The Battle for New Orleans : Only a Real Movement Can Win This War

By Glen Ford and Peter Gamble

New Orleans represents a challenge to African
Americans, unprecedented since the epic struggles of
the Fifties and Sixties. The perverse reality, to
which African Americans must rise, is that the man-made
disaster in the Gulf provides what may be the last
chance to build a real Movement, encompassing the
broadest sectors of Black America. Cruel history
presents the catastrophe as an unwanted opportunity, a
test of Black people’s capacity for the operational
unity craved by the vast bulk of African Americans. The
pain and anger in Black America is all but universal,
and demands collective action, the outcome of which
will largely define the true State of Black America as
it has evolved over the last two generations.

Let us put it bluntly: If Black America fails to
configure its human, organizational and material
resources to effectively resist the theft and ultimate
disfigurement of New Orleans, then we will be forced to
confront the existence of fundamental, crippling flaws
in the African American polity.

There is much reason for optimism. Movements often need
monsters, and George Bush and his minions are a horror
show. The Katrina debacle plunged Bush’s Black approval
rating to 12 percent, as measured by the prestigious
Pew Research Center. That’s only slightly above what
most pollsters consider the approval category’s
irreducible minimum - "about as low as you can go,"
according to Joint Center for Political and Economic
Studies senior analyst David Bositis. Few doubt that
the administration’s callous and ineffectual handling
of the Katrina crisis ("negligent homicide," charged
Black Georgia Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney) caused
the near-evaporation of Bush’s thin Black support.

(An NBC/Wall Street Journal poll taken earlier in
September showed only two percent of Blacks approved of
Bush’s performance. However, the poll included only 89
African Americans, too small a sample to be considered
reliable.)

All African American eyes are on New Orleans, that
once-flawed, now devastated jewel of the Diaspora whose
people have been dispersed to the far corners of the
United States: Alaska, Utah and, literally, who knows
where, in addition to large Black population centers.
The dissolution of a major African American city - far
eclipsing in scale the destruction of Black Tulsa in
1921 - has seared the collective Black psyche. The pain
and anger in Black America is all but universal, and
demands collective action effectively coordinated by
those who purport to be leaders. In the process, new
leadership - and hopefully, a "new" New Orleans that is
fit for mass Black habitation - will emerge.

Reversing the Slide

Until the watershed year of 1965, which saw both
passage of the Voting Rights Act and the Watts, Los
Angeles rebellion, most Black Americans, especially in
the South, were focused on the elimination of Black
voter disenfranchisement and legal segregation. The
Civil Rights Movement was not propelled by a laundry
list of issues - rather, its overarching project was
the defeat of Jim Crow.

By the time of Dr. Martin Luther King’s assassination
and passage of the last major civil rights legislation
in 1968 (the Fair Housing Act), the Jim Crow project
seemed essentially completed - although still requiring
years of mopping up operations. However, Black Power
projected an additional set of demands, much more
complex and varied, and calling forth a murderous
government response that added yet another layer of
Black grievances. While the beneficiaries of the Civil
Rights Movement - those African Americans whose
circumstances allowed them to walk through newly opened
doors - sprinted to higher living standards and elected
and corporate offices, mass Black incarceration became
the order of the day in every state of the union,
ravaging the very fabric of the bottom half of African
American society and threatening to destabilize the
half that were doing relatively well.

Although the historical Black Political Consensus
survived the sea change that followed the death of Jim
Crow, the scope of both Black aspirations and
grievances expanded dramatically, reflecting the
diversity of the upwardly mobile Black sectors’ often
frustrated dreams and the multiplying injuries endured
by the left-behind, criminalized Black population.

The Black Movement devolved to various sets laundry
lists with often radically different orders of
priority, depending on which Black sector was doing the
listing. Most African Americans can agree on most items
on the list - after all, the Black Political Consensus
remains intact - but not on which items are most
compelling. Thus, the diversity of the forces set loose
in the Black polity by the death of Jim Crow, while not
centrifugally spinning African Americans out of a
common orbit, has resulted in sometimes dramatic
mismatches in political priorities among Black sectors.

We have traveled a great distance from the simple
elegance of the chant: "What do we want? Freedom! When
do we want it? Now!"

As a consequence, efforts to forge "unity" across the
Black spectrum inevitably produce long lists of the
What We Believe and What We Demand type, drawn up in
order of the priorities of whichever group or tendency
dominates the gathering. Usually, such lists are
broadly inclusive, demonstrating that those in
attendance respect and share the concerns of their
brothers and sisters representing other Black sectors
or political schools of thought. However, laundry lists
can only lead to operational unity among those who give
high priority to the same items. Other, pro forma line
item endorsements add up to not much more than a well-
meant "Amen."

