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A place like nowhere else: Black Indians parading on the Sunday nearest Saint Joseph's Day, along MLK Boulevard in New Orleans' Central City, March 2011
The New Orleans that had a vibrant working-class of people who earned with their hands and skills is the New Orleans that produced the artists and creativity revered and relished by the world.
By Don Paul~Puppetgov
Two Sets of Facts Frame Our Piece: We Begin by Looking for “the root cause” of a “culture of death”
SET ONE
New Orleans, Louisiana has had the highest rate of murder-per-capita among United States’ cities every year of the 21st century. That rate is rising again.
As of February 1, 2012, New Orleans, a city of about 360,000 (343,839 according to the 2010 United States’ Census) had seen 25 murders in the new year. (http://www.nola.com/crime/).
Yes, that’s almost one murder per day during the month of January. Seven of 2012′s murders occurred between Wednesday, January 25, and Saturday, January 28.
Responding for many of us who live here, Mayor Mitch Landrieu has for months unto years bemoaned the city’s “culture of death” (April 28, 2011, http://www.nola.com/politics/index.ssf/2011/04/new_crime-fighting_strategy_fo.html). Mayor Landrieu notes that five students at John McDonough High School were killed in the school-year 2010-2011 (December 7, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/08/us/new-orleans-struggles-to-stem-homicides.html). He urges all of us who live here to “get at the root cause of it” (January 26, 2012, http://wwno.org/post/mayor-landrieu-unveils-program-get-illegal-guns-streets).
New Orleans' Mayor Mitch Landrieu with (left to right) Sheriff Marlin Gusman, Police Superintendent Ronal Serpas, Criminal Justice Coordinator James Carter, and City Council members Jackie Clarkson and Kristen Giselson Palmer
Murder in New Orleans is a familiar. In 2011 New Orleans had 199 murders, up from 175 in 2010, and again led U.S. cities in murder per capita, with 58 per 100,000, its rate of murder more than eight times New York City’s and more than ten times U.S. cities’ average. 2011 was the eleventh straight year that New Orleans has led U.S. cities in the rate of murder among its people (http://www.nola.com/crime/index.ssf/2010/05/new_orleans_murder_rate_remain.html).
The huge majority of those who have suffered and committed murder in New Orleans during 2012 and 2011 are Black, under age 40, and living in Wards or neighborhoods of Wards that disproportionately lack employment, education, and services. These Wards’ dark blocks contrast with Mercedes-Benz’ glowing new logo on the Superdome. These Wards’ street-corners have school-age young people selling rocks of Crack day and night.
The same was true for locations of murder in New Orleans during the prior years after levees’ failures flooded this city, following Hurricane Katrina, in 2005. The same was also true in 1994, when New Orleans’ population was about 500,000 and its total of murders for the year was 421. For a short review of geography, drug-dealing, Police corruption, and targeted killing, please see page 8 of a lengthy article at http://www.trutv.com/library/crime/gangsters_outlaws/cops_others/len_davis/8.html .
New Orleans Police try to settle the crowd at the corner of Lancaster and Tullis in Algiers after a man was shot to death in a car Thursday night. STAFF PHOTO BY MICHAEL DEMOCKER Thursday,September 27, 2007
In the parts of New Orleans where murder most happens illegal drugs are a leading part of the economy and the fight for control of drugs’ profits is a life-or-death business. In these neighborhoods, too, distrust of Police is deep, if not complete.
Compare these maps, please. One map shows locations for murder in New Orleans. The next map shows Wards whose pre-2005-flood populations are more than 35%, or more than 50%, missing as of 2011. Central City, Hollygrove, the 6th, 7th, 8th, and Upper and Lower 9th Wards, are the areas both most missing their pre-flood residents and the areas most riddled with murders.
http://media.nola.com/graphics/other/OrleansParishMurders.swf
http://www.gnocdc.org/PopulationLossAndVacantHousing/Map3.html
At the same time, New Orleans is 13th in overall crime-rate among U. S. cities, between Memphis, Tennessee and Jackson, Mississippi (http://os.cqpress.com/citycrime/2010/citycrime2010-2011.htm), and behind places such as Anchorage, Alaska and Rockford, Illinois in its rate of violent crime overall (http://www.buzzle.com/articles/americas-most-dangerous-cities.html)
Murder at 2nd and Baronne, Central City, New Orleans
Murder here can thus be seen as the common through extreme resort among young Black males to resolve disputes or avenge offenses. It’s the most final way to remove rivals in a drug-dealing economy. Said drug-dealing economy may appear to young Blacks as the only means of earning a living other than low-paid kitchen-work in the French Quarter or in a fast-food franchise. Jobs in the construction-trades (brick-masonry, carpentry, …) and along the docks of New Orleans now are almost all gone for those whose ancestors worked at such trades or worked as longshoremen beside the Mississippi River.
