I got lucky on Google with 'poor black'

[cynatnite]

Article dated: Sep 24, 2004

The evacuation of New Orleans in the face of Hurricane Ivan looked sinisterly like Strom Thurmond's version of the Rapture. Affluent white people fled the Big Easy in their SUVs, while the old and car-less -- mainly Black -- were left behind in their below-sea-level shotgun shacks and aging tenements to face the watery wrath.

New Orleans had spent decades preparing for inevitable submersion by the storm surge of a class-five hurricane. Civil defense officials conceded they had ten thousand body bags on hand to deal with the worst-case scenario. But no one seemed to have bothered to devise a plan to evacuate the city's poorest or most infirm residents. The day before the hurricane hit the Gulf Coast, New Orlean's daily, the Times-Picayune, ran an alarming story about the "large group…mostly concentrated in poorer neighborhoods" who wanted to evacuate but couldn't.

Only at the last moment, with winds churning Lake Pontchartrain, did Mayor Ray Nagin reluctantly open the Louisiana Superdome and a few schools to desperate residents. He was reportedly worried that lower-class refugees might damage or graffiti the Superdome.

In the event, Ivan the Terrible spared New Orleans, but official callousness toward poor Black folk endures.

Over the last generation, City Hall and its entourage of powerful developers have relentlessly attempted to push the poorest segment of the population -- blamed for the city's high crime rates -- across the Mississippi river. Historic Black public-housing projects have been razed to make room for upper-income townhouses and a Wal-Mart. In other housing projects, residents are routinely evicted for offenses as trivial as their children's curfew violations. The ultimate goal seems to be a tourist theme-park New Orleans -- one big Garden District -- with chronic poverty hidden away in bayous, trailer parks and prisons outside the city limits.

http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0924-02.htm

The entire piece is a good read.

[DemBones DemBones]

1. Great find. I just read an article last night that

explained how the Superdome was built after taking over property (homes) of black working class people and a cemetery where blacks were buried, forcing more blacks into the housing projects and poorer sections of the city. I think you'd find it interesting.


Here's a long quote, followed by the URL:

"For days I have been thinking of Sitting Bull's observation that the United States knows how to make everything, but doesn't know how to distribute it. He was being generous in attributing the lack of equitable distribution of goods to benign ignorance rather than to design. But, he knew better. Once in Chicago while performing with Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West, Sitting Bull spoke through his translator to the huge crowd of ragged white men, women, and barefoot children: "I know why your government hates me. I am their enemy. But why do they hate you?"The U.S. Cavalry, the 7th to be exact, Custer's old regiment, massacred Sitting Bull's unarmed, starving people in December 1890 at Wounded Knee, a few days after Sitting Bull himself had been shot and killed by the federal Indian police."

http://www.counterpunch.org/dunbar09072005.html

[ultraist]

2. They will use eminent domain to claim properties and gentrify NOLA

Anyone who refuses to sell, will be forced to through eminent domain. They will totally gentrify the entire city, pushing out any low income houses to the fringes.

No bid Haliburton contracts are already being signed!

Gentrify: code word to fuck over lower income people and marginalize them by fixing up or rebuilding housing that only the upper income can afford

[Dunvegan]

3. Perhaps Katrina should be renamed Tropical "StormThurmond"