"My daddy was Superman."
I heard my mother say that more times than I can count growing up. It didn't matter what the story was — the sandwiches he left under the front seat of his car for her every day after school, the cotton candy he'd bring home in a garbage bag after Bible study, the way half of uptown New Orleans seemed to know him by one word, “Sarge” — it always came back to that.
“My daddy was Superman.”
He was my grandfather: Sgt. Perry Roberson White of the New Orleans Police Department, known to our family — thanks to a cousin who couldn't quite manage "Granddaddy" — simply as "Gammy." By the time I was born, he'd been gone for nearly a decade. I never met him, yet he was always there — a near-mythical figure at my mother's kitchen table, a man I felt like I knew long before I knew a single fact about him.
"Because he was Perry White — because he was Sergeant White — it was what people called him until the day he died," his youngest daughter, my mother, Perryl, said. "He carried such a big responsibility on his shoulders."
Even at home, even off the clock, even years after he’d retired, he never fully stopped being the man the city knew. She grew up watching people treat her father like he was larger than life before she ever understood why.
“He was just ‘daddy’ to me,” she said.
The man who became Sgt. Perry White did not begin with a badge.
He was born Perry Roberson White on September 11, 1924, to Louis and Gertrude White. His father worked as a dry cleaner, and family history holds that he was swindled out of a cleaning formula — something close to a modern-day Oxiclean — by a white man who took advantage of his illiteracy.
That loss stayed with Gertrude. By my mother's account, it's part of why she drilled education into her four sons, Perry and his brothers, Louis, Clyde, and Cleveland, so hard growing up. Census records place the family on First Street, in the same part of New Orleans where my grandfather would go on to serve as a police officer decades later.
During World War II, according to family history, he served as a sergeant in the U.S. Army, working in supply. After the war ended, he returned to Dillard University to complete the studies interrupted by the conflict. He graduated in 1951 with a degree in chemistry. Prior to joining the NOPD he briefly worked as a postal worker and a science teacher.
He was a son shaped by a mother's insistence on education, a Dillard graduate and a veteran of a war fought for a country that still made it extraordinarily difficult for Black men to exercise the right to vote or eat in every restaurant — before he ever became one of the early Black officers to rise through the ranks of a newly reintegrated police department.
Everything that came after — Sixth District, sergeant's stripes, the badge his family called Gammy's — was built on that foundation.
That's the strange inheritance of growing up inside someone else's memory. You inherit the outline of a person long before you inherit the details. I knew he'd been one of the first Black officers to join the New Orleans Police Department after its reintegration. I knew he smoked cigars like it was a job requirement and loved a good bet at the racetrack. But I didn't have a document to my name to prove any of it.
For most of my life, my grandfather existed in the strange space between memory and evidence. I knew his voice only through my mother’s stories. I knew his face through a single photograph my family had kept. I knew his reputation through people who still said his name with a smile decades after he died. But history is cruel to people without paper. Without a personnel file, a newspaper clipping, a record somewhere with his name typed on it, even the most extraordinary life can slowly become a story people are allowed to doubt.
He'd been an obsession of mine since childhood — a man built almost entirely out of other people's memories. Chasing proof of him became a five-year mission.
This is the story of my search to reconstruct his life and what that search revealed about memory, history, and the people willing to preserve both.
Five years of dead ends
I spent years bothering the city of New Orleans.
I called the Crescent City Lodge of the Fraternal Order of Police, then the state FOP, then the national FOP. I called the National Organization of Black Law Enforcement Executives at the local, state and national levels.
Organization after organization offered some version of the same answer: We can't help you.
The NOPD's own recordkeeping, I learned, has long been a source of frustration for the people who served in it.
William “Billy” Roth, a retired sergeant who knew my grandfather beginning in 1967, told me the department "does not necessarily keep the best records." He recalled a fellow officer who'd served alongside my grandfather in the Third District. When that man died, his family tried to verify his years of service for a headstone, and the department told them it had no record he'd ever been an officer at all.
"I worked with him. We had records," Roth said, still sounding baffled years later.
"Mismanagement, or whatever it is."