These ancestors’ earnings built homes over generations in the same Wards that now are most missing their pre-flood residents. Before levees’ failures post-Katrina, the Lower 9th Ward had an extraordinarily high percentage of home-ownership among Wards in New Orleans, as you can see through the Tulane University-sponsored ‘Status Report on Housing in New Orleans’ at http://tulane.edu/nccrow/upload/NCCROWreport08-chapter5.pdf
His killer is described as a young Black male, a killer whose face is rendered thus to the public through mass-media.
Dr. Hill, writing in an article published last October, concludes: ‘With all the triumphal rhetoric of New Orleans as a city rising from the dead, the Census Bureau data offers the harsh truth that that some have risen while others have fallen. We act at our own peril if we ignore these troubling developments; the problems of education and youth crime and violence cannot be solved as long as local blacks are unfairly deprived the economic benefits of the recovery and the recovery jobs for rebuilding the city.’
In Our Problems Are Our Solutions: Southeast Louisiana Needs Better Levees, More Wetlands, and Many More Jobs in Infrastructure and Renewable Energy
SET TWO
New Orleans remains a sitting-duck to devastations that are sure to follow from its infrastructure failing under effects of a Category 2 (winds between 96 and 111 miles-per-hour) Hurricane again striking the city.
Let’s look back to 2005. Following the Category 3 (winds up 130 miles-per-hour) Hurricanes of Katrina and Rita, levees and other infrastructure such as pumping-stations failed in New Orleans and in surrounding communities. These failures produced murderous catastrophe due to the flooding, wreckage, disease, crime, and other consequences that ensued.
The U. S. Army of Engineers found itself responsible for the 2005 failures. USA Today wrote on June 1, 2006: ‘New Orleans’ levees failed during Hurricane Katrina because federal engineers for decades did not anticipate the potential height of storm waters and underestimated the strength required to hold them back, the Army Corps of Engineers concluded Thursday.’ Please see http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-06-01-levees_x.htm
A Federal Judge concurred with the Corps of Engineers’ assessment. In November 2009 U.S. Federal Judge Stanwood Duval awarded damages to plaintiffs against the Corps. Judge Duval wrote in his 189-page ruling: ‘The Corps’ lassitude and failure to fulfill its duties resulted in a catastrophic loss of human life and property in unprecedented proportions.’ Please see http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5gN3DhY32QNxP4tg3pG4VT_OPjr3A
Despite these findings, evidence from 2007 onward shows that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ rebuilding of levees in and nearby New Orleans is inadequate. Evidence also shows that the Corps’ new means of resisting storm-surge water are incomplete at best. In short, Levees, gates, and pumping-states are sure to fail again if New Orleans is struck by even a Category 1 (winds up to 95 miles–per-hour) Hurricane.
In 2007 the National Geographic Magazine ran a piece with the caption ‘New Orleans’ Rebuilt Levees “Riddled with Flaws”. The piece quoted Professor Robert Bea of the University of California-Berkeley Engineering Department. The article, ‘A City’s Flawed Armor’, and its interactive map of ‘Ten Points of Trouble’ can be seen at these urls–
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2007/08/new-orleans/online-extra-text
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2007/08/new-orleans/map-interactive
Harry Shearer’s 2010 documentary, “The Big Uneasy”, points out that the same “self-destructing” pumps which failed along Lake Pontchartrain in 2005 remain in place–http://www.loe.org/shows/segments.html?programID=11-P13-00034&segmentID=2 .
Regarding the actual content of levees’ rebuild-material, the engineer who writes the enlightening watchdog ‘fixthepumps’ blog summarizes on January 16, 2012: ‘That’s five different projects across two parishes with debris problems in the spring of 2010, almost none of which was revealed to the public.’ This engineer adds: ‘In the next part we’ll discuss even more projects where debris was found as recently as last spring [Spring of 2011], after the Corps declared the system 100-year ready.’ Please see http://fixthepumps.blogspot.com for many photos and schematics.
