What The African American Press Has To Say

Here are some reports on what is happening in New Orleans and beyond from African-American commentators and media.


From the San Francisco Bay View

'This is criminal': Malik Rahim reports from New Orleans

by Malik Rahim
Malik Rahim, a veteran of the Black Panther Party in New Orleans, for decades an organizer of public housing tenants both there and in San Francisco and a recent Green Party candidate for New Orleans City Council, lives in the Algiers neighborhood, the only part of New Orleans that is not flooded. They have no power, but the water is still good and the phones work. Their neighborhood could be sheltering and feeding at least 40,000 refugees, he says, but they are allowed to help no one. What he describes is nothing less than deliberate genocide against Black and poor people. - Ed.

New Orleans, Sept. 1, 2005 - It's criminal. From what you're hearing, the people trapped in New Orleans are nothing but looters. We're told we should be more "neighborly." But nobody talked about being neighborly until after the people who could afford to leave … left.

If you ain't got no money in America, you're on your own. People were told to go to the Superdome, but they have no food, no water there. And before they could get in, people had to stand in line for 4-5 hours in the rain because everybody was being searched one by one at the entrance.

I can understand the chaos that happened after the tsunami, because they had no warning, but here there was plenty of warning. In the three days before the hurricane hit, we knew it was coming and everyone could have been evacuated.

We have Amtrak here that could have carried everybody out of town. There were enough school buses that could have evacuated 20,000 people easily, but they just let them be flooded. My son watched 40 buses go underwater - they just wouldn't move them, afraid they'd be stolen.

People who could afford to leave were so afraid someone would steal what they own that they just let it all be flooded. They could have let a family without a vehicle borrow their extra car, but instead they left it behind to be destroyed.

There are gangs of white vigilantes near here riding around in pickup trucks, all of them armed, and any young Black they see who they figure doesn't belong in their community, they shoot him. I tell them, "Stop! You're going to start a riot."

When you see all the poor people with no place to go, feeling alone and helpless and angry, I say this is a consequence of HOPE VI. New Orleans took all the HUD money it could get to tear down public housing, and families and neighbors who'd relied on each other for generations were uprooted and torn apart.

Most of the people who are going through this now had already lost touch with the only community they'd ever known. Their community was torn down and they were scattered. They'd already lost their real homes, the only place where they knew everybody, and now the places they've been staying are destroyed.

But nobody cares. They're just lawless looters ... dangerous.

The hurricane hit at the end of the month, the time when poor people are most vulnerable. Food stamps don't buy enough but for about three weeks of the month, and by the end of the month everyone runs out. Now they have no way to get their food stamps or any money, so they just have to take what they can to survive.

Many people are getting sick and very weak. From the toxic water that people are walking through, little scratches and sores are turning into major wounds.
People whose homes and families were not destroyed went into the city right away with boats to bring the survivors out, but law enforcement told them they weren't needed. They are willing and able to rescue thousands, but they're not allowed to.

Every day countless volunteers are trying to help, but they're turned back. Almost all the rescue that's been done has been done by volunteers anyway.

My son and his family - his wife and kids, ages 1, 5 and 8 - were flooded out of their home when the levee broke. They had to swim out until they found an abandoned building with two rooms above water level.

There were 21 people in those two rooms for a day and a half. A guy in a boat who just said "I'm going to help regardless" rescued them and took them to Highway I-10 and dropped them there.

They sat on the freeway for about three hours, because someone said they'd be rescued and taken to the Superdome. Finally they just started walking, had to walk six and a half miles.

When they got to the Superdome, my son wasn't allowed in - I don't know why - so his wife and kids wouldn't go in. They kept walking, and they happened to run across a guy with a tow truck that they knew, and he gave them his own personal truck.

When they got here, they had no gas, so I had to punch a hole in my gas tank to give them some gas, and now I'm trapped. I'm getting around by bicycle.

People from Placquemine Parish were rescued on a ferry and dropped off on a dock near here. All day they were sitting on the dock in the hot sun with no food, no water. Many were in a daze; they've lost everything.

They were all sitting there surrounded by armed guards. We asked the guards could we bring them water and food. My mother and all the other church ladies were cooking for them, and we have plenty of good water.

But the guards said, "No. If you don't have enough water and food for everybody, you can't give anything." Finally the people were hauled off on school buses from other parishes.

You know Robert King Wilkerson (the only one of the Angola 3 political prisoners who's been released). He's been back in New Orleans working hard, organizing, helping people. Now nobody knows where he is. His house was destroyed. Knowing him, I think he's out trying to save lives, but I'm worried.

The people who could help are being shipped out. People who want to stay, who have the skills to save lives and rebuild are being forced to go to Houston.

It's not like New Orleans was caught off guard. This could have been prevented.
There's military right here in New Orleans, but for three days they weren't even mobilized. You'd think this was a Third World country.

