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BWB - New Orleans: Gentrification & Deception - Will Capitalist America "Trump" Blacks Once Again? (IV) - RI10
BWB - New Orleans:
Gentrification &
Deception - Will
Capitalist America
“Trump” Blacks
Once Again? (IV) -
RI10
Part IV of 4-Part Series
Battle Over Right to Return:
Housing Advocates Occupy New Orleans
Public Housing Office
Tuesday, September 4th, 2007
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/09/04/144238
Prior to Hurricane Katrina, over 5,000 families in New Orleans lived in public housing. Today, less than one quarter of them have been able to return home. Last Friday, over two dozen public housing residents and activists took over the HANO offices in New Orleans. They demanded that the government reopen the buildings. [includes rush transcript]
Two years after Hurricane Katrina drove out more than half of New Orleans, the battle over the right to return rages on. Prior to the hurricane over 5,000 families lived in public housing. Today, less than one quarter of them have been able to return home.
HANO, or the Housing authority of New Orleans, claims that its housing developments are unsuitable for accommodation but public housing advocates and residents argue that the buildings are inhabitable.
Last Friday over two dozen public housing residents and activists took over the HANO offices in New Orleans. They demanded that the government reopen the buildings.
* Sharon Sears Jasper, she was a resident of the St. Bernard housing development which is one of the four still-closed housing projects. She was among those who occupied the HANO offices on Friday.
* Stephanie Mingo, a displaced resident of the St. Bernard public housing development, the second largest housing project in New Orleans. She remembers the day the levees broke.
RUSH TRANSCRIPT
This transcript is available free of charge. However, donations help us provide closed captioning for the deaf and hard of hearing on our TV broadcast. Thank you for your generous contribution.
Donate - $25, $50, $100, more...
AMY GOODMAN: Two years after Hurricane Katrina drove out more than half of New Orleans, the battle over the right of return rages on. Prior to the hurricane, over 5,000 families lived in public housing. Today, less than a quarter of them have been able to return home. HANO, or the Housing Authority of New Orleans, claims that its housing developments are unsuitable for accommodation. But public housing advocates and residents argue the buildings are inhabitable.
Last Friday, Democracy Now! was there when over two-dozen public housing residents and activists took over the HANO offices in New Orleans. They demanded the government reopen the buildings.
Sharon Sears Jasper was a resident of the St. Bernard Housing Development, which is one of the four still-closed housing projects. She was among those who occupied the HANO offices on Friday.
SHARON SEARS JASPER: Today we are here to let you know that we are not going to stop. There will be no peace until we have justice. We refuse to let you tear our homes down and continue to destroy our lives. The government, the President of the United States, you all have failed us. You have fake promises. You have done nothing to help us. It's two years after the storm, and we are still suffering. But let me tell you this, we are going to fight this ’til the battle is fought and, as I always say, the victory is won. Our people have been displaced too long. Our people are dying of stress, depression and broken home. We demand that you open all public housing. Bring our families home now!
AMY GOODMAN: The police and military had surrounded the offices of HANO, as the protesters stayed inside for more than an hour.
Stephanie Mingo is also a displaced resident of the St. Bernard Public Housing Development, the second-largest housing project in New Orleans. I spoke to her at the International People’s Tribunal on New Orleans that was taking place at the same time downtown New Orleans. Stephanie remembers the day the levees broke.
STEPHANIE MINGO: I have a refrigerator, and it wasn’t a Housing Authority refrigerator, it was my own refrigerator. My brother had sense enough to break them doors, push it out my door, and put my two younger kids and my grandbaby in the refrigerator, and they just sailed on down to the bridge. And, you know, we went, stood on top of the bridge to help come get -- lift us up and bring us wherever they would bring us.
AMY GOODMAN: The rest of Stephanie's family survived, but Stephanie's mother died days after Katrina hit the Gulf Coast. Stephanie Mingo wants to return to St. Bernard Housing, to her community, she says. She says residents have offered to pay to fix up their own apartments, but have been rebuffed.
STEPHANIE MINGO: I want people around the world to know that this struggle is still going on, and what they see when our politicians or officials get up there and say our city is up and running, that is not true. I want the people around the world to know that the only thing our mayor is worrying about is the Essence Fest, the Jazz Fest, Carnival, the French Quarters, and our tours. That's the only thing he is protecting. He is not worrying about none of his low-income people, which is the hardest-working people in the world. He’s not worrying about us. That’s the God’s honest truth.
