reporting. Again, remember, this was 2013 when it happened. In some ways, her statements foreshadowed the Black Lives Matter movement, because that sprang to life about two months later, but her Black Lives Matter version came with a twist, which is that yes, of course, when trigger-happy cops shoot Black people, or vigilante shoot Black people, that is systemic racism at work, but systemic racism can also be responsible for young Black men who shot us for informing why they did that.

Within three years, and I say, she did finally recover enough to sort of live a normal life. She lived long enough to see Donald Trump run for election the first time in 2016. She, of course, as a feminist, a racial justice activist, and a left-of-center political person in general, she totally abhorred what Trump stood for, but she also saw that this was another symptom of what she saw as the failure of this country to grapple with the truth about race and racism, which, in her mind, and she certainly convinced me, means that we have to talk about slavery.

A lot of times, we talk about race, we talk about racism, but we don't talk about slavery enough, which is where it all started. It's the original sin, as Barack Obama put it, echoing James Madison. Deb would say, in the course of our interviews, "Until we, as a country, really face what slavery did and still does to this country, the cycle is going to continue." I said, "What do you mean? What cycle?"

She said, "The same cycle that caused the Mother's Day shooting, the same cycle that--" by that time, there had been the Charleston Church massacre in 2015, "The same cycle that sees a blatant white supremacist become the Republican party's nominee for president to succeed the nation's first Black president." That kind of backlash. She said, "Until we really face what slavery did and does to this country, we're going to keep reliving that."

She argued very much for a truth and reconciliation approach to racism and slavery, much like what happened in South Africa after apartheid, under Mandela.

Brian Lehrer: Let me follow up on truth and reconciliation in a second. Listeners, we have about five minutes, if anybody, after now hearing Mark Hertsgaard's story-- The basic story that feeds his new book, Big Red's Mercy: The Shooting of Deborah Cotton and a Story of Race in America. It was also a shooting of him at that Mother's Day Parade in New Orleans 11 years ago yesterday. If anybody has a question or a comment, 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692, call or text. We can take one or two.

Deborah Cotton's mission, truth and reconciliation, what does reconciliation mean to her in that context? The word can mean making up, like estranged family members might reconcile, but it also means paying your debts, like when you reconcile in the banking or financial sense. What is truth and reconciliation, especially reconciliation as Deborah Cotton sees it?

Mark Hertsgaard: That's such a good question, Brian. Forgive me, I'm not going to be able to give an adequate answer. There's a whole chapter in the book that explores that, but I would start by saying reconciliation is not the same as reparations. The reconciliation might lead to reparations. For example, it did in Germany, after the Second World War. In South Africa, it did not. At the very least, you have to start with the truth about what happened.

Bryan Stevenson, the great civil rights attorney says that we've done a terrible job in this country, of talking about the truth. Until you face the truth, you cannot reconcile. To Deb, what it would mean was that-- Let's be honest about that vacuum, that these young men who shot us did not do that in a vacuum. They did it in a society where, especially here in New Orleans, these young men, they grew up without a chance.

Even the federal agents investigating it felt that they had no parenting, no father, grew up in poverty, no education, no real job prospects outside of flipping burgers or dealing drugs, and they dealt drugs. Until we fix the underlying causes of poverty, racism, discrimination, and all the things that are woven into the society, we're not going to be able to reconcile. That means facing the truth of that and then taking real actions to fix it, and as it's happens, New Orleans is actually a leader in the country on this.

Their mayor at the time, Mitch Landrieu, was the first major US politician to publicly apologize on behalf of his government for slavery. Then he took down the monuments in the face of great opposition from people who wanted them to stay up. That's the kind of action that I think Deb would have approved of. Sadly, she did not live long enough to see all that. She died in May of 2017. Basically, she'd had, at that point, 36 major surgeries. Her body never worked properly again after the shooting, and eventually, the organs just gave out.

Brian Lehrer: You mentioned the Charleston church massacre. In the same breath as this, did you ever ask Deborah about the Black churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina, who also spoke of forgiving, in that case, the white racist mass shooter, Dylann Roof, who killed nine parishioners there, out of racial hatred, in 2015? The conditions of the shooters were so different, obviously.

I understand the connection that you say she made between racism, whether it's hate of the other or self-hatred, undergirding both incidents, as she saw it, but that was another incident of race, a mass shooting, and a forgiveness that, in that case, many people could not understand.

Mark Hertsgaard: Yes, I call it radical forgiveness. Deb had a gift for radical forgiveness, and that's-- whatever your faith, that's what Jesus Christ taught as well. I know you had Jacqui Lewis of the Middle Church there in New York on the air, a couple of weeks ago.

Brian Lehrer: Many times. [crosstalk]

Mark Hertsgaard: The same idea that you hate the sin, but you love the sinner. I did not talk about the massacre in Charleston with Deb, because, at that point, her father was dying, actually, so she was attending to him in his final moments, and I've heard your top of your show today, about that. No, I don't have something specific on that, but I'm pretty sure that she would have felt a kindred in this, to that.

Brian Lehrer: Radical forgiveness. Last question. You went back to New Orleans for yesterday's Mother's Day second-line parade. Part of this, I know, is launching your book release there, at the scene of the life-altering incident for you, but what else did it mean to you, or how did it feel yesterday?

Mark Hertsgaard: I came here to honor Deb's memory, and Deb's message of truth and reconciliation. Also, I'm sure if she were here today, she would make sure to be telling people that that same blatant white supremacist is on the ballot again in November. This country, hard to believe, is actually preparing to-- It's the equivalent, I think, to putting the Confederacy back in power after the Civil War. That's the choice American voters have in November.

Deb was not a Pollyanna when she forgave people. She also married that with the same statement that if we don't face the truth, we're going to keep having this stuff. Trump running for presidency a second time and being close in the polls, I think, validates what Deb said. I was very glad to be here, to honor her memory, but also to spread her message and to urge people, don't be cynical, don't be apathetic.

Get out there and make sure that you don't allow the Confederates back into power after the Civil War, because that's what we're talking about in November.

Brian Lehrer: Mark Hertsgaard. His day job is environment correspondent for The Nation, and running the media consortium Covering Climate Now, about doing just that, of which we are a part. His new book is Big Red’s Mercy: The Shooting of Deborah Cotton and A Story of Race in America. Mark, thank you so much for sharing this with us.

Mark Hertsgaard: Brian, I really appreciate it. Thank you.

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