Nagin tells black journalists: ‘We’re going to rebuild’
Ken Kusmer
INDIANAPOLIS — New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin last week blamed racism and government bureaucracy for hamstringing his city’s ability to weather Hurricane Katrina and recover from the disaster that struck the Gulf Coast nearly a year ago.
In remarks to the annual meeting of the National Association of Black Journalists, Nagin said the hurricane “exposed the soft underbelly of America as it relates to dealing with race and class.”
“And I, to this day, believe that if that would have happened in Orange County, California, if that would have happened in South Beach, Miami, it would have been a different response,” Nagin said.
New Orleans was 60 percent black before Katrina struck Aug. 29. Early this year the mayor called on fellow blacks to again make New Orleans a “chocolate” city, but he later apologized.
Last Friday, Nagin condemned federal regulations that discourage rebuilding in the largely black and low-lying Ninth Ward.
While tens of billions of dollars in federal aid have flowed to Louisiana and other states devastated by Katrina, much of it has gone to developers and contractors, Nagin said.
“Very little of those dollars have gotten to the local governments or to the people themselves,” Nagin said.
Katrina dispersed three-quarters of New Orleans’ pre-hurricane population of about 460,000 people, and today it’s a city of about 250,000. Nagin suggested that Louisiana and federal officials would prefer the city remain smaller.
He said the city is struggling to deliver services and rebuild with a quarter of its former municipal budget. The federal and state aid the city has received is inadequate and comes with too many rules, he said.
“We are being strangled, and they’re using the money to set local policies to try to take control of the city to do things that they had in mind all along, and that’s to shrink the footprint, get a bunch of developers in the city, and try to do things in a different way,” Nagin said.
“We’re not going to let that happen. They’re going to give us our money, and we’re going to rebuild this city.”
(Associated Press)
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Reflections
To explore the racial and economic dimensions of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, The Associated Press asked notable Americans who know the stricken region well to share their thoughts on a broad set of questions:
“Katrina exposed a deep divide of race and poverty along the Gulf Coast and in America. Has that divide narrowed at all in the past year? And do you find reason to hope that it will narrow in the future?’’
Here are their words:
Andrei Codrescu, author of “New Orleans, Mon Amour: Twenty Years of Writing from the City,’’ is the MacCurdy Distinguished Professor of English at Louisiana State University. A regular commentator on NPR, he divides his time between New Orleans and Baton Rouge.
“‘Race has become a code for poverty and crime that is used by conservative politicians to vote against social change. Black leaders have also soft-pedaled the issue of race because they were afraid of losing what social programs were left. Katrina revealed that there are people in America much poorer than it is publicly acknowledged.”
John Hope Franklin, 91, a professor emeritus at Duke University, assisted Thurgood Marshall on the 1954 Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education and, half a century later, chaired President Clinton’s Initiative on Race.
“... The New Orleans tragedy speaks in a loud but eloquent voice that racial inequities in the United States persist. One need only to visit Uptown, in the neighborhood of Tulane University, and the Ninth Ward, a remarkable concentration of African Americans, to conclude that in the pre-Katrina days it was racial disparities as usual. There were low wages for blacks, as well as poor housing, a false romanticism surrounding Mardi Gras and a lack of general support for education and social well being.
“As far as race in America is concerned, Katrina was just another example of the failure of the people of the United States to come to terms with a centuries-old problem ... and make a forthright effort to solve it. Thus, it ranks with the failure of our schools to serve the needs of blacks and whites alike. ... It is a bed-mate with the disparities in housing, not only in New Orleans but across the nation. ...
“There are many lessons to be learned from Katrina. Perhaps the most important one is ... an appreciation for the common threads that bind all mankind together (and that) the best way to achieve a better world is to treat all mankind as decent human beings.
“The nation didn’t know just how segregated we are. Now they know.
“The nation didn’t know just how bad our segregated schools are. Now they know.
Katrina also taught us that the government does not care much about the black and the poor unless they are embarrassed by the media in front of the whole world.”
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