AMY GOODMAN: I spoke to Stephanie Mingo just after she testified at the International Tribunal on Hurricane Katrina and Rita that took place over the weekend.
Fight to Reopen New Orleans Public
Housing "Horrible Slow and Tragic"
Tuesday, September 4th, 2007
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/09/04/144244
We speak with Tracie Washington, a lifelong New Orleans resident and civil rights attorney who has sued the city over its housing policies. "Somehow we've got to get to a critical mass of people where they are all telling the government that it's wrong, so that the government will stop on its own", Washington said. "We just can't keep suing every single day. They'll wear us out". [includes rush transcript]
* Tracie Washington, a lifelong New Orleans resident and civil rights attorney who has sued the city over its housing policies. She is President of the Louisiana Justice Institute.
RUSH TRANSCRIPT
This transcript is available free of charge. However, donations help us provide closed captioning for the deaf and hard of hearing on our TV broadcast. Thank you for your generous contribution.
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AMY GOODMAN: Tracie Washington also took part. She's a lifelong New Orleans resident and civil rights attorney who has sued New Orleans over its housing policies. She's President of the Louisiana Justice Institute.
TRACIE WASHINGTON: Housing in New Orleans, no matter what sector and what you're talking about with housing, we have horrible stagnation for those individuals who own homes and are trying to get back home. The slowness of the Road Home program that the state is administering is killing them. I mean, it really is.
Renters, you know, 57% of those homes that were destroyed by Katrina were being used by renters. That’s what our population was a little upside-down with that. There was no relief really provided by the federal government that went directly into the hands of renters, and so they're just stuck out, and that's the vast majority of the population that we had.
And then, probably some of the most tragic stories come from our public housing residents, because their homes remain shuttered, and they are perfectly usable, habitable -- I mean, they're going to need some work now, it's been two years, and they've been shuttered for two years -- but good buildings, and they have been locked out of their homes.
And so, between all of that, the skyrocketing homeowner’s and flood insurance that homeowners are dealing with, I mean, it's a stressful, horribly stressful situation for individuals seeking housing in New Orleans.
AMY GOODMAN: Why aren't they opening up the public housing, for the most part? How many houses, how many apartments haven't been opened up? How many people have gone back?
TRACIE WASHINGTON: We had a little over 5,100 units of public housing occupied prior to Hurricane Katrina. Right now, depending upon whose numbers you really want to use, we have somewhere in the neighborhood of 1,200 occupied public housing units, and that's, you know, the 31st of August, 2007.
And, you know, there is a move, and there a feeling by our government that we need to have mixed-income developments and that public housing of old, how it was run before, whatever, needs to be dismantled, and until they get their way, they're going to keep these buildings shut. We have litigation going right now to change that, but it's horribly slow, and it's tragic.
AMY GOODMAN: So it's not because the housing is unusable, if they fixed it up?
TRACIE WASHINGTON: Oh, no. No, not at all. We've got experts from MIT, all over the country, who have looked at the housing. I mean, that -- and, you know, the proof is in the pudding, really, quite frankly. They wanted to close down all of the housing, and immediately after Katrina, some of the residents got word of this, and they went and they took over one of the developments, Iberville. And so, they were able to get Iberville open.
Some of these developments that are closed down took in no water. I mean, they were not damaged at all. Lafitte? No water. C.J. Peete? No water. But the decision was made to take advantage of an opportunity. Hurricane Katrina came. Look what we can do. We can keep these people away from here, bring in the bulldozers, tear down this housing, cut the unit space and occupancy by two-thirds, call it mixed-income, take that one-third that's left and divide it into three, so we have a third of that space for public housing residents, and the rest we will use for market rate and, you know, a little bit below market rate. And that has always been the plan.
I will tell you this one funny anecdote. Before we decided to take on the public housing litigation, some of the residents at the St. Bernard development said, “You know that they are just trying to take over our St. Bernard to put in golf courses”, which at the time seemed to me sort of like they intentionally blew up the levees. And I’m like, “OK, sure. All right. Yeah, they want to put golf courses right in the middle of the hood”. And you'd hear it, and you'd basically dismiss it. They're my clients, but I dismissed it. Just this summer, the plans were announced for what the developers plan to do with St. Bernard, and guess what. Two championship golf courses in that development. And all I could do was go back to my clients and say, “OK. OK. You were right. You were right”. You know -- excuse me. Now I guess we just fight to get them on the back nine. I don't know. But it's just crazy. It's just crazy.
