|
Books by Jordan
Flaherty
Floodlines:
Community and Resistance from Katrina to the
Jena Six.
* *
* * *
Six Years After
Katrina
The Battle for New Orleans Continues
By
Jordan
Flaherty
Political power
has shifted to whites, but blacks have not given up
their struggle for a voice— and justice.
As this weekend’s
storm has reminded us, hurricanes can be a threat to
U.S. cities on the East Coast as well the Gulf. But the
vast changes that have taken place in New Orleans since
Katrina have had little to do with weather, and
everything to do with political struggles. Six years
after the federal levees failed and 80 percent of the
city was flooded, New Orleans has
lost 80,000 jobs and 110,000 residents. It is a
whiter and wealthier city, with tourist areas well
maintained while communities like the Lower Ninth Ward
remain devastated. Beyond the statistics, it is still a
much contested city.
Politics continues
to shape how the changes to New Orleans are viewed. For
some, the city is a crime scene of corporate
profiteering and the mass displacement of African
Americans and working poor; but for others it’s an
example of bold public sector reforms, taken in the
aftermath of a natural disaster, that have led the way
for other cities.
In the wake of
Katrina, New Orleans saw the rise of a new class of
citizens. They self-identify as YURPs—Young
Urban Rebuilding Professionals—and
they work in architecture, urban planning, education,
and related fields. While the city was still mostly
empty, they spoke of a freedom to experiment, unfettered
by the barriers of bureaucratic red tape and public
comment. Working with local and national political and
business leaders, they made rapid changes in the city’s
education system, public housing, health care, and
nonprofit sector.
Along the way, the
face of elected government changed in the city and
state. Among the offices that switched from black to
white were mayor, police chief, district attorney, and
representatives on the school board and city council,
which both switched to white majorities for the first
time in a generation. Louisiana also transformed from a
state with several statewide elected Democrats, to
having only one—Senator
Mary Landrieu.
While black
community leaders have said that the displacement after
the storm has robbed African Americans of their civic
representation, another narrative has also taken shape.
Many in the media and business elite have said that a
new political class—which
happens to be mostly white—is
reshaping the politics of the city into a post-racial
era. “Our efforts are changing old ways of thinking,”
said Mayor Mitch Landrieu, shortly after he was elected
in 2010. After accusing his critics of being stuck in
the past, Landrieu— who was the first mayor in modern
memory elected with the support of a majority of both
black and white voters—added
that "We're going to rediscipline ourselves in this
city."
The changes in the
public sector have been widespread. Shortly after the
storm, the entire staff of the public school system was
fired. Their union, which had been the largest union in
the city, ceased to be recognized. With many parents,
students and teachers driven out of the city by Katrina
and unable to have a say in the decision, the state took
over the city’s schools and began shifting them over to
charters. “The reorganization of the public schools has
created a separate but unequal tiered system of schools
that steers a minority of students, including virtually
all of the city’s white students, into a set of
selective, higher-performing schools and most of the
city’s students of color into a set of lower-performing
schools,” writes lawyer and activist Bill Quigley, in a
report prepared with fellow Loyola law professor Davida
Finger.
In many ways, the
changes in New Orleans school system, initiated almost
six years ago, foreshadowed a battle that has played out
more conspicuously this year in Wisconsin, Indiana, New
Jersey and other states where teachers and their unions
were assailed by both Republican governors and liberal
reformers such as the filmmakers behind
Waiting for
Superman. Similarly, the battle of New Orleans public
housing—which
was torn down and replaced by new units built in
public-private partnerships that house a small
percentage of the former residents—prefigured
national battles over government’s role in solving
problems related to poverty.
The anger at the
changes in New Orleans’ black community is palpable. It
comes out at city council meetings, on local
black talk radio station WBOK, and in protests.
“Since New Orleans was declared a blank slate, we are
the social experimental lab of the world,” says Endesha
Juakali, a housing rights activist. However, despite the
changes, grassroots resistance continues. “For those of
us that lived and are still living the disaster, moving
on is not an option,” adds Juakali.
Resistance to the
dominant agenda has also led to reform of the city’s
criminal justice system. But this reform is very
different from the others, with leadership coming from
African-American residents at the grassroots, including
those most affected by both crime and policing.
In the aftermath of
Katrina, media images famously depicted poor New
Orleanians as criminal and dangerous. In fact, at one
point it was announced that rescue efforts were put on
hold because of the violence. In response, the
second-in-charge of the New Orleans Police Department
reportedly told officers to shoot looters, and the
governor announced that she had given the National Guard
orders to shoot to kill.
