Katrina survivors and grassroots converging for conference and a march for New Orleans

13 Comments

1. 

   James Benjamin on December 10, 2005 at 1:49 am

   In the fwiw department, I gave your diary a plug on my blog.

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     blksista on December 10, 2005 at 5:52 pm

     Thank you!

2. 

   stonemason on December 10, 2005 at 8:36 am

   For keeping on this.

   Big KUDOS to you.

   Wish we could be there…  we live over a thousand miles away, but our hearts are with you.

   Please… like I need to say it… keep the updates coming.

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     on December 10, 2005 at 12:28 pm

     For those who would like to help, but cannot be there….

     I just posted this diary which is not likely to be immediately apparent as “Katrina-Related”, but it is….

     Do We Need Another Hero?

3. 

   duranta on December 10, 2005 at 10:11 am

   Several members of the People’s Hurricane Relief Fund, it’s a wonderful, active group, have been attending our NOHEAT meetings in New Orleans. NOHEAT is the New Orleans Emergency Action Team, a coalition of groups, including C3/HandsoffIberville, the group I belong to, who respond quickly to illegal evictions in progress, and rally for the reopening of public housing.

   Housing is the key issue, both emergency housing, and semi-permanent while people rebuild their homes.

   The other key issue are the levees. If they aren’t rebuilt, the way they should have been in the first place, there won’t be a New Orleans to come back to.

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     Janet Strange on December 10, 2005 at 12:21 pm

     I am looking forward to your report. I was hoping that someone who posts here would be there and could tell us how it went.

     • 

       duranta on December 10, 2005 at 7:13 pm

       The march was awesome. Good turnout considering the city is devoid of its people, people of color and the working class. A lot of networking, but few spectators, good media coverage, including CNN and local stations. Soul Rebels brass band marched, so basically it was a second line the entire way; very good for the soul. We all needed this. Few spectators because its a bit cold, and Canal ST. is still not the shopping mecca it was before the storm. Great speeches.

       Mama D was especially good, electric. Remember, she testified in front of Congress this week. She is emerging, in her sing-song, storytelling style, as the people’s spiritual leader. She’s beautiful.

       I laugh at Rep. Shayes I believe, from Conn., when he remarked in the hearing that she should stop speaking in tongues. I suppose speaking of grass roots efforts is like speaking in tongues to him.

       • 

         Janet Strange on December 10, 2005 at 8:25 pm

         Thanks! Sounds like it was great. Will you do a diary? (please, please . . .)

         • 

           blksista on December 10, 2005 at 11:55 pm

           n/t

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           duranta on December 11, 2005 at 9:45 am

           I have plans to do a diary on public housing. Also, thinking about a diary on Mama D, and other black leaders emerging out of New Orleans. I believe there is an effort, usually among whites who want to distance themselves from their own guilt, to discredit them because they talk about the levees being bombed during the storm.

           I’ve talked to white people and African-Americans who believe the levee was bombed. Some sort of explosion was heard by many. Now, it is my belief this explosion could have been the barge that burst through the levee in the lower ninth, possibly killing hundreds.

           But I believe their concerns and fears should be honored, given that the levees were bombed in 1927 I believe. It is a sad testiment to the state of affairs between the races in our country when those fears are being used to discredit black leaders who care very much for their communities.  

4. 

   DuctapeFatwa on December 10, 2005 at 2:09 pm

   Janeice Sylvester is one of thousands of Hurricane Katrina victims who could be made homeless twice by the storm.

   Sylvester was evacuated from New Orleans when the storm hit Aug. 29. Upon her return about two months later, the 26-year-old who has three small children found an eviction notice tacked to her door and the interior of her apartment ransacked.

   “I’m not sure whether my home was looted or (the landlord) was already putting my stuff on the street.”

   Community activists and legal aid groups say they’re battling a wave of eviction notices issued to low-income Katrina victims like Sylvester. They claim landlords are eager to find tenants willing to pay much higher rents now that housing is so scarce on the Gulf Coast.

   “We’re seeing the ugliest of market forces,” said Judith Browne, co-director of the Washington-based Advancement Project, a civil rights and legal aid organization.

