Apologies for cross-posting.

Jon Cloke
Newcastle University

Grassroots Gumbo

by CHRIS KROMM
The Nation
September 18, 2006
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060918/kromm

New Orleans

Reverend Luke Nguyen is hastily stuffing a white
cleric's collar around his neck as our car edges closer
to his latest nemesis. "They don't like it when I come
here," he says, pointing to the looming gates of the
Chef Menteur Landfill--a sprawling waste site buried in
mountains of hurricane debris. Father Luke has been
battling the dangerous, unlined dump from the day it
opened near his Village de l'Est neighborhood in New
Orleans East in February, and he's braced for another
standoff.

The security guard takes one look at the feisty priest
and quickly retreats. Father Luke shrugs; city
officials have been backing down ever since he began
leading thousands of Vietnamese residents back to
rebuild east New Orleans--the last area to dry after
Katrina's floods--a month after the storm.

"I came back on October 2 with a permit; then the
second week a few of us came back to live," Father Luke
remembers back at the rectory of Mary Queen of Vietnam
Church. "On the third weekend of October 2,000
parishioners came to mass, with no lights. We served
3,500 egg rolls. That's how you get people to come
back."

Getting people back, he declines to mention, also meant
breaking the law. The resettlement of New Orleans East
was civil disobedience, a mass act of defiance against
Mayor Ray Nagin's orders barring residents from
returning to great stretches of the city. But the
fishers, factory workers and grocery owners of Village
de l'Est came back anyway, 3,000 in all--and, without
fanfare, the city caved. Water and power lines were
rebuilt, schools have been rehabbed and planners are
now finishing blueprints to revive the two-block
business district, for the Mayor's review.

Few places devastated by Hurricane Katrina have a
success story to tell like the tightly knit Vietnamese
community of New Orleans East. But in many ways, Father
Luke and the outlaws of Village de l'Est symbolize a
gritty, grassroots movement that has grown and spread
throughout the Gulf Coast since Hurricane Katrina.

It's a movement without the luxury of high
expectations. Many of its people are still deeply
wounded by loss, in a place where people's patience is
fraying or gone (a mood expressed in New Orleans by the
recent rise of racist graffiti and bumper stickers,
like Go Back to Houston). The lives of many Katrina
activists are tied up with day-to-day struggles for
survival, recovery and dignity, while they strive to
keep their eyes on the prize of justice for all.
They've been blown apart from each other, with more
than 200,000 evacuees still scattered across the
nation.

But the Katrina movement has also scored surprising
victories, even if it has had to settle for merely
derailing the worst of what New Orleans writer Jordan
Flaherty calls the "orgy of greed and opportunism"
unleashed by the storms. It has also inspired ordinary
people to become extraordinary leaders, and awakened a
new generation of activists in the South and beyond.

"Y'all know who you are." Khalil Tian Shahyd, a New
Orleans native and graduate student back in town to
work for the People's Hurricane Relief Fund and
Oversight Coalition, is staring down a few squirming
members of the audience. We're at a neighborhood
planning forum in June, a free-for-all assembly at the
dingy Musician's Union Hall. Shahyd wants people to
face the elephant in the room: the fact that nearly
half the city is still in exile. "You have no right to
be planning for neighborhoods when most of those people
can't get back home," Shahyd berates the crowd.
"There's no way to justify this--morally, ethically,
any way."

The right to return for the displaced has been at the
heart of the Katrina movement's agenda since day one,
when it became clear that a toxic gumbo of political
and corporate agendas--leavened with staggering
official incompetence--would prevent many from making
it back.

Here in New Orleans, it's also the issue where
activists won their most impressive early victories.
The first was convincing Mayor Nagin to shelve the
rebuilding plans of his own Bring New Orleans Back
commission, unveiled by the pro-developer Urban Land
Institute in November [see Mike Davis, "Who Is Killing
New Orleans?" April 10]. Ignoring that a future storm
could ravage practically any part of New Orleans, the
ULI proposed that only the poorer, blacker
neighborhoods be written off and planted over so the
city might have a "smaller footprint."

