This is a pretty good piece on Ray Nagin from a local lawyer.

http://www.bayoubuzz.com/articles.aspx?aid=6006

He was basically a black Republican before he ran for mayor, his first elected office.
As for his chocolate comment, most people Uptown including me were ticked off.
But the background is this: the Bring Back New Orleans commission was studying plans for redeveloping the city and recommended that harder hit areas (Gentilly, Lower Ninth Ward, New Orleans East, Broadmoor and Lakeview)-- which are basically lower lying areas, should have a four month moratorium on development until the FEMA maps come out and people will know what they have to do to qualify for flood insurance.
At the meeting this met with very angry denunciations from both white speakers from Lakeview and black speakers from the lower nine. (It also met with a more interesting nuanced response from political boss and businessman Sherman Copelin, who represents New Orleans East.)
There is a feeling in the black diaspora that there's a plot among white residents in New Orleans to keep black residents from returning. (How that jibes with the same moratorium being proposed fro mostly white Lakeview, I don't know. But conspiracy theory is a substitute for thought.)
Nagin was already on the outs with parts of this community, and I think he was pandering to that base, and was pretty damned awkward about it to boot.
He was faking it up like a preacher when he really doesn't ever talk like that, and by referencing Uptown he really played into the conspiracy theory paranoia that's already out there. As one guy said, he stuck his foot in his mouth and then he shot himself in the foot.
New Orleans was about 2/3's black before Katrina, and I believe it will be majority black within a year, but with a substantial Hispanic and white minority. None of the more hysterical predictions or reactions about the city will come true.
Nagin will probably survive this unless a really formidable Democratic candidate comes along. He owned the white vote in teh last election; he's done all eh can to alienate it with this statement, but in the end I think unless Mitch Landrieu steps in , Nagin will win. If he really wants it... If we really have an election...
And that's how uncertain things are here on a late January day in the city that care forgot.