AMY GOODMAN: And so, what power do you have to change this? How can you challenge this legally?
TRACIE WASHINGTON: Legally, we go to court. That's how we've been challenging every wrong in the city of New Orleans, every violation of civil rights. But at the end of the day, Amy, at some point we've got to challenge the hearts and the morals of these folks, because there are not enough of us to keep running to court. So somehow we've got to get to, you know, a critical mass of people, where they are all telling the government that it's wrong, so that the government will stop on its own. I mean, at the end of the day, that's what's going to have to happen in the city, so that we can have social justice and equity. Otherwise -- you know, we just can't keep suing every single day. They'll wear us out.
AMY GOODMAN: So where do the people go who don't get home?
TRACIE WASHINGTON: I worry about it. For public housing residents, there is a safety net, as it were, but that safety net doesn't mean you get back to home. It means that wherever they put you, wherever you landed -- Atlanta, Arkansas, Los Angeles, Houston -- that, you know, you have housing there. And it is the view of our federal government that as long as we provide you with housing somewhere, then you are covered. It has done its duty. I don't believe that to be the case.
I don't know how long these vouchers are going to last. There are residents who still say that they are having problems with housing. And so, in my assessment, it is this effort and drive by the federal government to take away those safety nets that we think we should have in this society.
AMY GOODMAN: What role does Mayor Nagin play in this?
TRACIE WASHINGTON: The role he plays is that he's not playing a role. A real leader provides some vision, and they take heat regardless. If Mayor Nagin simply came in and said, “You know what? The management of the local housing authority by the federal government must end now. It's been under receivership. It's two years past the time the receivership should have ended. We want our housing authority returned to a local board”. Then at least the local population could take control and decide its destiny with public housing. We'd stand a fighting chance. Right now, we are fighting Washington, D.C. A locally run board, where those local officials would be responsible and responsive to the people, would be perfect. But it is Mayor Nagin, who has to make that call, and he has not and will not. He doesn't want public housing.
AMY GOODMAN: How does he indicate that?
TRACIE WASHINGTON: He just won't take it over. I mean, he just -- it's a call. It is a letter of intent. It is a petition. Public housing went into receivership, because the former mayor allowed it to go into receivership. It needed to go into receivership. But it's a simple -- I won't say it's a simple process, but he needs to ask for it to be returned. And he has not.
AMY GOODMAN: You said that the percentages are unusual in New Orleans for renters, the percentage of renters.
TRACIE WASHINGTON: Well, for those damaged homes, and then just generally, yes. I think -- and I can't give you the statistics off the top of my head, but generally in communities you find more home ownership than you have renters. Here, we flipped. We were opposite. We had much more -- many more renters than we had homeowners, and those were -- so they were disproportionately, adversely affected by the ravages of the water.
AMY GOODMAN: So they don't get Road Home money.
TRACIE WASHINGTON: No.
AMY GOODMAN: Do they get Red Cross money? Where do they get money?
TRACIE WASHINGTON: FEMA rental assistance, if they're eligible. Red Cross is just a joke, so whatever Red Cross money we all got in the beginning, that $2,000, you know, they could have gotten that. And then that's it. You know, some of them -- those people that we still see in the trailer parks all over the country, those are the former renters here. That's where our population is.
AMY GOODMAN: And do you deal with residents of, for example, the Lower Ninth Ward?
TRACIE WASHINGTON: We continue to represent them, as well as residents in many of the other communities. The mayor and the city have begun this demolition process with houses, and just arbitrarily and capriciously demolishing homes around the city. So just last week -- two weeks ago, we filed a suit, myself along with Loyola Law Clinic, Bill Quigley, to stop these demolitions until the city comes up with a rational policy for determining which houses should be demolished.
Right now, we have houses that were demolished that were -- I got a call today, Amy, from someone who had to -- whose Road Home was being fast-tracked so that her house -- she could rebuild her house. She had gotten her closing documents. She had been awarded $130,000. They had done the evaluations and appraisals and everything. She was doing the process, starting to redo her house. She came home. Her house was gone. She was stuck. This is a sixty-two-year-old woman whose house was demolished, notwithstanding the fact she told them, “Look, the Road Home people called the city and said, you know, it's going to take us another week. Don’t -- you know, don't do this”. So then they demolished the house, and this senior citizen then had to go back at closing and take the buyout. She had to take the buyout, because she didn't have a house anymore.
AMY GOODMAN: And what was the buyout?
