New Orleans: Good-by, Blacks: 6 Flags Over Bourbon Street

New Orleans: Good-by, Blacks: 6 Flags Over Bourbon Street
By David Remnick
Bush Watch
10/3/05

New Orleans was sixty-seven per cent African-American at the time of Katrina. It always had a substantial black population--it was one of the leading slave markets--and decades of migration starting at the time of Reconstruction made it even larger. The city was, in per-capita terms, the wealthiest in America before the Civil War and the wealthiest in the South until the nineteen-twenties. No more.

Few of the improvements in urban America--the growth of the black middle class, the decline of the murder rate, greater attention to inner-city schools--have taken firm hold in New Orleans. There is hardly any industrial base, no major corporate headquarters, no home-grown businesses on the scale of FedEx in Memphis, Coca-Cola in Atlanta, the Hospital Corporation of America in Nashville.

Colonel Terry Ebbert, the head of Homeland Security in the city, told me, "Drugs are the biggest business in town, bigger than tourism." Small wonder that at school-board meetings of Orleans Parish parents may think the worst--for example, that magnet schools are part of an over-all plan of educational disenfranchisement. Small wonder that they might believe that the break in the levees was a plot.

"Perception is reality, and their reality is terrible," Jim Amoss, the editor of the Times-Picayune, said. "We are talking about people who are very poor and have a precondition to accept this belief. Lots are cut off from mainstream news and information. They are isolated in shelters and they know a thing or two about victimization. It fits well into a system of belief."...

According to polls, huge numbers of people now living in shelters say they will not go back to New Orleans. Few have insurance policies or even bank accounts, credit cards, or savings sufficient to start over. Many of them are sick or unemployed. As Hurricane Rita bore down on Texas last week, there were still roughly a hundred and fifty thousand evacuees in Houston alone.

A poll conducted jointly by the Washington Post, the Harvard School of Public Health, and the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation showed that fewer than half the evacuees in shelters will move back, and there was nothing in my days of conversations in Houston, New Iberia, Lafayette, and elsewhere that made that figure seem exaggerated.