[News] Back Inside New Orleans

[Anti-Imperialist News]

Back inside New Orleans

by Jordan Flaherty

September 12, 2005

What actually happened in New Orleans these past two weeks? We need to sort
through the rumors and distortions.  Perhaps we need our version of South
Africa's Truth And Reconciliation Commission.  Some way to sort through the
many narratives and find a truth, and to find justice.

I spent yesterday inside the city of New Orleans, speaking to a few of the
last holdouts in the 9th ward/bywater neighborhood.  Their stories paint a
very different picture from what we've heard in the media.  Instead of
stories of gangs of criminals and police and soldiers keeping order, there
were stories of collective action, everyone looking out for each other,
communal responses.

The first few nights there was a large, free community barbecue at a
neighborhood bar called The Country Club.  People brought food and cooked
and cooked and drank and went swimming (yes, there's a pool in the bar).

Emily Harris and Richie Kay, from Desire Street, traveled out on their boat
and brought supplies and gave rides.  They have been doing this almost every
day since the hurricane struck.  They estimate that they have rescued at
least a hundred people.  Emily doesn't want to leave.  She is a carpenter
and builder, and says, "I want to stay and rebuild.  I love New Orleans."

Emily describes a community working together in the first days after the
hurricane.  She also describes a scene of abandonment and disappointment.
"A lot of people came to the high ground at St. Claude Avenue.  They really
thought someone would come and rescue them, and they waited all day for
something - a boat, a helicopter, anything.  There were helicopters in the
sky, but none coming down."

So people started walking as a mass uptown to Canal Street.  Along the way,
youths would break into grocery stores, take the food and distribute it
evenly among houses in the community.

"Then they reached Canal Street, and saw that there was still no one that
wanted to rescue them.  That's when people broke into the stores on Canal
Street."

I asked Okra, in his house off of Piety Street, what the biggest problem has
been.  He said, "It's been the police - they've lost the last restraints on
their behavior they had, and gotten a license to go wild.  They can do
anything they want.  I saw one cop beat a guy so hard that he almost took
his ear off.  And this was someone just trying to walk home."

Walking through the streets, I witnessed hundreds of soldiers patrolling the
streets.  Everyone I spoke to said that soldiers were coming to their house
at least once a day, trying to convince them to leave, bringing stories of
disease and quarantine and violence.  I didn't see or speak to any soldiers
involved in any clean up or rebuilding.

There are surely reasons to leave - I would not be living in the city at
this point.  I'm too attached to electricity and phone lines.  But I can
attest that those holdouts I spoke to are doing fine.  They have enough food
and water and have been very careful to avoid exposing themselves to the
many health risks in the city.

I saw more city busses rolling through poor areas of town than I ever saw
pre-hurricane.  Unfortunately, these buses were filled with patrols of
soldiers.  What if the massive effort placed into patrolling this city and
chasing everyone out were placed into beginning the rebuilding process?

Some neighborhoods are underwater still, and the water has turned into a
sticky sludge of sewage and death that turns the stomach and breaks my
heart.   However, some neighborhoods are barely damaged at all, and if a
large-scale effort were put into bringing back electricity and clearing the
streets of debris, people could begin to move back in now.

Certainly some people do not want to move back, but many of us do.  We want
to rebuild our city that we love. The People's Hurricane Fund - a
grassroots, community based group made up of New Orleans community
organizers and allies from around the US - has already made one of their
first demands a "right of return" for the displaced of New Orleans.

In the last week, I've traveled between Houston, Baton Rouge, Covington,
Jackson and New Orleans and spoken to many of my former friends and
neighbors.  We feel shell shocked.  It used to be we would see each other in
a coffee shop or a bar or on the street and talk and find out what we're
doing.  Those of us who were working for social justice felt a community.
We could share stories, combine efforts, and we never felt alone.  Now we're
alone and dispersed and we miss our homes and our communities and we still
don't know where so many of our loved ones even are.

It may be months before we start to get a clear picture of what happened in
New Orleans.  As people are dispersed around the US reconstructing that
story becomes even harder than reconstructing the city.  Certain sites, like
the Convention Center and Superdome, have become legendary, but despite the
thousands of people who were there, it still is hard to find out exactly
what did happen.

According to a report that's been circulated, Denise Young, one of those
trapped in the convention center told family members, "yes, there were young
men with guns there, but they organized the crowd. They went to Canal Street
and 'looted,' and brought back food and water for the old people and the
babies, because nobody had eaten in days. When the police rolled down
windows and yelled out 'the buses are coming,' the young men with guns
organized the crowd in order: old people in front, women and children next,
men in the back,just so that when the buses came, there would be priorities
of who got out first." But the buses never came.  "Lots of people being
dropped off, nobody being picked up. Cops passing by, speeding off.  We
thought we were being left to die."

Larry Bradshaw and Lorrie Beth Slonsky, paramedics from Service Employees
International Union Local 790 reported on their experience downtown, after
leaving a hotel they were staying at for a convention. "We walked to the
police command center at Harrah's on Canal Street and were told ...that we
were on our own, and no they did not have water to give us. We now numbered
several hundred. We held a mass meeting to decide a course of action. We
agreed to camp outside the police command post. We would be plainly visible
to the media and would constitute a highly visible embarrassment to the City
officials. The police told us that we could not stay. Regardless, we began
to settle in and set up camp. In short order, the police commander came
across the street to address our group. He told us he had a solution: we
should walk to the Pontchartrain Expressway and cross the greater New
Orleans Bridge where the police had buses lined up to take us out of the
City...

