Documenting Katrina’s Injustices

Black groups hope to use victims’ tales of loss to rebuild a more equitable New Orleans

The Rev. Susan K. Smith has been immersed in Hurricane Katrina stories for the last two months — and it is beginning to take an emotional toll.

“I can hardly sleep,” said Ms. Smith, senior pastor of Advent United Church of Christ, in Columbus,

Ohio. “I just want this to be over because I just want to process. I can’t believe people are living like this.”

Ms. Smith is chair of the Katrina National Justice Commission, a panel set up by black religious leaders to investigate the response to the hurricane that severely battered New Orleans and other Gulf Coast areas almost a year ago.

During hearings in June and July in Washington, New Orleans, and Houston, she and her fellow commissioners heard story after story about people who did not have the means to escape the floods of New Orleans, who were separated from their families, who lost their homes and possessions, who lacked proper medical care because hospitals were destroyed or their records disappeared, who are still living in trailers or in other states, or who desperately need mental-health counseling.

The collective tale is a grim one — and one that Ms. Smith said demonstrates that the United States has still not dealt with the racial and economic inequities that Katrina underscored.

“They haven’t been addressed,” she said during a lunch break at the Houston hearings. “It’s like if we close our eyes and pretend there’s no poverty, it won’t be there. If we close our eyes and pretend there’s no racism, it won’t be there.”

Panel of 30

The commission — made up of more than 30 prominent black pastors, scholars, nonprofit leaders, and business executives — is one of numerous projects created by African-American groups in Katrina’s wake to ensure that those issues remain on the policy agenda.

Established by the Samuel DeWitt Proctor Conference, a Chicago nonprofit group created in 2003 to help black churches promote social justice, the panel hopes to collect the stories of individuals who were displaced by Katrina, or who helped its victims, and to explore why the disaster disproportionately affected poor and black people.

Commission members include Cody Anderson, president of WURD 900 AM, in Philadelphia; the Rev. Marcus D. Cosby, senior pastor at Wheeler Avenue Baptist Church, in Houston; Ertharin Cousin, chief operating officer of America’s Second Harvest, in Chicago; and the Rev. Cheryl Townsend Gilkes, a professor of African-American studies and sociology at Colby College, in Waterville, Maine.

They plan to present a preliminary report to the Congressional Black Caucus’s Annual Legislative Conference in September.

The commission will issue recommendations about how to reconstruct hurricane-devastated areas in an equitable way. It also wants to ensure that Gulf Coast churches, many of which were destroyed by the storm, have the money and training to rebuild their congregations and their neighborhoods and to prepare for future disasters, with help from churches in other parts of the country.

“Who is going to be a voice for people who have been devastated financially and emotionally?” said Iva E. Carruthers, the conference’s general secretary. “If not the church, then who?”

Harsh Complaints

The effort to strengthen the ability of churches to respond to future disasters reflects the widespread criticism that the federal government and the American Red Cross failed to act quickly or effectively in some Gulf Coast regions after Katrina hit, especially those with low-income residents.

“Without the help of churches and civic organizations, we would be dead,” Bill Stallworth, the sole black member of the Biloxi, Miss., City Council, told the commission in Houston. “We’ve got to make the country understand this is not a black issue. This is an issue of human rights, of human dignity.”

Joseph Givens, a longtime New Orleans resident now living in a trailer there, told the panel in Houston that churches must help ensure that the city’s low-income residents have a voice as the city rebuilds.

“The work of the churches up to now has been, What do we do? Let’s send something. People need food, clothing, and shelter,” he explained during a break. “It’s the charity piece of this. Now the real work of the church is just beginning.”

Mr. Givens is a consultant for a new project called Churches Supporting Churches, headed by the Rev. C.T. Vivian, of Atlanta, the veteran civil-rights leader, in partnership with the National Council of Churches.

It hopes to raise more than $30- million from churches, major donors, and foundations to help an initial group of 36 churches in New Orleans rebuild over the next three years on the condition they also create community-development corporations, nonprofit groups that work to revitalize neighborhoods. Mr. Givens said churches should play this role because many low-income people are renters and do not have homeowner associations or other groups to represent them in the rebuilding effort. The money will also be used to provide living expenses, training, and advice in areas such as finance and architecture to the church pastors.