Roth would know. He joined the department in 1966, spent his early years in the Third District, later worked armed robbery and fugitive extraditions and retired in 1995 as the sergeant in charge of criminal investigations in the Eighth District — the French Quarter. He also served as president of the FOP during the department's famous 1979 strike. He's seen the NOPD from nearly every angle there is.
One of those calls led me to Darlene Anthony, a records technician in the NOPD's HR department who happened to be willing to do the digging no one else was.
She combed through storage boxes at police headquarters until she found a single typewritten card — my grandfather's entire service record, reduced to a few lines of type. She told me that when she went to pull it from the bottom of the box, she said a quiet prayer to herself: Lord, let this be Perry. It was.
Roth filled in the rest. He called me unexpectedly on a Saturday morning in June, having heard through mutual contacts that I was looking for more information about my grandfather, and a few days later he sat for an interview.
“You look like your grandfather in the face,” he said. “But you’d look better with a cigar in your mouth.”
At the end of our interview, he handed me a flash drive. On it were newsletters, commendation letters and photographs that another retired officer, Bobby Hamilton, had scanned and preserved himself before they could disappear.
Hamilton left the NOPD for a stint with U.S. Customs before eventually coming back because, as Roth put it, “he wanted his obituary to read NOPD, not Customs.”
It doesn't get more NOPD than that.
Hamilton passed the cataloged files to Roth, and they sat untouched on a flash drive until a stranger's grandson came looking.
By the time my grandmother died in 1999, whatever my grandfather had left behind had already scattered among family members. Katrina claimed much of what remained. By the time I started looking, we had almost nothing left to prove he'd ever existed at all.
I later learned my family's experience wasn't unusual. Heather Green, head of Reader Services at the Historic New Orleans Collection, told me this exact kind of gap is common, especially for Black families.
"That history is missing not because of a lack of the history," she said. "The people were out there doing the things; they were just not being kept and treasured the way that other people's histories have been."
Much of what survives, she told me, survives only because families preserve it themselves — a church record, a family Bible, a story someone remembered to write down before it disappeared for good.
"It's really important to kind of uplift oral histories," she said, "people capturing what's happening in your community with the people in the community, now, while they're still here."
And when an institution doesn't go looking, nobody else will.
"If institutions aren't seeing that," she said, "we have to make sure that we are doing what it takes to bring those stories in."
The world he walked into
My grandfather reported to police headquarters on February 20, 1952, at 27 years old, into a department that had reopened its doors to Black officers only two years earlier.
The door reopened because civil rights attorney A.P. Tureaud forced it, demanding the city allow qualified Black applicants onto the force.
On June 16, 1950, Carlton Pecoul and John Raphael Sr. became the department's first Black hires of the 20th century, assigned not to patrol, but to the Detective Bureau's Juvenile Division, working within Black neighborhoods rather than alongside white officers on the street.
To get there, my grandfather would first have to pass the civil service exam and be placed on an eligibility list, ranked according to his score.
When asked how it views his legacy today, a spokesman from the New Orleans Police Department said: "The NOPD offers endless thanks and appreciation to Sgt. Perry White for all his contributions while working in service to the citizens of New Orleans during his career. At a point in our city's history where race relations were not where they are today due to societal segregation and unjust racial inequalities of the time, we cannot overlook the service of Sgt. White and all the Black officers who wore the badge during this pivotal period, and the struggles they endured.”
More than seven decades after he first reported for duty, his impact remains visible.
The record comes together
The personnel card gave me an outline: he became a permanent officer by 1953, moved to the Sixth District that May, made sergeant in 1966 and became a permanent sergeant the following year. The commendations filled in the man behind it.
In January 1963, a year before the Civil Rights Act, he and Patrolman Leary Adams caught a burglar mid-break-in near the I.L.A. Hall on South Claiborne Avenue; he drew his revolver and held the man until backup arrived.
In 1969, after he and his longtime partner Sgt. Manuel Curry helped clear three armed robberies in a matter of weeks, a lieutenant recommended both men for a leadership citation, writing that the respect they commanded from their men was "not a demanded respect, but a deserved respect, obtained by hard work."