A Common Focus

There can be no question that millions of African
Americans are eager to find their own specific mission
within the context of a broad Black movement, as proven
beyond doubt by the 1995 and 2005 "Million" rallies -
events that drew multiples of the (integrated) 1963
March on Washington crowd. The problem is, these
searchers find themselves still without a mission at
the end of the rally.

This October’s Million More Movement rally produced a
10-point Issues Statement, while Nation of Islam leader
Min. Louis Farrakhan offered his "Covenant with God,
Leadership and Our People." Essentially, both
documents are generalized versions of the usual laundry
lists - useful for their inclusiveness, just as the
rally was worthwhile as "a mass reaffirmation of the
existence of an African American polity, a form of
Black nationhood that yearns for unity and autonomy in
the struggle against white supremacy, and for its own
sake." (see BC, "MMM: The Quest for a Movement,"
October 20, 2005).

But most of all, the huge throng wanted an action plan
for New Orleans.

"Katrina" was on virtually every speaker’s lips - the
crowd-arouser. From Dr. Ron Daniels, of the Institute
of the Black World, who reported that 30 heads of
national Black organizations had convened to assist the
Katrina families; to CME Bishop Henry Williamson, who
assured the vast audience that his denomination was
deployed in the Gulf region in strength, providing aid
and ministry; to the (whacky) songstress Erykah Badu,
who made sense to the crowd only when she invoked
"Katrina"; to Min. Farrakhan, who proposed a one dollar
per week contribution to a Millions More Movement
Disaster Relief Fund; to Congressional Black Caucus
chairman Mel Watt’s announcement that the CBC would
soon introduce "a specific piece of legislation,
restoring the families of the Gulf area - goal that is
definable" - speaker after speaker, representing the
broadest spectrum of African American sectors,
disciplines and political tendencies, made common cause
with Black New Orleans.

"Katrina" - shorthand for the tortures inflicted on the
helpless by nature and man, and the planned ethnic
cleansing of a great Black city - has the potential to
ignite a movement much wider and deeper than the
campaigns to Boycott South Africa and Free Nelson
Mandela, solidarity actions that breathed life into
broadly-based Black politics in the Eighties. Katrina
touches home and history, friends and family; it
revealed the Black condition in the raw. The exodus of
multitudes speaks to the Old Testament cultural
framework that is wired into the consciousness of even
the most secular African American. On the scales of
historical group memory and symbolism, the five days of
video-taped Black debasement in New Orleans will weigh
as heavily on the African American psyche as the dogs
and water hoses of Birmingham.

Katrina-related activities have proliferated beyond the
countable, to become an obligatory action item on every
authentic Black organization’s agenda. The expanding
universe of Katrina projects in some respects already
resembles the pre-1960 Civil Rights Movement - a focus
of all Black people’s deep concern, but inchoate, not
yet fully formed.

In a relatively short period of time, the 1950s Civil
Rights offensive was transformed into a great engine of
social change. In the current era, however, it is the
Right that is on the domestic and global offensive. A
Katrina-spawned movement will begin, of necessity, as a
broad, Black-anchored resistance.

The Fight to Return

Every strata of Black America - all of which were
physically represented on the Capitol Mall, October 15
– shared a soul-deep identification with Mtangulizi
Sanyika, of the African American Leadership Project, as
he outlined the New Orleans Citizen Bill of Rights. In
abbreviated form, the displaced citizens demand: the
right to return; to retain their right of citizenship
in the city; the right to shape and envision the future
of the city; the right to [fully] participate in the
rebuilding of the city; the right to quality goods and
services; the right to affordable neighborhoods; the
right to be paid a livable wage; the right to increased
economic benefits; the right to preferential treatment
in work associated with rebuilding the city; the right
to contracting preference; the right to an
environmentally clean and hurricane safe city; and the
right to preserve and continue the rich and diverse
cultural traditions of the city. (See the full text of
the document at the bottom of this page.)

The 12-point Bill of Rights fits wholly within the
Black Political Consensus, and could serve as a guide
to citizens of virtually every American city. Indeed,
the document contains most of the elements of BC’s
recommendations for urban "democratic development’
preserve and further empower the huge and strategic
Black and Brown presence in the central cities" (More
on that, below.)

