﻿Hi I’m Clint Smith and this is Crash Course Black American History. As many of you know, I was born
and raised in New Orleans. New Orleans is in my heart, in my soul, and every fiber of my being.
It’s the city that raised me and the city that made me who I am today.
In 2005, when I was 17 years old, I was excited to start my final year of high school.
I was excited for homecoming, for prom, for Friday night football games,
for winning a state championship as the captain of my school’s soccer team,
and for celebrating college acceptances with all of my friends. But it didn’t work out that way.
On August 28, 2005 Hurricane Katrina made landfall in New Orleans, and I evacuated with my family
to Houston, TX. I still remember how long it took us to get there, how we were surrounded bumper to
bumper by cars filled with hundreds of thousands of people trying to flee the city for safety.
When we got to Houston, I sat on my aunt and uncle’s couch and watched CNN as the grocery store
where we used to shop, the church we used to attend, and the school I used to go to were all
submerged under water. We later got a call that our home was submerged and destroyed as well.
It’s hard to express what that moment felt like, and in many ways, more than 17 years later
I’m still trying to find the right words to express it.
I say all of this because, this episode, and this subject is very personal to me.
Hurricane Katrina impacted my family, my friends, and me in profound ways. And it’s important to remember—
as we always try to remind people—that this history is not just an abstraction, or a scholarly exercise,
but something that impacted, and continues to impact the lives of real people.
Hurricane Katrina was also a moment that further demonstrated how racism is not just interpersonal,
but is systemic. It’s not just someone using a racial slur,
it’s the failure of a government to invest in and protect a community of disproportionately
poor and Black people who had been susceptible to a disaster like this for decades.
There’s a lot to unpack here, so let’s start the show.
INTRO
On August 23, 2005, a tropical depression formed over the Bahamas and before long it transformed
into a hurricane named Katrina, with a growing strength and ferocity that began to really worry people.
Government leaders across the Gulf states began telling people that they needed to evacuate,
and they needed to do it quickly. On August 28, many people had done so,
but for a range of reasons—because of a lack of transportation, costs, illness, mobility,
and personal choice—at least one hundred thousand people did not evacuate and were left stranded.
As the storm hit, the weather was rough,
but there was a hope that—at least in New Orleans— the worst of it
had been avoided. But then the levees around the city—and elsewhere across the Gulf region—
began to fail and massive flooding began. Over 50 levees and floodwalls were breached,
and there was more than $100 billion dollars in damage.
And this is part of what left so many people frustrated about what happened during Katrina,
that the flooding came not simply from the storm but from the failure of human
engineering, a failure that had fatal consequences for thousands, and impacted the lives of millions.
A June 2007 report by the American Society of Civil Engineers indicated that two-thirds of
the flooding was caused by the multiple failures of the city's floodwalls.
Let's learn a little bit more about levees - and how racism can turn an
engineering issue into something more sinister - in the Thought Bubble.
On a basic level, levees are supposed to hold back water so it doesn’t flood communities.
Levees can be built with materials like soil, sand, or rocks or with concrete, blocks of wood,
plastic, or metal. They can also help pump water away from communities. With a city
like New Orleans, where so much of the city is below sea level, levees are essential.
And people knew this. In 1965, Congress authorized the “Lake Pontchartrain and
Vicinity Hurricane Protection Project” following Hurricane Betsy, which was supposed to increase
New Orleans’ hurricane protection. But this project had not even been completed
by the time the storm hit in 2005. During Katrina, many of the communities
located at the lowest elevations and near the most unstable parts of the levees ended up bearing
the brunt of the flooding. Due to racism that started with historical segregation in the city,
those environments were often inhabited by Black and lower income folks in New Orleans.
Housing segregation, racial and restrictive covenants – other types of laws that encourage
housing segregation – and other measures had been designed to keep Black Americans from
moving into safer, higher elevation areas. And even though many of those measures were
illegal by the time Hurricane Katrina happened, the effects still persisted.
Thanks Thought Bubble. So, the people who most needed to evacuate,
because they lived in the most vulnerable areas to flooding, were often unable to do so.
Many of the poorest residents of New Orleans did not have cars, money, or places to stay
anywhere outside of New Orleans. Much of their community was concentrated
where they lived. The only way they could possibly evacuate was by walking.
And even when they did try this—tried to find safety for their children, their elders,
their neighbors, and themselves—they were met with the threat of violence.
Thousands of people tried to walk across the Crescent City Connection bridge to the nearby
suburbs. But when they did, they were met by armed police officers who stood on the bridge
to force people to turn back, sometimes they even fired their weapons over their heads.
Elsewhere, at the Danziger Bridge, police officers actually shot and killed two unarmed
civilians and seriously injured four others. All of these factors left many of the poorest
residents stranded, at risk of death, and traumatized by their experiences.
As the water levels of the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain rose, the streets became
even more flooded. There were parts of the city that were flowing with water up to 20 feet deep,
and within days up to 85% of the city was underwater.
People were waiting on the roofs of their homes, hoping for rescue. People lost
everything that they had. Many survivors had to take boats or helicopters to evacuation sites
at the Superdome or Convention Center in New Orleans. The Coast Guard rescued 34,000 people
and ordinary citizens organized to provide food and shelter for anybody that they could find.