I'm in the Algiers neighborhood of New Orleans, the only part that isn't flooded. The water is good. Our parks and schools could easily hold 40,000 people, and they're not using any of it.

This is criminal. These people are dying for no other reason than the lack of organization.

Everything is needed, but we're still too disorganized. I'm asking people to go ahead and gather donations and relief supplies but to hold on to them for a few days until we have a way to put them to good use.

I'm challenging my party, the Green Party, to come down here and help us just as soon as things are a little more organized. The Republicans and Democrats didn't do anything to prevent this or plan for it and don't seem to care if everyone dies.
Malik's phone is working. He welcomes calls from old friends and anyone with questions or ideas for saving lives. To reach him, call the Bay View at (415) 671-0789.


From Black News.com

Black Looters, White Finders - Is The Media Racially-Biased About Hurricane Katrina?
Long Beach, CA (BlackNews.com) - It's no question that there is massive looting going on in the gulf coast area by white and black Americans. People of all colors are doing what they can to survive.

But why is the mainstream media saying that the Black people are looting supplies, and that the white people are finding supplies?

A recent report from DiversityInc.com found one picture by an AFP/Getty Images photographer and another by The Associated Press (AP) - and each had a different caption when published.

The AFP/Getty photo shows two white people with food, with the caption that they were "finding" bread and soda from a grocery store. However, the AP photo shows a black person with some food, with the caption saying he had just finished "looting" a grocery store.

[Click Here To See]

Dante Lee of BlackNews.com, comments, "I've seen this variation several times, and it certainly reveals that the mainstream media is indeed racially-biased."

Pat Means of Turning Point Magazine, says, "The media must be careful in its labeling of people who are simply trying to survive. The media can not practice racism, when everyone is doing the same thing."

Others agree that the media is definitely targeting African-Americans to make them look worse than they already do.


From Black Press USA.com

New Orleans: A Disaster Waiting to Happen
by George E. Curry
NNPA columnist

I am angry. I am angry at the mayor of New Orleans. I am angry at the governor of Louisiana. I am angry at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). I am angry at the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), now part of the Department of Homeland Security. I am angry at George W. Bush. I am angry because they were warned last November that New Orleans was one of the “Disasters Waiting to Happen” – and did nothing about it. Consequently, hundreds, if not thousands, of people are dead. Needlessly.

In an eerie prediction of what happened as a result of Hurricane Katrina, an article titled, “What if Hurricane Ivan Had Not Missed New Orleans?” was published in the Natural Hazards Observer, a major journal headquartered at the University of Colorado in Boulder. It was written by Shirley Laska of the Center for Hazards Assessment, Response and Technology at the University of New Orleans. In other words, this was an article written by a reputable author in a reputable national publication that should have been read by people involved in disaster relief. If they had taken heed, many of the dead in New Orleans would be alive today.

Under the headline, “What if Ivan Had Hit New Orleans?” the author wrote, “New Orleans was spared this time, but had it not been, Hurricane Ivan would have:

- Pushed a 17-foot storm surge into Lake Pontchartrain;

- Caused the levees between the lake and the city to overtop and fill the city ‘bowl’ with water from lake levee to river levee, in some places as deep as 20 feet;

- Flooded the north shore suburbs as much as seven miles inland; and

- Inundated inhabited areas south of the Mississippi River.

“Up to 80 percent of the structures in these flooded areas would have been severely damaged from wind and water. The potential for such extensive flooding and the resulting damage is the result of a levee system that is unable to keep up with the increasing flood threats from a rapidly eroding coastline and thus unable to protect the ever-subsiding landscape.”

Until I read this article, I had said one of the positive things that I hoped would come out of this disaster is that relief experts would realize that they need to make special provisions for the poor, elderly and homeless. In essence, I gave them the benefit of the doubt. Now, however, I realize that there is no benefit in doubt.

The warning was there in black and white:

“For those without means, the medically challenged, residents without personal transportation, and the homeless, evacuation requires significant assistance.”

Laska spelled it out in even more detail.

During Hurricane Ivan in 2004, she continues, ‘Residents who did not have personal transportation were unable to evacuate even if they wanted to.
Approximately 120,000 residents (51,000 housing units x 2.4 persons/unit) do not have cars.

“A proposal made after the evacuation from Hurricane Georges to use public transit buses to assist in their evacuation out of the city was not implemented for Ivan. If Ivan had struck New Orleans directly it is estimated that 40-60,000 residents of the area would have perished.”

The additional problem of people having the means to leave, but refusing to do so was addressed in the article.