TRACIE WASHINGTON: The buyout was a little bit less than what they would have provided her to rebuild. And even with that -- it wound up being somewhere in the neighborhood of $100,000 -- the city says, “Well, she was made whole. She got $100,000”. I’m like, no, you don't get it. She was getting $130,000. With $100,000, you can't go and buy land and build a house. When you have to sell to the state, you sell your property. She has no property anymore. It's so tragic. It's just so tragic.
AMY GOODMAN: Don't residents have to approve demolition?
TRACIE WASHINGTON: No. The city passed a health ordinance that allows them to demolish property.
AMY GOODMAN: They don't have to even inform the residents?
TRACIE WASHINGTON: Sure, but informing them means they can send it to what the city considers the last known address, which is in most cases the house that the people aren't living in. So you get a notice at a house that you're not living in that your house is going to be demolished.
AMY GOODMAN: Who profits from this?
TRACIE WASHINGTON: I don't know. I mean, I just don't know. You know, I can go with the theories that my clients give me and say that's crazy, but I did that before, and it wasn't crazy.
AMY GOODMAN: I heard Trump might be coming to town.
The Lower Ninth Ward, in all seriousness, by the Industrial Canal, folks, developers have always wanted that tract, that large tract, for, you know, shipping, industry, big warehouses, things of that nature. So when I say that's the stuff I hear, that's what I hear. And this is even better than eminent domain. You know, that condemnation means court hearings and appeals and this, that, and the other. If you can simply pass a health ordinance that allows you to tear down somebody's house without an opportunity to be heard, without an appeal right, that's the best thing in the world for the city.
AMY GOODMAN: What gives you hope now?
TRACIE WASHINGTON: I wake up every day breathing, so, you know, I’m -- I’ve got a law license, and as long as somebody doesn't take that away, I can keep fighting. I think right now, because, for example, demolitions are happening all over the city and, you know, whites and blacks are getting these letters and notices that more folks are joining forces to fight these things, and I have to think that that's going to help.
AMY GOODMAN: Tracie Washington is the President of the Louisiana Justice Institute, speaking to us in New Orleans this weekend.
The Privatization of New Orleans: Curtis
Muhammad on Tycoons, Trump and Gulf
Coast Oil
Tuesday, September 4th, 2007
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/09/04/145214
We speak with longtime activist, Curtis Muhammad, a member of the People's Organizing Committee and a native of New Orleans. On the second anniversary of Katrina, Muhammad wrote a farewell letter to the left and progressive forces in the United States. He is leaving the country and heading south. [includes rush transcript]
We turn to a conversation with Curtis Muhammad from the People's Organizing Committee. Muhammad is a native of New Orleans and a longtime activist. During the sixties, he was an organizer with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC, and co-founded Community Labor United. After the Hurricane hit, he hit the road tracking the New Orleans refugees into shelters from city to city. We first spoke to him in Jackson Mississippi a few days after the flood.
On the second anniversary of Katrina, Curtis Muhammad wrote a farewell letter to the left and progressive forces in the United States. He is leaving the country and heading south. I visited him on his front porch in New Orleans and asked him why.
* Curtis Muhammad, a native of New Orleans and a longtime activist. He is a member of People's Organizing Committee.
RUSH TRANSCRIPT
This transcript is available free of charge. However, donations help us provide closed captioning for the deaf and hard of hearing on our TV broadcast. Thank you for your generous contribution.
Donate - $25, $50, $100, more...
AMY GOODMAN: We turn now to a conversation with Curtis Muhammad from the People's Organizing Committee. Curtis is a native of New Orleans and a longtime activist. During the ’60s, he was an organizer with SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and co-founder of Community Labor United.
On the second anniversary of Katrina, Curtis Muhammad wrote a farewell letter to the left and progressive forces in the United States. He's leaving the country and heading south. I visited with him on his front porch in New Orleans and asked him why.
CURTIS MUHAMMAD: Well, you know. You know, I come out of SNCC, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. I started organizing when I was eighteen in Mississippi in 1961, and I lived a good ten years inside of movement activity. And I realized some years ago that I was becoming a kind of a dinosaur -- that is, people who are activists and organizers, who even have knowledge of what a movement looked like. And most activists probably think this is business as usual, that the kind of stuff we do, a demonstration here, a conference, a workshop there, but have no real understanding of what a movement looked like, and how an enemy deals with a movement. So when this thing happened with Katrina, it was just so ugly, and it reminded me so much of the COINTELPRO era of the ’60s, that we began to talk and try to show young people what was going on.
