The dispute focuses on the responsibility of relief organizations to speak out against injustice in the communities in which they work. Since September of 2006, St. Bernard Parish has been aggressive in passing racially discriminatory laws and ordinances. Although these laws have faced condemnation in Federal court and in the media, rebuilding organizations active in the parish have so far refused to take a public position.

Racial discrimination has a long history in St. Bernard politics. Judge Leander Perez, a fiery leader who dominated the parish for almost 50 years, was known nationally as a spokesman for racial segregation. The main road through the Parish was named after Perez, and his legacy still has a hold on the political scene there. Lynn Dean, a member of the St Bernard parish council told reporter Lizzy Ratner, “They don’t want the blacks back… What they’d like to do now with Katrina is say, we’ll wipe out all of them. They’re not gonna say that out in the open, but how do you say? Actions speak louder than words. There’s their action.”

The action Lynn was referencing is a “blood relative” ordinance the council passed in 2006. The law made it illegal for Parish homeowners to rent to anyone not directly related to the renter. In St Bernard, which was 85% white before Katrina hit, this effectively kept African Americans, many of whom were still displaced from New Orleans and looking for nearby housing, from moving in. The Greater New Orleans Fair Housing Action Center sued the Parish, saying the ordinance violated the 1968 Fair Housing Act. A judge agreed, saying it was racially discriminatory in intent and impact.

The story doesn’t end there. St. Bernard’s government agreed to a settlement, but the illegal ordinance was followed by another, blocking multi-family construction in the Parish. Last month, U.S. District Judge Ginger Berrigan found the Parish to be in contempt of court, saying, “The Parish Council’s intent…is and was racially discriminatory.” An editorial in the New Orleans Times-Picayune agreed, saying, “This ruling strips off the camouflage and reveals St. Bernard’s actions for what they really are: an effort to keep lower-income people and African-Americans from moving into the mostly white parish.”

Relief Work Questioned

St. Bernard Parish was heavily damaged by flooding in the aftermath of Katrina. Thirteen percent of households lived below the federal poverty line, and every home took in water. Many organizations and volunteers have come through to volunteer time and donate money, including United Way, Salvation Army, and the Greater New Orleans Foundation.

An organization called the St. Bernard Project, which was founded in 2006 by two transplants from Washington, DC, has become one of the most high profile organizations active in the region, with millions of dollars in corporate and individual donations and thousands of volunteers.

This has been a big couple of weeks for the St. Bernard Project. On August 29, President Obama mentioned them in his weekly address, saying, “The St. Bernard Project has drawn together volunteers to rebuild hundreds of homes, where people can live with dignity and security.” Last week, the touring production of the Broadway show The Color Purple, produced by Oprah Winfrey, announced that they will be raising money for the organization, and that author Alice Walker will be personally participating in the fundraising. Last year, CNN named co-founder Liz McCartney its Hero of the Year.

But this national acclamation has only increased criticisms of the work happening in the Parish. Lance Hill, the executive director of the Southern Institute for Education and Research at Tulane University, first raised his voice on the issue in 2006, after the ordinance was passed. Hill is quick to point out that he is not against rebuilding work in the Parish. However, he adds, “If they chose to rebuild homes that Blacks and Jews would be barred from, at a minimum they have a moral obligation to inform volunteers of the policies of the Parish. To not do so is to mislead volunteers and donors and to become complicit with racism.”

Hill is also one of the signatories of an open letter, released this week, which expresses deep concerns over rebuilding efforts in the parish. “Regrettably, many relief and volunteer organizations chose not to respond to the ‘blood relative’ law, remaining silent on this issue,” the letter states. “With the benefit of hindsight, we now know that St. Bernard Parish officials interpreted silence as consent, which has now emboldened this rogue government to pursue other means to defy the Fair Housing Act.”

Organizers say that the letter is intended to pressure organizations to think about larger issues of injustice as they work in the region. “It is time that we take a stand against housing discrimination in St. Bernard and throughout the Gulf Coast,” the letter states. “And make clear what the moral imperatives are for all organizations that seek to rebuild the Gulf Coast as a fair and just society.” Among the signers of the letter are human rights organizations like the National Economic and Social Rights Initiative, regional groups like Moving Forward Gulf Coast, and local initiatives like MayDay Nola, which works on housing in New Orleans.

Zack Rosenburg, the cofounder of St. Bernard Project, is angered by the complaints of Hill and others. “We are not an advocacy group and we’re not commenting on that,” he told me, referring to the laws of the Parish. “We’re helping people get home.” Rosenburg added that at least 30% of the families they have worked with have been African American, and he asked me to “think about the Black families who are living in FEMA trailers and want to move home, before writing this piece… try to build things up instead of pulling things down.”

Lance Hill and other advocates claim that working on relief without challenging systemic injustices actually exacerbates the problem. They point out that the number of houses rebuilt for African Americans in the community – perhaps two hundred at the most, if you include all nonprofits working in the area – pales in comparison to the thousands that have potentially been excluded by the laws of the parish. “The main reason that these relief groups have had to disproportionately rebuild Black rentals,” explains Hill, “is because the Parish is tearing down or blocking construction of affordable housing faster than the relief groups can rebuild.”

“This is why this issue in St. Bernard has troubled me so much,” adds Hill. “Exclusion is at the core of the injustices of Katrina. The deliberate efforts to prevent people from returning and the denial that these policies and practices were in place has been the central issue. The exclusionary ideology that was widespread in the white community in New Orleans became law in St. Bernard.”

Organizers hope that the multiple levels of pressure will ultimately challenge elected officials in St. Bernard Parish to make the area an example of rebuilding with justice for all. “Our silence doesn’t help anybody,” says Hill. “It destroys more than the relief groups can ever dream of building.”

Up a darkened stairway and through the detritus of a building that looks like its been scavenged for anything of value to sell, Rohn and Miller enter a sundrenched room. Inside is Michael Palmer, a 57-year-old white former construction worker and merchant seaman who has made a home here. Palmer – his friends call him Mickey – is in some ways lucky. He found a room with a door that locks. He salvaged some furniture from other parts of the hospital, so he has a bed, a couch, and a rug. Best of all, he has a fourth-floor room with a balcony. “Of all the homeless,” he says, “I probably have the best view.”

Mickey has lived here for six months. He’s been homeless since shortly after Katrina, and this is by far the best place he’s stayed in that time. “I’ve lived on the street,” he says. “I’ve slept in a cardboard box.” He is a proud man, thin and muscled with a fresh shave, clean clothes and a trim mustache. He credits a nearby church, which lets him shave and shower.

But Palmer would like to be able to pay rent again. “My apartment was around $450. I could afford $450. I can’t afford $700 or $800 and that’s what the places have gone up to.” Keeping himself together, well-dressed and fresh, Mickey is trying to go back to the life he had. “I have never lived on the dole of the state,” he says proudly. “I’ve never been on welfare, never collected food stamps.” Palmer rented an apartment before Katrina. He did repairs and construction. “I had my own business,” he says. “I had a pickup truck with all my tools, and all that went under water.”

Palmer is one of thousands of homeless people living in New Orleans’ storm damaged and abandoned homes and buildings. Four years after Katrina, recovery and rebuilding has come slow to this city, and there are many boarded-up homes to choose from. The Greater New Orleans Community Data Center counts 65,888 abandoned residential addresses in New Orleans, and this number doesn’t include any of the many non-residential buildings, like the hospital Mickey stays in. Overall, about a third of the addresses in the city are vacant or abandoned, the highest rate in the nation. UNITY for the Homeless is the only organization surveying these spaces, and Miller and Rohn are the only fulltime staff on the project. They have surveyed 1,330 buildings – a small fraction of the total number of empty structures. Of those, 564 were unsecured. Nearly 40% of them showed signs of use, including a total of 270 bedrolls or mattresses.

Using conservative estimates, UNITY estimates at least 6,000 squatters, and a total of about 11,000 homeless individuals in the city.

UNITY workers have also found that not all people living in New Orleans’ abandoned homes are squatters. In the last three months alone, they have found nine homeowners living in their own toxic, flood-damaged, often completely unrepaired homes. These are people living in buildings — identified as abandoned and not fit for human habitation — that they (or extended family members) actually own.

The abandoned building dwellers they’ve found are generally older than the overall homeless population, with high rates of disability and illness. The average age of folks they have found is 45, and the oldest was 90. Over 70% report or show signs of psychiatric disorders, and 42% show signs of disabling medical illnesses and problems. Disabling means “people that are facing death if not treated properly,” clarifies Rohn. “We’re not talking about something like high blood pressure.”

Life in Abandoned Homes

“This leg here bent backwards and the muscle came up,” says Naomi Burkhalter, an elderly Black woman in a wheelchair, sitting outside of the abandoned house she lives in and gesturing to her badly twisted leg. She was injured during Katrina, and can’t walk. She stays in a flood-damaged house in New Orleans’ Gert Town neighborhood, with no electricity or running water. She says the owner – who cannot afford to repair the home – knows she lives there, along with two other women. When they need water, they fill bottles up from neighbors. When she needs to get in and out of her house, she crawls, very slowly dragging herself up and down the steps with her hands, leaving her wheelchair outside and hoping no one takes it. Miss Naomi worked at a shrimp company and rented an apartment before Katrina. Now, between her injury and higher rents, she can no longer afford her former home. “My rent was 350 dollars,” she explains. “But when I came back, my rent was up to $1200.” Burkhalter has been homeless since then.

UNITY has received funding from the federal government for 752 housing vouchers specifically to help house the city’s homeless population. They have put people on a list, with those in the most danger of dying if they don’t get help on the top of the list. However, the vouchers still have not arrived, and at least 16 people from the list have already died while waiting. “The stress and trauma that these people have endured cannot be overstated,” says Martha Kegel, executive director of UNITY. “The neighborhood infrastructure that so many people depended on is gone.”

This problem was exacerbated by the demolition of thousands of units of public housing, an act which not only took away the community that many people found brought them comfort and safety, but has also made affordable rentals for poor New Orleanians even harder to find. Section 8 subsidized housing has been offered as a solution for those displaced from public housing and other poor renters, but a new study from Greater New Orleans Fair Housing Action Center (GNOFHAC) shows that discrimination keeps many people from finding quality housing through the program. According to the report, 82% of landlords in the city either refused to accept Section 8 vouchers, or added insurmountable requirements.

The study found that both discrimination on the part of landlords (99% of Section 8 voucher holders in Orleans parish are Black) and mismanagement on the part of the housing agency were barriers. One prospective landlord told a tester for GNOFHAC that he wouldn’t rent to Section 8 holders, “until Black ministers…start teaching morals and ethics to their own, so they don’t have litters of pups like animals, and they’re not milking the system.”

The mismanagement from the Housing Authority of New Orleans (HANO) was also a big problem for prospective landlords. “I faxed HANO the needed information 12 times for the rent I was never paid” said one landlord. Another housing provider said, “I called every day for a month and never got a call back.”

Last month, more than a hundred members of STAND for Dignity, a grassroots membership project of the New Orleans Workers Center for Racial Justice, protested outside of the offices of HANO, decrying their lack of action. A single mother named Ayesha told the crowd that she had been on the Section 8 waiting list for eight years, and still hasn’t received any help. She is paying 80% of her income on rent, and has been forced to go months at a time without water, gas or lights. George Tucker, another member of STAND, and also (like Mickey Palmer) a former merchant mariner, told the assembled crowd his story of being evicted from his apartment because HANO lost his paperwork. Because of bureaucratic carelessness, he was homeless for thirteen months. “This governmental crookedness is not new,” he said. “But it cannot continue without consequences.”

Last week, at least partly in response to criticism from folks like the members of STAND, HANO announced that they would accept new applications for Section 8 vouchers, for the first time in six years. The period that they will accept applications in is only a week long – from September 6 through 12.

Fear and Harassment

“My best friend died three weeks ago in this chair,” says Mickey Palmer gesturing next to him in his room in the abandoned hospital. “There was two other people staying here with me. One gentleman got in an accident about two months ago and he’s paralyzed in the hospital. Another friend of mine OD’ed and died here three weeks ago. My best friend. So I’m here alone.”

Palmer also fears police harassment. “The police hate homeless people,” he declares. “They’ll arrest me on drunk in public,” he says. “I haven’t had a drink in months.” Gesturing around the room that he has made into a home, he adds, “Of course, this is illegal. If I get caught I can not only be evicted, but incarcerated. I could go to jail for trespassing.”

This fear drives the homeless further underground, and makes it even harder for organizations like UNITY to find them and offer help. “Our city has a long history of police criminalization of homelessness, so people have reason to hide,” explains Martha Kegel.

Despite the size and scope of this problem, help has been hard to come by, from either the city, state, or federal government. “I’m not a politician and I’m not politically savvy,” says Palmer. “But I don’t think they care.”

In a rare step forward last month, both houses of Louisiana’s legislature unanimously passed a bill creating a statewide agency – to be almost entirely funded by the federal government – to address the issue of homelessness. However, Governor Jindal vetoed the bill. Jindal also vetoed funding for the New Orleans Adolescent Hospital, further reducing medical and mental health services in the city – another factor that has made life hard for many homeless folks in the city. As rates of mental illness rise in the city, we now have less treatment available then ever before.

For people like Mickey, caught in a city with few good paying jobs, much more expensive housing, and ever-decreasing social services, there are not many options. “At one time we were part of the city and part of the workforce,” Mickey says. “But people cannot afford the housing in New Orleans anymore. I find most of the people I know, my friends, they can’t afford the rent.”

Like most people in his position, Palmer has felt hopelessness at his plight. “I try not to get depressed, he says, nervously flicking his lighter. “But this can get you depressed. Coming back here last night got me a little depressed.”

