In his Martin Luther King Jr. Day speech the wonderful mayor of New Orleans likened the city to that of a chocolate city. Wow, here’s a quick guess at who won’t be mayor next term.

NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana (CNN) — Mayor Ray Nagin on Tuesday apologized for urging residents to rebuild a “chocolate New Orleans” and saying, “You can’t have New Orleans no other way.”

“I’m really sorry that some people took that they way they did, and that was not my intention,” the mayor said. “I say everybody’s welcome.”

Nagin added that he never should have used the term “chocolate.”
Across the Hurricane Katrina-ravaged city, many voiced their displeasure with the mayor’s Monday remarks at a Martin Luther King Jr. Day speech. One Web site even began peddling T-shirts showing Nagin with a top hat along with the caption “Willy Nagin and the Chocolate Factory.”

Resident Alex Gerhold called Nagin’s remarks “stupid” and “pitiful.”

“He used the wrong dairy product to describe us. We’re more Neapolitan, not chocolate,” Gerhold said. “It doesn’t do the city any kind of justice.”

Aisha Johnson said she didn’t think the mayor’s comments were necessarily inflammatory, just out of line.

“He should have chosen his words more carefully,” she said.

But some residents, like Ann McKendrick, were angered.

“You can’t reunite a city if your comments are going to divide a city,” McKendrick said.

Nagin’s remarks fall into a line of inappropriate statements the mayor has made, said civil rights attorney Tracie Washington. She said she is “done trying to figure out what our mayor is going to say off the cuff on any given day.”