"Over my dead body," said Carolyn Parker of the Lower
Ninth Ward, echoing a backlash that exploded at city
forums and evacuee town meetings nationwide. Nagin grew
more nervous as another front opened on the right to
return: the burgeoning "stop the bulldozers" movement.
Led by the People's Hurricane Relief Fund, ACORN and
other community groups, along with allies at the Loyola
Law Clinic and the Advancement Project in Washington,
DC, by January they had physically blocked a demolition
in the Lower Ninth and won an injunction to save more
than 2,500 homes from being flattened without
notification of the owners.

The revolt soon spread to public housing. Even though
most of the city's 38,000 public rental units were only
lightly damaged, officials spent $1.5 million to
barricade the developments and keep the working poor at
bay. But groups like N.O. H.E.A.T. and C3/Hands Off
Iberville worked to get residents back into the
Iberville development--long coveted by the lords of
real estate thanks to its proximity to the French
Quarter--before the city could stop them.

The uprisings not only temporarily scuttled the
developer agenda, it also helped change the political
course of New Orleans. With the African-American vote
shrinking, the mildly liberal Mitch Landrieu seemed
destined to become the first white mayor since 1979.
But Nagin, in part by rejecting plans to level black
neighborhoods, won 80 percent of black voters, who were
mobilized and bused in by the Jeremiah Project, NAACP,
ACORN and others. "I'm no fan of Nagin; he's in the
pocket of the folks with money," one woman said. "But
I'll be damned if we'll let them take over"--"them"
being the downtown elite who seemed a bit too excited
over prospects of a "whiter, lighter city."

But the right to return is about more than just
housing; the displaced--especially families--face
obstacles at every turn. Hospitals are still closed,
only fifty-seven of 117 city schools will open this
fall, daycare centers are almost nonexistent. Sixty
percent of city establishments still don't receive
electricity. For many, coming home is a fading dream.
"We care about the right to return," says Pam Broom,
who was displaced to Atlanta, then Durham, North
Carolina. "But now, we're just trying to make community
wherever we are."

The irony is that, just as many of Katrina's displaced
are moving on, grassroots voices may finally be poised
to have a say in the city's future. Thanks to community
pressure--and the promise of $3.5 million from the
Rockefeller Foundation--in July the city created a
Unified New Orleans Plan, which teams up neighborhood
groups with expert planners in a bottom-up process of
rebuilding. At the eleventh hour, ACORN applied to be
recognized as a planner group, and succeeded--a big
step up from blocking bulldozers. "Now we're at the
table," says ACORN founder Wade Rathke, based in New
Orleans. "We're now in a position to help hundreds of
people who want to get back into their neighborhoods."

Khalil Tian Shahyd insists that a plan that doesn't
include the displaced from the beginning is fatally
flawed. He gives an example: "Residents haven't been
allowed back to Lafitte public housing, but it's at the
center of a plan called the 'Lafitte Corridor
Development,' where the city wants to sell property to
movie studio complexes." Such rebuilding without
representation would be especially tragic at Lafitte,
he says, "the center of black Mardi Gras." But Shahyd,
who spent a semester observing community-led planning
in Kerala, India, believes that if people are brought
back home, the process could be a way to engage
ordinary New Orleanians in the decisions that affect
their lives, a "brilliant opportunity to rethink
democracy."

Ask Katrina activists what it will take to turn around
the region's fortunes, and many will come back to the
idea that the Katrina movement must go national--even
international (what about the United Nations principles
guaranteeing rights for "Internally Displaced
People"?).