Two years later, he and Curry helped take down a wanted, armed suspect known as "Dead-eye,” disarming him after he tried to draw a pistol, without harm to a single bystander.
Then came Easter Sunday, 1974. A man in a wheelchair, armed, firing from a second-floor window on South Rampart Street, saying over and over that he wanted to die. My grandfather had every justification, and every opportunity, to fire back. He chose not to. The standoff ended with no shots fired by police, and the department's citation credits him with recognizing, in the moment, that the man in that window needed to be taken alive, not killed — "restraint, cool-headedness, bravery in the face of danger, and humane action."
When I read that citation to my mother, who’d just turned six a month prior that year, her response, through tears, was simple but powerful.
"That's my daddy," she said. "A people person."
Roth remembers what the job looked like on the ground in those years, before two-man cars, before radios worked outside the vehicle.
"Once you stepped out, you were on your own," he told me.
He remembers responding to a call once and finding my grandfather already on scene, working it exactly the way he always did — cool, calm and collected.
Roth described White and Curry as men who always seemed to know what was happening in their district before anyone told them, because they knew so many people — not informants, he was careful to say, just people who liked them enough to call the house with a tip.
"It's like they talk about community policing now," Roth said. "It was that, before it was ever a thing."
That partnership with Curry is documented well beyond my own family's records.
In a 2004 newspaper interview, Curry was asked who the best NOPD sergeant no longer living was. He didn't hesitate:
"I would say Perry White. He was one of the first Black sergeants on the department. He took his job seriously. He made sergeant at the same time I did... And we were both sent to the Third District. When I first went down there, the platoon really had to be shaped up. But once I shaped it up with Perry, it was the best platoon in the city. Black and white policemen respected Perry on the job. He started walking the beat on Dryades Street, same as I did. On Rampart Street, people called me 'Perry White' and they called Perry 'Sgt. Curry.' They got us confused. He always smoked a cigar, always had a cigar in his car."
A separate NOPD veteran, William "Trap" Trepagnier, said in a 2014 profile piece that his own best years on the job came serving under Curry and White, "white and black sergeants, respectively, who lifted their squads above the racial tensions of the day."
By family account, my grandfather took the lieutenant's exam three times and missed the cutoff by a single point each time. My mother remembers helping him study for the exam after work.
“We’d sit and study, my daddy and I,” she said. “He spent nearly every spare moment, and he did not have many, studying for that test. My daddy was the smartest man I knew. There’s no way he didn’t pass that test.”
Her theory was that he'd risen too fast and been liked by too many people to be allowed to rise further without upsetting the department's order.
He retired on January 1, 1987, after nearly 35 years on the job.
In his later years on the job, my mother remembers Curry riding around to schools in a kind of resource-officer role, a driver in tow, still checking in on the community he and my grandfather had once policed together and stopping to talk about him, unprompted, to anyone who'd sit still long enough to listen.
Off the clock
Every superhero has a second identity. One belongs to the world, and one belongs to the people who get to close the door behind him.
My grandfather’s world knew Sgt. White. My mother knew Daddy. It would take me five years, a records technician and a stranger’s flash drive to meet even a fraction of the first man. The second one, I only ever got secondhand, but he’s the one my mother has spent her whole life trying to describe to me.
"Sgt. White was left at the door," she said. "Daddy came through the door."
What came through the door was a man of small, exact rituals. Every school day, a ham sandwich from Sam's, the neighborhood sandwich shop, wrapped in butcher paper and tucked under the car seat with a bag of chips — a shrimp po-boy instead on Fridays for my mother after school.
A cigar always within reach, White Owls and Hav-A-Tampas, tucked into the visor of his car, the glove box, the top pocket of his shirt. You always knew he'd been in a room before you ever saw him — you could smell him.
He didn't drink. He didn't use drugs. His one real “vice” was the racetrack — first the Fair Grounds, later a track out in Kenner — and he chased it with enough devotion that arriving fifteen minutes late one afternoon, because she'd waited on fresh doughnuts, earned my mother one of the only sharp words she remembers him ever saying to her.
