The Victims, ’Largely Poor and Black’

By DAVID GONZALEZ

The scenes of floating corpses, scavengers fighting for
food and desperate throngs seeking any way out of New
Orleans have been tragic enough. But for many African-
American leaders, there is a growing outrage that many
of those still stuck at the center of this tragedy were
people who for generations had been pushed to the
margins of society.

The victims, they note, were largely black and poor,
those who toiled in the background of the tourist
havens, living in tumbledown neighborhoods that were
long known to be vulnerable to disaster if the levees
failed. Without so much as a car or bus fare to escape
ahead of time, they found themselves left behind by a
failure to plan for their rescue should the dreaded day
ever arrive.

"If you know that terror is approaching in terms of
hurricanes, and you’ve already seen the damage they’ve
done in Florida and elsewhere, what in God’s name were
you thinking?" said the Rev. Calvin O. Butts III, pastor
of Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem. "I think a lot
of it has to do with race and class. The people affected
were largely poor people. Poor, black people."

In the days since neighborhoods and towns along the Gulf
Coast were wiped out by the winds and water, there has
been a growing sense that race and class are the
unspoken markers of who got out and who got stuck. Just
as in developing countries where the failures of rural
development policies become glaringly clear at times of
natural disasters like floods or drought, many national
leaders said, some of the United States’ poorest cities
have been left vulnerable by federal policies.

"No one would have checked on a lot of the black people
in these parishes while the sun shined," said Mayor
Milton D. Tutwiler of Winstonville, Miss. "So am I
surprised that no one has come to help us now? No."

The subject is roiling black-oriented Web sites and
message boards, and many black officials say it is a
prime subject of conversation around the country. Some
African-Americans have described the devastation wrought
by Hurricane Katrina as "our tsunami," while noting that
there has yet to be a response equal to that which
followed the Asian tragedy.

Roosevelt F. Dorn, the mayor of Inglewood, Calif., and
the president of the National Association of Black
Mayors, said relief and rescue officials needed to act
faster.

"I have a list of black mayors in Mississippi and
Alabama who are crying out for help," Mr. Dorn said.
"Their cities are gone and they are in despair. And no
one has answered their cries."

The Rev. Jesse Jackson said cities had been dismissed by
the Bush administration because Mr. Bush received few
urban votes.

"Many black people feel that their race, their property
conditions and their voting patterns have been a factor
in the response," Mr. Jackson said, after meeting with
Louisiana officials yesterday. "I’m not saying that
myself, but what’s self-evident is that you have many
poor people without a way out."

In New Orleans, the disaster’s impact underscores the
intersection of race and class in a city where fully
two-thirds of its residents are black and more than a
quarter of the city lives in poverty. In the Lower Ninth
Ward neighborhood, which was inundated by the
floodwaters, more than 98 percent of the residents are
black and more than a third live in poverty.

Spencer R. Crew, president and chief executive officer
of the national Underground Railroad Freedom Center in
Cincinnati, said the aftermath of the hurricane would
force people to confront inequality.

"Most cities have a hidden or not always talked about
poor population, black and white, and most of the time
we look past them," Dr. Crew said. "This is a moment in
time when we can’t look past them. Their plight is
coming to the forefront now. They were the ones less
able to hop in a car and less able to drive off."

That disparity has been criticized as a "disgrace" by
Charles B. Rangel, the senior Democratic congressman
from New York City, who said it was made all the worse
by the failure of government officials to have planned.

"I assume the president’s going to say he got bad
intelligence, Mr. Rangel said, adding that the danger to
the levees was clear.

"I think that wherever you see poverty, whether it’s in
the white rural community or the black urban community,
you see that the resources have been sucked up into the
war and tax cuts for the rich," he said.

Outside Brooklyn Law School yesterday, a man selling
recordings of famous African-Americans was upset at the
failure to have prepared for the worst. The man, who
said his name was Muhammad Ali, drew a damning
conclusion about the failure to protect New Orleans.

"Blacks ain’t worth it," he said. "New Orleans is a
hopeless case."

Among the messages and essays circulating in cyberspace
that lament the lost lives and missed opportunities is
one by Mark Naison, a white professor of African-
American Studies at Fordham University in the Bronx.

"Is this what the pioneers of the civil rights movement
fought to achieve, a society where many black people are
as trapped and isolated by their poverty as they were by
segregation laws?" Mr. Naison wrote. "If Sept. 11 showed
the power of a nation united in response to a
devastating attack, Hurricane Katrina reveals the fault
lines of a region and a nation, rent by profound social
divisions."

That sentiment was shared by members of other minority
groups who understand the bizarre equality of poverty.

"We tend to think of natural disasters as somehow even-
handed, as somehow random," said Martín Espada, an
English professor at the University of Massachusetts and
poet of a decidedly leftist political bent who is Puerto
Rican. "Yet it has always been thus: poor people are in
danger. That is what it means to be poor. It’s dangerous
to be poor. It’s dangerous to be black. It’s dangerous
to be Latino."

This Sunday there will be prayers. In pews from the Gulf
Coast to the Northeast, the faithful will come together
and pray for those who lived and those who died. They
will seek to understand something that has yet to be
fully comprehended.

Some may talk of a divine hand behind all of this. But
others have already noted the absence of a human one.

"Everything is God’s will," said Charles Steele Jr., the
president of the Southern Christian Leadership
Conference in Atlanta. "But there’s a certain amount of
common sense that God gives to individuals to prepare
for certain things."

That means, Mr. Steele said, not waiting until the eve
of crisis.

"Most of the people that live in the neighborhoods that
were most vulnerable are black and poor," he said. "So
it comes down to a lack of sensitivity on the part of
people in Washington that you need to help poor folks.
It’s as simple as that."

Contributing reporting from New York for this article
were Andy Newman, William Yardley, Jonathan P. Hicks,
Patrick D. Healy, Diane Cardwell, Anemona Hartocollis,
Ronald Smothers, Jeff Leeds, Manny Fernandez and Colin
Moynihan. Also contributing were Michael Cooper in
Albany, Gretchen Ruethling in Chicago, Brenda Goodman in
Atlanta and Carolyn Marshall in San Francisco.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/02/n...