Even still, it's estimated that between 1,000 and 4,000 people lost their lives,
most to drowning. It is considered the deadliest hurricane since 1928. Many survivors ended up
permanently displaced and moved to cities like Mobile, Alabama; Houston, Texas;
Baton Rouge, Louisiana; and Chicago, Illinois. I have friends and family who left when they
evacuated from the storm, and then never came back. Over one million people across the Gulf Coast
were displaced and resettled elsewhere. For many, the narrative around Hurricane Katrina
was that New Orleans, and Louisiana as a whole, were unprepared for this disaster. And there was
a lot of finger pointing. Some people blamed Mayor Ray Nagin for not evacuating the city earlier,
for the lack of a clear plan, or for not anticipating the obstacles that existed for low-income people
who wanted to evacuate but couldn’t. Mayor Nagin pointed his finger at the
federal government for designing the levees so poorly. He also said that the government was
very slow to respond and was incompetent in helping New Orleans residents.
For others, it reflected how the wars in the Middle East were taking up too much time,
energy, and focus—and distracted the federal government from solving important problems
right here in the United States. Almost immediately after the storm ended,
it started to become very clear that the federal government, including the
Federal Emergency Management Agency or FEMA for short, along with President George W. Bush,
did not understand how bad things were in New Orleans and across the rest of the Gulf Coast.
FEMA was criticized by many for being slow to respond and uncoordinated in their efforts.
Many attributed this lack of urgency to the fact that the victims of the storm were largely poor and Black.
New Orleans was a majority Black city and nearly 30% of the city lived in poverty.
Many African American political leaders stated that when hurricanes have hit
predominantly white cities, like Palm Beach Florida, the federal government
moves extremely quickly in its response. Whereas in New Orleans, even a year-and-a-half
after the hurricane, much of the city had not been rebuilt, and many neighborhoods –
like the predominantly Black Ninth Ward – were still in ruins for years.
Even when help with finding shelter did come, it came in the form of unstable
government trailers that were often filled with toxic levels of formaldehyde.
Ultimately, the debacle had a range of political consequences. The Director of FEMA,
Michael D. Brown, was viewed by many as unsuited for his duties and he was forced to resign.
The New Orleans Police Department superintendent was also forced to resign.
Louisiana governor Kathleen Blanco did not run for re-election in 2007.
And Mayor Ray Nagin left office in 2010 and was later convicted of bribery, fraud,
and money laundering during his tenure as mayor.
In November 2009, a federal judge ruled that the Army Corp of Engineers were infrastructurally
irresponsible and to blame for most of the flooding during the hurricane.
This was the first time that a specific government agency was held liable for
Hurricane Katrina flooding, but the judge limited liability to the worst parts of the damage in
the lower 9th Ward and St. Bernard Parish. Thousands of Black Americans were left destitute,
displaced, and dead in the wake of this catastrophe. The demographic landscape of
the city was forever changed as well. In the years following the storm,
many of the Black families who had lived in the city for generations,
could not afford to move back and rebuild. Oftentimes, the people who came in their place
were younger white Americans who had the means that many Black New Orleans families did not.
Some communities that were once all-Black, now have few Black people left in them.
Gentrification is something that almost every urban city experiences,
but in New Orleans the process was supercharged by the devastation wrought by Katrina.
Over the course of the past 17 years, I have replayed the events of those days following
Katrina over and over and over again in my head. I think about the people in the Superdome forced
to sleep in a place where they were subjected to violence, hunger, neglect, and fear.
I think about the homes that families in New Orleans—and across the Gulf Coast—
lived in for generations and how those homes were completely destroyed along with
generations of memories inside of them. I think about the Black people wading through
water filled with sewage and death in order to search for food and shelter and help.
And I think, most of all, about how it is almost impossible for me to imagine that the response to
Katrina would have been the same if the people in the Superdome, or on top of their roofs,
or wading through sewage water were affluent and white, rather than poor and Black.
In fact it’s hard for me to imagine white affluent people would have ever been left
in the conditions like those that were present in the Superdome at all.
Also, we can’t talk about this storm, without also talking about climate change. Many leaders
on the national and international stage have argued that Black and Brown folks are usually
pushed to parts of the world where the effects of climate change are the most vicious.
The Army Corps of Engineers even stated that the impact of climate change is impairing their
ability to produce safe environments for residents of places like New Orleans.
And, obviously, this doesn’t just impact the United States.
Leaders like Mia Mottley, the Prime Minister of Barbados, have been very vocal about getting
the western world to understand that it will largely be smaller previously colonized islands,
as well as low lying coastal regions, that will be disproportionately impacted by the increasing
frequency and ferocity of these storms. It is something that all of us need to worry about,
and we need to think collectively about what is owed to the countries most at risk.
Hurricane Katrina was a devastating moment in American history,
and one that I’ll remember for the rest of my life. But it was also a warning of what can
result from the dangerous cocktail of racism, economic inequality, and climate change.
All of these problems are still urgent and pervasive in the United States today,
and while awareness of these challenges seems to be on the rise, it is rare
that we consider them in tandem. Katrina made clear the interconnectedness of these issues,
a lesson still relevant nearly two decades later.
Thanks for watching! I’ll see you next time.
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