“Researchers have estimated that prior to a ‘big one,’ approximately 700,000 residents of the greater New Orleans area (out of 1.2 million) would evacuate,” Laska wrote. “In the case of Hurricane Ivan, officials estimate that up to 600,000 evacuated from metropolitan New Orleans between daybreak on Monday, September 13 and noon on Wednesday, September 13, when the storm turned and major roads started to clear…

“The fact that 600,000 residents evacuated means an equal number did not. Recent evacuation surveys show that two thirds of nonevacuees with the means to evacuate chose not to leave because they felt safe in their homes. Other nonevacuees with means relied on a cultural tradition of not leaving or were discouraged by negative experiences with past evacuations.”

Those that dismiss environmentalists as kooks, should pay special attention to the observations about marshes.

“Loss of the coastal marshes that dampened earlier storm surges puts the city at increasing risk to hurricanes,” the article noted. “Eighty years of substantial river leveeing has prevented spring flood deposition of new layers of sediment into the marshes, and a similarly lengthy period of marsh excavation activities related to oil and gas exploration and transportation canals for the petrochemical industry have threatened marsh integrity.”

Using the Hurricane Ivan model to predict what would happen if a major hurricane struck New Orleans, Laska wrote: “Should this disaster become a reality, it would undoubtedly be one of the greatest disasters, if not the greatest, to hit the United States, with estimated costs exceeding 100 billion dollars. According to the Red Cross, such an event could be even more devastating than a major earthquake in California. Survivors would have to endure conditions never before experienced in a North American disaster.”

It ended, “The hurricane scenario for New Orleans that these conveying risks portend is almost unimaginable. Hurricane Ivan had the potential to make the unthinkable a reality. Next time New Orleans may not be so fortunate.”


George E. Curry is editor-in-chief of the NNPA News Service and BlackPressUSA.com. He appears on National Public Radio (NPR) three times a week as part of “News and Notes with Ed Gordon.” In addition, his radio commentary is syndicated each week by Capitol Radio News Service (301/588-1993). To contact Curry or to book him for a speaking engagement, go to his Web site, www.georgecurry.com.


From Black Commentator Radio
Text of Radio BC audio commentary
September 2 2005
Will the ‘New’ New Orleans be Black?

One of the premiere Black cities in the nation faces catastrophe. There is no doubt in my mind that New Orleans will one day rise again from its below sea level foundations. The question is, will the new New Orleans remain the two-thirds Black city it was before the levees crumbled?

Some would say it is unseemly to speak of politics and race in the presence of a massive calamity that has destroyed the lives and prospects of so many people from all backgrounds. But I beg to differ. As we have witnessed, over and over again, the rich and powerful are very quick to reward themselves as soon as disaster presents the opportunity. Remember that within days of 9/11, the Bush regime executed a multi-billion dollar bailout for the airline industry. By the time you hear this commentary, they may have already used the New Orleans disaster to bail out the insurance industry – one of the richest businesses on the planet. But what of the people of New Orleans, 67 percent of whom are Black?

New Orleans is a poor city. Twenty-eight percent of the population lives below the poverty line. Well over half are renters, and the median value of homes occupied by owners is only $87,000. From the early days of the flood, it was clear that much of the city’s housing stock would be irredeemably damaged. The insurance industry may get a windfall of federal relief, but the minority of New Orleans home owners will get very little – even if they are insured. The renting majority may get nothing.

If the catastrophe in New Orleans reaches the apocalyptic dimensions towards which it appears to be headed, there will be massive displacement of the Black and poor. Poor people cannot afford to hang around on the fringes of a city until the powers-that-be come up with a plan to accommodate them back to the jurisdiction. And we all know that the prevailing model for urban development is to get rid of poor people.
The disaster provides an opportunity to deploy this model in New Orleans on a citywide scale, under the guise of rebuilding the city and its infrastructure.

In place of the jobs that have been washed away, there could be alternative employment through a huge, federally funded rebuilding effort. But this is George Bush’s federal government. Does anyone believe that the Bush men would mandate that priority employment go to the pre-flood, mostly Black population of the city. And the Black mayor of New Orleans is a Democrat in name only, a rich businessman, no friend of the poor. What we may see in the coming months is a massive displacement of Black New Orleans, to the four corners of the nation. The question that we must pose, repeatedly and in the strongest terms, is: Through whose vision, and in whose interest, will New Orleans rise again. For Radio BC, I’m Glen Ford.

You can visit the Radio BC page to listen to any of our audio commentaries voiced by Co-Publisher and Editor-in-Chief, Glen Ford. We publish the text of the radio commentary each week along with the audio program.


From BET
Gulf 's Toxic Stew Adds to Crisis for Black Residents
BET, News Report, Mary M. Chapman, Sep 02, 2005

Weary, anxious and in shock, Thomas Reed is doing the only thing he can do – wait. He's sitting in a hotel room 400 miles from his drowned hometown, fielding calls from worried loved ones, one eye on the TV set.