You may also wish to visit the website of the organization, Levees.org, headed by Sandy Rosenthal, that has been most active in raising public awareness about New Orleans’ and hundreds’ more U.S. communities’ vulnerability to levees-failure. The documentary, “The Katrina Myth: the Truth about a thoroughly unnatural disaster’ offers a calm but compelling, 10:52-long wake-up for the nation. It’s at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wln_iq5bc8k .
Many of us who live in greater New Orleans know from first-hand experience how vulnerable to hurricanes’ effects our infrastructure remains.
On August 31, 2008 the U.S. National Weather Service predicted that Hurricane Gustav would strike New Orleans as a Category 4 Hurricane with winds of 145 miles per hour. Gustav veered westward in the following 24 hours. While its Hurricane-force blows wrecked large parts of Houma and Baton Rouge, Gustav’s winds to New Orleans never exceeded that of Tropical Storm-strength, 70 miles per hour. Its predicted storm-surge of 15 to 22 feet into New Orleans diminished to nine feet, more than 10 feet less than the 22-foot peak storm-surge from Katrina in 2005.
Nevertheless, those of us who stayed in New Orleans for Gustav watched water crash over the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ new T-wall along the Industrial Canal, between the Lower 9th and Upper 9th Wards, for four hours on September 1, 2008. It lapped over railroad-tracks and onto France Road.
Water pours over the Industrial Canal levee at Florida Avenue in New Orleans. Storm-surge spilled over the wall along both its Lower 9th and Upper 9th Ward sides. Photo: John McCusker / The Times-Picayune
We also saw water over-run Lakeshore Drive by Lake Pontchartrain for hours that afternoon.
If Gustav had struck New Orleans as the Category 2 Hurricane that hit Houma 50 miles west of here, with winds up to 111 miles per hour, New Orleans would surely have been flooded to a catastrophic extent by the consequent storm-surge. Unknowable but imaginable calamities and misery would have ensued, again.
After Gustav a group of us in New Orleans came together to look at solutions to the region’s hurricane-related vulnerabilities. By late 2009 and early stages of the New Orleans Mayor’s race, that group had evolved into the Working People’s Committee on Levees, Wetlands and Jobs. This group included members from the Home Builders Institute, the Operational Plasterers and Cement Masons, and the Laborers International Union of North America . We also represented programs that had produced more than 200 graduates of training in the construction-trades in New Orleans over the preceding two years.
We presented Mayoral candidates with ‘Our Plan to Fight Crime through Levees, Wetlands, and Jobs.’ Our Plan had three action-oriented parts:
•’Raise or build levees and flood-walls around New Orleans and other imperiled communities to a minimal height of 25 feet, using dredged sediment as much as possible.’
•’Plant 1,000,000 trees and shrubs to restore wetlands from the Gulf Coast inland, wetlands that could naturally absorb the forces of Hurricanes and storm-surges.’
•’Employ at least 50,000 pre-Hurricane Katraina residents of New Orleans and elsewhere in southeast Louisiana to build levees and walls and plant trees and shrubs to restore wetlands.’
Now, more than two years later, such a Plan appears even more viable and urgent a framework for solving New Orleans’ and in fact the United States’ crucial problems.
We can and should train and employ ‘at-risk’ youth in skills and work that remediate our nation’s failing infrastructure and that address our society’s vulnerability to effects of climate-change (whether said climate-change is anthropogenic of not). Our Working People’s Committee flyer on Levees, Wetlands and Jobs is available as a PDF through this url: http://www.puppetgov.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/Levees.-Wetlands-Jobs-Plan.pdf
Other projects that would employ at ‘at-risk populations’ in work that could improve New Orleans, making the city more affordable and sustainable and reducing its peoples’ susceptibility to crime, have gone to the City of New Orleans, through advisors within the Administrations of Ray Nagin and Mitch Landrieu, over the past five years.
I’m personally acquainted with three proposals:
•The Sustainable Building Center that was to be the main revenue-generating component of the Danny Barker Place in the 7th Ward
•Earth-energy and solar-energy systems for residents of the Upper 9th Ward and elsewhere in greater New Orleans that would employ more than 1000 apprentices and technicians over the first two years of this program to take advantage of southeast Louisiana’s high favorability for renewable energy
•And the Wesley United Digital Arts and Training Center (or WUDAT-C) in Central City that was to train and employ young people in the digital arts at a site that was before 2005′s flooding the home to New Orleans’ second-oldest African-Americans church.
