Militant Katrina: Looking Back at Black Power

Abstract

In 1955, Louis Armstrong sang a sentimental song depicting Christmas in New Orleans as a dreamy time of praying barefoot choirs and sparkling midnight magnolias.¹ A few days before Christmas in 2007, cameras at New Orleans’s city hall captured a different kind of yuletide. During the third holiday season since Hurricane Katrina, the city’s centuries-old struggle over race, poverty, and exclusion erupted in plain view, producing one of the most troubling public moments since the storm. Upset over the planned demolition of approximately 3,500 units of public housing in a housing-starved city, dozens of protesters showed up to voice their outrage. Upstairs, the city council was set to vote to follow the wishes of the federal government and tear down four large public-housing developments that had been closed since Katrina. Apartments and town homes painted in pastels and spaced out to appeal to market-price renters would replace the half-century old brick buildings of Lafitte, St. Bernard, C. J. Pee te (originally Magnolia), and B.W. Cooper (originally Calliope). Three of the complexes occupied over 100 hundred acres of downtown real estate and fired the imagination of developers and speculators familiar with HOPE VI projects, the initiative of the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to turn troubled public housing projects into mixed-income neighborhoods.² Over the past year, opponents formed the Coalition to Stop the Demolition, and activists linked to it were demanding that the city reverse course and allow residents to return to their former apartments.³