One Year After Katrina, The Other New Orleans Rises Up

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- Culture flows from the bottom up. The culture of New Orleans was from the street. If you remove the people from the street, the culture here is not going to be the same.

Dr. Alan Colon, Professor of African Studies at New Orleans’ Dillard University, on August 28, 2006 at the First Annual Katrina Memorial, Xavier University, NOLA.

Before Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans last year, two thirds of its residents were African Americans. In a city with over of its citizens living in poverty, 84% of the poverty stricken were African Americans. And with a school system that Dr. Colon characterized as "a model for public school failure," 94% of its students were African Americans (all statistics from Dr. Colon).

But this ongoing human disaster was largely ignored until Katrina came to town. As Dr. Colon put it, "The decayed core festered away from tourism. Out of the Katrina Floodwaters images of the other New Orleans materialized."

The Other New Orleans materialized again in the city’s Lower 9th Ward on August 29 of this year, the first anniversary of the deluge. The event was dubbed the Great Flood Commemoration & Memorial Ceremony.

Located in New Orleans’ southeast corner, the Lower 9th is separated from the rest of the city by the Industrial Canal, whose shoddy walls collapsed from the force of the storm surge last year, inundating the entire community. The floodwaters ripped homes from their foundations and obliterated them in minutes. Hundreds drowned.

One of Dr. Colon’s co-panelists on August 28 was Dr. Ivor van Heerden, director of Louisiana State University’s Hurricane Resource Center. Van Heerden, a frequent critic of the Army Corps of Engineers work in southern Louisiana, showed aerial photos he took of New Orleans the day after Katrina hit.

"We predicted New Orleans was going to flood," he reported. A wall of water 14 to 15 feet high breached the Industrial Canal. "What we saw from the air was that all the houses were gone. About 89% of the flooding in New Orleans was from breaches. If the levees had held the maximum flood level would have been three feet."

And so on the morning of August 29 this year people gathered in the Lower 9th where the wall had collapsed last year. The irony of a crowd of predominantly black folks coming together to mourn their dead beneath a recently rebuilt white wall towering over their still devastated community could not have been clearer, or crueler.

Around a table filled with memorial candles, people called out the names of those who died in the flood. "George Cronan, Mary Cronan…" Olayeela Daste, an African American woman dressed in white, led a service for the circles of humanity assembled around the table. "We are here today," she intoned, "because so many died, and we were not able to give them a proper burial." Then she asked the crowd to call out the names of others who perished last year. "George Perkins," rang out, "Helen Smith."

Daste continued, "All of those who are unnamed, let them feel the light, the freedom and justice we long for."

The Lower 9th Ward wasn’t the only New Orleans community where levee walls inside the city collapsed from what van Heerden characterized as "catastrophic structural failure." In Lakeview in the northwest corner of the city, the 17th Street Canal’s breach caused mass death and destruction as well, as did the collapse of the London Street Canal in New Orleans East.

But Lakeview was predominantly affluent and white, and people who chose to live there could have made other choices. A third panelist on August 28 was Dr. Michael Eric Dyson, Professor of Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania, and author of Come Hell or High Water. Dyson spoke of "submerged migration," like that which had brought people to the Lower 9th. "Geography is destiny," he asserted. "Those who lived low were people forced to live in certain areas or spaces. The storm was racially neutral in its attack, but racist in its consequences."

On the March

Later that morning on the 29th in the Lower 9th, people started marching off through the mostly deserted streets. Others continued to call out the names of the dead. "Ella Beard, Elaine Nelson, James Washington, Mary Benjamin…"

The Lower 9th Ward is the last section of the city still lacking electricity and drinking water in some parts. In a city where half the population has not returned a year after Katrina, most of the Lower 9th’s hasn’t. As Dr. Colon had pointed out the night before, "Most of the people who have returned to New Orleans are white. Most of those who haven’t are black."

In some other hard hit parts of town, white FEMA trailers, where people stay while fixing up their homes, are a common sight these days. Along the march route we saw exactly two.

