From Military-Occupied New Orleans

(Letter)

30 June 2006

Dear WV,

I’m writing from military-occupied New Orleans. The National Guard and State Police have been sent into town and a juvenile curfew imposed, because as far as the bourgeois state is concerned, a few too many black people have returned.

The immediate excuse was five black teenagers being gunned down in a car in Central City in apparent retribution for a previous drug deal gone bad. Rural Slidell across the lake just had a drug-related slaughter of four people, but nobody called for the National Guard to go there. And since when did the government care about the lives of black youth being lost? Louisiana ranks 49th out of the 50 states in all measures of child welfare, from premature birth to death by murder.

Rather this is a crackdown in what has become a largely Wild West town with little police presence. Most of all, it is a line drawn at gunpoint to emphasize official hostility against the “wrong people,” i.e., black people returning home. This coincides with an ongoing campaign of roundups and deportations of Latino work crews shaping up for work in the early mornings at the local Lowe’s and Home Depots.

On June 7, the New Orleans Times-Picayune published a front-page large-print article on a (six-month-old) census report subtitled, “We’re Whiter, We’re Older, We’re More Affluent.” This may be good news to some old, rich white people, but not to anyone else. Besides, the count of who has returned is a moving target. Many evacuees have come back to stay somewhere nearby, across the river or in the next parish (county). Only two of my Gentilly neighbors are back in their own houses, but most of the rest are here on weekdays or weekends staying in FEMA trailers, staying with friends or relatives, working on their ravaged houses and trying to find a way to move back home for good.

To the consternation of the older-whiter-richer crowd, black Democratic mayor Ray Nagin was re-elected in the April runoff. Not because of the absentee ballot which was made nearly impossible to file, but because just enough black evacuees made it back here by hook or by crook to vote in person. They came in ACORN-sponsored buses, they came in family cars and caravans, from Houston, from Dallas, they came for Easter, they came because they were homesick. They didn’t particularly come to vote for Nagin, as shown by exit interviews and polls. They said they came because “people died for my right to vote” and because “This is my home and nobody can take it away.”

Nagin was the accidental and undeserving beneficiary of these sentiments and only because there was no one else. And not least of all, in protest against the 22 mostly white candidates who came out of the woodwork thinking a whiter population would elect them. A local black columnist, son of civil rights attorney Lolis Elie, wrote that black New Orleanians were loath to publicly “spank” the mayor especially in concert with white racists.

As of January the population of Orleans Parish remained reduced by a whopping 64 percent. Then in January, the college students returned, or 80 percent of them anyway. They came back to Tulane, Xavier, University of New Orleans, Loyola, Delgado Community College, and even the tiny flooded black Dillard University, which holds classes at the Riverside Hilton. Quite remarkable, since colleges and universities everywhere in the U.S. including the Ivy Leagues gave free tuition for the entire year to any New Orleans student who showed up at their door in September. Eighty percent of the students gave that up after one semester to return to ravaged New Orleans.

The construction and demolition crews are another big part of the re-population, adding to the Old West feeling. Cowboy boots and oversized work trucks with Texas plates are everywhere. N.O. and its cuisine stand to be permanently improved by the influx of Latino workers living in tents, sleeping in their trucks, and in the buildings they are gutting. Without them, there would be no residential roofs or sheetrock going up anywhere in town. Taco trucks and Mexican restaurants are springing up. Wages have increased across the board due to difficulty in attracting enough workers. Locals including blacks are finally getting work on the canal repairs and debris collection crews. The Port of New Orleans with its long-unionized, heavily black workforce, has been up and running full speed since shortly after the storm. The situation is ripe for badly needed multiracial unionization in this historically under-unionized town.

More evacuees returned to town in April and more still with the end of the school year in June. But the ongoing housing shortage is keeping many away. Rents have doubled due to the huge reduction in housing stock. Especially affected are poor and low-wage working people, families with children, and the elderly. One hundred twenty-five thousand homes were damaged or destroyed, and over 300,000 people exiled. Mail delivery is promised to resume in the flooded areas as of the end of June (ten months after the flood!). Where phone and electricity service is restored in the 80 percent of town that flooded, it is a Sometime Thing.

Last year there were 54,000 public school students. The school year ended in June with 9,000. All but a tiny fraction of these are in union-busting “charter schools” with entrance requirements and tests that most N.O. public school kids couldn’t possibly pass. The only regular public schools open did so in response to parents’ lawsuits. Uncounted numbers of kids are back and not enrolled in any school.