The occasion was a post-show celebration of the taping of Hip Hop Kom, an American Idol-type talent competition for Palestinian rappers. Fifteen acts from across Palestine performed on Thursday night, and the show was broadcast simultaneously in Gaza City and the West Bank city of Ramallah. Through the use of video conferencing and projection, each city could see and hear the performances happening in the other. Five groups from Gaza participated, and Gazawians came in first, third, and fourth place.

The Gaza City show was held in a small theatre in the Palestine Red Crescent building. Although only publicized by word of mouth, nearly 200 young people filled the theatre, loudly cheering for the rappers and breakdance crew who took the stage.

One of the organizers of the contest, a charismatic literature major named Ayman Meghames, is a minor celebrity here. Part of Gaza’s first Hip-Hop group — named PR: Palestinian Rapperz — Ayman dedicates his time to supporting and publicizing Gaza’s young music scene.

Armed with a ready smile, Ayman was seemingly everywhere at once that night. He was on stage introducing the acts, helping with technical difficulties, greeting friends, and coordinating with the West Bank organizers.

For Ayman, making music is a form of resistance to war and occupation, and also a tool to communicate the reality of life in Palestine. “Most of our lyrics are about the occupation,” he tells me. “Lately we’ve also started singing about the conflict between Hamas and Fatah. Any problem, it needs to be written about.” Rapper Chuck D, from the group Public Enemy, once called rap music the CNN for Black America. For Ayman and his friends, music is their weapon to break media silence. “Most of the world believes we are the terrorists,” he says. “And the media is closed to us, so we get our message out through Hip-Hop.”

One of the first acts to take the stage was a duo called Black Unit Band. Mohammed Wafy, one of the two singers, displays the innocent charm of a teen pop star as he jumps from the stage and into the audience. Tall and skinny with a shock of black hair, Mohammed is 18 and looks younger. Khaled Harara, the other singer (and Mohammed’s next door neighbor) is a few years older and several pounds heavier, but no less energetic on stage.

As the evening progressed, the energy in the room continued to rise. The next act featured six members from two combined groups (DA MCs, and RG, for Revolutionary Guys) now collectively called DARG Team. The crowd was up on their feet, many of them singing along as the performers displayed a range of lyrical stylings.

In Mohammed Wafy’s apartment, the perfomers waited anxiously for the results of the contest. The call came in on Ayman’s cel phone. Putting it on speaker, everyone listened as the results were announced: DARG team had come in first place, and Black Unit had placed third. There were no hurt feelings apparent for those that didn’t win — for these young performers, every victory is a shared victory. DARG members will now go on to Denmark to produce an album (if they can get out of Gaza).

Fadi Bakhet, a studious and slightly preppy looking Afro-Palestinian in wire-rimmed glasses, is DARG’s manager, and also the brother of one of the members. As the night continued, the gathering moved to his apartment. They celebrated the successful show, which also fell on the last day of exams for many students, and the laughing and conversation continued late into the night. The next day was hot and sunny, and thousands of Gazawians gathered on the beach to swim and relax by the Mediterranean.

These stories may seem incongruent with much of the international reporting about Gaza and the Hamas government. But it is exactly for this reason that they should be told.

If you follow the reporting on Palestine in the US media, you may imagine a fundamentalist state. Hamas-stan, as at least one Israeli commentator has called it. You may imagine a nation of terrorists, where women are oppressed and men launch rockets. But perhaps when we learn that Palestinian families swim on Friday afternoons, that they study literature in the day and rap about imprisoned friends at night, we can rethink the US’ unquestioning support for Israeli aggression against this almost entirely defenseless population.

Yesterday, I visited a journalism class at the Islamic University, taught by Rami Almeghari. The students had many questions, but one young woman’s words in particular stayed with me. “What can we do to reach people in America and tell them how things really are here,” she asked. “How can we get them to listen, and to see?”

There is an intense desire here to rebuild. There is no shortage of skilled labor. Billions of dollars of aid from countries around the world, including the US, has been pledged. But scarcely a single house has been rebuilt. From the Rafah border in the south to the town of Beit Hanoun in the north, people are still living in tents, or with family members, or in shelters.

The range of destruction is breathtaking. More than 1,400 Palestinians were killed in 22 days, the vast majority civilians, including more than 300 children. Schools, health clinics, houses, and, most importantly, the basic infrastructure of both public services and government has been destroyed. Rubble is everywhere. Basic government structures, such as the building that houses the Palestinian parliament are all destroyed.

Two days ago, a delegation 66 activists, scholars, journalists and human rights workers, mostly from the US, visited the Parliament building. The visit was organized by the peace group Code Pink, which has led several delegations attempting to break the blockade. The group was surprised to find the building housing the legislature reduced partly to rubble, and Parliament members forced to meet in a tent outside. Having no building to meet in is just one of the many problems facing the elected government of the Palestinian people. “Not only are more than 11,000 prisoners in Israeli jails,” explained Dr. Ahmed Bahar, the acting speaker of the Palestinian legislative council, and part of the Hamas political party. “Forty members of the legislative council are imprisoned, including the head of the legislature. Can you imagine if the head of the legislature, of anywhere else in the world, were held in prison by a foreign government?” Dr. Bahar appealed to the US activists assembled for help in breaking the siege. “They don’t allow basic construction material to enter,” he said. “Cement, glass, wood, steel.”

Gaza is among the most densely populated places on earth. One and a half million people live in 139 square miles, and it has been described as the world’s largest prison. Traveling across this very small area, you meet people everywhere who just want to live a normal life, but are being prevented by a cruel blockade from going anywhere or doing anything.

“The biggest lie that has been told is that Gaza is a hostile entity,” declares John Ging, the head of the United Nation’s Relief and Works Agency in the Gaza Strip. “It’s populated by well educated, decent people. They’re not spitting hatred. They’re asking for help, they’re asking for justice, they’re asking for the rule of law.” An Irish former soldier with a staff of 10,000, Ging is a UN bureaucrat, not an activist, but his respect for the international law has made him a passionate spokesperson for a rebuilding of Gaza.

Under the current siege, explains, Ging, “There’s no cement, even if its to repair a hospital or school or health center. So people are being kept alive, nothing more.” Its been said in the US media that the situation in Gaza is complicated, that the siege is part of a defense against terrorism, but Ging denies these claims. “When it comes down to it, its rather simple what’s needed,” he says. “What we now need to focus on is creating a life for people here. We need to see the depoliticization of assistance. What we have here in Gaza is a failure to uphold those basic human rights.”

Gaza is currently hosting several delegations of international human rights observers and activists from the US and Europe. With each month, more people come here, and see the painful reality of the situation here. And with each new arrival, the siege perhaps moves a step closer to ending.

President Obama is scheduled to be in Cairo tomorrow, and members of Code Pink plan to ask him to visit Gaza. Tens of thousands of people from the US have signed a petition asking him to see the devastation. Across Gaza, people are looking for some sign that the new president will stand up for human rights in Palestine. “We ask Obama not to close his eyes to the Palestinian catastrophe,” says Dr. Bahar. “We are running out of time,” says John Ging. “We need to move from keeping people alive to giving them a life.”

Tall and self-assured, Freedia is a powerful performer and brings an undeniable energy to the play. During rehearsals, says Lucky, “when Freedia comes in, the cast lights up, and everyone does their best.” Freedia is best known as part of a community of gay rappers self-identified as sissy bounce artists. She rejects that label, saying, “I’m a gay rapper, don’t get me wrong. But there’s no such thing as separating it into straight bounce and sissy bounce. It’s all bounce music.”

Bounce is the name given to the style of New Orleans Hip-Hop recognized for a distinctive beat and call-and-response lyrical style that owes much to Mardi Gras Indians and other local cultural traditions. Although not widely listened to outside of the south, bounce dominates New Orleans clubs, and is so identified with the poor neighborhoods of the city, it’s sometimes called “project music.”

“When you hear bounce,” says Lucky, people in a club go wild. “They just forget about it. They throw their hands up in the air, they catch the wall.” However you label Freedia’s music, she is one of several gay rappers who have broken down barrier after barrier to become some of New Orleans’ most popular musicians.

Spreading New Orleans Culture

Catch Dat Beat attempts to spread the love of bounce, and it proves infectious. The play advertises that it has no profanity or “obscene body gestures,” (a challenge, when capturing the bounce experience, which often involves a lot of both). Lucky Johnson is a cousin of popular director/actor Tyler Perry, and like a Tyler Perry script, Catch Dat Beat has positive characters and an accessible story. The basic story follows a hair stylist (played by Freedia) who throws a block party to show a visiting cousin how New Orleans gets down. There are moments of conflicts (will Freedia’s grandfather, played by Lucky, accept her sexuality? Will police break up the block party?) but the show is really about celebrating local culture. Lucky also acts in the play, along with bounce trendsetter Tenth Ward Buck

The second act of the show recreates a block party on stage, and features short appearances by many of the biggest names in bounce. During the opening weekend, the crowd rose cheering to their feet as stars including Ms. Tee, Gotti Boy Chris and Katey Red took over the stage.

Lucky wants Catch Dat Beat to help popularize bounce and New Orleans. He structured the play around a block party to show that New Orleans celebrations are really about building community and supporting your neighbors.

“Growing up in less fortunate neighborhoods, your parents would have card games, or suppers,” explains Lucky. “Say Miss Carol across the street’s light bill was due. Miss Carol would have a supper. Everyone in the neighborhood would buy a plate to help her pay the light bill.” In other words, continued Lucky, the block party comes from this tradition, and is ultimately about “how a people are able to come together in a time of need.”

Lucky has produced many of New Orleans bounce hits, and sees producing as a way to support positive work. “I can’t sign a hip hop gangster rapper,” he says. “I don’t advocate killing and drugs or slap that bitch. I’m not into that. I’m not gonna put my money behind it. If you come to me with something that says ‘get on the dance floor and have a good time,’ then I can support it.”

He is excited about all of the play’s actors, heaping praise on the accomplishments of Tenth Ward Buck and Freedia. “Buck was the first in so many ways,” he says of his star, listing his accomplishments. “The first to speed up bounce, the first to take an R&B track and bounce it out.” Through more than ten years of albums, plus a film, an upcoming book, and his dedication to working with youth, Buck has earned the praise.

As for the star of the show, “Freedia is outstanding,” says Lucky. “Every time he’d get the mic, he’d just light up the room.” Buck also Is quick to praise Freedia. “As Freedia was coming up, a lot of people tried to drag him down,” Buck says. “And he didn’t care about what they said, he kept moving forward. I don’t care if you straight or what, everyone is bouncing to Freedia’s music.” In fact, the sissy bounce community that Katey Red birthed ten years ago with her album Melpomene Block Party has rejuvenated the form, and gay rappers like Freedia have gone from a novelty to a central part of bounce culture.

Conquering Obstacles

Bounce music faces many obstacles on the way to national popularity. It is in many ways so distinctly New Orleans, with most songs featuring neighborhood-specific references, that it’s hard to imagine a bounce party in any other city. However, elements of bounce have appeared in songs by national acts like David Banner, Mike Jones and Beyonce.

Here in New Orleans, bounce artists bring lines around the corner when they perform. Freedia believes bounce will keep growing, and isn’t worried about any potential obstacles. She has struggled in a sometimes-homophobic music scene and become one of the leading stars — gay or straight — in New Orleans. “We been working really hard all these years of getting people to accept us,” she says. “Maybe get throwed at and screamed at, but over time all that has changed. All the hard work has finally paid off.”

With a show at this year’s Jazz Fest by Big Freedia, Katey Red and Sissy Nobby, as well as a photo spread in hipster music magazine XLR8R, the music form is clearly reaching new audiences. “For me it was the determination to change the people and make them love what we do,” says Freedia. “And that’s what my job was. When I became a gay bounce rapper I said that I was going to change it and make people love me, and make them love gay people.”

“People say negative things,” about gay rap stars, acknowledges Lucky. “I don’t care, at the end of the day it’s about the message. People who are homophobic, it tells me about that person’s character, because god loves us all no matter what.”

* Check out Ya Heard Me, the definitive Bounce Film.

Tourists drive by and people with cameras gawk. Richard looks directly at the camera and says, “It looks like there’s more money to be paid in devastation than regeneration. If y’all keep paying your money to see it, should we rebuild it?”

The short film New Orleans For Sale, which has garnered several awards, was made by 2-Cent Entertainment, a group of young Black media makers in New Orleans. The group, which currently has 10 members , made New Orleans for Sale to convey the frustration felt by many New Orleanians as the city has become a national spectacle and a backdrop for countless national politicians, while the aid the city needs to rebuild still hasn’t arrived. In 2008, the film won several awards including an NAACP image award in a competition, called Film Your Issue, which featured a high-powered jury with the likes of news anchor Tom Brokaw and media executives from MTV Networks, Lionsgate Entertainment and USA Today.

Working at the intersection of art and justice, as well as entertainment and enlightenment, 2-Cent has attracted a wide and growing audience. In New Orleans, they’ve also collaborated with the People’s Hurricane Relief Fund, produced shows on local television and radio stations, and created mix CDs and scores of short videos. Beyond creating inspiring programming, 2-Cent members also seek to pass their skills onto the next generation, and have taught and presented their work and in New Orleans high schools and colleges.

“Huey Newton said the young people always inherit the revolution,” says Brandan “B-Mike” Odums, 2-Cent’s founder. “And that’s what 2-Cent is, it’s how our generation responded to that call.”

Positive Images

The collective formed in 2004, when Odums gathered a group of friends (most of them fellow students at the University of New Orleans) to produce a TV show with a message.

“A lot of TV promotes a monolithic way of thinking, saying there’s only one way to be, or promoting ignorance as cool,” says Odums. “We say it’s hot to stand up for yourself and speak for yourself.”

The group was still newly formed when Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, and in the aftermath of the storm, with 2-Cent members spread across the United States, they nearly disbanded. “Katrina made us realize that this is what we want to do,” says Odums. “We’d done two episodes before the storm. Everybody was scattered. We had to decide if this is something we really want to do. Katrina forced us to make the decision.”