"We organized ourselves and the 200 of us set off for the bridge with great
excitement and hope. ...As we approached the bridge, armed Gretna sheriffs
formed a line across the foot of the bridge. Before we were close enough to
speak, they began firing their weapons over our heads. This sent the crowd
fleeing in various directions...

"Our small group retreated back down Highway 90 to seek shelter from the
rain under an overpass. We debated our options and in the end decided to
build an encampment in the middle of the Ponchartrain Expressway on the
center divide, between the O'Keefe and Tchoupitoulas exits. We reasoned we
would be visible to everyone, we would have some security being on an
elevated freeway and we could wait and watch for the arrival of the yet to
be seen buses.

"All day long, we saw other families, individuals and groups make the same
trip up the incline in an attempt to cross the bridge, only to be turned
away. Some chased away with gunfire, others simply told no, others to be
verbally berated and humiliated. Thousands of New Orleanians were prevented
and prohibited from self-evacuating the City on foot. Meanwhile, the only
two City shelters sank further into squalor and disrepair. The only way
across the bridge was by vehicle. We saw workers stealing trucks, buses,
moving vans, semi-trucks and any car that could be hot wired. All were
packed with people trying to escape the misery New Orleans had become."

Media reports of armed gangs focused on black youth, but New Orleans
community activist, Black Panther, and former Green Party candidate for City
Council Malik Rahim reported from the West Bank of New Orleans, "There are
gangs of white vigilantes near here riding around in pickup trucks, all of
them armed."  I also heard similar reports from two of my neighbors - a
white gay couple - who i visited on Esplanade Avenue.

The reconstruction of New Orleans starts now.  We need to reconstruct the
truth, we need to reconstruct families, who are still separated, we need to
reconstruct the lives and community of the people of New Orleans, and,
finally, we need to reconstruct the city.

Since I moved to New Orleans, I've been inspired and educated by the
grassroots community organizing that is an integral part of the life of the
city.  It is this community infrastructure that is needed to step forward
and fight for restructuring with justice.

In 1970, when hundreds of New Orleans police came to kick the Black Panthers
out of the Desire Housing Projects, the entire community stood between the
police and the Panthers, and the police were forced to retreat.

The grassroots infrastructure of New Orleans is the infrastructure of
secondlines and Black Mardi Gras: true community support.  The Social Aid
and Pleasure Clubs organize New Orleans' legendary secondline parades -
roving street parties that happen almost every weekend.  These societies
were formed to provide insurance to the Black community because Black people
could not buy insurance legally, and to this day the "social aid" is as
important as the pleasure.

The only way that New Orleans will be reconstructed as even a shadow of its
former self is if the people of New Orleans have direct control over that
reconstruction.  But, our community dislocation is only increasing.  Every
day, we are spread out further.  People leave Houston for Oregon and
Chicago.  We are losing contact with each other, losing our community that
has nurtured us.

Already, the usual forces of corporate restructuring are lining up.
Halliburton's Kellogg Brown & Root subsidiary has begun work on a $500
million US Navy contract for emergency repairs at Gulf Coast naval and
marine facilities damaged by Hurricane Katrina.  Blackwell Security - the
folks that brought you Abu Ghraib - are patrolling the streets of our city.

The Wall Street Journal reported that the rich white elite is already
planning their vision of New Orleans' reconstruction, from the super-rich
gated compounds of Audubon Place Uptown, where they have set up a heliport
and brought in a heavily-armed Israeli security company.   "The new city
must be something very different," one of these city leaders was quoted as
saying, "with better  services and fewer poor people. Those who want to see
this city rebuilt want to see it done in a completely different way:
demographically, geographically and politically."

While the world's attention is focused on New Orleans, in a time when its
clear to most of the world that the federal government's greed and
heartlessness has caused this tragedy, we have an opportunity to make a case
for a people's restructuring, rather than a Halliburton restructuring.

The people of New Orleans have the will.  Today, I met up with Andrea
Garland, a community activist with Get Your Act On who is planning a bold
direct action; she and several of her friends are moving back in to their
homes.  They have generators and supplies, and they invite anyone who is
willing to fight for New Orleans to move back in with them.  Malik Rahim, in
New Orleans' West Bank, is refusing to leave and is inviting others to join
him.  Community organizer Shana Sassoon, exiled in Houston, is planning a
community mapping project to map out where our diaspora is being sent, to
aid in our coming back together.  Abram Himmelstein and Rachel Breulin of
The Neighborhood Story Project are beginning the long task of documenting
oral histories of our exile.

Please join us in this fight.  This is not just about New Orleans.  This is
about community and collaboration versus corporate profiteering.  The
struggle for New Orleans lives on.


-----------------------------------------------
Jordan Flaherty is a union organizer and an editor of Left Turn Magazine
(www.leftturn.org).  He is not planning on moving out of New Orleans.
-----------------------------------------------
Some Organizations Mentioned in This Article:

www.qecr.org
www.getyouracton.com
www.neighborhoodstoryproject.org
www.indyvoter.org

Other Organizations That Need your Support:
www.jjpl.org
www.thejusticecenter.org
www.criticalresistance.org
www.nolahumanrights.org

The Freedom Archives
522 Valencia Street
San Francisco, CA 94110
(415) 863-9977
www.freedomarchives.org 
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