Public housing residents have gotten the brunt of the racist “blacks stay away” barrage. During the recent mayoral election, black Democratic City Council president Oliver Thomas called project residents “soap opera watchers” and declared that only those who could prove they had jobs would be permitted to return. A Houston news editorial replied to Oliver saying that Houston took in all your citizens without discrimination, do you mean to say you won’t take them back?

Mayoral candidate and Republican former City Councilwoman Peggy Wilson repeatedly denounced project residents as “pimps and welfare queens.” Another candidate, Rob Couhig, called for the “culture of entitlement to be replaced with the culture of self-reliance.” These latter two quotes roughly reflect the menu on the race question to be found in the bourgeois Republican and Democratic parties: do you want your white racism served straight up, or do you want it in code words?

Let there be no mistake. Projects are populated by the working poor, the elderly who used to be the working poor, low-wage single mothers and kids, and the disabled. Far from being criminals, they are mostly victimized by criminals. It would be hard to find a project resident who in his or her lifetime hasn’t worked harder than the whole City Council and bushel of mayoral candidates put together.

Alphonso Jackson, Bush’s Secretary of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), took up the racist cudgel next. He stated some months back that only “the best people” should be allowed to return to the housing projects. Evacuees in Houston responded by printing T-shirts proclaiming “Best of the Best” and verbally denouncing the Feds at public meetings. Jackson recently announced a plan to demolish four huge housing projects totaling 5,000 units, none with flood damage above the first floor. St. Bernard Avenue housing project residents and supporters have set up a tent camp called “Survivor Village” with protest signs just outside the newly fenced-off project. They aptly note the entire first floors could have been cleaned and gutted for what has been spent on fences and devices barring entry. A group of public housing residents just filed a discrimination suit against HUD and HANO (Housing Authority of N.O.) for refusing residents’ return.

As for the elderly, the Katrina death count recently rose by nearly a third when 32 states reported Katrina-related deaths-in-exile. These were overwhelmingly the elderly and ill. Ripped from their familiar homes and support systems, hundreds of them went down the tubes fast. These are a few: Clarence Gatemouth Brown, internationally famous R&B guitarist who was performing and recording right up to the storm, died at age 80 in Texas, where he had evacuated, when he learned that his Slidell, LA home and everything in it was lost. So did a 90-year-old widow and Holocaust concentration camp survivor when she heard her N.O. home of 60 years was lost. Leslie Austin, the real-life restaurateur model for the TV show Frank’s Restaurant, died of a heart attack in exile. Shebie Kimbrough, Grammy award winning drummer for Professor Longhair, had been playing right up to the storm but died in a nursing home within a month of a harrowing evacuation from his senior housing project.

Fats Domino, 78, survived being pulled from floodwaters in his 9th Ward home where he lost all his treasured pianos, awards and belongings, but he has been too fragile to play publicly ever since.

Everybody now knows the flood damage and resulting death count was caused not by Katrina but by the staggering incompetence and discontinuity of the canal work done over many years and many presidential administrations by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Not a head has rolled in the Corps for this. The same guys who did it are the ones fixing it.

This tragedy was criminally aggravated by the federal government’s racist refusal to come in and rescue the stranded, dying and desperate citizens for four fateful days. They barred the Red Cross and other rescuers from entering. The smirking and egregious Michael Brown of FEMA was the only sacrificial lamb. “Homeland Security” still ensures security only for Bush and Friends, and does unprecedented trampling on the liberties of the rest of the population.

New Orleans remains endangered in the coming hurricane season by the unrepaired infrastructure, lack of a realistic evacuation plan still, the failure to fix the city’s burned-out pumping stations, and the too-little-too-late approach to fixing the canals.

This manmade disaster has put into stark relief the bankruptcy of the capitalist system and the twin capitalist Democratic and Republican parties. It will take the building of strong, fighting labor unions and a workers party to lead a socialist revolution to smash racial oppression, sweep away the rule of the rich, and establish a workers state.

Ruth
New Orleans

P.S. Thank you for the excellent New Orleans coverage in your April 14 issue, better said than I ever could. I will attest to the authenticity of the interview with the heroic longshoreman who commandeered a boat to rescue people in the absence of any police or military. He was one of many, and that is exactly how it happened.