The collective briefly relocated together to Atlanta, then made the decision together to return to New Orleans.

Kevin Griffin, another of the founding members of 2-Cent, joined because he shares Odum’s desire to change the images and messages delivered to today’s youth. “We were seeing the images that BET and others were putting out,” Griffin says. “And we wanted to do something different, more positive.”

Griffin is not just a media activist; he is also one of the leaders of a citywide movement spearheaded by the Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana, an organization whose mission is to close the Youth Studies Center, the city’s youth prison. The group has led campaigns to shut down other youth prisons around the state including the notorious youth prison in Tallulah, Louisiana, and they are also working to create more options for young people beyond jail.

For Griffin, these struggles have personal meaning. “At the age of 10, I was sent to the Youth Studies Center,” Griffin explains. “A year later I was moved to Tallulah, which was known as the worst youth prison in the country. I was 11. The next youngest person was 17, so I was a child among adults. And I was there for five years.”

When he was released, Griffin was determined to turn his experience into something positive. “I could have stayed on that path that was laid out for me,” says Griffin. “But I didn’t want to become that.” He credits his family for helping support him when he got out.

Griffin now works full-time at WBOK, a Black-owned talk radio station (their slogan is “Talk back, talk Black”). Art also runs in his family. His cousin Mannie Fresh, the music impresario of New Orleans’ Cash Money record label, produced much of the music that made New Orleans hip hop famous.

Humor and Style

2-Cent videos are notable for both humor and great production values. “We liked a lot of the messages you would see on Public Access TV,” explains Griffin. “But we wanted to make something with better production.” This combination of form and content, and a mix of serious and comic, defines the 2-Cent style.

“We take education and comedy and we mix it all together,” says collective member Manda B, who writes and acts in many of the group’s videos. “We can trick people into learning. We built it off a foundation of edutainment. Even with our most crazy and bizarre scripts, we have a meaning.”

The group seems to have limitless energy and ideas, and they bring new angles to their subjects, finding humor in unexpected places, and bringing ideas to young people by using that humor. Their piece on Jena, Louisiana, is filmed at the September 20, 2007 protests in Jena, when tens of thousands of young people converged in what was called the birth of the 21st century civil rights movement. But the 2-Cent video intercuts with one of their members—an effortlessly humorous young performer named Stiggidy Steve—wandering confused on Jena Street in New Orleans and wondering where everyone is.

“Older folks may try to put out similar ideas,” says Manda B. “But it’s like they’re preaching. I think we know how to connect with our generation.”

These young media activists praise Gil Scott Heron, who said the revolution will not be televised, but for 2-Cent, media is a tool to be taken and used for the mission of social change.

“Other generations marched, and we march too,” says Odums. “But in this age we have a whole new range of weapons, and we’re trying to use those weapons. I think Martin Luther King, Jr. would want to be on YouTube, to have his speeches distributed that way. Malcolm X would love to make mixtapes, have those out on the streets. The same reasons they boycotted and had protests in that era are our reasons too. We’re coming from that same mindset, but we’re using new tools, trying to get our inheritance.”

After nearly five years together, the group has survived Katrina and all the connected stresses of living in New Orleans during this time, and their bonds become stronger and closer. When asked what aspect of their work they were most proud of, various 2-Cent members expressed the same sentiment as Manda B, who explained, “For me, the best element of all this is that we’re family.”

For a large collective, 2-Cent seems to have no problem working together, creating new content every week, and continually expanding the range of work they do and the audiences they reach. “We’re all together like family,” says Griffin. “And we can’t imagine not staying together.”

The media landscape in the US is changing rapidly. As all forms of journalists face massive layoffs, analysts fear that journalism’s role as a counterforce against the powerful is in jeopardy. For progressives and radicals working in media, it’s important to not only question what format news will come in, but also how to approach our work so it is both accountable and sustainable.

While corporations have shown an ever-decreasing interest in funding investigative journalism, independent media is undergoing its own transformation. Part of it is in economic challenges to old methods of distribution, such as rising print costs and postage rates for print publications. But the larger transformation has been in where people turn for news and information.

For much of the last century, a vibrant world of left journalism was an important part of movements for change. Hundreds of radical magazines, newspapers and radio stations did the hard work of covering stories that the corporate media wouldn’t take on. But, in recent years, that work of journalism has been increasingly abandoned to the corporate media, while radicals and progressives – especially through websites and blogs – have been more likely to comment on the stories reported by others. This work of media criticism is vital. However, now that news corporations are increasingly making the decision that journalism is no longer profitable or needed, there is also a need for an organized alternative to take their place. At last year’s Allied Media Conference – a gathering of radical grassroots media-makers in Detroit – organizers asked the question, “What is our evolution, beyond survival?”

The State of Corporate Media

The US military has not withdrawn from Iraq, but the US media has. The New York Times reported in December that, “America’s three broadcast network news divisions have stopped sending full-time correspondents to Iraq.” The article went on to note “network evening newscasts devoted 423 minutes to Iraq [in 2008]…compared with 1,888 minutes in 2007.” The fading coverage of Iraq is a reflection of political decisions and ratings pressures, but it also illustrates some of what we are losing as funding is cut for serious journalism in almost every format.

The cuts are affecting every type of media. NPR, which until recently had been undergoing a growth in staff and programming, recently cancelled News and Notes, their only news program that focused on Black issues. This came as they cut almost 10% of their staff nationwide.

The much-discussed end of print seems to portent the biggest changes, especially for local news coverage. At least 525 magazines went out of business in 2008, according to mediafinder.com, and even more went under in 2007. The Los Angeles Times has cut nearly half its staff in the last eight years, while the Tribune Company announced that they would trim 500 pages of news each week from their twelve papers. The Miami Herald slashed 370 jobs last year, nearly a third of their workforce, with more cuts announced for this year. Book publishers – corporate and independent – have also been announcing staff layoffs and bankruptcies. Many of these reductions happened before the current economic freefall, and there are dire predictions of steeper drops on the horizon.

When The Christian Science Monitor recently ended weekday publication after a century, the New York Times quoted the paper’s editor as saying, “We have the luxury – the opportunity – of making a leap that most newspapers will have to make in the next five years.” Last week, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer became the largest US paper to make the shift to being only available online, laying off the vast majority of its staff in the process.

Journalism and Money

The story behind the statistics is this: consumption of media hasn’t gone down – if anything, it’s gone way up. But as more and more people have become accustomed to getting their media online and for free, who will fund journalism?

Corporations will continue to make money off of media. And they will certainly fund a certain amount of journalism as a part of this. But for independent media-makers, will this work continue to be financially sustainable? And will new models of funding work for them?

As technology has made most kinds of media creation easier, the range of people doing this work has grown. At the Allied Media Conference, an annual gathering of radical media, it appears the future of media is alive and well. From hip-hop artists to radio activists to video journalists, radical educators, and a network of women of color bloggers, the several hundred participants at last year’s gathering were younger than most conferences, with many high school students who are already deeply involved in challenging work, and the gathering had much more of a queer energy than most media gatherings. The conference was also majority people of color, and very much focused on organizing and social movements.

Although print is under-represented at the conference (which ironically began as a gathering of zine makers), the dialogue that exists between different mediums represented is inspiring. Seeing gatherings like this, I believe that there is a new generation coming up who will continue to use these tools to hold the powerful accountable.

But even with many technological barriers removed, there is still a need for money. Every potential source of funding has its problems. Advertising funds some news websites, but that’s not an option for anti-corporate media-makers. Foundations have stepped in to fund investigative reporting and other projects, but this funding doesn’t nearly meet the need, and – in this time of economic crisis – this form of support is going down. Finally, critics point out that getting funding from foundations is not so different from getting money from corporations. Through your funding, you become accountable to the wealthy people who are paying you, and not to your community’s needs.

Reader Support

Without alternative sources of funding, publishing any kind of print publication can be extremely difficult. Bitch Magazine is one of the larger independent publications, selling tens of thousands of copies of each issue. The magazine has an extremely small staff, a specific niche that they fill that no one else does, and a loyal readership. Yet even with these advantages, they recently faced a serious financial shortfall.

Last September, Bitch’s editor and publisher announced on their website and in a youtube video that they need to raise $40,000 by October 15 or they would have to cease publishing. They raised $46,000 in three days, and over the next several weeks tens of thousands dollars more came in. They now have well over 500 sustainers who have pledged to donate anywhere from $5 to $100 or more every month. The crisis they faced illustrates the fragility of all independent magazines, but the quick and massive outpouring of support demonstrates that financial support is possible from our communities.

While media companies have repeatedly failed in their attempts to get readers to regularly pay for their product, examples like Bitch provide some evidence that people will pay to keep a valued resource alive.

New Distribution Models

Grassroots organizers and activists founded Left Turn Magazine – the publication I work with – as a political project. The magazine has focused on writing by people directly involved in movements, rather than journalists or academics. We are an all-volunteer collective with members in cities across the US, including Chicago, Durham, Washington DC, New York City, Oakland, and New Orleans.

In 2004, the magazine was passed on to an editorial collective made up mostly of organizers and activists. Instead of media-makers who founded a magazine, we are organizers who suddenly had a magazine given to us. Because of this, we have always seen the magazine as a tool or resource for social movements, and we have looked for alternate models of distribution, not relying on corporate distributors and bookstores, or anonymous mass mailings.

Most of our distribution happens through what we call our activist distribution network – grassroots organizations, activists, infoshops, and collectives who pay what they can and distribute the magazine to their communities. Many of these distributors also suggest content for the magazine and write articles about organizing happening in their communities.

This model is not necessarily sustainable for a larger project, and has many drawbacks. But we have consistently grown while magazines all around us have gone out of business over the past years. Most importantly, we believe that our model – which involves much more direct contact with our readers – creates a kind of journalism that is more accountable to the communities it seeks to serve.

Grassroots Media Tour

Recently, Left Turn joined a coalition of activist projects that launched the Grassroots Media Tour. Sponsors included several print publication, such as Bitch Magazine, ColorLines Magazine, $pread Magazine, and Make/Shift Magazine, as well as Free Speech Radio News. The tour brought performances, film screenings, poetry, workshops, and discussions to communities across the South – from Greensboro, North Carolina, and Miami, Florida, to Denton, Texas. Nearly one thousand people saw the tour, with standing-room only crowds in several cities.

For participants in the tour, the most exciting aspect was the opportunity to connect with people across the South who are engaged in the vital work of connecting media and social justice. We met with organizations such as the Hive in Greensboro, Project South in Atlanta, Take Back the Land in Miami, Esperanza Peace and Justice Center in San Antonio, and many more. We found inspiring and exciting organizations struggling in innovative ways for justice and liberation.

Some of our inspiration for this tour came from the mass mobilizations for the Jena Six in 2007. Almost 50,000 people from around the US came to support high school students in a small town in northern Louisiana who were facing life in prison for a school fight. The organizing and publicity for the Jena case originated from the families themselves, and spread from there. Left Turn was the first national news outlet to cover the case, and the story spread over email, blogs, social networking sites, Black radio, and other noncorporate outlets such as Democracy Now and The Final Call newspaper. While CNN and every other major corporate news outlet eventually covered the case, there is no doubt that it was activists that made it a story they couldn’t ignore.

The attention certainly helped the students – all of them are in school, rather than in prison. While five of the six still have charges hanging over their heads, they are in a much better situation, with much better legal representation, than most Black youths entangled in the Prison Industrial Complex. However, this public scrutiny was also hard for the young students at the center of the case. Mychal Bell, the only member of the Jena Six to have been convicted, recently attempted suicide, shooting himself in the chest with a gun.

The Jena Six case serves to illustrate two important points. The first is the power of independent media, which helped to nurture this story until the major outlets could no longer ignore it. The second lesson is the importance of accountability in our movement. It’s not enough for media to be focused on grassroots struggles; we also need communication, collaboration, and empathy for those directly affected. As Mychal Bell has demonstrated, there are lives at stake.

New technology will continue to change the way we consume information. But the need for communication across communities and for uncovering the deceptions of the powerful remains unchanged. We need to find ways, as a movement, that we can support – and hold accountable – grassroots, community-oriented media. Its clear that corporations wont do it for us.

New Orleans’ immigrant communities are often ignored or under-represented. But through grassroots organizing, legal action, and political lobbying, Asian and Latino organizations in the city have won some important victories. Activists from New Orleans’ Arab population — which is largely Palestinian — have expressed hope that they can follow these examples.

The city’s Vietnamese community gained influence through post-Katrina struggles to bring their New Orleans East neighborhood back in the first months after the storm. This effort, which also involved a fight against a city landfill located near their homes, turned grassroots protests into political power, including the recent election of the nation’s first Vietnamese-American congressman.

The city’s Latino community has grown and changed as thousands of recent immigrants came looking for work in rebuilding after the storm. Despite continuing problems, including police harassment of undocumented immigrants, grassroots efforts have helped translate those numbers into political influence and leverage over employers who had sought to exploit them. While employers and politicians have sought to pit the city’s Latino and Black workers against each other, organizers have built alliances between these communities.

These examples, together with a sense that there is a need for their community to be heard, have provoked Arab New Orleanians into action. According to Angelina Abbir Mansour, a student activist at UNO, outrage caused by the devastation in Gaza was a catalyst. “When the Gaza massacre happened, the first thought that came to everyone’s head was ‘we can’t be quiet anymore,’” she explained. Young activists have also been inspired by successes in other cities, such as a recent successful campaign to get Hampshire College to divest from companies that supply the Israeli military as well as sit-ins and building occupations on other campuses in the US and Europe.