Stanley Covington, Don Paul, and O.C. Draughan working on the first house of Structural Concrete Integrated Panels in New Orleans' Upper 9th Ward, July 2007, photo by Jaime Hazard
The Sustainable Building Center and Danny Barker Place evolved from efforts by Rebuild Green of early 2007 in the Upper 9th Ward. In May of that year, Rebuild Green introduced the Adopt-a-House and Adopt-a-Block outreach later adopted by Make It Right. In that month, too, while building the first house of Structural Concete Integrate Panels SCIPS) in the Upper 9th Ward, Rebuild Green also partnered with the architectural firm of Perkins + Will with plans for a Sustainable Building Center to be located in the 7th Ward at one corner of Galvez Street and A. P. Tureaud Boulevard. The Sustainable Building Center was to be (and still could be) the main revenue-generating component of the Danny Barker Place, a multi-purpose complex would include a Theater, schools in the arts and trades, and 18 residences. The Danny Barker Place was to be equipped with solar and earth-energy systems for net-zero use of utilities. Please check out a PDF of the beautiful rendering that Perkins + Will produced for the proposed Danny Barker Place and its Sustainable Building Center.
The S B C reasonably projected the training and employment of more than 1000 local residents in the installation of earth-energy systems that could supply an endlessly renewable, cost-saving source of power for air-conditioning and heating to thousands of homes in southeast Louisiana, similar to the U.S. Army’s 4003 units at Fort Polk. Please see these pdfs for more on the S B C and earth-energy systems.
The Perkins + Will renderings and pro forma projections for the Danny Barker Place and the Sustainable Business Center were given to Ed Blakely and Jerry Williams of Mayor Ray Nagin’s Administration in 2007.
HBI-class volunteers work on West wall of the Wesley's Sanctuary, December 2009
The Wesley United Digital Arts and Training Center evolved from efforts to simply save from demolition the two-story, 7200-square-foot building at 2517 Jackson Avenue that had been home to the Wesley United Methodist Church. A lack of return by the Wesley’s elderly congregation and financial considerations caused the Methodist Conference of Louisiana to leave the building vacant after 2005′s flooding. Sakura Kone brought volunteers from Common Ground Relief into the building in mid-2007 to preserve it. Please see Lolis Eric Elie’s article in the New Orleans’ Times-Picayune–http://www.nola.com/news/index.ssf/2009/08/wesley_united_methodist_church.html By mid-2009 those of us who formed Restore Wesley United saw that one good use of this irreplaceable building would be a Digital Arts and Training Center whose primary aim was education and employment of the neighboring Central City community. The ground floor at 2517 Jackson would hold three classrooms. The spacious upstairs Sanctuary would hold commercial facilities–editing bays, a Green Screen, a performance hall, and a recording studio.
Over the next 18 months, into January of 2011, efforts of Restore Wesley United progressed with the help of many partners. Two grants from the Louisiana Disaster and Recovery Foundation, three from Dave Eggers’ Zeitoun Foundation, and the contributions of hundreds of volunteers and donors (Adopt-a-Brick and Adopt-a-Pew) moved us forward. We had support from the Early Childhood and Family Learning Foundation at the Mahalia Jackson Center one block away along Jackson Avenue, from the Ashe Cultural Center, from United Saints of Central City, from the Preservation Resource Center, the National Trust for Historic Preservation, from Strip Ease of New Orleans, Central City Home Depot, Hal Collums Construction, Ecologic Mortar in Pennsylvania, Frey Vineyards in California, Organic Valley Farms across the U.S, and New Orleans’ architect Steven Bingler and his Concordia firm. We also had support from musicians Evan Christopher, Michael Franti, Helen Gillett, Kirk Joseph, the Preservation Hall All-Stars, Jonathan Richman, Patti Smith, and Ben Vereen. We had support from writers Foster Gamble, Chuck Kinder, Michael Rogers, April Smith, Scott Turow and Tom Zigal. We had support from distance-runners Amby Burfoot, Eve Pell, Ric Sayre and Steve Spence and we had support from dozens of adopters inside and outside New Orleans. You can read a summary of the project as of January 2011, written by Zoie Clift, in the online magazine of the National Trust for Historic Preservation--http://www.preservationnation.org/magazine/story-of-the-week/2011/new-orleans-mother-church.html . Zoie’s piece has a nice photo of synergy–collegiate volunteers, Michael Franti and bandmates, in the Sanctuary’s great, brick-walled space.
In April of 2011 representatives of Restore Wesley United met twice with Scott Hutcheson, Mayor Landrieu’s chief Advisor on Cultural Economy. Our talk was particularly about how the WUDAT-C would work with the Early Childhood and Family Learning Foundation to bring at-risk youth into classes that would both inspire their creativity and make them employable in the global entertainment-industry.
