Gary Younge (The Nation): The Battle of New Orleans

[Jack Rabbit]

From The Nation
Issue of May 8, 2006
Posted Thursday April 20

The Battle of New Orleans
By Gary Younge

"There are two types of power," said Linda Jeffers, addressing an accountability session of New Orleans mayoral candidates at the city's Trinity Episcopal Church. "Organized money and organized people." Since Hurricane Katrina the battle between those two forces has shaped the struggle to rebuild New Orleans. Now it is set to intensify.

The one thing both seem to agree on is that neither wants the city to return to the way it was before the hurricane. The people of New Orleans, most of whom are black and many of whom are poor, want schools that will educate their children, jobs that will pay a living wage and neighborhoods where capital investment matches the large pools of social capital created by their churches and close-knit communities. Organized money has something else in mind: the destruction of many of those communities, the permanent removal of those who lived in them and a city that follows the gentrification patterns of racial removal and class cleansing that have played out elsewhere in America. Under these circumstances, the organization of people has been impressive. Grassroots groups have done a remarkable job of cohering those scattered throughout the country into a political constituency.

As Jeffers spoke, the city's mayoral candidates sat before an audience of more than 500 who had been bused in from Tennessee and elsewhere in Louisiana, as well as several hundred evacuees in Houston, Austin, San Antonio and Dallas who were watching the candidates being questioned on satellite. Five days later Jeffers, a leader with the nonprofit Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF), who moved from Gentilly to Houston after Katrina, schlepped through the unforgiving Texas heat distributing food and signing up eighty evacuees for their absentee ballots at the Encore housing complex. Meanwhile, various organizations have been ferrying people from neighboring states to satellite polling stations dotted around Louisiana for early voting in the April 22 election.

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