By Paul Anger, 2nd vice chair, Jefferson Parish Democratic Executive Committee
Jeanne McGlory has packed a lot into her 78 years.
Civil rights activist, fighting for equality.
New Orleans police sergeant, fighting crime and opening opportunities for others at NOPD.
Teacher of at-risk children, helping them find their way.
McGlory holds a Master of Social Work from Tulane University. She’s working on her Master of Fine Arts in the University of New Orleans Creative Non-Fiction program – and hoping to complete a book about what she calls “the human side of police.”
At 78, she’s not tapping the brakes. Earlier this month, the Jefferson Parish Democrats – almost all of them far younger – elected her as chair.
McGlory has stood up for what she believes for decades, since she was a teenager at Xavier Prep and joined the New Orleans NAACP’s Youth Group. In the early 1960s, as civil rights protests swept the country, she and others “sat-in” at a Royal Castle counter and tried to order. McGlory and friends were told to get out. Police were summoned.
“They brought several paddy-wagons,” McGlory recalls. “They took our names and asked where we went to school. We thought we would be arrested, but they let us go home.”
McGlory later learned that police leadership – at least in this case – had decided that the best way to avoid fueling the Civil Rights Movement and generating bad publicity for New Orleans was to avoid violent confrontation.
At age 16, McGlory says, she wasn’t thinking much about affiliating with a political party. “We were working on equality,” she says.
But her parents were Democrats, and the party’s policies nationwide – voting rights, equal opportunity, equal justice, other issues that remain at risk today – naturally appealed to her. When she turned 21, she registered as a Democrat.
As a young adult, McGlory experienced life across the country – lived in New York and Los Angeles, went to school in Houston. She volunteered in 1965-67 for local Texas campaigns by civil rights pioneer Barbara Jordan. [JM1] In 1972, Jordan became the first African-American woman elected to Congress from the South.
By then, McGlory was working for the New Orleans Police Dept. – still fighting for her rights. At 5’6”, she challenged the NOPD height requirement of 5”8” – which was subsequently thrown out. McGlory rose to sergeant before retiring in 1996.
“I don’t want anyone to think I was a hero or brave,” she says. “I found people on the street fascinating. I found police fascinating. People think police wake up and think about how many tickets they’re going to write or how many arrests they’ll make. It’s not like that. Police think, ‘Oh, it’s looks nice out today.’ After morning roll calls, we’d ask each other where we’re going to eat.”
McGlory says she never had to fire her weapon on the streets. “I was fortunate,” she says. “But for the grace of God …”
McGlory retired from NOPD after 26 years in 1996, at age 52. She then worked as a special agent at the Office of Municipal Investigation, looking into complaints against city employees. She did that for six years before leaving to teach.
Among other classes, she taught 7th graders identified as “overage underachievers.” She bought them supplies, gave them books, and told them, “I have great expectations for you guys.”
They didn’t have what she had growing up in New Orleans in the ‘50s and ‘60s, the only child of John McGlory and Beatrice Jones McGlory. They lived on Annette Street in the 7th Ward, which back then “truly was a village,” she says. “The people in the block looked out for each other. My mom was at the kitchen stove, and my dad made barbecue sauce for the block. We’d all get together.”
Her mother worked at Haspel Brothers factory, sewing suits for Haspel and for Brooks Brothers; her father was a tile-setter and worked on construction of the Superdome in the ‘70s. The McGlorys lived a life that Americans anywhere could identify with – hard work and service to country.
Jeanne McGlory likes to say she’s “four days older than D-Day,” born just before the Allies invaded Normandy on June 6, 1944. Her father was in the infantry, stormed the beach, fought across Europe and didn’t see his daughter until she was 14 months old.
Since then, the country has seen a roller-coaster of uplifting progress and frustrating backsliding on civil rights, women’s rights and voting rights. McGlory had no grand plan to become a Democratic Party leader, but as at other points in her rich life, a door opened and she walked through.
She moved to River Ridge after Katrina, and a friend suggested a few years ago that she run for the Jefferson Parish Democratic Executive Committee (JPDEC). She became chair this year, succeeding Trey Mustian, who led JPDEC for three years. He oversaw expansion of social media, added diversity and launched the livestream discussion show Jeff Talk. “I want to be half as good as Trey,” McGlory says.
She looks with alarm at what many Republicans are doing to dismantle rights, cut services, send wealth upward, lie brazenly about the 2020 election and threaten our democracy. “We’ve got to register voters,” she says, “get them motivated and get them to vote.”
Besides setting priorities for the Jeff Parish Dems, she urges Democrats to “talk with your friends. We can communicate with them, people we know – talk with them about what’s happening.”
She wants to involve more young people, who are apt to become Democrats, but the idea that lifelong Democrats don’t have enough to offer anymore “hurts my feelings.”
She recently watched a news program with young Democratic leaders in Congress saying, in effect, “how terrible it is that old people run things in Washington.”
“They want to send older people out to pasture,” McGlory says. “So guess what I do to make myself feel better? I put the Rolling Stones on my TV. They make me happy, full of energy, bouncing around the stage.”
She was born the year after Mick Jagger -- and the same year as Diana Ross, Patti LaBelle and Gladys Knight. McGlory is the mother of Joya McGlory, 52, and grandmother of Jonathan Hickman, 28. Like her, they’re Loyola University graduates.
McGlory long ago earned the right to tap the brakes, but it’s not in her nature. Never has been.
“I always had to have a plan,” she says. “A lot of times it had to do with going to school somewhere, making friends, finding something to do. I’m always thinking about what I’m going to do next.”