"I'm trying to get to the track," he told her, "and you're going to make me late."
He missed the race that day. He never brought it up again.
He loved my grandmother, Florence, gently, and through action rather than declaration. They met on an arranged date, through a mutual friend named Florine, at a little place near his home on First Street. My mother tells it like she was standing in the room herself — her own grandmother (my great-grandmother) and aunt teasing my grandmother as she got dressed for his college graduation, laughing that this man surely didn't want her.
My grandmother, wearing the new dress and gloves she’d made for the occasion, already having been told plainly they'd marry once he finished school, was resolute in her belief.
“He told me he was going to marry me,” she said. “I believe him.”
He proposed shortly after crossing the stage at Dillard. They married shortly thereafter and remained married until the day he died.
She ran the household, and he trusted her with it completely. My mother remembers him coming home every couple of weeks with a stack of paycheck stubs from his details, dropping them in a kitchen drawer, and walking away. The bills got paid, the lights stayed on, and he never once asked how.
Their home was one of abundance.
“It didn't matter who you were; anyone could come to our home and eat,” my mother said. “My father would sit right at the kitchen table and would not bat an eye. All were welcome at our table.”
She continued, “We had many laughs, many good times at that table. You know my daddy chewed his food exactly 32 times regardless of what he was eating? He’d love you, but he’d hate the way you eat.”
Thanks, Mamma.
Every year at Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s and Easter, my grandmother’s cooking brought well over 100 people to the family’s home on Randolph. A feat requiring strength, patience and a balanced checkbook.
The one time my grandfather tried to take the job over himself, as a joke, he lasted about 30 minutes at the kitchen table with a checkbook before giving up.
He never tried that again.
When asked to describe my grandfather in one word, Mamma said “love.”
“My daddy was love. The bible says, ‘Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails.’ My daddy was all of those things.”
She gave me an example from early childhood: “When I was a little girl and he’d come home from work late at night he’d knock at the door and I’d reach out and feel his face. Now, don't ask me why but I had to do that each time, but I did. And he let me!” she said through deep laughter.
“He was just that kind of man. It was silly, but it made me happy, so he happily obliged.”
My grandparents raised three daughters together, all of them educators — Perretta, the eldest, became an elementary school principal; Perrilyn, a classroom teacher, came next; my mother, Perryl, has spent 30 years teaching, nearly the last decade of it in literacy intervention.
There was a whole side of him the neighborhood saw that the family almost never did.
The first Mardi Gras after he retired, the family talked him into watching the Zulu parade with them instead of just passing through. They parked blocks away and walked toward Jackson and Dryades, straight back into the streets that had been his beat for years, and it took what felt like an hour to cover a few blocks.
People came off their porches. Officers left their posts to shake his hand. "Man, come see, it's Sarge," somebody called out. My grandmother, half-laughing, told him to be nice to everybody crowding around.
He looked at her, completely unbothered. "I am being nice," he said. "These are my people." My mother still laughs about that one.
Even my mother didn’t know the full weight of what he’d left behind until years after he was gone. Working as a teacher at Langston Hughes Elementary, she was once stopped by the school’s financial secretary, Ms. Venato, who’d overheard her name.
"By any chance," she asked, "was Perry White your dad?" It turned out she’d worked the cash box at security details with him at Booker T. Washington High School for years. My mother had 45 minutes free that period. Ms. Venato used every one of them, one story after another.
"I was standing there with tears in my eyes," my mother told me, “the stories were just so beautiful.”
My mother hadn’t gone looking for the legend. It came and found her, in a school office, from a stranger who’d simply been waiting for the chance to talk about him.
At home, it was Sanford and Son on the television, cartoons for the grandkids, a nap after a long detail, cigar smoke wherever he'd last been standing. He didn't require much. He wanted his cigars, his ponies, and his family, and as far as anybody could tell, that was enough for him.
The old Sergeant went home
In December 1995, Sgt. White went home to be with the Lord. He was 71. But his memory did not go with him.
His funeral turned into something closer to a citywide testament to exactly how many people he'd touched. Hundreds stood outside before the family's car ever arrived. Officers and mourners filled the basement, choir loft and stairwells of the church. Floral arrangements lined both exits.