Both meetings went well. The second, on April 20, 2011, was especially encouraging. Attending it along with Scott Hutcheson and me were Patrick Cooper (founder of the ECFLF), Katie Gunnell of the New Orleans Office of Film and Video, Scott’s assistant Asante Salaam, and Gail Glickman of Chicago and New Orleans. I presented a Budget and Schedule that promised to complete enough structural, plumbing and electrical work at the Wesley site for its ground-floor to be opened as an educational facility within 16 weeks for a total cost of less than $487,000. Scott spoke enthusiastically about funding sources through City of New Orleans assistance–the “two pots” of Community Development Block Grants, the Economic Development Fund, Urban Development Action Grants, the United States’ Community Development Financial Institutions Fund, … Scott said our next meeting should involve Cedric Grant and/or Tony Faccione from “the eleventh floor” and that we could “maybe get it in before Jazzfest.”
Finally, I thought. Finally, here are people within City government who understand what we’re trying to do and want to help, I thought. After two years, tens of thousands of volunteers’ hours worked at the Wesley project, and about $15,000 of personal funds expended, a breakthrough appeared to be at hand.
Nothing of subsequent, positive response has come since from the City of New Orleans. I sent e-mail answers and elaborations to Scott and Asante on April 25 and April 27, 2011. Asante responded to them and to further communication in June that a response was in process. On July 21, after meeting with Pat Cooper, I sent Scott another e-mail, repeating readiness to move forward. No response has come from the later effort, either.
Other organizations and efforts in and for New Orleans have met a similar lack of response over the past one to six years. Common Ground Relief, where I worked in 2006, gutted more than 1200 houses and employed more than 20 ex-offenders at the Woodlands Apartments complex during that year. Common Ground Relief received no material support from City, State or Federal Government that year.
Photos of work by other, more recent, well-meaning organizations, such as the Central City Artist Project, the Lower 9th Ward Village, and Our School at Blair Grocery, can be found in the Updates section at restorewesleyunited.org.
This year, Pat Cooper, principal fund-raiser for the $17-million renovation/creation that’s now the multi-service Mahalia Jackson Center, left the Early Childhood and Family Learning Foundation to become Superintendent of Schools in Lafayette, Louisiana. His plans for five more ECFLF facilities in disadvantaged neighborhoods of New Orleans are now in abeyance.
My intention in looking back at frustrated efforts over the past six years in New Orleans is not to complain.
The intention is, rather, to raise again solutions to the problems that Mayor Mitch Landrieu and tens of thousands more in New Orleans recognize as most urgent for this city to grow and prosper as a multi-racial, cultural and economic center.
Nowhere else is like this place in its mix and its potentials. As “The Katrina Myth” documentary says, “New Orleans is just where it should be.”
The New Orleans that remains vital is of old, native cultures and new, global influxes.
The New Orleans that had a vibrant working-class of people who earned with their hands and skills is the New Orleans that produced the artists and creativity revered and relished by the world. Broad-based and reasonably remunerative employment, truly public education, and the accompanying revival of roots and community that now can cross divisions of race and class through 21st-century technology, will let this city rise again and let it be the global model that it’s “gumbo” make it uniquely fit to be.
Here’s a photo of the kind of community that once was a constant in New Orleans.
Mothers teaching children at Lafitte Housing, circa 1940
And here are videos of the Nicholas brothers, Fayard and Harold, dancing in the closing number, “Jumpin’ Jive”, of Stormy Weather, 1943, a movie coincident with the kind of community you can see above. Fred Astaire called the Nicholas brothers’ performance here ‘the greatest dance number ever filmed.’
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Nice investigative work. You are able to put into words from things we have witnessed accruing through the years. That is why you don’t see me run in the evenings any longer. I have had to shorten my track because I no longer feel safe, even in the Point.
Agree totally and understand frustration felt in “Culture of Death”, but believe that the majority of the New Orleans population (the ones with the Mardi Gras Mentality) just don’t care. And they wonder why some call New Orleans a Third World Country. Ha!! One soon realizes that the powers that be appear to talk the talk, but never really walk the walk. Your paragraph where you write that you finally thought you had found people in City Govt that understood and wanted to help…….really hit home. I’m thankful there are so many (like you) who do care, who have viable solutions and keep reminding us (with your words and actions) to care and that something must be done. Guess I’ll close with “throw me something Mister and I don’t mean Mardi Gras beads.