Mass Protests

At Jackson Square, in the center of New Orleans’ French Quarter, more than a thousand people gathered on January 4 for one of the largest demonstrations this city has seen in recent years. Tracie Washington, a civil rights leader in the city and the director of Louisiana Justice Institute, attended with her son. Addressing the crowd on a megaphone, she said, “My son asked me today about what is happening in Gaza. He asked, ‘Is it like if I pinched you and you punched me?’ I said to him, ‘No, its like if you pinched me and I shot you with an AK-47.’”

The cheers of the crowd were audible from several blocks away. Palestinian youth led raucous chants of “No Justice, No Peace,” and “Gaza Gaza don’t you cry, in our hearts you’ll never die.” Children held up signs saying, “This is what an Israeli target looks like.”

The Louisiana Justice Institute was one of several New Orleans social justice and civil rights organizations that Palestinian organizers have built ties with — others included INCITE New Orleans, The Women’s Health and Justice Initiative, Pax Christi, Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, and Mayday Nola, an organization that works on public housing issues. “I’ve seen a huge amount of support from the African American community,” says Mansour, who is co-founder of a chapter of the General Union of Palestinian Students on the campus of the University of New Orleans. “Because they know more than anyone what its like to face racism. Alliances between our communities make sense.”

The January 4th march was the second of four mass demonstrations for Gaza during the Israeli bombing. The first demonstration, brought together in less than 24 hours, brought out more than 300 people. Palestinian youth from New Orleans organized and led the march, and entire families participated.

The size of the demonstrations surprised even the organizers. “New Orleans is a small town,” says activist and business owner Emad Jabbar. “For 1,200 people to come out with just a few days notice — I’m speechless.” Every local TV station covered the demonstrations. However the Times Picayune, New Orleans’ local paper, refused to send a reporter. In response, activists organized a demonstration the following week, bringing almost 100 people to protest outside the paper’s offices.

Beginnings

Organizing in New Orleans’ Arab community is not new — it goes back to at least the late 80s, during the first Intifada, a time of increased activity in the Palestinian Diaspora around the world. Since then, activism has surged and receded in waves, with support and trainings from national organizations such as the Muslim American Society and US Campaign to End The Israeli Occupation playing an important role.

The two years before Katrina saw mass action, as well as coalition building and education, among local Palestinians and their allies, and in some aspects today’s movement is built from work that happened then. From 2003 through 2005, activists presented a breathtaking array of events; from films, demonstrations and speakers; to art shows, a Palestinian hip-hop concert, presentations in high school and college classrooms, and a regional conference. They met with newspaper editorial boards, appeared on radio shows, set up literature tables at busy public locations, and spoke at churches.

A coalition of activists also organized human rights delegations to the Middle East, sending nine delegates from diverse backgrounds and communities to Palestinian cities on the West Bank in the summer of 2004. They self-published a book and a released a newsletter, made and distributed a film (chronicling one member’s journey to Palestine), and worked on several art projects, including a hip-hop show, a photography exhibition, and collaborations with the New Orleans International Human Rights Film Festival.

A multiracial and multi-generational coalition of Palestine activists met on the campus of Xavier University, a historically Black college, and its core group included Muslims, Christians, Jews, and secular activists. The group collaborated closely with many different aspects of the Arab and Muslim community in the city — meetings were attended by representatives of New Orleans’ Muslim Shura Council, the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee of New Orleans, New Orleans’ Palestine American Congress, and Stop The Wall — a local group made up of more than 200 New Orleanians with family in the Palestinian village of Beit Anan.

Another core member of the group was a white Episcopal minister who had traveled to Bethlehem and Jerusalem, and several members were Palestinian Christians. Nation Of Islam members were a part of the group, as well as several Jewish activists, including a woman who had gone on a pro-Israel delegation organized by New Orleans’ Jewish Federation — and came home disturbed by the Palestinian suffering she’d seen, causing her to break with the Federation and become an activist for Palestinian rights.

A Small Community

According to the US census, New Orleans’ pre-Katrina population was 67 percent African American and 27 percent white, with all other categories adding up to about 6%. Maher Salem, a young community leader and business owner, adds that, “The Palestinian community is a small minority in New Orleans. The city is mostly African American and white, then you have Latinos, then Vietnamese, and Palestinians are the smallest group. We’re at the bottom of the list.”

As with many immigrant communities, New Orleans’ Palestinian community is both spread out and insular. Families are located in various suburbs on New Orleans’ Westbank (on the other side of the Mississippi river), but there isn’t a particular neighborhood where most live. The community is rarely discussed in national coverage of New Orleans, or even in the local media. “Growing up, I didn’t know there was a Palestinian community here,” Mansour says. “I guess because we’re a small population and were not making headlines.”

Many of New Orleans’ Palestinians are from a handful of small towns and villages near Ramallah and Jerusalem, such as Silwad, Al-Bireh, Al-Mizra’a, and Beit Anan. They are often small business owners, owning restaurants, convenience stores, and clothing stores. In the aftermath of Katrina, much of the city’s Arab community was displaced, losing both their stores and homes. “A lot of us lost businesses,” says Salem, “and many from our community moved to other cities.” Although they no longer live here, many of those that are displaced still feel connected to the city. “I know guys that are in Dallas now,” Salem says. “But every time we have a protest or something else happening they call and ask what happened. They miss living here.”

For those that have returned, rebuilding has been a struggle — as it has been for other New Orleanians in this city where a third of all properties are still empty. Sandra Bahhur is a Palestinian-American woman originally from Al-Bireh. A nurse and restaurant owner, she has been a strong voice for social justice in New Orleans. Sandra’s home in the Lakeview neighborhood of New Orleans was so destroyed by flooding that she couldn’t get the doors to open. Her business on Carrollton Avenue was destroyed, just days before it would have been ready to debut. They had been working all day on the restaurant the day before the hurricane, as they did many days. “We had just bought a new oven, new refrigerators, new kitchen equipment,” she told me days after the storm. “Everything’s destroyed. Our home is destroyed, the business is destroyed. We lost everything. Everything.”

Like many New Orleanians, Sandra and her husband Luis love New Orleans, and refused to give up. After two more years of work, their restaurant reopened in late 2007 to positive reviews and full houses. However, Sandra and Luis were never able to fully recover from the debt they went into to rebuild after the storm. With the recent economic downturn, the restaurant hit hard times, and closed permanently last month. Although they love the city, Sandra and Luis’ future in New Orleans is uncertain.

Changing The Media

Although disappointed with local media coverage, activists have created powerful video and images documenting their own movement, and spread the word through social networking sites, email, texting, and word of mouth. 2-Cent Entertainment — a group of young African-American video activists who are responsible for some of the most exciting media organizing happening in New Orleans today — made a pair of powerful videos documenting the activist uprising, which have been widely distributed online.

The young activists that organized the actions are determined to make their mark in the city, through changing the media landscape and shifting public opinion. “We’re a part of this city,” says Emad Jabbar. “We identify with it. If you ask most New Orleans Palestinians where they’re from they’ll say New Orleans — especially the young ones.” It was this spirit that led dozens of Palestinians to join with African American community leaders in last month’s annual Martin Luther King march. Community leader Maher Salem explains, “My cause, my goal is about the Palestinian people, Gaza, and freedom for everyone. However you describe me — businessman, father, community leader — what I am is someone who stands for justice.”

As they move forward, Palestinian activists in New Orleans are excited at the possibilities. “People call me, come to me in the street and in the Mosque, and ask me what are you up to, what’s next,” says Jabbar. “Our organizing in New Orleans is moving forward. People in the community are passionate, and have a lot of energy. We just need to keep stepping up.”

Resources:
New Orleans Palestine Solidarity
New Orleans Palestine Solidarity, updates
2-Cent Entertainment
New Orleans Workers’ Center for Racial Justice
Muslim American Society
Left Turn Magazine

The Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola is already notorious for a range of offenses, including keeping former Black Panthers Herman Wallace and Albert Woodfox, in solitary for over 36 years. Now a death penalty trial in St. Francisville, Louisiana has exposed widespread and systemic abuse at the prison. Even in the context of eight years of the Bush administration, the behavior documented at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola stands out both for its brutality and for the significant evidence that it was condoned and encouraged from the very top of the chain of command.

In a remarkable hearing that explored torture practices at Angola, twenty-five inmates testified last summer to facing overwhelming violence in the aftermath of an escape attempt at the prison nearly a decade ago. These twenty-five inmates — who were not involved in the escape attempt — testified to being kicked, punched, beaten with batons and with fists, stepped on, left naked in a freezing cell, and threatened that they would be killed. They were threatened by guards that they would be sexually assaulted with batons. They were forced to urinate and defecate on themselves. They were bloodied, had teeth knocked out, were beaten until they lost control of bodily functions, and beaten until they signed statements or confessions presented to them by prison officials. One inmate had a broken jaw, and another was placed in solitary confinement for eight years.

While prison officials deny the policy of abuse, the range of prisoners who gave statements, in addition to medical records and other evidence introduced at the trial, present a powerful argument that abuse is a standard policy at the prison. Several of the prisoners received $7,000 when the state agreed to settle, without admitting liability, two civil rights lawsuits filed by 13 inmates. The inmates will have to spend that money behind bars — more than 90% of Angola’s prisoners are expected to die behind its walls.

Systemic Violence

During the attempted escape at Angola, in which one guard was killed and two were taken hostage, a team of officers — including Angola warden Burl Cain — rushed in and began shooting, killing one inmate, Joel Durham, and wounding another, David Mathis.

The prison has no official guidelines for what should happen during escape attempts or other crises, a policy that seems designed to encourage the violent treatment documented in this case. Richard Stalder, at that time the secretary of the Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections, was also at the prison at the time. Yet despite — or because of — the presence of the prison warden and head of corrections for the state, guards were given free hand to engage in violent retribution. Cain later told a reporter after the shooting that Angola’s policy was not to negotiate, saying, ”That’s a message all the inmates know. They just forgot it. And now they know it again.”

Five prisoners — including Mathis — were charged with murder, and currently are on trial, facing the death penalty — partially based on testimony from other inmates that was obtained through beatings and torture. Mathis is represented by civil rights attorneys Jim Boren (who also represented one of the Jena Six youths) and Rachel Connor, with assistance from Nola Investigates, an investigative firm in New Orleans that specializes in defense for capital cases.

The St. Francisville hearing was requested by Mathis’ defense counsel to demonstrate that, in the climate of violence and abuse, inmates were forced to sign statements through torture, and therefore those statements should be inadmissible. 20th Judicial District Judge George H. Ware Jr. ruled that the documented torture and abuse was not relevant. However, the behavior documented in the hearing not only raises strong doubts about the cases against the Angola Five, but it also shows that violence against inmates has become standard procedure at the prison.

The hearing shows a pattern of systemic abuse so open and regular, it defies the traditional excuse of bad apples. Inmate Doyle Billiot testified to being threatened with death by the guards, “What’s not to be afraid of? Got all these security guards coming around you everyday looking at you sideways, crazy and stuff. Don’t know what’s on their mind, especially when they threaten to kill you.” Another inmate, Robert Carley testified that a false confession was beaten out of him. “I was afraid,” he said. “I felt that if I didn’t go in there and tell them something, I would die.”

Inmate Kenneth “Geronimo” Edwards testified that the guards “beat us half to death.” He also testified that guards threatened to sexually assault him with a baton, saying, “that’s a big black . . . say you want it.” Later, Edwards says, the guards, “put me in my cell. They took all my clothes. Took my jumpsuit. Took all the sheets, everything out the cell, and put me in the cell buck-naked . . . It was cold in the cell. They opened the windows and turned the blowers on.” At least a dozen other inmates also testified to receiving the same beatings, assault, threats of sexual violence, and “freezing treatment.”

Some guards at the prison treated the abuse as a game. Inmate Brian Johns testified at the hearing that, “one of the guards was hitting us all in the head. Said he liked the sound of the drums — the drumming sound that — from hitting us in the head with the stick.”

Solitary Confinement

Two of Angola’s most famous residents, political prisoners Herman Wallace and Albert Woodfox, have become the primary example of another form of abuse common at Angola — the use of solitary confinement as punishment for political views. The two have now each spent more than 36 years in solitary, despite the fact that a judge recently overturned Woodfox’s conviction (prison authorities continue to hold Woodfox and have announced plans to retry him). Woodfox and Wallace — who together with former prisoner King Wilkerson are known as the Angola Three — have filed a civil suit against Angola, arguing that their confinement has violated both their 8th amendment rights against cruel and unusual punishment and 4th amendment right to due process.

Recent statements by Angola warden Burl Cain makes clear that Woodfox and Wallace are being punished for their political views. At a recent deposition, attorneys for Woodfox asked Cain, “Lets just for the sake of argument assume, if you can, that he is not guilty of the murder of Brent Miller.” Cain responded, “Okay. I would still keep him in (solitary) . . . I still know that he is still trying to practice Black Pantherism, and I still would not want him walking around my prison because he would organize the young new inmates. I would have me all kind of problems, more than I could stand, and I would have the blacks chasing after them . . . He has to stay in a cell while he’s at Angola.”

In addition to Cain’s comments, Louisiana Attorney General James “Buddy” Caldwell has said the case against the Angola Three is personal to him. Statements like this indicate that this vigilante attitude not only pervades New Orleans’ criminal justice system, but that the problem comes from the very top.

The problem is not limited to Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola — similar stories can be found in prisons across the US. But from the abandonment of prisoners in Orleans Parish Prison during Katrina to the case of the Jena Six, Louisiana’s criminal justice system, which has the highest incarceration rate in the world, often seems to be functioning under plantation-style justice. Most recently, journalist A.C. Thompson, in an investigation of post-Katrina killings, found evidence that the New Orleans police department supported vigilante attacks against Black residents of New Orleans after Katrina.

Torture and abuse is illegal under both US law — including the constitutional prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment — and international treaties that the US is signatory to, from the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ratified in 1992). Despite the laws and treaties, US prison guards have rarely been held accountable to these standards.

