In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, the Houston Astrodome, long a symbol of public sector obedience to the interests of private capital, became the scene of something else: a successful effort among the displaced poor and working class of New Orleans to organize themselves to confront the power structures that left them stranded. DALTON HILLIARD, a New Orleans native living in Houston, reports.
The contrast was telling.
On the first Saturday at the mass shelter in the Houston Astrodome, tens of thousands of New Orleans residents, having spent the better part of a week facing polluted flood waters, government neglect and racism, now were treated to a circus of political opportunism and condescension. Liberal politicians like Reverend Jesse Jackson and Bill and Hillary Clinton, moths to the flame of the international media presence, brought entourages intrusively through the rows of cots lining the stadium floor. Loudest of all, Oprah Winfrey and a host of multi-millionaire black celebrities took to the PA system to let ‘their people’ know that everything was going to be alright.
At the same time that Saturday, in one section of the stadium’s bleachers, something very different was going on. A group of 40 evacuees were meeting to discuss an agenda of demands and develop an organizing strategy to get them met.
The anger in the group was palpable.
Everyone had spent days in the flood, waiting – on rooftops, in attics, on interstates, in the New Orleans Superdome – while helicopters circled endlessly, shining lights but bringing no food, no water and no means to escape. National guardsmen, when they finally arrived at the Superdome, threw meal packets down to people from an overpass ‘like they were feeding dogs’.
When Charles Dixon, after waiting two days on an interstate, attempted to lead a group of several hundred families across a bridge on foot into Jefferson Parish, the white-flight suburb that borders New Orleans and one of the few dry parts of the metropolitan area, they were turned back. Police officials announced into a megaphone that Jefferson Parish was not an evacuation route and warning shots rang out over their heads.
Most of the evacuees in the meeting that Saturday were still missing family members, who either had been separated in the flood or, more common, during the evacuation from New Orleans. At many of the pickup points, the authorities, when they finally arrived, divided men, women and children onto separate buses, which were heading, it turned out, to separate cities.
Several members of the group had found that their cell phones, their only means of communication, had been cut off the day before, because they had been unable to pay their bills.
The group decided to form a new organization, the Survivors Leadership Group (SLG), to organize fellow survivors and advocate for their collective interests. They drew up a petition with their demands: provide immediate financial assistance; initiate a transition to dignified living; create a public database of survivors; improve communication and provide a long-term recovery package.
In one week, the Survivors Leadership Group had got 5,000 signatures from Katrina evacuees, held a press conference with international media, and were seeing substantial progress on the five points. They got the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to forbid cell-phone providers from cutting off cell phones from disaster-affected areas for three months. And they got Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), on the ropes for their pathetic failure in New Orleans, to implement an immediate assistance grant of $2,000, which exempted Katrina victims from the usual red-tape of the FEMA process.
None of this is to suggest, even remotely, that the recovery process overall has been handled well. Notwithstanding several important local victories, the rigidity and incompetence of FEMA and others has been as thorough in the month following Katrina as it was in the first week, when people were drowning and starving in New Orleans.
Still, the experience of the SLG does point the way towards what will be necessary if Katrina is to become a watershed moment of change in the political culture of the United States and lead to a significant shift in the class-orientation of US politics.
The tragedy of Katrina has the potential to play that role, for several reasons. First, its lessons are so obvious and, temporarily, so widely understood. Who can now claim not to understand the human consequences of chronic under-investment in the public sector? Who can deny the deep racism and class division at the heart of American capitalism, which determined who lived and who died, who got out and who got left behind?
Second, the political and capitalist elite have been shaken by how nakedly the divisions of class and race, on which their own power depends, were suddenly revealed for all the world to see. It is this, and the attempt on the part of those elites to compensate for their embarrassment, that gave the SLG the political space to accomplish what they have.
Third, Katrina has been the occasion of a sudden and significant shift in class relations in a major US city, between the middle-class and the working poor. It was not just the poor of New Orleans who did not have insurance to cover their losses, who have been left homeless and jobless, but the working and middle class as well. Historically, where the middle class leans, so go politics, and the fact that a substantial portion of the middle class has suddenly become unemployed or working poor creates an opportunity for political realignment.
There is, furthermore, a precedent in the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, the political fallout from which led to a substantial shift in US politics in the late 1920s, laying the groundwork for the New Deal.*
The fundamental question, then, is whether Katrina, in the long term, will become the occasion for a significant political shift, or whether it will be covered over in collective amnesia and sentimentalization.
And it is here that the example of the SLG is instructive. For if we rely on the Bill Clintons and Hillary Clintons, the Jesse Jackson’s and the other liberal political opportunists to be the voice of indignation on this national outrage; if we tolerate the celebrity spokespeople of liberal Hollywood speaking for us on this issue, then the battle is lost before it begins.
If, however, we take the example of the New Orleans Survivors – who ignored the media circus to get down to organizing – then hope may come, afterall, from the stinking flood-waters of New Orleans.
*In the flood of 1927, over 1000 lives were lost in the Mississippi Delta region, levees were intentionally blown at the behest of New Orleans bankers to flood working class communities and protect bankers’ interests, and thousands of black sharecroppers were held in concentration camps and forcibly forbidden from evacuating, because of the fear among large southern farmers that, if they let blacks evacuate, they would not come back, and they would lose their agricultural labor force.
These events were on the front pages of newspapers nationwide for months, and as a result, deep realities of the US class struggle in the 1920s, kept far from the public sphere for years, became fuel for a movement of change.
The populist radical Huey P Long then rode the wave of anger about the flood to his election as Louisiana Governor in 1928, on a platform that included a progressive income tax, increased funding for education, public works to rebuild Louisiana and the US, an end to wars for empire, and an end to financial oligarchy.
Long was assassinated in 1935 as he prepared to run for president, but it was his threat from the radical left that pushed the Roosevelt Democrats to implement the New Deal.
*See John M. Barry, Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America.
FRFI 187 October / November 2005