For one, Katrina activists need good allies; they can't
do it all alone. But it also speaks to the need for
federal accountability. "The way we see it, it was
federally run levees that failed and caused most of the
death and destruction," observes Darryl Malek-Wiley, a
longtime New Orleans activist. "So the federal
government owes us something. Call it reparations." And
not just money for no-bid contracts, rescuing Army
bases and tax-break corporate "GO Zones," but resources
for people's needs.

Where has been the national movement to demand justice
for the Gulf and its people? Aside from tossing a few
political hand grenades after the storm, Democrats
largely dropped Katrina as a major issue; House
minority leader Nancy Pelosi didn't make her first trip
to New Orleans until March 3, six months after the
gravest "natural" disaster in US history.

A handful of national groups have proved to be more
useful: The Advancement Project and the NAACP got to
work on housing, labor and voting rights. The Sierra
Club and other outfits have helped residents address
environmental threats. This summer the AFL-CIO unveiled
a $1 billion investment from its pension funds to
underwrite affordable housing, hospitals and other
projects, and Change to Win is helping with a workers'
center. New groups like Color of Change and the Katrina
Information Network have heightened media scrutiny, and
Representative Jesse Jackson Jr. and former Senator
John Edwards have barnstormed the country to talk about
Katrina and poverty.

But added up, it's been a far cry from the broad
mobilization or channeling of public outrage that could
have changed the course of the past year. And there's
been plenty of outrage: In February 66 percent of
voters nationwide said they were bothered "a great deal
or good amount" by Bush's handling of Katrina--far
outpacing concern for the Valerie Plame and Jack
Abramoff scandals, which were objects of pundit
obsession.

"The Democrats and most national groups, they didn't
tap into that anger," says one African-American
activist, who didn't want me to use his name. "A black
city is destroyed, thousands are dead, hundreds of
thousands of lives were devastated. We needed a March
on Washington moment. They didn't care."

The national alliances required to shift federal
priorities may still need to gain traction, but the
Katrina movement has already left another legacy to the
country by inspiring a new generation of activism.

Far from the halls of power, in the devastated Ninth
Ward a clutch of volunteers, descendants of another
strand of the 1960s freedom movement, are buzzing. And
hammering: It's February, and the mostly white and
conspicuously countercultural youth at the Common
Ground Collective are erecting bunk beds at breakneck
speed.

"Spring break," explains our guide Matt, a ponytailed
DJ from New York. "We're expecting hundreds of
volunteers to come." As it turns out, March brought
2,900 volunteers from 220 colleges (and eight
countries) to Common Ground, a project launched as an
emergency health clinic and relief center days after
Katrina by Malik Rahim, a former Black Panther. Under
the slogan "Solidarity, Not Charity," Common Ground
soon became a beacon for Seattle-generation activists,
and has since proliferated new outposts and projects
across the city, from house-gutting to "bio-
remediation" of soil toxins and the opening of a
Women's Center.

The success and high profile of Common Ground--which
has brought some 10,000 volunteers through its crash-
course program in mutual aid that includes a radical
history of New Orleans and a workshop in "Dismantling
Racism"--have overshadowed other impressive youth
efforts in the region, such as a spring-break drive
that brought more than a thousand students from
historically black colleges into community projects.

This is their Freedom Summer, and those making the
pilgrimage can't help but be changed by the experience.
They've been cast into a scattered but epic battle
between the Gulf's dispossessed--relegated to lives in
tents, trailers and exile--and a gathering storm of
privateers and power brokers whose ambitions can only
sharpen the divide between those who have and those who
are clearly holding on to very little.

Which, in the eyes of New Orleans lawyer-activist Bill
Quigley, prepares them perfectly for the struggles they
face back home. "In New Orleans it's so condensed and
easy to see, but these same forces of destroying our
public housing, destroying public healthcare,
destroying public education--those things are happening
in every community across this country," Quigley says.
"What is happening in New Orleans is coming to your
community."

Chris Kromm, executive director of the Institute for
Southern Studies, is the coordinator of Gulf Coast
Reconstruction Watch (http://www.reconstructionwatch.org).

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