Once we say that abuse or torture is ok against prisoners, the next step is for it to be used in the wider population. A recent petition for administrative remedies filed by Herman Wallace states, “If Guantanamo Bay has been a national embarrassment and symbol of the U.S. government’s relation to charges, trials and torture, then what is being done to the Angola 3 . . . is what we are to expect if we fail to act quickly . . . The government tries out it’s torture techniques on prisoners in the U.S. — just far enough to see how society will react. It doesn’t take long before they unleash their techniques on society as a whole.” If we don’t stand up against this abuse now, it will only spread.

Despite the hearings, civil suits, and other documentation, the guards who performed the acts documented in the hearing on torture at Angola remain unpunished, and the system that designed it remains in place. In fact, many of the guards have been promoted, and remain in supervisory capacity over the same inmates they were documented to have beaten mercilessly. Warden Burl Cain still oversees Angola. Meanwhile, the trial of the Angola Five is moving forward, and those with the power to change the pattern of abuse at Angola remain silent.

* Research assistance for this article by Emily Ratner.

According to a study by PolicyLink, 81 percent of those who received the Federally-funded, State-administered Road Home grants had insufficient resources to cover their damages. The average Road Home applicant fell about $35,000 short of the money they need to rebuild their home, and African-American households on average had an almost 35% higher shortfall than white households.

More than one in three residential addresses — over 70,000 — remain vacant or unoccupied, according to a report by the Greater New Orleans Community Data Center. While workers with Brad Pitt’s Make It Right project are working on overdrive to finish the first of their scores of planned houses in the notoriously devastated Lower Ninth Ward, the neighborhood overall ranks far behind other neighborhoods in recovery, with only 11 percent of its pre-Katrina number of households. The same report notes that since the devastation of the city, rents have raised by 46% citywide (much more in some neighborhoods), while many city services remain very limited; for example, only 21% of public transit buses are running.

Divided City

Its not just activists that speak of race and class divisions in New Orleans. A poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that 70% of residents feel we’re divided by class and/or race. The Kaiser survey also found unity among New Orleanians: we’re united in feeling forgotten by the rest of the US. Eight out of 10 said the federal government has not provided sufficient support. Nearly two-thirds think that the US public has largely forgotten about the city.

The survey found large percentages saying that their own situation has deteriorated. Fifty-three percent of low-income residents report that their financial situation is worse today than pre-Katrina. The percentage of residents who say they have been diagnosed with a serious mental illness such as depression has tripled since 2006.

There is a continuing debate about how many people live in New Orleans, with no definitive figures until the next complete census. But last year, the census bureau estimated a population of 239,000. Other analysts — and Mayor C. Ray Nagin — estimate the population to be nearly 100,000 higher. By any measurement, the growth has stagnated, while even optimistic figures report that 150,000-200,000 former residents (out of a former population of nearly 500,000) have been unable to return. The once nearly 70% African American city is now estimated to be less than 50% African American, a change reflected in the changing face of electoral politics statewide. While Republicans have been losing across the US, Christian Coalition candidate Bobby Jindal was easily elected Governor last year, and in the city, decades of Black-majority city council shifted to a white majority.

Blank Slate or Burial Ground

Much of the change in the city is led by a new strata of the city’s population — planners, architects, developers, and other reformers. Many of them self-identify as “YURPs” — Young, Urban Rebuilding Professionals — in their work with countless nonprofits, foundations, and businesses. Some of New Orlean’s newer residents have spoken of the city as a blank slate on which they can project and practice their ideas of reform, whether in health care, architecture, urban planning, or education. What this worldview leaves out, according to some advocates, is the people who lived here before, who are the most affected by these changes, and have the least say in how they are carried out. “It wasn’t a blank slate, it was a cemetery,” says poet and educator Kalamu Ya Salaam. “People were killed, and they’re building on top of their bones.”

The vast majority of New Orleans’ new professionals have come here with the best intentions, with a love for this city and a desire to help with the recovery. However, many activists criticize what they see as token attempts at community involvement, and a paternalistic attitude among many of the new decision makers.

For example, our education system was in crisis pre-Katrina, and certainly needed revolutionary change. Change is what we have gotten; the current system is in many ways unrecognizable from the system of three years ago; but this revolution has been overwhelmingly led from outside, with little input from the parents, students and staff of the New Orleans school system.

Shortly after the post-Katrina evacuation of the city, the entire staff of the public school system was fired. Not long after that, school board officials chose to end recognition or negotiation with the teachers’ union — the largest union in the city, and arguably the biggest outlet of Black middle class political power in the city. Since then, the school landscape has changed remarkably — from staff to decision-making structure to facilities. According to Tulane professor Lance Hill, “New Orleans has experienced a profound change in who governs schools and a dramatic reduction of parent and local taxpayer control of schools.”

The school system used to consist of 128 schools, 124 of them controlled by the New Orleans School Board. Now according to Hill, 88 have opened for the fall, and “50 of them are charter schools (privatized management) governed by self-appointed, self-perpetuating boards; 33 are run by the State Department of Education through the Recovery School District; and only five are governed by the elected school board.”

“There are now 42 separate school systems operating in New Orleans,” Hill continues, with their own “school policies, including teacher requirements, curriculum, discipline policies, enrollment limits, and social promotions. Publicly accountable schools in which parents have methods for publicly redressing grievances are limited to only five schools (5.6% of the total).”

Several recent articles have expressed excitement and admiration for the new school system, including extended pieces in the New York Times and the New Orleans Times-Picayune. For school reformers, who came to New Orleans with a desire to try out the changes they had imagined, this represents a dream come true. They have media support, federal, state and city officials on their side, and a massive influx of money and cheap (and young, idealistic) labor. Teach for America supplied 112 teachers last year, has committed 250 this year, and a projected 500 next year, while tens of millions of dollars in funding is coming through sources such as the Gates and Walton foundations.

There is no doubt that some students receive an excellent education in the new New Orleans school districts, but critics are concerned that the students that are being left behind, are those that need the most help — those without someone to advocate for them, to research and apply for the best schools. According to New Orleanian Kalamu Ya Salaam, who is director of a school program called Students at the Center, the new systems represent “an experimentation with privatization, and everything that implies.”

Although the new charter schools have been able to choose from the best facilities and have used methods such as state standardized tests to pick only select students (including 40% fewer special education students), there are still serious questions over the extent to their much-heralded success. G.W. Carver School, the subject of a fawning NYTimes piece last Spring, received an 88% failure rate for English and an 86% failure rate for Math on state standardized tests.

Anniversary and Commemoration

August 29, the anniversary of the devastation of the city, falls between the Democratic and Republican conventions. While the Democratic and Republican parties crown their nominees, activists on the ground will be on the streets, still fighting for a just recovery. “It ain’t to rain on Obama’s parade,” says Sess 4-5, a New Orleans-based hip hop star and activist, “but the people down here need the world to understand that its still a tragic situation. The rent has tripled, the health care system is in shambles, we have less access to education for our kids. The working class and poor are being exploited, while everyone at the top is getting fat off our misery.”

“We think August 29 should be holy day, not a day for business as usual,” explains Sess, who is one of the organizers of a Katrina March and Commemoration, starting Friday morning in the Lower Ninth Ward, and marching into the 7th Ward. That march is one of two activist commemorations in the city that day, the other starting uptown, near the BW Cooper development, one of the major housing developments torn down this year. “The Mayor announced to the world that New Orleans was ‘open for business’ but we’re here to tell you that it is closed for families,” declares former public housing resident Barbara Jackson, who will be part of the demonstration at BW Cooper, called Sankofa Day of Commemoration. “Five thousand demolished homes. Eight thousand new jail beds. This is their one for one replacement plan for us.”

Taking to the streets is not the only agenda of local activists. In New Orleans, people have been organizing at the grassroots, working together to build a movement. In the aftermath of the US Social Forum last year in Atlanta, a broad coalition of social justice organizations began meeting monthly to combine efforts. This group, called the Organizers Roundtable, is an important spot for collaborations and community building.

It’s been community, not foundations or government, that has led this city’s recovery at the grassroots. Bayou Road — a street of Black-owned, community-oriented, businesses in New Orleans’ seventh ward — has rebuilt post-Katrina to more businesses than they had before the storm. It hasn’t been government help that has enabled these businesses to come back, but the effort of community members coming together. It was also community, and local support, that has brought back the membership of many local cultural organizations, like the network of Social Aid and Pleasure Clubs, who organize secondline parades nearly every weekend throughout the year, as well as benefits that provide school supplies for area youth.

The Right to the City alliance (RTTC), a nationwide coalition of organizations that focuses on urban issues such as health care, criminal justice, and education, sees the continuing crisis in New Orleans as central to their work. They are co-sponsoring the march in New Orleans, as well as actions in seven other cities, including Los Angeles, New York City, Oakland, Providence, San Francisco, Washington, D.C. and Miami.

The work of RTTC deserves special notice, as a coalition that has worked to support the struggles of the people of New Orleans, and to bring that struggle and solidarity home to their own communities, while taking guidance from voices on the ground. In this time of many competing visionaries struggling to reshape this city, that willingness to listen to the people who lives are being affected, and to take that struggle and those lessons home to their own communities, may be the radical change New Orleans needs most.

Recent congressional attention has again brought Angola into the media limelight. The focus this time is on the prison’s practice of keeping some inmates in solitary confinement for decades, especially two of Angola’s most well-known residents – Herman Wallace and Albert Woodfox. Woodfox and Wallace are the remaining members of the Angola Three, political activists widely seen as having been interned in solitary confinement as punishment for their political activism.

Modern Plantation

Norris Henderson, co-director of Safe Streets/Strong Communities, a grassroots criminal justice organization in New Orleans, spent twenty years at Angola — a relatively short time in a prison where 85 percent of its 5,100 prisoners are expected to die behind its walls. “Six hundred folks been there over 25 years,” he explains. “Lots of these guys been there over 35 years. Think about that: a population that’s been there since the 1970s. Once you’re in this place, it’s almost like you ain’t going nowhere, that barring some miracle, you’re going to die there.”

Prisoners at Angola still do the same work that enslaved Africans did there when it was a slave plantation. “Angola is a plantation,” Henderson explains. “Eighteen-thousand acres of choice farmland. Even to this day, you could have machinery that can do all that work, but you still have prisoners doing it instead.” Not only do prisoners at Angola toil at the same work as enslaved Africans hundreds of years ago, but many of the white guards come from families that have lived on the grounds since the plantation days.

Nathaniel Anderson, a current inmate at Angola who has served nearly thirty years of a lifetime sentence, agrees. “People on the outside should know that Angola is still a plantation with every type and kind of slave conceivable,” he says.

Prison Organizing

In 1971, the Black Panther Party was seen as a threat to this country’s power structure – not only in the inner cities, but even in the prisons. At Orleans Parish Prison, the New Orleans city jail, the entire jail population refused to cooperate for one day in solidarity with New Orleans Panthers who were on trial. “I was in the jail at the time of their trial,” Henderson tells me. “The power that came from those guys in the jail, the camaraderie…Word went out through the jail, because no one thought the Panthers were going to get a fair trial. We decided to do something. We said, ‘The least we can do is to say the day they are going to court, no one is going to court.’”

The action was successful, and inspired prisoners to do more. “People saw what happened and said, ‘We shut down the whole system that day,’” he remembers. “That taught the guys that if we stick together we can accomplish a whole lot of things.”

Herman Wallace and Albert Woodfox were inmates who had recently become members of the Black Panther Party, and as activists, they were seen as threats to the established order of the prison. They were organizing among the other prisoners, conducting political education, and mobilizing for civil disobedience to improve conditions.

Robert King Wilkerson, like many inmates, joined the Black Panther Party while already imprisoned at Orleans Parish Prison. He was transferred to Angola, and immediately placed in solitary confinement (known at Angola as Closed Cell Restriction or CCR) — confined alone in his cell with no human contact for 23 hours a day. He later found out he had been transferred to solitary because he was accused of an attack he could not have committed — it had happened at Angola before he had been moved there.

In March of 1972, not long after they began organizing for reform from within Angola, Wallace and Woodfox were accused of killing a correctional officer. They were also moved to solitary, where they remained for nearly 36 years, until March of this year, when they were moved out four days after a congressional delegation led by Congressman John Conyers arranged a visit to the prison. Legal experts have said this is the longest time anyone in the US has spent in solitary. Amnesty International recently declared, “the prisoners’ prolonged isolation breached international treaties which the US has ratified, including the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the Convention against Torture.”

Wilkerson, Wallace, and Woodfox became known internationally as the Angola Three – Black Panthers held in solitary confinement because of their political activism. Wilkerson remained in solitary for nearly 29 years, until he was exonerated and released from prison in 2001. Since his release, Wilkerson has been a tireless advocate for his friends still incarcerated. “I’m free of Angola,” he often says, “but Angola will never be free of me.”

This history of struggle and resistance brings a special urgency to the case of the Angola Three. Kgalema Motlante, a leader of the African National Congress, said in 2003 that the case of the Angola Three “has the potential of laying bare, exposing the shortcomings, in the entire US system.”

Purchasing Testimony

Wallace and Woodfox have the facts on their side. Bloody fingerprints at the scene of the crime do not match their prints. Witnesses against them have recanted, while witnesses with nothing to gain have testified that they were nowhere near the crime. There is evidence of prosecutorial misconduct, such as purchasing inmate testimony and not disclosing it to the defense. Even the widow of the slain guard has spoken out on their behalf. Most recently, their case has received attention from Representative Conyers, head of the House Judiciary Committee, and Cedric Richmond, chair of the Louisiana House Judiciary Committee, who has scheduled hearings on the issue to begin this month.

But this is more than the story of innocent men railroaded by a system. The story of the Panthers at Angola is both inspiring and shocking. It is a struggle for justice while in the hardest of situations.

