’New Orleans is our Gettysburg’

A Generation’s Defining Event

By BC Publishers Glen Ford and Peter Gamble

This Saturday’s elections in New Orleans represent yet
another element of the vast crime committed against Black
America. With as many as 300,000 residents, overwhelmingly
African American, strewn about the country in government-
engineered exile, the elections are an insult to the very
idea of democracy, and to the dignity of all Black people.

This farcical exercise in faux democracy will no doubt be
followed by corporate media declarations that New Orleans is
returning to ’normalcy’ - the same term that the media
bandied about when the city held a shrunken Mardi Gras, in
February.

Behind that bland word, ’normalcy,’ lies a wish list and
narrative that sees white rule as normative in America - the
way things should be - and Black electoral power as an
aberration, a kind of organized pathology in which people are
assumed to be up to no good. Despite Katrina’s vast damage to
Louisiana infrastructure and commerce, there is a current of
elation among white elites and common folk alike, at the
winds and waters that cleansed New Orleans of its two-thirds
Black majority, which was seen as a sore on the body politic,
a den of Otherness and iniquity.

The white American narrative, which begins with national
’democratic’ elections after the birth of the republic in
which only a tiny fraction of the population - white male
owners of substantial property - could vote, bestows mythic
significance to the electoral exercise, no matter how bogus
and profoundly undemocratic. Thus, two ink-dipped elections
in U.S.- occupied Iraq are heralded as benchmarks of
progress, despite the deepening and widening conflict and
misery that afflict the Iraqi people. In New Orleans, the
mystical mantra of elections in which the majority of the
population cannot fully participate, is equated with a kind
of ’recovery’ from the storm and flood - when no such thing
has occurred.

But the whites of New Orleans are free of the overwhelming
Black presence - free at last! - a prerequisite for the
creation of a ’new’ and ’better’ city. Some speak openly of
the new lease on life that the dispersal of Black residents
has afforded the high- ground whites that have found
themselves the new majority. (See ’New Orleans Elections
Fever,’ April 20, 2006). When their rule is sanctioned by
this weekend’s elections, ’normalcy’ will be just around the
corner.

’At the same time that they were talking about holding
elections, they were holding evictions,’ said Rev. Lennox
Yearwood, chairman and CEO of Washington-based Hip Hop
Caucus, who has immersed his organization in New Orleans
political organizing and relief work. ’What needs to happen
is the organizing of our people, wherever they are.’

The task is formidable, because the entire national and state
white power structure is determined to be permanently rid of
those exiled by Katrina. The Louisiana state legislature has
rushed to put New Orleans schools up for sale, to preclude
the return of Black families. The bill states that "the
recovery district may sell any property which the school
district determines will not be used for providing
educational services on or before August 29, 2006."

’Recovery district.’ What a deformation of the English
language. The white powers-that-be want only to ’recover’ New
Orleans for themselves, and ensure that there will be no
place for even the most determined Black exiles to return to.
The white search for ’normalcy’ is, in reality, an ongoing
crime against humanity. Saturday’s election is intended to
bestow respectability to the crime.

However, a bleached New Orleans will never be legitimate to
African Americans, who understand that they have been
collectively raped of their personhood, not by weather, but
by man. Bogus elections provide a false facade of due process
– a fragrance to hide the stench of raw expulsion of a people
– but it does not fool a single African American anywhere in
the nation.

In the words of University of Chicago political scientist
Michael Dawson, Katrina ’could very well shape this
generation of young people in the same way that the
assassinations of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King shaped our
generation’ - the men and women who developed their political
consciousness in the Sixties.

Rev. Yearwood agrees. ’People are becoming much more
political,’ said the 26-year-old minister. ’The common person
in Houston, Atlanta, New Orleans is much more engrossed in
politics, in the spirit of self- determination. I’m
encouraged.’

Katrina is becoming a rallying cry for all of Black America,
creating a new generation of activists. ’I’m beginning to see
more Fannie Lou Hamers emerging,’ said Rev. Yearwood.
"People don’t need more organizations telling them what to
do. They are saying, Just give me the tools and I’ll get the
job done."

While the powerful conspire to make a fait accompli of the
New Orleans diaspora, the results of which will be certified
by the most undemocratic election since passage of the Voting
Rights Act in 1965, the political consciousness of Black
America is being transformed. A horrible lesson has been
relearned: Katrina "suggested to Blacks the utter lack of the
liberal possibility in the United States," says Prof. Dawson.
We must strike out on our own path, with whatever allies are
willing to make common cause with us. The New Orleans
election will never be ’closure’ for us.

’New Orleans is our Gettysburg,’ said Rev. Yearwood. ’If we
lose there, we lose all the marbles.’

The forces arrayed against a Black return to New Orleans do
not realize that they have set in motion the entire national
Black polity. Just as President John Kennedy inspired western
Europeans when he declared ’Ich bin ein Berliner’ (’I am a
Berliner’) in 1963, all Black people see their fates entwined
with the New Orleans diaspora - ’I am a New Orleanian.’

We understand that the enforced exile of hundreds of
thousands of our brothers and sisters is an assault and
disenfranchisement of us all, and that we cannot afford to
lose in this twilight struggle. Defeat is not an option. As
Rev. Yearwood put it: ’You can live in LA - you lose. You can
be in New York - you lose. If we lose in New Orleans, we lose
it all.’

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