He can barely believe what he's seeing.

"I have never, ever seen anything like this," says Reed, a Black group insurance salesman who fled New Orleans with his two kids Sunday for Greenville, Miss. "I even see some faces I recognize."

Most of them Black faces.

TV cameras reminded America just how Black New Orleans is, as they showed thousands of African Americans pouring into the Superdome arena for shelter.

Reed lives in the heart of New Orleans, overwhelmingly Black and poor. At least he did. Right now, he doesn't know whether he has a house at all. He has no relatives in New Orleans, but he hates to see what's happening to those left behind.

Jennifer Burns does too. A Tuskegee, Ala., resident, who lived in New Orleans for 30 years, wonders aloud whether friends she knew have survived. But as it turns out, besting the hurricane is just the start. Those who lived face another adversary: floodwaters poisoned by several agents, including raw sewage and toxins from the floating dead.

The toxic soup likely has other ingredients too, nasty by-products of petrochemical plants, industrial sites, oil refineries, storage tank farms, underground gas stations and sewage treatment plants, facilities common throughout the Gulf. Even before Katrina, such by-products had already seriously compromised the soil, air and water in areas heavily populated by impoverished African Americans, says an internationally renowned environmental expert.

"Even when there's no natural disaster Blacks have lived the closest (to these facilities)," says Robert Bullard, founder and director of the Environmental Justice Resource Center at Clark Atlanta University. "These issues have been exacerbated by the hurricane. So now you have a combination of things coming together, flooding and the mix of pollutants. A hurricane releases all that stuff.

"Then when you talk about a group of people who lack health insurance and homeowner's insurance, when something like this happens, you know just who is going to be the most vulnerable," says Bullard, who wrote "Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class and Environmental Quality" (2000, Westview Press).

Going beyond a widely circulated 2002 United Methodist Church report on the increasingly contaminated state of groundwater in rural America, Bullard has called the recurring proximity of hazardous materials plants to impoverished, mostly Black neighborhoods environmental racism.

"Then when something happens like this, most aren't able to pack up and drive 300 miles and buy gas and check into a hotel with no credit card," says the Ware professor of sociology at Clark. "This is a race and class issue."

The southern United States is characterized by “look-the-other-way” environmental policies and giveaway tax breaks, Bullard said in a report presented last year to the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development.

"Lax enforcement of environmental regulations has left the region’s air, water and land the most industry-befouled in the United States. The Lower Mississippi River Industrial Corridor has over 125 companies that manufacture a range of products including fertilizers, gasoline, paints and plastics," the report said.

Bullard advises watching to see how rebuilding unfolds in Katrina's aftermath. "It would be great if everything were equal and fair, but we know who gets the royal treatment. If you live across the tracks, you are going to get treated like you live across the tracks. Let's see who gets the levees put back in first. It's downtown, the French Quarter. It's sure not going to be the neighborhoods," he says.

"If their houses are standing – there's also a lot of public housing – there's going to be mold when they get back. And they have no nest egg, no savings accounts to do anything about it."

Indeed, the 2000 U.S. Census shows that in New Orleans, 11.5 percent of Whites lived below the poverty line, compared with 35 percent of Blacks. In Mobile, Ala., another hard hit area, 8.2 percent of Whites were impoverished, compared with 34.7 percent of African Americans. Some 27.3 percent of Blacks in Biloxi, Miss., lived beneath the poverty line, compared with 10.5 percent of White residents. For Gulfport, Miss., it was 11.2 percent for Whites, 29.2 percent for African Americans.

"These are people who mostly work service jobs and who just couldn't get out. But New Orleans is important ... , so it'll get fixed back up," Reed says.

About the latter, Marc Morial agrees. President of the National Urban League, Morial was the mayor of New Orleans from 1994 to 2002. "It has to be rebuilt, it just must be saved," says Morial. "It's important to the nation, important to the world.

"But the most immediate thing is to save people's lives; this is catastrophic. Then some people only have enough money for a hotel room for two or three days. From what I'm seeing, it's nearly brought me to tears. There's story after story of pain in all three states.

"This is like Noah's flood."

U.S. Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) spoke to BET.com from his home near Jackson, Miss., his phone hooked up to a generator. He arrived in town about a day after Katrina struck. "The one thing that people miss is that a lot of Blacks here don't have their own means of transportation," he says. "So when you say 'evacuate' to a person who doesn't even have a car, what are you saying? Most of these people were not able to go."

And those left behind, he says, may have to deal with toxic stew. "There is no question that if you look at where all these sites are located, irregardless of this occurrence, they tend to be located in low-income, minority communities. Anytime a situation like this is upon us, it exacerbates the dilemma."

As for Reed, he's doing the best that he can.

"I'm just playin' it by ear, basically. Stay here a few more days, see what's goin' on.

"There's not much more I can do."