“They swam against the current in Blood Alley,” says Nathaniel Anderson, a current inmate at Angola who has been inspired by Wallace and Woodfox’s legacy. “For men to actually have the audacity to organize for the protection of young brothers who were being victimized ruthlessly was an extreme act of rebellion.”

Like many prisoners during that time, Norris Henderson was introduced to organizing by Black Panthers in prison, and later became a leader of prison activism during his time at Angola. The efforts of Wilkerson, Woodfox, Wallace, and other Panthers in prison were vital to bringing improvements in conditions, stopping sexual assault, and building alliances among different groups of prisoners. “They were part of the Panther Movement,” Henderson tells me. “This was at the height of the Black power movement, we were understanding that we all got each other. In the night-time there would be open talk, guys in the jail talking, giving history lessons, discussing why we find ourselves in the situation we find ourselves. They started educating folks around how we could treat each other. The Nation of Islam was growing in the prison at the same time. You had these different folk bringing knowledge. You had folks who were hustlers that then were listening and learning. Everybody was coming into consciousness.”

Insatiable Machine

The US has the largest incarcerated population in the world — twenty-five percent of the world’s prisoners are here. If Louisiana, which has the largest percentage imprisoned of any US state, were a country, it would have by far the world’s largest percentage of its population locked up, at one out of every 45 people. Nationwide, more than seven million people are in US jails, on probation, or on parole, and African Americans are incarcerated at nearly ten times the rate of whites. Our criminal justice system has become an insatiable machine — even when crime rates go down, the prison population keeps rising.

The efforts of the Angola Three and other politically conscious prisoners represented a fundamental challenge to this system. The organizing of Wallace, Woodfox, and Wilkerson, though cut short by their move to solitary, had an effect that continues to this day.

Prison activism, and outside support for activists behind bars, can be tremendously powerful, says Henderson. “In the early 1970s people started realizing we’re all in this situation together. First, at Angola, we pushed for a reform to get a law library. That was one of the first conditions to change. Then, we got the library; guys became aware of what their rights were. We started to push to improve the quality of food, and to get better medical care. Once they started pushing the envelope, a whole bunch of things started to change. Angola was real violent then, you had inmate violence and rape. The people running the prison system benefit from people being ignorant. But we educated ourselves. Eventually, you had guys in prison proposing legislation.”

This was a time of reforms and grassroots struggles happening in prisons across the US. Uprisings such as the Attica Rebellion were resulting in real change. Today, many of the gains from those victories have been overturned, and prisoners have even less recourse to change than ever before. “Another major difference,” Henderson explains, is that “you had federal oversight over the prisons at that time, someone you could complain to, and say my rights are being violated. Today, we’ve lost that right.”

Working for criminal justice is work that benefits us all, says Henderson. “Most folks in prison are going to come out of prison,” he states. “We should invest in the quality of that person. We should start investing in the redemption of people.”

After decades of efforts by their lawyers and by activists, Wallace and Woodfox have been released from solitary, but the struggle continues. Wallace and Woodfox remain behind bars, punished for standing up against a system that has grown even larger and more deadly. And the abuse does not end there. “There are hundreds more guys who have been in [solitary] a long time too,” Henderson adds. “This is like the first step in a thousand-mile journey.”

On a recent Saturday afternoon I visited Hayward Fair, a civil rights movement veteran from Tallulah. Mr. Fair is one of the founders of People United for Education and Action, a grassroots organization dedicated to transforming the local prison (now called Steve Hoyle Rehabilitation Center and primarily holding adults convicted of nonviolent offenses) into a “success center” which would give classes and training. If they succeed in their struggle it will be the first time in this country — where for decades funding for education has been cut while prisons have been built — that a prison has been shut down and replaced by a school, a groundbreaking reversal of the nationwide trend.

When I met with Mr. Fair he was going door to door with activists from the grassroots organizations Families and Friends of Louisiana’s Incarcerated Children, Southern Center for Human Rights and Safe Streets Strong Communities. At nearly seventy years old, with muscular arms and a shaved head, he shows no sign of slowing down. “I’ve been doing a little community organizing,” he explained, modestly. As he went from house to house, it seemed everyone in the city knew and respected him, and everyone had an opinion about both the prison and what Tallulah needs. Wielding respect from both his age and his reputation for fighting for justice locally, Fair was bringing a vision of a new Tallulah to residents who have seen a town die around them.

Speaking in a gravelly voice and a deliberate step weighted with experience, Mr. Fair led me to the site of the prison. “When the prison came to town most people weren’t even aware of what it was going to be,” he said. “It was something that produced jobs and people needed jobs so there wasn’t no real resistance to it.” But now, the local economy is devastated, and Fair blames the prison, at least in part. “It’s killing the economy of the area, in my opinion,” he claims. “Prisons only bring money to the owners.”

When you enter the city limits, the first thing you see after you pass the “Welcome to Tallulah” sign is the prison, a large complex of 33 buildings surrounded by fence and barbed wire. Standing nearby, Fair gestures down the street. “We’re about a block and a half from the junior high school, we’re about 5 blocks from the senior high school. Our children have to walk out from the classroom and the next thing they see is all these bars and towers and all these big buildings. It had a psychological effect on the children and the adults as well. It really just devastated this whole city.” For several years, the people of Tallulah, aligned with Families and Friends of Louisiana’s Incarcerated Children, have fought this struggle, to not just close the local prison, but to open something different in its place, to demonstrate that small rural towns don’t have to turn to prisons for jobs.

Tallulah, which is seventy percent Black, used to be a town that Black folks would travel from all around the region to visit. To demonstrate his point, Fair took me to the downtown, to street of shuttered storefronts, with virtually no people out. “On a day like this, on a Saturday evening, you could hardly walk down the streets of Tallulah, you’d be bumping into people. You had all businesses on this end of town,” he gestured across the street. “All the way down, nothing but businesses; grocery stores, cafes, clothing stores, barrooms, you name it. The town was wide open, stayed open 24 hours a day, seven days a week.”

Now Fair says, the town is a very different place. “We are working trying to bring our image back up, but we are now labeled as a prison town.” As in much of the country, prisons are a big business in rural Louisiana, and this part of the state has several. “You go east you got a youth prison. West down here you got this facility, you go south you got two prisons right outside the city limits.” Tallulah is now far removed from its former glory. Young people move away as soon as they’re able. “We lose maybe 70% of our young people,” he says. “Why should they stay? There’s no opportunities here for them.”

The prison in Tallulah has a long and notorious reputation. Minnesota Senator Paul Wellstone visited in 1998, and incarcerated kids broke onto a roof to shout out complaints about their treatment. The New York Times wrote several articles that same year, including a front page report calling Tallulah the worst youth prison in the US, and the US Justice Department sued the state of Louisiana over the systematic abuse at the prison, where even the warden said, “it seemed everybody had a perforated eardrum or a broken nose.”

New Orleans-based journalist Katy Reckdahl chronicled the beginnings of the struggle to transform this prison in an important series of articles several years ago. But now the effort is nearing its final days. Activists have lined up local and statewide support for this important transition, from the community level to meetings with the Governor, to support of national allies such as the Center for Third World Organizing and the Southern Center for Human Rights. With a new Governor on the way, the next few weeks will be crucial for this struggle, and for the fate of Tallulah. If the people of Tallulah win, it will be an important victory for people everywhere concerned about issues of race, education, and criminal justice.

Mr. Fair is proud of the civil rights history of Tallulah, which is located not far from where the Deacons for Defense, a pioneering Black armed self-defense group active during the civil rights movement, was formed. “We had some people here that went off to world war two, then they come back here and were second class citizens,” he explained. “They had to ride in the back of the bus. They said were not going to put up with this. So we started a movement ourselves, to eliminate that.”

Fair experienced intense white resistance to basic rights for Black folks. “At one point the Klan met about three miles outside of town and had a rally and they was going to come into town that evening. They thought they were going to run all the Blacks out of town,” Fair says. But resistance in the town was strong. “When they came into town the streets was crowded. People were walking stiff legged, with their shotguns down under their pants. We told the police were going to take care of ourselves; we don’t need you to take care of us. They thought they were going to scare somebody, but nobody here was afraid of them.”

I asked Fair how Tallulah fits into a wider struggle. “All the eyes of the world is focused on the Jena Six. But every small community in the south, and in the north, has its Jena Six. Maybe you can’t visualize it or maybe you don’t want to visualize it, but this is not just small rural towns. Look at New Orleans, during the storm. When the people was trying to cross the bridge to get out of the flood, there were people on the other side, armed, that would not let them cross. In the rest of the nation people are being treated the same way. Chicago, New York, it don’t matter where you are.”

Before leaving, I asked Fair what kept him in the struggle. “I ain’t struggling, I’m free,” he answered, explaining that this struggle is not about him. “I’m gonna do what I know is right, and I don’t care who you are. I see the young people in the community that need help. That’s what keeps me going. If you see something and you feel it aint right, don’t say they ought to change it, get in there, roll your sleeves up and say lets change it. That’s the only way. You gotta keep a cool head and do the thing that’s right. When you know right and fight for it, you’re gonna win.”

The basic facts of the case are by now widely known. In this 85% white town, where the high school yard was segregated by race, a Black student asked to sit under a tree that had been reserved for white students only. The next day, three nooses hung from the tree. The white students who hung the nooses received only a mnor punishment, and more importantly, no one in the white power structure of LaSalle Parish, where Jena is located, seemed to take the nooses seriously as racial incident. There were no lectures to the students on the meaning of the nooses, or the legacy of racism, slavery and Jim Crow in the rural south. Instead, the Parish’s district attorney told protesting Black students that he could take away their lives, “with a stroke of my pen.” He then proceeded to attempt to do just that, charging six students with attempted murder after a schoolyard fight later that year.

In the nine months since their children were charged with attempted murder, the family members of the Jena Six organized meetings, hosted rallies, sent out press releases and letters and made phone calls — whatever they could think of. They were determined to not let this stand. For months, they stood nearly alone, accompanied by solidarity visits from activists from nearby towns and cities in Louisiana and Texas. Many of their friends and neighbors were afraid to speak out, and some reported having their jobs threatened. One white couple who spoke out said they felt pressured to leave town. But, in the face of what seemed like overwhelming obstacles, and with no organizing experience or friends in high places, the people of Jena continued to struggle. After months of silence from the media and from mainstream civil rights organizations, the first media stories began appearing, which were widely forwarded by mail, and amplified by homemade videos. After Mychal Bell’s conviction at the end of June, and stories on Democracy Now and in the Final Call newspaper, support started growing exponentially, with hundreds of letters bringing tens of thousands of dollars in donations. By September, it became a movement that even the corporate media could not ignore.

At 5:00am, the buses were already arriving. A full bus from Chicago emptied out, some people brushing their teeth as they stepped into the slightly cold pre-dawn air. They seemed exhausted, but also charged and energized. Next came buses from Baton Rouge, Los Angeles and Philadelphia. By 7:00am, reports were coming in that hundreds of buses were lined up outside of town, some having been briefly prevented by State police from entering. Meanwhile, hundreds of people, from cars and buses and motorcycles, were pouring into Jena, while many thousands more were gathering in the streets outside the Jena courthouse. As simultaneous rallies began in the two locations, thousands of more people streamed into the city. By 9:00am, there were, by some estimates, up to 50,000 people in this town of 2,500. Almost every business in town was shut down, many roads were closed by police checkpoints, and a sea of protest filled the city for miles.

This demonstration was not initiated by any one national organization, and there was little coordination between some of the major organizations involved. The initial call came from the families themselves, and most people had heard about the demonstration through local Black radio stations, especially on syndicated shows like the Michael Baisden and Steve Harvey shows, as well as through blogs and youtube (one activist-made youtube video, recommended by Baisden, has already been seen well over a million times) as well as on social networking sites like myspace. As Howard Witt has pointed out in the Chicago Tribune, “Jackson, Sharpton and other big-name civil rights figures, far from leading this movement, have had to scramble to catch up. So, too, has the national media, which has only recently noticed a story that has been agitating many black Americans for months.”

This decentralization was beautiful, although sometimes chaotic. As thousands gathered at the rally at the ball field, which was sponsored by the NAACP, thousands more demonstrators marched from the courthouse to the Jena High School, and tens of thousands continued to arrive and fill the streets around downtown Jena. Because this movement was without central leadership, there were many agendas, and also some confusion, as people were unsure when the march began, or if there was a march, and also unsure about parallel events, such as an afternoon hiphop concert at the ball field, which was mostly attended by people from the local community. People seemed unconcerned about the lack of clarity, however, and marched on their own schedule, which led to a more democratic feel to the day, unlike the more controlled, and sometimes disempowering, marches that some mainstream groups have organized in the past.

The t-shirts on display reflected the lack of central control — every community had made their own t-shirt, literally hundreds of variations on the theme of Free The Jena Six, many personalized to reflect their school or community. Hours of speakers delivered messages of solidarity and calls to action, from Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson to performers such as Mos Def and Sunni Patterson, while the enormous crowds marched and chanted, and also simply basked in a truly historic outpouring of activism. Participants varied from children and teens at their first demonstration to civil rights movement veterans. Many people who had never before been to a demonstration ended up organizing a delegation or booking a bus for this journey.

While the vast majority of the white community of Jena chose to stay either indoors or out of town, hundreds of Black Jena residents proudly displayed their “Free The Jena Six” shirts, and continued to gather in the ball field hours after most out of town visitors had left. White activists from across the US also largely stayed away from this historic event — perhaps 1 to 3 percent of the crowd was white, in what amounts to a disturbing silence from the white left and liberals. This silence indicates that the US Left is divided by race in many of the same ways this country is.