   Sylvester said she went to the nearby town of LaPlace after the hurricane and tried to contact her landlord from there but couldn’t get through.

   In early November, she returned to find her apartment in disarray and filled with mildew. The eviction notice on her door included a court date scheduled for the day before.

   The Advancement Project represented Sylvester and other evacuees in a lawsuit against Louisiana officials who preside over eviction proceedings. The petition, filed in federal court in New Orleans, says it’s unconstitutional to notify evacuees they’re being evicted simply by posting a notice on their door.

   Landlords say they’re following existing law, which never contemplated the forced displacement of hundreds of thousands of people. They also say they need paying tenants to meet their own obligations and cover the costs of Katrina-related repairs.

   A few days before Thanksgiving, a judge sided with Browne and her tenant clients. The judge issued an order requiring court officers to get the addresses of Katrina evacuees facing eviction and mail them eviction notices that give them 45 days to respond.

   “At least we’ve bought some time,” Browne said.

   Sylvester, who lost her job as a cosmetologist when Katrina destroyed the shop in which she worked, is glad she has a second chance to fight eviction. “I’m satisfied (the court) overturned the evictions and have given people more time.”

   But courts in Mississippi and Louisiana also have decided that most Katrina victims must pay rent for the time their apartments were uninhabitable.

   That’s what happened to Greg Dedeaux, a 52-year-old truck driver who was forced to leave his apartment in Gulfport, Miss., the night Katrina made landfall. Dedeaux lived in his car while the roof of his apartment building was repaired. After two weeks, he returned with his mother, who also had been displaced by the storm. Dedeaux now faces eviction because he balked at paying rent for the time he was unable to live in his apartment. “The only thing that didn’t get hurt in my apartment was the bathtub.”

   A Mississippi court ruled that Dedeaux had to pay back rent. He did.

   But his landlord, David Crittenden, wants him out anyway. “I don’t want anybody renting from me that I had to sue.” Dedeaux’s unit rented for $345 a month but is expected to rent for a lot more after he leaves. He plans to raise rents by at least 25 percent for new tenants.

   nerdified link

5. 

   Other Lisa on December 11, 2005 at 12:02 am

   Here is the headline & lede:

   Anxiety Is the Cornerstone
   Set aside the French Quarter and the trucks hauling away debris. New Orleans is not bouncing back. ‘We are not OK. We are desperate.’

   The article puts the blame for New Orlean’s lack of recovery almost entirely on the Federal government’s lack of commitment to the city.

   • 

     Janet Strange on December 11, 2005 at 1:22 am

     From the article:

     A few weeks ago, Cecile Tebo, a social worker for the Police Department, received an e-mail from a sister in Florida congratulating her for the quick steps toward recovery New Orleans had taken. After all, she’d seen on TV reports that the French Quarter was reopened and that plans were being laid for Mardi Gras. They’ve even begun to patch up the roof of the Super Dome.

     “You must be so much better,” the sister wrote.

     Her timing was not perfect. Tebo, 45, a native and daughter of a former police superintendent, received this well-meant note shortly after one of her best friends, a pediatrician and father of three, hanged himself. . . .

     On her job, she was called to a bridge where a man was poised to jump, holding an umbrella. “Don’t take this umbrella,” he told officers who talked him down. “It’s all I have.” She went to the home of a woman in breakdown. A piece of red construction paper had blown onto her porch. The woman mistakenly believed the city had tagged her home for demolition.

     “People are killing themselves,” Tebo said this week in a Garden District coffee shop. “All these meetings aren’t working. All these plans they talk about aren’t working.”

     She had watched herself growing more and more depressed, unable to sleep or do her job.

     After her sister’s e-mail, she arose from her bed at 3 a.m. and, weeping, wrote a response in the form of a letter to the editor of the Times-Picayune:

     “The attention received in the early days of this tragedy was relentless…. But now, though thousands continue to suffer and drown in grief and despair, the cameras have turned elsewhere. We are left to suffer alone with fear and broken promises….

     “I want the word to get out. We are not OK. We are desperate, depressed, anxious, angry. People are killing themselves. Relationships are deteriorating. The antidepressants are not working. No, we are not OK.”