Thus, a true national movement to defend and support
the citizens of New Orleans, if sustained, would infuse
millions with the lessons and logic of a new urban
politics that elevates human and citizenship rights
above corporate rights. A movement that is immersed in
the language, spirit and values of the New Orleans
Citizen Bill of Rights would refine and clarify the
African American conversation, and also alter the
prisms through which non-Black Americans perceive the
world. That’s what real movements do; it’s what the
Civil Rights Movement did. In a real sense, the New
Orleans document takes the rights gained by the
decades-ago movement to what Black folks used to call
"a higher level."

However, the Bush regime recognizes none of these
rights - not for New Orleans citizens, nor for people
anywhere on the planet. Rushing like a storm surge, the
Bush men and the corporations they serve saw the breach
of the city’s levees as a grand opportunity to flood
the region and nation with reactionary rollbacks of
citizen and worker protections, to impose by
"emergency" measures Hard Right programs that could not
pass congressional muster.

Bush Bum-rushes the Gulf

"Whether or not by design, the administration has used
the tragedies of hurricanes Katrina and Rita to waive,
bend, and break federal laws that protect our civil
rights, worker rights, public health and safety, while
suspending rules that help small and minority-owned
businesses," said Wade Henderson, executive director of
the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights (LCCR), in a
letter to key congressional committees.

Among the administrations offenses against law and
decency:

* Cutting wages for construction workers in the
Gulf states by indefinitely suspending the Davis-
Bacon Act, which guarantees workers are paid the
region’s prevailing or average wage. Suspending
wage protections for Gulf Coast workers allows
all contractors, regardless of whether or not the
work relates to cleanup and reconstruction, to
pay as little as $5.15 hour.

* Ignoring federal procurement practices, which has
resulted in the award of several multi-million
dollar no-bid contracts that hurt local small,
minority, and women owned businesses.

* Denying equal opportunity employment initiatives
for workers in the Gulf states through an
exemption from some existing Affirmative Action
Program (AAP) requirements for new federal
contractors dealing with Hurricane Katrina
relief.

* Exploiting the hurricane to create a private and
religious school voucher program that could allow
federal money to be used to promote employment
discrimination.

* Allowing a temporary waiver of environmental
protections in the Gulf Coast region and supporting
additional environmental suspensions at the expense
of the health and safety of Katrina survivors,
particularly the poor, disabled, and minority
populations.

* Rebuilding segregated and inaccessible housing.

* Enforcing immigration laws during search and
rescue.

The latter outrage demonstrates the Bush men’s pure,
devilish cynicism and howling racism. While allowing
reconstruction contractors to import low-wage, non-
citizen workers from Latin America, Homeland Security’s
immigration agents conduct raids that single out
Latino-looking residents of emergency shelters.

Having failed to get congressional approval for a
federal school voucher program except in the colony of
Washington, DC, Bush seeks to establish a de facto
national voucher system by dispensing half a billion
dollars to private schools that enroll the far-flung
children of displaced families.

Thwarted over the years by the U.S. Supreme Court in
their jihad against affirmative action, the Bush crowd
decrees that such programs will be cleansed from the
Gulf by emergency fiat.

Bush policy is the precise opposite of the New Orleans
Citizen Bill of Rights. The lines of struggle have been
drawn in the muck left by Katrina.

Wade Henderson, speaking for the LCCR and 60 other
civil rights, labor and advocacy organizations,
declared: "Instead of directly meeting the rebuilding
challenges created by Katrina, the administration has
chosen the moral equivalent of a Trojan Horse."

Little George Wallace, standing in the Alabama
schoolhouse door in 1963, seems tame by comparison. At
least Governor Wallace was faithful to some version of
the rule of law, albeit perverted. Bush recognizes no
law, at home or abroad. His regime’s lawlessness has
created a host of allies for a new Black movement to
call on, should it choose to - from a far longer list
than was ever available to Dr. King.

For Whom Katrina Tolls

"If New Orleans is rebuilt as an enterprise zone,
private investors will wait for the government to clean
up the mess and then build luxury condos to replace
affordable housing. They’ll turn New Orleans into a
theme park, with its former residents unable to afford
to come back." - Rev. Jesse Jackson, Sr. in the Chicago
Tribune, October 11, 2005.

It does not have to be that easy. But the ethnic
cleansing of New Orleans will surely be accomplished in
the absence of a mass Black movement, mobilizing
elements of all African American classes and
disciplines, the broadest range of large and small
organizations, and the forging of strategic alliances
with non-Blacks.