Yesterday’s march, however, was not about division. It was a generational moment — the kind of watershed event that could signal a turning point in our movements. But what does the gigantic crowd in Jena mean? For some supporters, it felt like a fulfillment of those months that the families stood alone — a moment where the world stood with them, and the power structure backed down. In the last week Mychal Bell’s convictions have been overturned, and most of the other students saw their charges lessened. Yesterday was also a moment for grassroots independent media, who built this story, and kept it alive until the 24 hour news channels could no longer ignore it. It was a moment for historically black colleges and universities to shine — Student activists organized bus convoys — five or more buses arrived from many southern schools — which were quickly filled by a broad range of students.

Yesterday was a moment for the unaffiliated left, for people everywhere concerned about a criminal justice system that has locked up two million and keeps growing. It was a moment for those concerned about school systems in the US, and especially the policing of our schools, what activists have called the School to Prison Pipeline. It was a moment for those that feel that the US has still not dealt with our history of slavery and Jim Crow, and our present realities of white supremacy. Perhaps that is where the power in yesterday’s demonstration lies; if this undirected and uncontrolled outrage can be directed towards real societal change, if outrages like Jena can finally bring about the conversation on race in this country that we were promised after Katrina, if this united movement to support these six kids can show that we can unite for justice and win, then Jena will truly have been a victory.

As writer Andre Banks asked yesterday, “What would happen if every person who wore a t-shirt today or handed out a flyer or wrote a blog post woke up tomorrow and looked for the Mychal Bell in their own backyard? He, or she, won’t be hard to find. What if our outrage, today directed at the small Louisiana town of Jena, extended to parallel injustices in Detroit or Cincinnati or Sacramento or Miami? What if we viewed this mobilization not as the end of a successful, innovative campaign, but as the moment that catalyzes us into broader and deeper action in every place where we are?” If this happens, we can say that it all began with six families in Jena, Louisiana, who refused to stay silent.

Since at least the 1950s, and shows like Dragnet, Hollywood’s representation of cops has been as a thin blue line of heroes protecting the good people from the bad. The Seventies were a time of radical movements, and this brought radical criticisms of police into the mainstream, with films like Serpico and Chinatown exposing police corruption and brutality. However, the Seventies ultimately led to a new kind of hero. ” Dirty Harry” played by Clint Eastwood — the cop — or, in the case of the Death Wish movies, vigilante — who was brutal and violent, but ultimately sympathetic.

Audiences could no longer believe the old clean-cut images of cops — there were too many front-page stories of police violence and corruption — but it was still necessary to maintain the public perception that cops are necessary. The new generation of cops on film and TV — later refined and popularized by stars from Mel Gibson in Lethal Weapon to Dennis Frantz in NYPD Blue – was that of a troubled, violent, flawed, but ultimately sympathetic hero. Yes, they broke the rules, but ultimately the rules are the problem. These cops would torture people based on a hunch — but, they were always right. The person they tortured would always end up being guilty, and they would always get information from torturing them that they would not have gotten otherwise.

This justification was developed in Hollywood, and then perfected years later by the Bush Administration, who made explicit the arguments that films like Die Hard had implied — we need cops (and soldiers and federal agents) to break the rules. In fact the rules are the problem. There are “good people” and “criminals,” and we don’t need to worry about how the “bad guys” are treated. Further, the job of keeping us safe is necessarily dirty, and the police will need to break some rules to do their job right. “Tough on Crime” politicians like former New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani also contributed to this environment by discarding decades of reforms and practices meant to give opportunity for rehabilitation, instead pushing for more police, more prisons, and more arrests.

Courage To Burn

Into this archetype comes the Fox cop drama K-Ville. The publicity material for the new show explains, “Two years after Katrina, the city is still in chaos…many cops have quit, and the jails, police stations and crime labs still haven’t been properly rebuilt. But the cops who remain have courage to burn and a passion to reclaim and rebuild their city.”

Like all Hollywood products, this show is about making money first and foremost — it attempts to ride on the coattails of popular cop shows like Law and Order and CSI. In doing so, it also falls perfectly into an agenda of explaining and forgiving brutal police behavior. In fact, it takes one of the nation’s most notoriously racist, violent and corrupt police forces, and explains away their harmful acts as the natural result of the trauma of Katrina and its aftermath. When the cops on this show torture — for example, the first episode contains a kind of amateur “waterboarding” — it is because they are good people who have been pushed too hard. It makes us empathize with them and not, for example, with their victims, who are seen as deserving of whatever punishment they receive. As the show publicity states, the show’s hero is “unapologetic about bending the rules when it comes to collaring bad guys. The stakes are too high, and the city too lawless, for him to do things by the book.”

A Good Cop

Anthony Anderson stars as Marlin Boulet, a Black New Orleans cop who has seen his city devastated, who is fighting, as a homeowner, for his ninth ward neighborhood to return, while fighting as a cop against a sea of crime.

Like Law and Order, the show (at least in the first episode) dodges much of the racial politics of policing by having the criminals be mostly wealthy and white, while the police are racially diverse. Like many of these TV shows, there is an attempt to please as wide an audience as possible – the shows bring in conservatives with the tough on crime rhetoric, but bring in liberals by having the villains be corporate criminals. K-Ville even has one white villain say, “That storm wasn’t a disaster… that storm was a cleansing,” a moment that indicts white racism in the cleansing of the city, and not something that you would expect from Fox. In fact, despite being skeptical about New Orleans’ notoriously brutal police force being portrayed as heroes, it’s hard not to root for them when the first episode’s villains are Blackwater mercenaries (here called “Black River”).

Although the show gets much wrong about how race, class and power work in New Orleans — and the US — it also gets a surprising amount right. For anyone from Louisiana, the short scene with a barbeque and the song “Cupid Shuffle” playing (by Cupid, an artist from Lafayette, Louisiana) makes up for a lot that has come before. The show also has throwaway references to other New Orleans-specific phrases and foods — from the term “neutral ground” to eating gumbo — that makes the viewer feel that someone involved in writing the show at least spent some time in New Orleans.

In the end, however, these accuracies only help to convey the deeper, and more problematic, purpose of the show — a portrayal of New Orleans police as an essential thin blue line of protection in an outlaw city. The show brings up the horror of prisoners abandoned in Orleans Parish Prison, but only to reinforce an eventual rescue by the New Orleans police (if K-Ville had the courage to tell the true story of what prisoners went through in those days after the storm, it would be a very different show). The show brings up white racism, but only as an exception, not as a system of power that has displaced almost half of the Black population of the city. In short, the show gets some of the problems right, but it gets the answer deeply wrong.

Demonized and Policed

The reality is that the police, glamorized on K-Ville, are a part of the disaster the people of New Orleans have faced, not part of the solution. In the months after Katrina, while New Orleanians wanted to return and rebuild their city, they got “security” instead. Hundreds of National Guard troops, as well as police forces from across the U.S. and private security forces including Blackwater, Wackenhut and an Israeli company called Instinctive Shooting International began patrolling the nearly empty city.

As has been widely reported, the town of Gretna, across the Mississippi from New Orleans and part of Jefferson Parish, stationed officers on the bridge leading out of New Orleans blocking the main escape route for the tens of thousands suffering in the Superdome, Convention Center, and throughout the city.

From the initial images broadcast around the world, demonizing the people of New Orleans as “looters” and “criminals,” the public perception of New Orleans’ people has been shaped by bullying and “tough on crime” rhetoric, exemplified by Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco bringing in National Guard troops shortly after Katrina with the words, “They have M-16s and they are locked and loaded…These troops know how to shoot and kill, and they are more than willing to do so if necessary, and I expect they will.” This public perception, now validated by K-Ville, was no doubt a big cause of so-called “Katrina Fatigue” — the widely reported feeling that the nation has run out of sympathy for the people of New Orleans. Why feel sympathy for a city of thugs?

The Disaster Before the Disaster

While shows like K-Ville draws a solid line between good and bad, real life is murkier. Nationwide, nearly 90 percent of people imprisoned in federal prisons are there for nonviolent offenses. Louisiana is at the vanguard of mass-imprisonment, with the highest rate of imprisonment in the country — 816 sentenced prisoners per 100,000 state residents. If Louisiana were a county, it would have the highest imprisonment rate in the world. As cases like the that of the Jena Six so vividly demonstrates, the racial disparity in both arrests and sentencing in the state is striking. Although African-Americans make up 32 percent of Louisiana’s population, they constitute 72 percent of the state’s prison population.

The stories that shows like this one leave untold are those of community coming together to solve problems. In New Orleans, our real “first-responders” are folks in the communities most affected, who were out in the days after the storm rescuing people and distributing food. The true hope for our city lies in projects such as Safe Streets Strong Communities, Families and Friends of Louisiana’s Incarcerated Children, and Critical Resistance, grassroots organizations that are on the frontlines of struggles for justice in New Orleans, organizing in their communities and building a movement. There are also the lawyers and advocates of organizations such as Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana, Innocence Project New Orleans, A Fighting Chance and the Louisiana Capital Assistance Center. These organizations have represented those who the system has abandoned, from kids caught up in notoriously brutal youth prisons to indigent people on death row. These are the truly compelling stories of criminal justice in New Orleans post-Katrina, yet you can be sure that these local voices will be among those that K-Ville will not air.

The city’s criminal justice system, already rated among the worst in the nation by human rights organizations pre-Katrina, continues to be in crisis. After the storm, thousands of prisoners were abandoned in Orleans Parish Prison as the water was rising. In the days after Katrina, mainstream media depicted the people of New Orleans as looters and criminals, and a makeshift jail in a bus station was the first city function to re-open, just days after the storm.

For Robert Goodman, an activist around criminal justice issues who was born and raised in the schools and prisons of Louisiana, this demonizing and criminalization of the survivors was no surprise. He tells me that the primary crisis of New Orleans is a discriminatory and corrupt criminal justice system, adding that, “every time a black child is born in Louisiana, there’s already a bed waiting for him at Angola State Prison.”

On May 9, 2006, Robert Goodman’s brother was killed in an encounter with the New Orleans police. This was another death in a long list, including Jenard Thomas, an unarmed 25 year old, shot by police in front of his father a few months before Katrina, in a case that inspired weekly protests for months, until interrupted by the storm. The list also includes three deaths in Orleans Parish Prison this year, including, most recently, Glenn Thomas, the son of Rosetta James, another criminal justice reform activist.

A Broken System

In New Orleans, 95% of the detained youth in 1999 were Black. In 2004, Louisiana spent $96,713 to incarcerate each child in detention, and $4,724 to educate a child in the public schools. “When I went to prison, I was illiterate,” Goodman tells me. “I didn’t even know anything about slavery, about our history.”

New Orleans’ public defense system is in such poor shape that Orleans Parish Criminal District Court Judge Arthur Hunter recently complained that, “indigent defense in New Orleans is unbelievable, unconstitutional, totally lacking the basic professional standards of legal representation, and a mockery of what a criminal justice system should be in a Western civilized nation.”

Orleans Parish Prison, the city jail, was — pre-Katrina — the eighth largest jail in the US. Advocates complain that there is no forum for oversight over the jail or Marlin Gusman, the criminal Sheriff who oversees it. “We’ve suffered under a policy where the city builds a huge jail that is then required to be filled with human beings, or else it’s a waste of money,” states civil rights attorney Mary Howell.

Robert Goodman and Rosetta James are fighting to change the system that took away their loved ones, as part of a grassroots organization called Safe Streets Strong Communities. Safe Streets is struggling not just to reform the entire system, from policing and public defense to prison, but also to reframe the debate around these issues.

Safe Streets began as a coalition of grassroots activists and organizers from a number of organizations who came together post-Katrina to respond to the immediate crisis. “Our first priority was to help those individuals who had been in Orleans Parish Prison prior to Katrina, many of whom were being held illegally for minor, non-violent offenses,” explains co-director Norris Henderson. “In the early days, right after the storm, Safe Streets was basically performing triage for a broken system.”

In the transition from the crisis of Katrina to the long-term catastrophe that the city is still in, Safe Streets focused their energy on building their base, ensuring that people in communities most affected were shaping the priorities and making the decisions of the organization.

The organization has been one of the most inspiring stories of post-Katrina New Orleans. Shortly after Safe Streets began pressuring on the issue, the city’s indigent defense board was completely reconstituted and now includes people that actually care about poor people receiving a fair trial. After Safe Streets turned their focus to issues around policing, the city approved and funded an office of the independent monitor to oversee the police. In addition, the city council has begun looking at downsizing Orleans Parish Prison, as well as reducing the sheriff’s budget, and tying it to reform and greater accountability — also a part of Safe Street’s strategy.

More importantly, they helped reframe the debate around criminal justice in the city. Within a few months after the storm, instead of talk of more prisons, journalists and politicians were looking at the system, and the roots of the problems. Evidence of widespread police misconduct and people locked up for months without charges began to be reported.

For those that have been victimized by law enforcement violence, organizing and talking about what they have faced has already been transformative. “I can’t imagine where my family would be if it weren’t for Safe Streets,” Goodman tells me. “We would have been pushed to the side. This organizing inspired my mother to live another day.”

* A version of this story originally appeared in the July/August issue of ColorLines Magazine. See a special online collection of Katrina-related reporting at: www.colorlines.com/.

The story that has unfolded since then is one of racism and injustice, but also of resistance and solidarity, as people from around the world have joined together with the families of the accused, lending legal and financial support, adding political pressure, and joining demonstrations and marches.

The nooses were hung after a Black student asked permission to sit under a tree that had been reserved by tradition for white students only. In response to the three nooses, nearly every Black student in the school stood under the tree in a spontaneous and powerful act of nonviolent protest. The town’s district attorney quickly arrived, flanked by police officers, and told the Black students to stop making such a big deal over the nooses, which school officials termed to be a “harmless prank.” The school assembly, like the schoolyard where all of this had begun, was divided by race, with the Black students on one side and the white students on the other. Directing his remarks to the Black students, District Attorney Reed Walters said, “I can make your lives disappear with a stroke of a pen.”

