Kalamu ya Salaam

Abstract

Kalamu ya Salaam (Pen of Peace) was born Vallery Ferdinand, III, in 1947 and raised with his two brothers in a modest home built by his father on St. Maurice Avenue near Law Street. He is recognized as one of the Lower Ninth Ward’s most talented artists, as well as a revered community activist and a feared political critic. A leader during the civil rights movement in New Orleans, Kalamu attended Carleton College in Minnesota for two quarters on a partial scholarship, before becoming overwhelmingly homesick for the black culture of New Orleans. Kalamu was a leader of the Black Arts South Movement and a participant in Free Southern Theater. From 1983 to ’87, he was the executive director of the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Foundation. Before Katrina, he lived in Algiers with his wife, Nia, ran the cultural listserv e-drum, and codirected Students at the Center, a writing program for high school students. Like his grandfather Noah Copelin, he has influenced generations of New Orleanians.

On July 10, 2006, the bearded activist, writer, and educator opened the red front door of his home for an interview.¹ He was wearing his customary attire: black jeans, black t-shirt, and black shoes. Only his red-rimmed glasses challenged the ensemble. The phone rang continually for the entire four-hour session, but remained unanswered. The interview was held in a small room painted deep red and lined with framed African art, at a dining room table decorated with a bold kente cloth runner.

Kalamu is an example of the dynamic, creative, hardworking, and stubborn talent that once was common in his neighborhood. In the spirit of the Lower Ninth Ward, he was a bookworm who even read a book on how to give “licks” in order to defeat a bully and earned a reputation for toughness that gave him license for his artistic and intellectual expression. He observed Katrina from Houston, where he drove before the storm. During the fall of 2005 while on a cross-country tour, Kalamu videotaped seventy-five hours of frank, emotional interviews by displaced survivors for a project called “Listen to the People” in an attempt to memorialize in words, sounds, and images the devastated people and places he loved, and to stir a nation’s conscience as a secular prophet. The spirit of the Lower Ninth Ward lives on in Kalamu’s relentless will: not only to survive, struggle, and win but above all to create.