NEW ORLEANS: A year after Katrina

Delores Thomas, Clarence Thomas and Dianne Mathiowetz at Katrina memorial in Ninth Ward, New Orleans Aug. 29. WW photo: Monica Moorehead

We, like millions of others worldwide, had watched in horror the television coverage last year of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast being battered by Hurricane Katrina’s wind and waves.

There were thousands of images of people wading through water, caused by broken levees, that submerged their neighborhoods; stranded them on rooftops, at the Convention Center, at the Superdome and on highway bridges guarded by racist police and vigilantes. All desperate for help. Those images remain burned in our memories.

Aloyd Edinburgh, Jr., Monica Moorehead, Aloyd Edinburgh, Sr. & Clarence Thomas in front of Fema trailer in lower Ninth Ward. Photo: Delores Thomas

Many of these same memories and images resurfaced instantly one year later as we drove through the lower Ninth Ward, the once vibrant neighborhood where thousands of working and
poor people, the vast majority African American, lived and where many died during and after Katrina hit on Aug. 29, 2005.

We saw block after block of destruction. We witnessed, alongside Million Worker March Movement national
co-chair, Clarence Thomas, and his spouse, Delores Thomas, just a few houses showing signs of life, the debris removed off the streets, the gutted houses with new sheetrock or a new roof evident and a FEMA trailer filling the yard. Those who came back to rebuild their homes have received little to no money from any level
of government.

One of the many condemned Ninth Ward homes. WW photo: Monica Moorehead

These signs of life were rare among the more common sights of nothing fundamentally changed from a year ago except that the flood waters are gone. Across the street from the levee that is now “rebuilt,” all the houses have been torn down. The towering grass now covers the scars, remnants of cement foundations emerge and a broken water pipe still bubbles.

It is here in the lower Ninth Ward that the anniversary march begins, with buses from Houston and Atlanta and vans and cars from dozens of states and cities bringing back the displaced to claim their right to return—for good—to a city with affordable and available housing, functioning utilities, decent schools and hospitals.

WW photo: Monica Moorehead

It is here, too, that George W. Bush came—with more empty promises—for his photo-op with revered music legend Fats Domino, but only after the area had been secured with military vehicles, Secret Service agents and New Orleans police blocking the traffic and questioning the residents’ right to be there.

One year later and the aftermath of Katrina continues to strip bare the class façade of U.S. capitalism—a for-profit system that cannot provide even the basic needs for its people, especially if they are Black and poor. One year later and the people still struggle on!

The writers were in New Orleans Aug. 28-29.