The white students who confessed to hanging the nooses never received any meaningful punishment. Nor did the white students who months later beat up a Black student at a school party, nor did the white former student who threatened two Black students with a shotgun. But, after these incidents, when Black students got into a fight with a white student, six Black youths were charged with attempted murder, and now face a lifetime in prison. The Black students may not have been involved in the fight, but they were known to be organizers of the protest under the tree. The white student was briefly hospitalized, but had no major injuries and was socializing with friends at a school ring ceremony the evening of the fight.

The Black students were arrested immediately after the fight, in December of last year. School officials and police officials took statements from at least 44 witnesses to the fight. The statements do not paint a clear picture of who was involved. Statements from white students refer to “Black boys”, but many testimonies are unclear as to the identities of who was involved. Some of the arrested youths are not implicated in the fight by any of the witnesses.

Despite this, when Mychal Bell, the first youth to go to trial, refused to take a deal in exchange for testifying against his friends, he was quickly convicted by an all-white jury. Bell’s public defender Blane Williams, visibly angry at Bell and his parents because the youth did not take the deal, called no witnesses and gave no meaningful defense. This attorney’s behavior gives a vivid example of our nation’s broken and underfunded public defender system. Some have called Jena a throwback to the past, but in fact Jena presents a clear vision of the current state of our criminal justice system.

In Paris Texas, a white teenager burns down her family’s home and receives probation. A black one shoves a hall monitor and gets 7 years in prison. Genarlow Wilson, in Atlanta, is sentenced to ten years in prison for participating in consensual oral sex with a 15 year old when he was 17. Like these and many other cases, the case in Jena is textbook proof that there are still two systems of justice functioning in this country, one for Black people, and one for white. No serious observer can doubt that the students of Jena would never have faced charges if a Black student had been beaten instead of a white student. The unpunished incidents in the days and months leading up to the fight clearly demonstrate this.

Local Resistance

Immediately after the arrests, parents of the accused began organizing. Their call, “Free the Jena Six,” was initially heard by activists from other parts of Louisiana, such as the Lafayette public access TV show, “Community Defender,” which was the first media from outside their immediate area to give coverage of the case. Noncorporate and grassroots media has been vital in spreading word of the case, beginning with blogs and YouTube videos, which then led to high profile stories on Democracy Now and in The Final Call.

Lasalle parish, where Jena is located, is 85% white. The town is still mostly segregated — from the white barber who refuses to cut Black hair to the white and Black parts of town, separated by an invisible line. Lasalle is also one of Louisiana’s most wealthy parishes, with small oil rigs in many back yards contributing to area wealth. The parish is a major contributor to Republican politicians, and former klansman and Louisiana gubernatorial candidate David Duke received a solid majority of local votes. Jena was also the former site of a notoriously brutal youth prison, which was closed after years of lawsuits and negative media exposure. The prison is now scheduled to be reopened as a private prison for the growth business of immigrant detentions

Three hundred supporters, most from the immediate region, but some from as far away as California, Chicago and New York, descended on Jena on July 31 to protest District Attorney Reed Walters’ conduct and call for dismissal of all charges. The largest groups included Millions More Movement delegations from Houston, Monroe and Shreveport, nearly fifty members of Families and Friends of Louisiana’s Incarcerated Children from Lake Charles and New Orleans. Other delegations from across Louisiana included members of INCITE Women of Color Against Violence, Critical Resistance, Common Ground and Malcolm X Grassroots Movement. The demonstration marched through downtown Jena — reported to be the biggest civil rights march the town of 2,500 residents has ever seen — and delivered a petition with 43,000 signatures to the District Attorney’s office.

In the two weeks since the demonstration, more major allies have begun to come on board. The Congressional Black Caucus, representing 43 members, including Senator Barack Obama, issued a statement calling for charges to be dropped, while the city of Cambridge Massachusetts passed a resolution in support of the families of the Jena Six. Al Sharpton and other national leaders have visited Jena, while Jesse Jackson called members of the state legislative Black caucus on their behalf.

ColorOfChange.org, which has coordinated much of the outside support, has gathered 60,000 signatures on a petition to Louisiana Governor Blanco, calling for her to pardon the accused, and investigate District Attorney Reed Walters.

Blanco, a Democratic governor elected with the overwhelming support of Black residents of Louisiana, responded with a condescending statement, tersely informing petitioners, “The State Constitution provides for three branches of state government — Legislative, Executive, and Judicial — and the Constitution prohibits anyone in one branch from exercising the powers of anyone in another branch.” This is the same governor who, as Katrina approached, urged gulf coast residents to “pray the hurricane down” to a level two. When New Orleans was flooded and people were trapped in the New Orleans Superdome and convention center, she informed the nation that she was sending in National Guard troops, and “They have M-16s and they’re locked and loaded. These troops know how to shoot and kill, and they are more than willing to do so, and I expect they will.” More recently, Blanco created a program to bring federal money to homeowners rebuilding after Katrina — the “Road Home” — that has been a dismal failure on every level.

Mychal Bell’s sentencing is currently scheduled for September 20. The families are planning another demonstration for that date, and also have assembled a legal team for Bell and the other youths. National allies such as Southern Poverty Law Center and NAACP joined initial supporters such as Friends of Justice (from Tulia, Texas) and ACLU of Louisiana. Legal expenses for the youths could be hundreds of thousands of dollars, and funding is still needed. Except for Mychal Bell, who has a bail hearing scheduled for September 4, all of the youths are out on bail.

The case of Jena Six has served as a wake-up call on the state of US justice. It shows vividly the racial bias still inherent to our system. But is has also shown something else. That this group of families refuses to be silent in the face of injustice, and that hundreds of thousands of other people around the world have chosen to stand with them, and say that we are drawing the line, here, in Jena Louisiana.

Resources:

Donate to support the legal defense fund:
Jena 6 Defense Committee
PO BOX 2798
Jena, LA 71342

Donate online
Sign the petition

For more information or to offer concrete support, email: jena6defense@gmail.com.

Bean was speaking at a rally organized by residents of Jena, Louisiana. In the space of a few weeks, more than 150 of this small town’s residents have organized an inspiring grassroots struggle against injustice. The demonstrations began when six Black students at Jena High School were arrested after a fight at school and charged with conspiracy to attempt second-degree murder. The students now face up to 100 years in prison without parole, in a case that King Downing, National Coordinator of the ACLU’s Campaign Against Racial Profiling, has said “carries the scent of injustice.”

Local activists say that this wave of problems started last September, when Black high school students asked for permission to sit under a tree at an area of the high school that had, traditionally, been used only by white students. The next day, three nooses were hanging from the tree.

The following week, Black students staged a protest under the tree. At a school assembly soon after, Jena district attorney Reed Walters, appearing with local police officers, warned Black students against further unrest. “I can make your lives disappear with a stroke of my pen,” he threatened.

According to many in Jena, tensions simmered in the town over the fall, occasionally exploding into fights and other incidents. No white students were charged or punished, including the students found to have been responsible for hanging the nooses. Bryant Purvis, one of the Black students now facing charges, states that, after the incident, “there were a lot of people aggravated about it, a lot of fights at the school after that, a lot of arguments, and a lot of people getting treated differently.”

In the first weekend of December, a Black student was assaulted by a group of white students, and a white graduate of Jena High School threatened several Black students with a shotgun. The following Monday, white students taunted the Black student who was assaulted over the weekend, and one of the white students was beaten up.

Within hours, six Black students were arrested. “I think the district attorney is pinning it on us to make an example of us,” said Purvis. “In Jena, people get accused of things they didn’t do a lot.”

Soon after, their parents discovered that these students were facing attempted murder charges. “The courtroom, the whole back side, was filled with police officers,” Tina Jones, Bryant’s mother, recalls. “I guess they thought maybe when they announced what the charges were, we were gonna go berserk or something.”

At last week’s demonstration, family members and allies spoke about the issues at the center of the case. “I don’t know how the DA or the court system gets involved in a school fight,” said Jones. “But I’m not surprised – there’s a lot of racism in Jena. A white person will get probation, and a black person is liable to get 15 to 20 years for the same crime.”

Alan Bean began his activism in 1999 in response to a string of false arrests in his town of Tulia, Texas. In response, he founded an organization called Friends of Justice and dedicated himself to supporting community organizing around cases of criminal justice abuse in rural Texas and Louisiana. His work is often a vital intervention, bringing experience and ideas to local struggles. Small towns like Jena — which has a population of 2,500, and is 85 percent white — are often left out of the organizing support, attention, and funding that organizations in metropolitan areas receive.

This disparity was not always the case. Rural southern towns were the frontlines of the 60s civil rights movement. Groups like CORE (Congress of Racial Equality) and SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) were active throughout the rural south.

These rural towns have also been important sites of homegrown resistance. In 1964, in Jonesboro, Louisiana, just north of Jena, a group of Black veterans of the US military formed the Deacons for Defense, an armed self-defense organization, in support of civil rights struggles. The Deacons went on to form 21 chapters in rural Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama, continuing a legacy of defiance that inspired future generations of organizers.

Violent confrontations with racial undertones still occur in many of these towns. Shortly after the incident in Jena, Gerald Washington of Westlake, Louisiana was shot three days before he was to become the town’s first Black mayor. Less than two weeks after that, shots were fired into the house of another Black mayor, in Greenwood Louisiana. Jena itself is a mostly segregated community that was also the site of the Jena Juvenile Correctional Center for Youth, a legendarily brutal prison that was shut down in 2000.

Jena residents formed their own defense committee, without the support of national organizations. They have been holding weekly protests and organizing meetings that have attracted allies from near and far. A gathering last week was attended by allies from other northern and central Louisiana towns, and representatives from the ACLU, NAACP, and National Action Network.

Parents questioned why the noose and other threatening actions were not taken seriously by the school administration. “What’s the difference,” asks Marcus Jones, the father of Mychal Bell, one of the students, about the disparity in the charges. “There’s a color difference. There was white kids that hung up a noose, but it was black kids in the fight.” Sentencing disparity is a big issue in many of these small town struggles, where many see it as the modern continuation of the brutal southern heritage of lynching.

Marcus Jones explains a litany of reasons why the students should not be charged with attempted murder. “The kid did not have life threatening injuries, he was not cut, he was not stabbed, he was not shot, nothing was broken. You talk about conspiracy to attempt second-degree murder, you think about the mafia, you think somebody paid a sniper or something. We’re talking about a high school fistfight. The DA is showing his racist upbringing, and bringing it into the law.”

For three of the youth, Robert Bailey, Theo Shaw and Mychal Bell, trial starts May 21. The other dates have not been set yet. I asked Bryant Purvis how this has affected him. “One of my goals in life is to go to college, and not to go to jail, and that changed me right there,” he tells me. “That crushed me, to be in a jail cell.”

When asked how her life has changed, Purvis’ mother described the sadness of having her son taken away from her without warning. “You wake up in the morning and your son is there. You lay down at night and he’s there. Then all of a sudden he’s gone. That’s a lot to deal with.”

Further Reading
To learn more about the Deacons for Defense, see the book, The Deacons for Defense: Armed Resistance and the Civil Rights Movement, by Lance Hill.

Friends of Justice

Letter From New Orleans Grassroots

However, although New Orleans has received some long-deserved attention for its crises, Mississippi — by many measures the most impoverished state in the US — received the brunt of the damage from the hurricane. In three hardest hit coastal counties, 64,000 homes were destroyed and more than 70,000 received damage. Many of the poorest residents still have received no federal assistance, and tens of thousands remain spread across the US.

For those who have not returned to their homes, reports Monique Harden of the Gulf Coast organization Advocates for Environmental Human Rights, “displaced residents are subjected to a complex and historic interplay of race, class, and the lack of access to housing, healthcare, education, and economic opportunities.” In Gulf Coast cities, immigrants and other people of color have been for the most part left out of reconstruction funding, and for communities most affected by the storm, rebuilding seems to not be on the government agenda. Schools, health care, and criminal justice systems are in crisis.

“We had our ninth ward in East Biloxi,” Jaribu Hill, executive director of the Mississippi Workers Center for Human Rights explains, referring to the poor, mostly African American and Vietnamese coastal community that was leveled by Katrina. “The government has been slow to clean up, slow to provide resources, slow to respond. Even now, people have yet to receive aid. Not only is there widespread poverty, there is widespread displacement.”

“There’s no rebuilding being done except for casinos and condos,” Vicky Cintra of the Mississippi Immigrants Rights Alliance (MIRA) adds.

MIRA, which has been advocating for immigrant’s rights in Mississippi since 2000, quickly emerged post-Katrina as one of the only voices advocating for immigrants. Since Katrina, MIRA has helped workers recover over $1 million dollars in unpaid wages. “We’re fighting contractors who feel that, because they are dealing with immigrants, they don’t have to pay them, they don’t have to respect worker’s comp laws, or health and safety rules, or any guidelines of ethical behavior,” Cintra asserts.

Both Hill and Cintra complain that poor people have been left out of the planning process, pointing out that post-storm planning happened for the most part without the input of poor residents, and has focused on building luxury housing and helping to rebuild and expand casinos. “They had it decided and were just waiting for Katrina,” Cintra asserts. “It could have been anything. They were going to get rid of poor people and people of color. They had plans ready.”

Cintra tells me that in areas like East Biloxi, former neighborhoods are overgrown and empty. “At first, you think its undeveloped land,” she tells me. “But when you walk through the new underbrush you see the foundations of homes and realize this used to be a populated area. This is where people’s lives used to be.”

The struggle for justice for poor people in Mississippi didn’t begin with Katrina, and advocates and activists see no end in sight. “Before Katrina, people were victims of poverty. We still have the same problems now, but with displacement added.” Hill says, adding, “This is our work in 2007. We are part of the resistance movement.”