waged long-standing political battles with the City Council, led by his archrival Sidney Barthelemy, and with COUP, Barthelemy's political organization. He spent much of his time as mayor trying to increase the strength and influence of the mayor's office over independent, state-chartered governmental bodies, like the Sewerage and Water Board and the Dock Board (the supervisory body for the Port of New Orleans), an effort he described as a democratization of city governance. He built a powerful patronage machine using unclassified city employees and used it to defeat opponents in the state legislature — including Hank Braden, Louis Charbonnet, and Nick Connor — by personally sponsoring little-known challengers. In 1978, Braden and Charbonnet competed over a vacant state senate seat, which Braden claimed by a 14-vote margin. In his first term, Morial faced a sanitation workers’ strike and a police strike which led him to cancel the 1979 Mardi Gras parade season. The police union wagered, among its membership, that a strike coinciding with Mardi Gras would force the city to grant many of their demands, but Morial refused to give in and was supported by leaders of many of the city's Carnival krewes. The New Orleans krewes either canceled their parades that year or moved them to suburbs in other parishes. Emblematic of Morial's hard-line stance toward the police strikers was the Napoleonic gesture he made by placing his arm inside his coat and striking a characteristically pugnacious pose at the announcement that he was canceling Mardi Gras . Most of Morial's achievements occurred in his first term as mayor. Expanding upon the efforts of his predecessor Moon Landrieu, Morial redoubled the city's commitment to affirmative action in hiring city workers and introduced minority hiring quotas for city contractors. The proportion of black employees on the city's workforce increased from 40% in 1977 to 53% in 1985 under Morial's tenure. Under Morial's administration the number of black officers in the NOPD was increased to make up one third of the force. But continued incidents of police brutality — most notably the police killing of four blacks in Algiers in 1980 — damaged Morial's reputation in the black community. Morial was responsible for getting federal Urban Development Action Grant (UDAG) funding for several major projects, including Canal Place and the Jax Brewery development in the French Quarter. He continued to support previous mayor Moon Landrieu’s emphasis on tourism and tried