Over the following
days, police shot and killed several civilians. A police
sniper wounded a young African American named
Henry
Glover, and other officers took and burned his body
behind a levee. A 45-year-old grandfather named
Danny
Brumfield, Sr. was shot in the back in front of his
family outside the New Orleans convention center. Two
black families—the
Madisons and Bartholomews—walking
across New Orleans’ Danziger Bridge fell under a
hail of gunfire from a group of officers. “We had more
incidents of police misconduct than civilian
misconduct,” says former District Attorney Eddie Jordan,
who pursued charges against officers but had the charges
thrown out by a judge. “All these stories of looting, it
pales next to what the police did.”
District Attorney
Jordan, who angered many in the political establishment
when he brought charges against officers and was forced
to resign soon after, was not the only one who failed to
bring accountability for the post-Katrina violence. In
fact, every check and balance in the city’s criminal
justice system failed. For years, family members of the
victims pressured the media, the U.S. Attorney’s office,
and Eddie Jordan’s replacement in the DA’s office, Leon
Cannizzaro. “The media didn’t want to give me the time
of day,” says William Tanner, who saw officers take away
Glover’s body. “They called me a raving idiot.”
Finally after more
than three years of protests, press conferences, and
lobbying, the Justice Department launched aggressive
investigations of the Glover, Brumfield, and Danziger
cases in early 2009. In recent months, three officers
were convicted in the
Glover killing (although one
conviction was overturned), two were convicted in
beating a man to death just before the storm, and ten
officers either pled guilty or were convicted in the Danziger killing and cover-up. In the Danziger case, the
jury found that officers had not only killed two
civilians and wounded four, but also engaged in a
wide-ranging conspiracy that involved planted evidence,
invented witnesses, and secret meetings.
The Justice
Department has at least seven more open investigations
on New Orleans police killings, and has indicated their
plans for more formal oversight of the NOPD, as well as
the city jail. In this area, New Orleans is also leading
the way—in
a remarkable change from Justice Department policy
during the Bush Administration, the DOJ is also looking
at oversight of police departments in Newark, Denver,
and Seattle.
In the national
struggle against law enforcement violence, there is much
to be learned from the victims of New Orleans police
violence who led a remarkable struggle against a wall of
official silence, and now have begun to win justice.
“This is an opening,” explains New Orleans police
accountability activist Malcolm Suber. “We have to push
for a much more democratic system of policing in the
city.”
In the closing
arguments of the
Danziger trial, DOJ prosecutor Bobbi
Bernstein fought back against the defense claim that the
officers were heroes, saying the family members of those
killed deserved the title more. Noting that the official
cover-up had “perverted” the system, she said, “The real
heroes are the victims who stayed with an imperfect
justice system that initially betrayed them.” The jury
apparently agreed with her, convicting the officers on
all 25 counts.
Jordan Flaherty is a journalist and staffer with
the Louisiana Justice Institute. His award-winning
reporting from the Gulf Coast has been featured in a
range of outlets including the New York Times, Al
Jazeera, and Argentina's Clarin newspaper. He is the
author of
Floodlines:
Community and Resistance from Katrina to the
Jena Six. He can be
reached at
neworleans@leftturn.org, and more info can be found
at
floodlines.org. For speaking engagements, see
communityandresistance.wordpress.com.
Source:
TheRoot
* * *
* *
On the Fifth Anniversary of Katrina Displacement Continues
Post Katrina One Hundred Thousand Yet to Return
(Junious Ricardo
Stanton)
* * *
* *
* * *
* *
* *
* * *
|
Floodlines
Community and Resistance from Katrina to the
Jena Six
By Jordan Flaherty
Preface by Tracie Washington
/ Foreward by Amy Goodman
When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, it
was a tragedy. What followed was a
government-sanctioned travesty. Flaherty, a
white New Orleans resident and journalist,
interviews a number of locals about the
recovery effort, outlining a systemic
pattern that includes restrictions of
service, human rights violations, and
destruction of property targeting the city's
African-American majority. |
 |
The behavior of the notorious New Orleans police
department towards this community is appalling, but
even more distressing is Flaherty's reporting on the
failure of the federal government to respond to the
needs of its citizens, and their use of paramilitary
mercenaries to enforce a pattern of brutal
occupation. To learn how profoundly the system
failed (and continues to fail) will be extremely
difficult for some readers, and Flaherty pulls no
punches in his quest to uncover failures,
highlighting how the systems in place for rebuilding
(foundation support, non-profit groups, military
intervention) remain woefully inadequate. Readers
will be compelled, depressed, disturbed, and angered
by what they find in this well-written report.
Crucial reading—Publishers
Weekly
YouTube
- The Jena Six
* *
* * *
posted 30 August 2011
|