The Katrina National Justice Commission has heard testimony from more than 60 people, including hurricane evacuees, pastors, relief workers, and advocacy groups; Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, Democrat of New York; and representatives of the American Red Cross and the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

It has compiled excerpts of some of the testimony it has heard, on paper and on the Web, including:

• Nicole Davis, a doctor at what is now the Southeast Louisiana Veterans Health Care Center, in New Orleans, described “the worst night I have ever had as a physician.” She was forced to evacuate patients and visitors after the city’s levees broke, including two women whose husbands had just died in the emergency room. “I did not have time for them to say goodbye,” she said. “I did not have time for them to mourn.”

• Kwame Asante, state director of the Louisiana National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, in Baton Rouge, said he represented more than 17 people who were detained on “bogus” looting charges when they returned to check on their homes after Katrina struck.

• Karla Weaver, a former corporal in the New Orleans sheriff’s office, said her husband, a Gulf War veteran, had killed himself in April. “He could no longer take the pain of not being able to take care of his family,” she said.

• Howard Rodgers, executive director of the New Orleans Council on Aging, described a phenomenon called “Katrina-related deaths” — the deaths of older evacuees who wanted to return to New Orleans but couldn’t because there was no housing for them. “They are basically in a foreign land, and they are grieving,” he said.

While the immediate traumas of Katrina have passed, many witnesses said charities and policy makers now need to tend to the mental health of the hurricane’s survivors and to the conditions under which the region will be rebuilt.

In Houston, Marian Wright Edelman, president of the Children’s Defense Fund, told the panel it was “morally scandalous” that despite living in a rich country, many children from low-income families who were traumatized by Katrina were not receiving proper medical care. She is urging Congress to adopt legislation to make it easier for people to get Medicaid-covered health care following a disaster.

Saket Soni, an organizer at the New Orleans Worker Justice Coalition, described the harsh conditions facing black and immigrant workers who are helping to rebuild New Orleans, as documented in a new report prepared by his group — homelessness, substandard housing, transportation problems, contractors refusing to pay for completed work, and employers of day labor pitting workers of different ethnic backgrounds against one another by asking them to bid themselves out for low wages.

“Are we willing to see a rebuilding, are we willing to see a reconstruction, where at the bottom of the food chain, all the way down the contract chain, you’ll always find people of color — people of color trapped in homes, locked out of work, living in parks, sleeping under statues of Robert E. Lee, and waking up the next morning and looking for work without very much hope of getting paid?” Mr. Soni asked.

The group’s report, “And Injustice for All: Workers’ Lives in the Reconstruction of New Orleans,” calls on policy makers to strengthen and enforce labor laws, and philanthropists to give money to groups that join African-Americans, Latinos, American Indians, and others in a united fight for worker’s rights in New Orleans.

The Rev. Joseph Wilson, who fled to Houston after Katrina destroyed his home in New Orleans, explained why many evacuees, including himself, were reluctant to return to the city. He said some areas resembled bombed-out Beirut, were still littered with hazardous debris, and were susceptible to more flooding.

“Even though the call is out for people to come back to New Orleans, it’s a very difficult place to be now,” said Mr. Wilson, who is now associate pastor of St. John’s Downtown, a United Methodist church in Houston.

The Samuel DeWitt Proctor Conference — which has received money from the Annie E. Casey Foundation, in Baltimore; the Twenty-First Century Foundation, in New York; the AARP Foundation, in Washington; the Black United Fund of Illinois; and the Service Employees International Union — wants to document Katrina’s impact for the historical record, as well as offer recommendations about the reconstruction effort and ways to ensure that the nation is better prepared for future disasters.

The group has videotaped the testimony heard by the commission, material that Ms. Carruthers says it may post on the Web and use to make a documentary.

Meanwhile, Ms. Smith, a Proctor Conference board member and former journalist, has been traveling back and forth to New Orleans, taking photos and interviewing hurricane survivors so she can compile her own Katrina chronicle.

“I can’t leave it alone,” she said. “I can’t just let these things slide.”