The march reached the St. Claude Street Bridge (a drawbridge), which spans the Industrial Canal into the Upper 9th Ward, another impoverished African American community that was badly flooded. In fact, we were following the traditional route of the Martin Luther King Jr. parade.

The drawbridge and the Lower 9th were closed until late January. Survivors of the flooding who left to get relief supplies weren’t allowed back in. Not until October were residents returning to see what had become of their homes allowed in under a "look and leave" order, and a curfew went into effect at 4 p.m. National Guard roadblocks into the Lower 9th remained up until mid-May. In New Orleans, these conditions existed only in the Lower 9th Ward.

The National Guard still patrols both parts of the Ninth Ward, as well as Lakeview and New Orleans East. It was called back in May after a spate of murders in others parts of the city. During the march a humvee and a police car preceded a black hearse that led the march, but the National Guard’s duties pretty much consisted of handing out drinking water. Temperatures along the route were approaching the mid 90s, with high humidity accompanying them, conditions very much like those of the day a year ago when the floodwaters came.

On the other side of the bridge along St. Claude Avenue, young African Americans at the head of the march broke out a hip hop rhythmed chant: "We don’t want to go to war/Just give us our home, we’ll be alright/Just give us our home, we’ll be alright/We’re New Orrrrrleans!" The crowd picked up the chant and it became its anthem, echoing one of the demands of the event, the Right to Return.

As the march moved along at an increasing pace, neighborhood people came out and joined in. The signs of poverty were everywhere, blighted houses, hard cynical faces, check cashing and discount liquor stores, piles of debris the floods had left behind. But so too was the exuberance of the residents, those who had survived, who had the will and wherewithal to come back.

The march had taken on the spirit of a traditional New Orleans jazz funeral, starting out slow and mournful, then gradually picking up tempo as the steam rose up off the streets and the sweat of the Other New Orleans flooded them.

The night before, Dr. Colon had begun his remarks by stating, "African Americans in New Orleans have been the most marginalized, with the least resources, money, and transportation to leave. Now they’re the most purposely discouraged from returning.

"In the Katrina diaspora, they’re the most marginalized in the country and in this city. African American people are at a crossroads in our history. In every meaningful measure they have the least of the best and the most of the worst. It is a critical condition and an emergency state…New Orleans is the only U.S. city from which people were displaced and not encouraged to return. Mayor Nagin said, ‘Return at your own risk.’"

Dr. Dyson concluded his remarks by declaring, "American hasn’t fully processed what happened a year ago. Martin Luther King said in 1965, ‘We’re marooned on a tiny island of poverty in the midst of material prosperity.’ And that’s where we are today. Do we as Americans care about poor people? Imagine ourselves as them."

Back on St. Claude Avenue the march reached Franklin Avenue, a major intersection. On

On Franklin’s grass median a brass band waited to join the march. Usually in a jazz funeral the band starts off playing the slow mournful parts first. But everything’s different now. So the horns and drums laid down a funky riff right off, and the players took turns blaring solos that were at once defiant and joyful. More people poured out of their homes and workplaces and took to the streets together, a tiny island of raucous dancers in the midst of a staggered city that has suffered so much in the last year, coming from people who have suffered so much over past centuries.

Another chant goes up from the crowd over the bold bouncing rhythms: "New Orleans, New Orleans!" And within that, begun by a woman carrying a sign reading, "Bush Is Full of S___," "I love New Orleans!" There’s more bodies heaving in the heat, more sweat drenching everyone, the streets are almost slick with it, fighting off the sorrow, fighting against all the less and less of the 12 months just past.

And it was all still going on as the crowd surged into Louis Armstrong Park, and assembled in Congo Square. During segregation this was the only part of the city where African Americans could freely express themselves. People were still carrying on, honoring the dead and inspiring the living to go on, just like a good jazz funeral should.

The party might be over tomorrow, and the grim racist realities the professors so eruditely, and likewise passionately, elucidated the night before will still be looming. But for today, the Other New Orleans was back on the streets, and the streets were theirs again.

Michael Steinberg is a veteran writer and activist, recently relocated to New Orleans.

Michael Steinberg