Activists should understand that the Battle for New
Orleans will take place over years - and that the Bush-
corporate assault is well-advanced. In a brilliant
article first posted on the website of the Clark-
Atlanta University-based Environmental Resource Center,
EJRC director Robert D. Bullard and Beverly Wright, a
Katrina survivor who directs the Deep South Center for
Environmental Justice at Dillard University, spelled
out what the nascent movement is up against:

"Hurricane Katrina has opened the floodgate of land
speculation and redevelopment scenarios that plan
for’ rather than plan with’ the storm victims.
What gets built and redeveloped (and for whom) and
who participates in the re-building process are
major economic justice issues. A small group of
private companies, nongovernmental organizations
and members of think tanks have divided up ’pre-
completed’ no-bid contracts. A predatory form of
’disaster capitalism’ exploits the desperation and
fear created by catastrophe to engage in radical
social and economic engineering."

The Right’s "radical social and economic engineering"
cries out for a massive Black response that is equally
sophisticated and comprehensive - and backed by masses
of fired-up people. The liberation of a once-great
Black city from the grip of land pirates acting in
concert with the federal government, is no easy task.
However, the struggle must be joined, since the outcome
may well decide the fate of urban - and therefore Black
– America.

Katrina hurled New Orleans into a kind of time machine,
instantly fast-forwarding the city to an advanced stage
of the gentrification process. The "Negro-removal"
stage was skipped entirely, courtesy of the
floodwaters. In real-time cities, poor and working
people drift away house by house, block by block, with
very little drama, to points unknown. An incremental
exile, a piece by piece theft of community, then a
final, anti-climactic fait accompli.

In maddening contrast, the Katrina drama has fixed our
attention on the sheer precariousness of the Black
condition. Like Ebeneezer Scrooge, we see the future of
our cities - and we ain’t in it. A specter from the
urban future screams at us in the present, in the form
of a quarter million displaced African Americans and a
valuable hole where a cultural center of Black America
used to be.

Suddenly, Black folks are waking up, shaking - and
universally angry.

Where There’s a Will, There Must Also Be a Plan

The collective Black human and material infrastructure
is exponentially more developed than in 1955, when the
African American working poor of Montgomery, Alabama
sustained a bus boycott that humbled Jim Crow in the
former capital of the Confederacy; or in the years that
followed, when a tiny group of progressive Black
preachers embarrassed a racist superpower in the eyes
of the world, forcing Uncle Sam to leave his white
supremacist clothes in the closet; or in 1964, when
mere hundreds of young people invaded the fortress of
Mississippi with virtually no money in their pockets
and little backup during Freedom Summer.

The best and the brightest of the era were at the core
of activism, but there were not many of them, and even
less cash. The resources that Blacks and their allies
can bring to bear in the Battle for New Orleans are on
a different order of magnitude than 40 years ago. At
long last, and at such high cost to the people of the
Crescent City, one senses a general Black will to
struggle.

A true national movement has as many components as the
polity, itself. The Battle for New Orleans will require
lawyers, researchers, city planners, architects, social
scientists, psychologists, financiers, educators,
pension fund managers, liberation theologians, culture
workers, athletes, medical practitioners, criminal
justice experts, chefs, t-shirt designers, micro- and
macro-organizers, as solid a front of Black politicians
as can be assembled - and hundreds of thousands of foot
soldiers in struggle.

A vision of the new New Orleans is also required- a
full-blown counter-vision to the condo-studded "theme
park" corporate blueprint, one that will inspire both
those displaced from the city and the African American
movement at-large.

In BC’s final edition of the five-part series, "Wanted:
A Plan for the Cities to Save Themselves" (July 29,
2004), we sketched some of the steps that must be
taken, and questions that must be answered in the quest
to build a healthy city, a place that exists for the
benefit of those who live there. Much the same process
applies to the task of rebuilding and restoring New
Orleans under the auspices of its largely displaced
citizens.

"We must present the fullest picture of the [new]
city’s demographic, physical, and economic layout
and activity: where different populations live; how
dollars move; where people work, and what types of
work they do; where they shop; how they move around
the city; what public or private institutions
anchor which neighborhoods, and what activity do
they create; what is the state of the housing
stock, and where; how many businesses exist; who
owns them, and who do they employ, and where do the
employees live; what is the state of infrastructure
(streets, water, sewage, phone and cable
telecommunications, mass transit lines, etc.), and
who does the infrastructure serve; what are the
physically attractive (and, therefore, valuable)
sites and vistas, and who owns/controls them; how
are police deployed; where are the schools?"

If African Americans fail to develop a plan for New
Orleans, they will have no effective role in the final
product of reconstruction, whatever the exertions of a
reinvigorated Black movement.