But the trauma, the trauma of how the dollars are being spent, who gets the dollars, who gets to talk to you, who gets to talk to the press, who gets to talk to the bosses in the power structures -- the people that I see building in the Ninth Ward, for an example, no government agencies, no 501(c)(3)s, no NGOs, but just real basic grassroots people. So when they come together and set up their little grassroots organizations, they say -- the foundations, all of them say, “Who are your godfathers? We can't give you money directly. Poor people buy Cadillacs and dope. We can't give you money. Go get a godfather. Go get a Jesse Jackson. Go get an Urban League. Go get an NAACP. Go get an ACORN. Go get somebody that we know have handled dollars. But not you”. And so, we have hundreds of poor groups who are struggling with fists and wrists, nothing, to build their communities, when nobody else want to do it, and everybody just living off of it. It's like free enterprise on poor people, how you get a grant talking about how you and what you're going to do for poor people, but yet nobody builds a house for poor people. Nobody is there teaching the folk how to get up off the ground and counseling and working with the trauma and teaching them how to facilitate their meetings.
And so, it just hit me that we have this philosophical thing, our movement, for years: let’s organize the workers, let's organize the poor people, let’s organize the grassroots. And here we, one time in our lives, have these resources. 900 organizations on the ground in New Orleans, all of them got grants. We knock doors every day. We have no competition talking to poor people, none. And by that, they're talking to poor people. If you get them in a meeting and they come long enough, they'll come to your meeting and try to take them if they look like they're good people that they can sit in a circle when the press is present. But the idea of working with poor people to empower, to teach them how to manage and control their own affairs, it is not happening. And everybody's present. All of us are present. It ain't like the left is overseas and just the liberals are here. Everybody's here. So that's what's disturbing me. And I think that's more catastrophic than what the government did.
But I also don't think that that's just us, that that's something ingrown with us. I think it has an external agenda. I think that that work that our government did in the ’60s to destroy the organizations of that era, I don't think that work ever stopped. And I think we've got to discover how they control us, how they keep us acting like reformists and liberals, how they keep us from taking risks. I mean, it's amazing, with all this devastation and the thousands of people they killed intentionally -- and we knew they did it -- ain't nobody really mad, ain't nobody went crazy and blew up something, set something on fire. I’m not advocating it, but it's just ironic that it ain't happened. How is this possible? How is it possible that people who lead radical organizations, their greatest solution is how to lobby the state or the Congress or the senator or the…?
So the story that this young man was telling you earlier, I watched these grassroots people organize their demonstration, and I watched the national organizations that know, and then I watched the government close down their plant. And then a few days later I see them all -- government, police, press, all the players -- come together and do a demonstration, and walk away. What -- to an old veteran struggler, that tells me something. Maybe it doesn't speak to someone else who have never seen a movement. But that's the way the enemy operate. So they did a show, a dog and pony show, for some reason, about public housing, but our people are still strewn in trailer parks throughout the South who belong in those houses that are ready to be occupied with just minimal cleanup. You've seen those houses. So that's devastating to my spirit, that we can be so manipulated that we can't even stand for justice with our own people, with the least of ours, we can talk about it as if it's some kind of romantic conversation piece. So that's what it is.
AMY GOODMAN: After Katrina, after you went and followed where survivors were going, how they were being treated, you held a gathering at Southern University in Baton Rouge. Can you talk about what you were trying to do in the series of gatherings you had in different places, and then what happened?
CURTIS MUHAMMAD: Well, we was trying to see if the progressive community understood the historical moment, and they convinced us that they did. And we talked to everybody. And so, we were guilty of inviting everybody to come, too, because we were like, “This is genocide” -- and people say, “Yeah, this is genocide” -- “and this is our opportunity to really organize on behalf of the poor. Let's do it. Let's put the people in charge of their own destiny, and let's take our gifts, skills and talents and resources and throw them at their feet and give them everything, every kind of support we can give them”. And people said, “Let's do it”.
And we started, and folks heard it, and we talked it nationally, and you helped us talk it, and people threw money at us to the tune of almost $1.3 million in a matter of four or five months. And all those organizations who had signed on to empower the poor, to organize the poor, to give them the reins to the struggle started looking back at those little programs and ideas they had in their files that had never worked in the last forty years and decided, well, maybe it’s better we try this again. And so, the poor people had to take second seat to those people, and they still are.
