‘We must turn things around’

Johnnie Stevens, an organizer for the Million Worker March, reported the following to Workers World newspaper about his travels in Texas and Louisiana from Sept. 4-12.

Johnnie Stevens

On the days that Teresa Gutierrez and I were touring Texas and Louisiana, in Houston, Baton Rouge, Covington and the eight-hour ride trying to get into Algiers, there was roadblocks by military police. But there was no CBS, no CNN, no NBC, no ABC—there was no cameras, no crews; there wasn’t no bourgeois media trying to go in and film what was going on. Because the media is handling it like Iraq or Somalia.

For you to have a million people being evacuated, and so many people killed, and no aid coming in for days, and no coverage of this—the media don’t want to show it. This is a demand from the Bush administration and from the State Department, so people could not see, the world can’t see, what happened in New Orleans. There can’t be no greater nightmare that what happened there with the storm and people being separated. Headlines and articles are scripted by the Bush administration.

This is the level of neglect that we saw and heard. One Mexican doctor said, “I really want to go in and help.” They had people who were tree cutters who asked to come in and couldn’t. They was all told they wasn’t needed. And Teresa and I saw miles of trees all over the place, and dead animals all over the place, and this could have helped.

We met a man at the Houston airport who was Somalian. He actually worked at the rental car agency. He said he knew the neglect that the Black community faced in Houston because of the invasion and neglect of what happened in Somalia under the Clinton administration in 1991. He offered solidarity.

As of Sept. 13, we heard that dead bodies was sitting in Algiers and they’re being marked with an “X” on their head and being left there, so the neglect is continuing as of today.

The word on the streets

On the route from Baton Rouge, we met a Honduran man, which is one of the largest Latin@ populations in New Orleans. The Haitian community in New Orleans was large too, probably the third-largest community in the U.S. that sends remittances back to Haiti.

We got to do some interviews with persons from a transgender organization who was collecting supplies at a gay club in Houston who actually said they weren’t giving it to the Red Cross and said that they were going down and delivering the things themselves. They packed a car to take things to people—transgender, gay and straight alike.

One of the persons worked in the hospital in the trauma department when you first bring people in, so this person has been a volunteer at the Houston convention center where many evacuees are.

The other thing that’s noteworthy at the convention center was that on 9/11 there was a Muslim Center here—a newly formed ad hoc coalition of 20 organizations—that did volunteering there that day. The Muslims know what it feels like to have a tragedy.

Also in Houston there was work, mobilizations, going on to stop the state of Texas from executing Frances Newton—who is a Black woman—on Sept. 14. We were handing out leaflets about Sept. 12 actions in over 100 cities that actually had a prominent box about Frances Newton. The community and the evacuees at the convention center has been reading our leaflets about that and they were outraged that the execution wasn’t stayed.

Also we interviewed Alice Walker. She spoke of the continuing racism in the United States.

I met a gentleman who was a former longshore worker, a retiree. His wife and daughter was in another place. He told me that his insurance company would not pay for property they lost. The insurance companies are already beginning to deny the class character of the hurricane and saying it was a flood and they don’t pay for floods. In his words these were the biggest looters in the world.

By contrast, when me and Teresa was coming from trying to get in to visit Algiers, one of the roadblocks diverted us into another parish named La Place. It’s a predominantly white parish. We witnessed a white flight of probably thousands lined up in the eight hours we were criss-crossing highways. You could say it might have been tens of thousands. And they were being escorted out like a white flight with helicopters and military convoys. This was the day before they were talking about the mandatory evacuation.

Town meeting

We were getting ready for a meeting that was called by Minister Louis Farrakhan on Sept. 11 at the Power Center in Houston. This was a meeting that Minister Farrak han invited Black leaders around the country to, from the Millions More March, leaders such as Clarence Thomas from the Million Worker March Movement, and Chris Silvera of the National Black Teamsters.

This was a town meeting to hear accounts from people of New Orleans who were victims of Hurricane Katrina who were housed in Houston.

The Millions More March organized buses from the Astrodome and the George R. Brown Convention Center to bring evacuees in to give their accounts. The Houston Chronicle said it was 700 people.

The mikes was lined up at both sides to get accounts of the tragedy and the suffering that was happening. There were testimonies from those who were saying that the Red Cross wasn’t helping them.

One woman said that she took 48 people into her house—three relatives and 45 other people that was in the house and couldn’t get any help from the Red Cross. One evacuee reminded us that FEMA and the Red Cross wasn’t giving out $2,000 debit cards—which wasn’t enough anyways—but was giving UP TO $2,000. So some were getting $300 or $400.

One woman gave an account of her family being on the roof waving to the military helicopters in New Orleans and being passed by constantly. People were saying that they wasn’t stealing, they were only taking from the stores what was needed.

And a lot of evacuees gave account of some of their children was in Iraq and that money should be used here.

An evacuee mother said her son was transgender and was attacked for this and raped in one of the centers—the convention center in Houston. One girl also got raped at the center and the guards was right outside.

Erykah Badu thanked the evacuees for sharing their stories and saying that New Orleans brought the face of racism in the U.S. But we will gather and we will build a better New Orleans ourself.

The Minister Louis Farrakhan also thanked the evacuees and the city of Houston for coming out and asked could he speak and be pardoned because he had to go to another townhouse meeting in Baton Rouge and later in five rural towns in Mississippi in which Black mayors of those towns said they had not received any help from FEMA or the Red Cross.

He made a statement that the Red Cross and FEMA were criminals and that the community will have to make them open up their books. And he said that the victims and organizations should actually be a part of paying immediate attention to the crisis at hand and of the group that be rebuilding the Gulf states.

He made a sharp analogy to the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, that so many lives is lost and that that money should be rerouted and not only spent on the Gulf Coast, but spent on the many poor in the United States.

The New Black Panther Party was commended by Minister Robert Muhammad, who is the Southwest regional coordinator of the Nation of Islam, for going into Algiers and New Orleans and bringing people out. He went on to raise Frances Newton as a part of the crisis, where Black people were oppressed farther.

I just think myself that it’s a people’s movement that has arisen out of this crisis and that we should rush ahead to form commissions to actually investigate the Bush administration, FEMA and the Red Cross. And so we could have the level of organization to actually intervene right now because in the case of Algiers, they’re really up against military occupation.

I think what people should know, like what’s happening in the Algiers community, which is that a lot of people there are refusing to leave. A lot of people that we interviewed was saying that they wanted to return to New Orleans, young and old.

We should call for a solidarity movement around Algiers, which has taken the lead and the responsibility to actually care for people and bring attention to the world—the firsthand activism that the bourgeois media is not getting out.

The question of the war in Iraq should be tied to this because it’s the same level of greed as we saw—the money taken away from the levees was actually being sent to Iraq. So this is anti-war, labor and a people’s struggle and we could turn things around. We must turn things around.