My mother remembers squeezing through the vestibule just to get inside, at his home church, Zion Travelers Second Missionary Baptist.
"It seemed like every NOPD officer from the brass on down was there," she told me. "The community, the Uptown community, they came out. People whose lives my daddy touched. They remembered him."
She has joked more than once that it was probably the best day in the city's history to commit a crime, because as far as she could tell, every officer in New Orleans was standing in or around that church.
As the procession made its way through the city, it passed Sam's, the sandwich shop where my grandfather purchased the sandwich and chips that sat under the seat of his car for my mother every day after school during her childhood.
She looked out the limousine window and saw the same men who'd made those sandwiches standing outside on the sidewalk in their paper hats, the rest of the shop's workers beside them, still wearing theirs. As the procession rolled past, they took the hats off their heads. Up and down the route, people sitting on their porches stood.
One extended family member, hearing the sirens before she knew whose procession it was, fainted on the sidewalk when she learned my grandfather had passed.
All she’d seen was the size of the procession — the number of cars, the police escort, the whole street stopping at once — and she assumed, in that instant, that it had to be someone the entire city would have known.
She assumed the mayor had died. He wasn’t a mayor. He wasn’t a celebrity or a politician or anyone whose face had ever been on a ballot. He was a sergeant who’d spent nearly 35 years walking a beat in the Sixth District. Nearly 35 years changing lives.
Manuel Curry led the procession on foot until Louisiana Avenue, where he stopped and saluted before joining the rest of the officers for the drive to the cemetery — a walk he would retrace alone, unprompted, more than a decade later, according to a 2009 profile of Curry's own life and career.
It's one of the most beautiful things I've found in five years of looking: an old friend, near the end of his own long life, ruefully driving the same route again just to remember.
Musicians Joe "Cool" Davis and Aaron Neville came in and sang as mourners viewed the body. And John Raphael Jr. — son of John Raphael Sr., one of the two men whose hiring in 1950 had reopened the department's doors to Black officers in the first place — stood to speak. He told a story from his own childhood: lost on a street corner on his way to school, panicked, until he heard a familiar voice call his name and turned to find my grandfather's patrol car pulled up beside him.
"It's okay. I'm going to take you to your daddy," he said.
What's left
In the end, this is a story about how many things one man can be at once, and how few of them ever make it into any single record.
He was a husband. A father. A brother. A son. A son-in-law. A police officer. A sergeant. A leader other men followed without being told to. A friend, in the fullest sense Manuel Curry ever used that word. A member of Zion Travelers Second Missionary Baptist Church, faithfully, long after he'd hung up the badge.
And to one little girl at a kitchen table in New Orleans, who grew up to become my mother, he was, simply and completely, Superman.
He came up through a department that had barely finished deciding whether men who looked like him were allowed to wear its uniform, and he built a career inside that same institution that other men, white and Black both, would later measure their own against. He did it without raising his voice, without firing his weapon when he didn't have to, without letting the job turn him into someone his own children wouldn't recognize when he came home.
In a city and in an era where men who looked like him could be beaten, killed, or erased from the record entirely and no one would answer for it, he chose restraint. He chose the community. He chose to be, in his daughter's words, "love" — again and again, whether or not anyone with the power to promote him further ever recognized what the people around him already knew.
Among his seven grandchildren are a doctor, two lawyers, an educator, an engineer, a journalist and an aspiring pharmacist — a testament to the hard work of my grandparents.
I never met him. I never will. But five years of phone calls, a records technician's quiet prayer over a cardboard box, and a retired sergeant's flash drive later, I know him now in a way I didn't when I started.
This piece, and every document behind it, will be shared with the New Orleans City Archives, so that the next person looking won't have to start the way I did — with nothing at all. And so these stories, the stories of the everyday pioneers, will not go quietly into that goodnight.
Rest easy, Gammy. Your story has been told.
This story was produced by the Gulf States Newsroom, a collaboration between Mississippi Public Broadcasting, WBHM in Alabama, WWNO and WRKF in Louisiana and NPR.