AMY GOODMAN: So what do you think needs to be done? I know that your letter was a goodbye letter, but what do you feel needs to be done? This is two years since Hurricane Katrina. People are utterly devastated here.
CURTIS MUHAMMAD: You know, I hate to say this, but I really think that time is going to have to heal us. The greatest -- the greatest periods of history in America -- I don't know if this is true of the world, but it's definitely true here -- is when everybody was in trouble, and somebody saved us.
When the Civil War hit, the whole country was just in shambles, and the slave rebels, those who had been part of the rebel movement before the Civil War, stepped up and won the war for them in exchange for a Reconstruction program, one of the most beautiful periods in history, the Reconstruction period, thirteen years before they threw us back in slavery almost.
The next beautiful period is the Depression. Everybody got scared. The stock market crashed, and everybody saw a little poverty for a minute, and we came out of that wanting everybody to have jobs, everybody to have an education and medical care and housing. That's where public housing comes from, that's where Social Security comes from, that's where the eight-hour day comes from, that's where the hospitals, the Charity hospitals come from -- all the stuff we are dismantling now, because we have forgotten what it's like to suffer as a mass.
So what we do in New Orleans, we isolated the poor of us, the darkest of us, to kill, to literally -- we abandoned them. We were ready to let them die at the hands of a hurricane that we knew and hoped was coming. This country did that with knowledge. With knowledge. That’s how folks --
So what has to happen? Something has to happen to remind human beings that we can all suffer, every last one of us -- they've seen this -- because those have been the periods when we most did the best as human beings in this country. So something catastrophic has to happen inside of America that affects the entire mass to wake up our humanity, to pay attention to those who are the most oppressed.
AMY GOODMAN: And you don't think the attacks on 9/11, followed by Hurricane Katrina, did that?
CURTIS MUHAMMAD: Wasn't enough. Too many rich people, too many people making money. The CEOs’ $346 million-a-year salary, can you imagine some poo-poo like that?
AMY GOODMAN: The relief groups, the groups that are on the ground that are working, do you find fault with them?
CURTIS MUHAMMAD: It's not so much fault. It's lack of understanding. I mean, yeah, I mean, people need food, so you feed people. People need medical care, so you give them medical care. But if you don't have a process of teaching people to give skills and talents and resources of self-governance, of self-sustenance, it's really just a throwaway. And it's not that they don't -- they just don't know better. They're good liberal people.
AMY GOODMAN: Veteran organizer Curtis Muhammad, speaking to him in New Orleans. We'll come back to the conversation in a minute.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN: We return to Curtis Muhammad, veteran organizer from New Orleans. I was sitting with him on his front porch, as he had just released a letter to the left and progressive forces, a farewell letter to the United States.
CURTIS MUHAMMAD: The students who are the children of the men who demanded, who stopped their movement to demand to go defeat Germany, black men, demanded to be soldiers -- they were they who were first to find the ovens and free Jews in Germany. Little known history, by the way. That's what we wanted to do when we went to Germany. We came home; we did not want to live on the cotton plantations. We migrated to take the jobs of the steel mills and the auto plants in the North. But the schools we knew that would accept our children were down South, and we sent them there to go to school. And those children wanted hamburgers at night, and we started the sit-in movement because we couldn't get them. Do you remember the story?
So we got this massive sit-in movement, just swelled all over the South. And one smart woman named Ella Baker called us together and said, “Hey children, y'all are doing good work, but you need to know that there's been a movement around before you started this hamburger business”. We’re doing freedom rides, we’re integrating buses. We were just raising much hell. We’re in the evening news and the morning news, and we were totally convinced we were the movement.
And Ms. Baker said, “Do me a favor. What do you think the worst state in the whole union is?” Oh, we were smart: “Mississippi!” She said, “Why don't you go down there and talk to some of the elders about what they want?” And a few of us decided to do that. And the people that she sent us to talk to gave us a list of towns to go to with a car and some gas money and told us to tell the people our story, who we were, and ask them what would they have us do if we were going to work for freedom for them. And we did it and came back to the people. Amsie Moore was one of the great men who sent us. He said “No, I don’t want to hear it today. Go tomorrow”. They made us do it for five days: knock on doors and ask people these four or five questions after we introduced who we were. And the tally of our conversation with people was, “Oh, it's nice that y'all would like to integrate those places -- it's good -- and that you've got the freedom rides and all those marches you had, but we want the right to vote”. Wow!
