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Survivors
of New Orleans say
"They
treated us like dogs . . . wristbands"
FEMA Runs out of Plastic
Houston, TX - The fight for survival
goes on in Houston. Families spent all day traveling miles back
and forth across the city, looking for opportunities
to register for aid that may or may not be there.
Many picked up food, water, clothes and toys
for their children; walking with awkward loads to wherever they
are stuck sleeping for the night.
At the Astrodome/Reliant Center, the fury is
spilling over and the repression is building. This morning, the
number of police at the barricades was five times what is was
yesterday. One outraged resident, Celesta Johnson, of Jefferson
Parish, Louisiana, exploded, "They have us with bands on
our wrists. They make you wear bands when you're in
prison."
She was outside the Astrodome with her friend
Felicia Mudro, also of Jefferson, and Felicia's daughter Curston.
The women explained that if
the children lost their wristbands, or if a person's wristband
appeared too large, the police would take the band and they
would not be allowed back in to the Astrodome at all.
"We saw a three-month old baby and her
mom sleep out on the street because the baby lost his
wristband." There were many others sleeping out last night
because of the curfew, according to the pair.
Many are outraged at what they have been
seeing from the time they left New Orleans and are suspicious of
what will happen to their city. According to Mark Hooktin, 33,
staying in a hotel with his 2-year old and one-year old sons and
fiancé,
"Everyone should have been evacuated 50
hours, 60 hours or more before the hurricane come. I think that
dam broke on purpose, that's what I think. I think they wanted
to clear New Orleans, and get all of the Black people from out
there. I don't think they want nobody to come back. But I am
going back."
Hootkins's feelings about the future of the
city were echoed by Roy Camry, a tenth-grade student at the
(former) McDonald Senior High in New Orleans, "It's not
going to be really for Black people. To tell you the truth, I
think they're going to make it all a big suburb."
Ms. Mudro and Ms. Johnson also spoke of their
harrowing trip out of Jefferson Parish and into Houston. Felicia
Mudro recounted her experience, "They treated us like dogs,
the military police. They wouldn't give us water, wouldn't give
us food, passed us up for three days on the highway with our
children. The whole world needs to know they are screwing us
over." Both women said they had no choice about coming to
Houston. "We didn't ask to come to Texas, they loaded us up
and made us come here."
A man who worked at what was Tulane
University, who wandered with his wife and three children from
Mississippi to Arkansas and then to Houston in search of help,
said,
"I'm from Bangladesh and there they do a
damn good job (of disaster relief), but here...I was just joking
that they should send them FEMA) over there, to train them.
Bangladesh is one of the poorest countries in the world, and
they do a better job."
Today at the Astrodome, many people continued
to arrive from
other states. FEMA showed up in force
for the first time. FEMA agents wearing dark blue
uniforms were handing out flyers under signs that said, "No
debit cards here today." For the past few days, people have
been scrambling to get emergency debit cards worth $2,000 to
meet basic necessities, move into apartments or leave town.
Late yesterday afternoon, people were told to
show up for their cards by 8:00 a.m. this morning.
Last night it was announced around 9:00 p.m. that FEMA
had cancelled the card program. FEMA spokesman Tom Costello was
quoted in today's Houston Chronicle: "We regret the late
announcement."
FEMA said they 'ran out' of plastic needed to
make the cards. Instead, FEMA will direct deposit money to those
who have bank accounts or mail checks to those who have mailing
addresses.
Besides lining up for hours a day at the
Astrodome, people also lined up at the George R. Brown
Convention Center in downtown Houston, to continue chase after
FEMA and other aid. One woman, who got sick of getting nowhere
on the telephone, said, "I called FEMA at 2:30 a.m. in the
morning. I put the speaker on and said if she (the operator)
came on, I'll wake
up. I did three families in one phone call. I said, 'Baby don't
hang up cuz I got three families staying in this place and
everybody lost everything."
posted 13 September 2005
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1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus
Created
By Charles C. Mann
I’m
a big fan of Charles Mann’s previous
book
1491:
New Revelations of the Americas Before
Columbus, in which he
provides a sweeping and provocative
examination of North and South America
prior to the arrival of Christopher
Columbus. It’s exhaustively researched
but so wonderfully written that it’s
anything but exhausting to read. With
his follow-up,
1493, Mann has taken it to a
new, truly global level. Building on the
groundbreaking work of Alfred Crosby
(author of
The Columbian Exchange and, I’m
proud to say, a fellow Nantucketer),
Mann has written nothing less than the
story of our world: how a planet of what
were once several autonomous continents
is quickly becoming a single,
“globalized” entity.
Mann not only talked to countless
scientists and researchers; he visited
the places he writes about, and as a
consequence, the book has a marvelously
wide-ranging yet personal feel as we
follow Mann from one far-flung corner of
the world to the next. And always, the
prose is masterful. In telling the
improbable story of how Spanish and
Chinese cultures collided in the
Philippines in the sixteenth century, he
takes us to the island of Mindoro whose
“southern coast consists of a number of
small bays, one next to another like
tooth marks in an apple.” We learn how
the spread of malaria, the potato,
tobacco, guano, rubber plants, and sugar
cane have disrupted and convulsed the
planet and will continue to do so until
we are finally living on one integrated
or at least close-to-integrated Earth.
Whether or not the human instigators of
all this remarkable change will survive
the process they helped to initiate more
than five hundred years ago remains,
Mann suggests in this monumental and
revelatory book, an open question. |
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The Persistence of the Color Line
Racial Politics and the Obama Presidency
By Randall Kennedy
Among the best things about
The Persistence of the Color Line
is watching Mr. Kennedy hash through the
positions about Mr. Obama staked out by
black commentators on the left and
right, from Stanley Crouch and Cornel
West to Juan Williams and Tavis Smiley.
He can be pointed. Noting the way Mr.
Smiley consistently “voiced skepticism
regarding whether blacks should back
Obama” . . .
The
finest chapter in
The Persistence of the Color Line
is so resonant, and so personal, it
could nearly be the basis for a book of
its own. That chapter is titled
“Reverend Wright and My Father:
Reflections on Blacks and Patriotism.”
Recalling some of the criticisms of
America’s past made by Mr. Obama’s
former pastor, Mr. Kennedy writes with
feeling about his own father, who put
each of his three of his children
through Princeton but who “never forgave
American society for its racist
mistreatment of him and those whom he
most loved.” His father distrusted
the police, who had frequently called
him “boy,” and rejected patriotism. Mr.
Kennedy’s father “relished Muhammad
Ali’s quip that the Vietcong had never
called him ‘nigger.’ ” The author places
his father, and Mr. Wright, in
sympathetic historical light. |
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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If you like this page consider making a donation
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Negro Digest /
Black World
Browse all issues
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1965
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____ 2005
Enjoy!
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
/
The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
/
Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
/
January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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ChickenBones Store
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update
30 January 2012
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