Black America is challenged to make Katrina/New Orleans
the center of gravity around which an inclusive African
American movement revolves - a unifying nexus and
vision that draws together organizations and previously
unaffiliated individuals, especially youth, in common
cause. There are plenty of tasks for us all.

African American Leadership Project & The New
Orleans Local Organizing Committee & The Greater
New Orleans Coalition of Ministers New Orleans
Citizen Bill of Rights’

1. All displaced persons should maintain the "Right
of Return" to New Orleans as an International
"Human Right." A persons’ socioeconomic status,
class, employment, occupation, educational level,
neighborhood residence, or how they were evacuated
should have no bearing on this fundamental right.
This right shall include the provision of adequate
transportation to return to the city by the similar
means that a person was dispersed. THE CITY SHOULD
NOT BE DEPOPULATED OF ITS MAJORITY AFRICAN-AMERICAN
AND LOWER INCOME CITIZENS, and must be rebuilt to
economically include all those who were displaced.

2. All displaced persons must retain their right of
citizenship in the city, especially including the
right to vote in the next municipal elections.
Citizen rights to the franchise must be protected
and widely explained to all dispersed persons. The
provisions of the Civil Rights Act of 1965 should
be examined and enforced in this regard.

3. All displaced persons should have the right to
shape and envision the future of the city. Shaping
the future should not be left to elected officials,
appointed commissions, developers and/or business
interests alone. We the citizens are the primary
stakeholders of a re-imagined New Orleans. Thus, we
MUST be directly involved in imagining the future.
Provisions must be included to insure this right.

4. All displaced persons should have the right to
participate in the rebuilding of the city as
owners, producers, providers, planners, developers,
workers, and direct beneficiaries. Participation
must especially include African-Americans and the
poor, and those previously excluded from the
development process.

5. In rebuilding the city, all displaced persons
should have the right to quality goods and services
based on equity and equality. Disparities and
inequality must be eliminated in all aspects of
social, economic and political life. It should be
illegal to discriminate against an individual due
to their income, occupation or educational status,
in addition to the traditional categories of race,
gender, religion, language, disability, culture or
other social status.

6. In rebuilding the city, all displaced persons
should have the right to affordable neighborhoods,
quality affordable housing, adequate health care,
good schools, repaired infrastructures, a livable
environment and improved transportation and
hurricane safety.

7. In rebuilding the city, workers, especially
hospitality workers should have the right to be
paid a livable wage with good benefits.

8. In rebuilding the city, African-American should
have the right to increased economic benefits and
ownership. The percentage of Black owned
enterprises MUST dramatically increase from the
present 14%, and the access to wealth and ownership
must also be dramatically improved.

9. In rebuilding the city, African-Americans and
any displaced low income populations should have
the right to preferential treatment in cleanup
jobs, construction and operational work associated
with rebuilding the city.

10. In rebuilding the city, the right to
contracting preference should also be given to
Community Development collaboratives, community and
faith-based corporations/organizations, and New
Orleans businesses that partner with nonprofit
service providers and people of color. No contracts
should be let to companies that disregard Davis-
Bacon, Affirmative action and local participation.
Proposed legislation to create a "recovery
opportunity zone" should specifically include
Community Development organizations and minority
firms as alternatives to the no bid multi-national
companies. Over the last 30 years, such firms have
demonstrated their capacity to successfully build
hundreds of thousands of quality affordable
housing, and neighborhood commercials and
businesses and service enterprises.

11. In rebuilding the city, priority must be given
to the right to an environmentally clean and
hurricane safe city, rather than the destruction of
Black neighborhoods or communities such as the
lower 9th ward. Priority must also be given to
environmental justice, disaster planning and
evacuation plans that work for the most transit
dependent populations and the most vulnerable
residents of the city.

12. In rebuilding the city, priority must be given
to the right to preserve and continue the rich and
diverse cultural traditions of the city, and the
social experiences of Black people that produced
the culture. The second line, Mardi Gras Indians,
brass bands, creative music, dance foods, language
and other expressions are the "soul of the city."
The rebuilding process must preserve these
traditions. THE CITY MUST NOT BE CULTURALLY,
ECONOMICALLY OR SOCIALLY GENTRIFIED. INTO A
"SOULLESS" COLLECTION OF CONDOS AND tract home
NEIGHBORHOODS FOR THE RICH. We also respectfully
request that the CBC initiate its own Commission to
thoroughly investigate all aspects of the physical
and human dimensions of the Katrina disaster.

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