So we go back to the organizational meeting and say, “Well, here's our findings. People want us to work on the right to vote. Ain't but 600 voters in the whole state of Mississippi, but they're the majority population. But you have to learn how to read and write before you can vote, because you have to pass a literacy test to vote. 65% of the people can't read and write. So the first thing we've got to do is do literacy”. The students said, “No, we already got a movement. Let's just keep going, because, you know, we have to stop what we're doing. We have to go be teaching people how to read and write before they can even try to vote, and then they might not pass. It will be years before we get the right to vote”. We said, “No, but that's what the people said they want to do”.
So we're having this big fight in the SNCC meeting, about to tear the organization up, and we just got started. Ms. Baker calms us down and said, “Look, why don't you do two things? Why don't you have a direct action arm that do demonstrations and have a voter registration arm that works on voter registration?” We said, “Great!” 300 people in the room. Nine people agreed to go to Mississippi to work on this out of 300 -- 1961. By ’63, we were growing. By ’64, it was the most popular demand in the movement: the right to vote -- one man, one vote. By ’65, we had won the Voting Rights Act. That was a movement, but it was a consensus.
What was key was we discovered -- this is what Ms. Baker taught us. She said when -- an organizer do not design a program and sell it to the people. An organizer talks to the people until they discover what the people already agree to. She said the people have a consensus. They're just not aware of it. The organizer's job is to find out what it is and then organize around that consensus. And our consensus was the demand for the right to vote.
AMY GOODMAN: And what do you think the equivalent is here now in New Orleans?
CURTIS MUHAMMAD: I think public school education is one. We proved that in New Orleans before Katrina. I think public school education is a mass consensus in America. And I think you can organize around it, and parents and students would take risk on that question. I really do.
I also think that genocide is growing to be one, and I think that the enslaved men and black male children between fourteen and twenty-five -- every mother have lost a child to the slave trade of the prison-industrial complex, and I think that the movement ignores it, because they never saw that black males were at the bottom of oppression, because our oppression has been defined by other than our own community. But if you ask the average black mother, “My children don't get educated, and my boys are going to jail”.
AMY GOODMAN: What do you think of the charter schools and the firing of?
CURTIS MUHAMMAD: I think it's another form of slavery. It's another way to isolate the very poor and the very dire, so that genocide is possible. I think we are involved in a genocidal mode in this country for particularly young black males right now, and I think very poor black folks are very vulnerable to it. So I think this hurricane was an opportunity to do it. They just missed it.
I think we need a whole re-education in this country. We didn’t -- we missed it when we watched the automation of the cotton picker thirty or forty years ago. We missed the fact that three, four, five million people were still on cotton plantations and tobacco plantations and sugarcane plantations who had been there since slavery, never reading, never writing, knowing nothing about society, was dumped all at once, within one-and-a-half decades, into the major cities of the country. Something like one-fifth of our population had just come off the plantations in 1965, ’70. And those are they who are the super poor, who are uneducated, that this country do not want to invest in educating. I mean, there’s some stuff going on among us that we just have not taken the time to look at.
AMY GOODMAN: Housing, who, do you believe, in New Orleans is designing this experiment on privatization? There's a T-shirt at the tribunal that says something like "Don't believe the hype. It's not redevelopment" -- let's see if I can get it exactly. “It's not redevelopment that is slow, so-called, here” -- let me get it exactly. “Don't believe the hype. Gulf Coast recovery is not ‘slow.’ It's a privatization scheme that takes away our homes, schools, hospitals and human rights”. Do you agree with that?
CURTIS MUHAMMAD: You know, this thing is so big, Amy, that I’m really nervous about grabbing a little piece of something to agree or disagree with, because it's such a massive, broad scheme. Since you do a lot of investigative stuff, you need to look at the shipbuilding contracts and where they are right now and look at the number of them that's coming to shipyards along this coast of New Orleans and look at the new shipyards being constructed. You need to look at the oil find in the Gulf, that was equivalent to some of the biggest oil finds in the Middle East, and the development that has happened since that find, the number of new rigs that have been built right out on the Gulf Coast. And then we need to think about what is the plan for the mouth of the Mississippi moving up in this city that is host to the --
You've got one TV. Why are you going to take two? Go, man. Tell her to stop taking -- OK. Go ahead, man. Go ahead.
So we’re wondering -- we’re wondering what's planned, that -- I mean, we watched them bring 30,000 H2 visas in to work in the shipping yard and in the oil rigs, where they can pay people less than $20 an hour easily. They can get down to $9, $8, and $10, and they used to have to pay big money for that. We don't quite know what they're after, the casino population. People have seen Trump down here trying to buy real estate, you know, the big tycoons, you know? The gated community is growing faster and faster. We don't know what they're up to. Somebody needs to look at this.
It's bigger than just -- I mean, you saw -- you looked at the public housing. If we got a housing problem, they could have knocked that out in a week if they wanted to, clean it up and wash a few things, put a few windows in, turn on the electricity and the water, get the people back in. They could have done that for almost 8,000 families. That's a lot of people. Times four, what's that? Twenty-four, five --
AMY GOODMAN: 32,000.
CURTIS MUHAMMAD: 32,000 people. That's a lot of people that they could have just brought home. No, why not? You can't explain that by the side. That's too big. That needs some research. You don't just say, “screw you” to 32,000 people and just explain it all away, some kind of little old cute way.
AMY GOODMAN: What do you think of the candidates coming in on the anniversary of Katrina? I think Barack Obama came, and Hillary Clinton. I think John Edwards was here. Well, of course, President Bush. Alberto Gonzales said it was one of the high points of his career, was New Orleans and the Katrina time, because of the level of cooperation.
CURTIS MUHAMMAD: You know, I mean, poor people have all -- this is -- poor people have always been the -- what's the word? -- the --
AMY GOODMAN: “Backdrop”?
CURTIS MUHAMMAD: Yeah, for political poo-poo. You know, they show up at our picnics in an election year and talk about how they're going to do this for us and put chickens in our pot and cars in our garages, and jobs, and they always promise this poo-poo. But then, what's so ugly about this, what's so ugly about New Orleans, I mean, we have recorded close to 6,000 people that died. We think that was a real intentional attempt to wipe out 100,000 black folks right here with Hurricane Katrina. And here's all these thousands of people using these poor people to pick their stuff up and stand tall and look like somebody, and nothing changes. You walked around this town. The Ninth Ward ain't changed. Public housing ain't changed. Ain't nobody doing nothing for no poor people.
The housing going on, so they took care to elect -- they're doing something down there for, what, the musicians. You saw that. They're doing something for the homeowners. You see that down there by the levee, what the town community is called, back there behind the Ninth Ward, and they call it Ninth Ward, what --
AMY GOODMAN: Holy Cross.
CURTIS MUHAMMAD: Holy Cross community, you see this kind of construction going on. You see the Garden District downtown, the casinos, the hotels, you see it. It's not a secret. And so, people come here and say, “Oh, we're going to do this, we're going to do” -- and then we still poor, we still got nothing, still got no help.
And you know what? When I travel around the country people think that folks are doing stuff for poor people in New Orleans. That's what's so weird. I was just in Europe. People in England said they were surprised that poor people ain't got no houses. They thought -- I was down in Latin America. People thought we weren't catching hell. In some kind of way they are able to project this feeling that everything is OK in New Orleans. You know, people like me get accused of being a conspiracy theorist or something, but this is stuff people can see. They literally have no intentions, by evidence, of bringing poor black folks back to this city.
AMY GOODMAN: What about Ray Nagin, the Mayor?
CURTIS MUHAMMAD: That's another long story. You've got to deal with the fact that we were the slaves of masters from England, from France, and from Spanish, to understand that. You'd have to understand the apartheid of the white light-skinned Creole, dark-skinned Creole and the black folk. The reality of New Orleans is a cast that was institutionalized by the Spanish that other people honored, and we still in it. Ray's heritage is the islands, so his heritage is part of the Creole heritage. This town has never been politically run by anybody else other than Creoles. We don’t like to talk about it. We like to be cool.
But part of the problem here is we have a serious apartheid. I mean, local, state and national governments were in an agreement to allow those 100,000 people to die, and Ray Nagin was the mayor. I don't back off of that. And we had 278 buses upstairs on the sixth floor of the damn city parking lot that could have driven people out of this town. I’m sorry. Ray can't do that to me. He was in agreement. And nowhere else in history has every arm of the government agreed to let something like that happen. Even slavery, everybody wasn't in agreement. But on this one, the local, state and national governments had agreement to just let them people sit here.
AMY GOODMAN: Do you think the whole thing can happen again?
CURTIS MUHAMMAD: Yes, I do. I really do. But they will be much better at painting the picture. There won't be nobody like me looking at it, I bet you. It can happen again.
AMY GOODMAN: Veteran organizer Curtis Muhammad in New Orleans. He is leaving the United States this week and heading south. He wrote a goodbye letter to the people of the United States.
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