Deep distrust over New Orleans rebuilding

updated 6:25 p.m. ET Oct. 24, 2005

Darryl Delatte, 57 years old and 22 months shy of retiring as a mechanic, was rescued from his flooded New Orleans home after Hurricane Katrina and dropped on an interstate. There, he watched people die — and wondered why no help came.

“Everybody kept passing you by,” he says.

Now, at a cavernous disaster relief center in Houston, he ponders the promises made by government officials — of land and jobs for evacuees back home, of a rebirth of the city’s essential, vibrant black community.

He has doubts, real and hardened.

It is not difficult to find other black New Orleanians who share those doubts — forged in an era of slavery, cemented by floods and hurricanes past and decades of political and social disappointment. And those doubts have profound implications for the very much uncertain prospect of rebuilding New Orleans.

Delatte, for example, does not believe the government will help blacks return to their homes or even give them a chance at buying them back, or offer assistance when mortgages and credit-card bills come due.

He concludes: “A lot of people ain’t going to come back.”

Beneath the shattered, condemned homes of the poorest and blackest sections of New Orleans, lodged in the dank, toxic soil left behind by Katrina, are deep roots of distrust for the government.

Tragic limbo
That distrust is fully evident eight weeks after Katrina drowned the city. Many its black residents are stuck in a tragic limbo, a mix of questions and conspiracies. Most immediately, they wonder how they could have been left behind so egregiously in a disaster foreseen for decades.

Layman Thomas, 47, who works for the New Orleans parks department, still seethes over what he saw at the infamous convention center: “No response, no security, no food or water. We were back there on our own. Nobody to help us, direct us or nothing.”

“I think they played race on our entire state,” he says. “We had people from all different cities who wanted to come get us. But the president and the governor had to release all that. But it took them all days to sign the papers.”

The notion that blacks were intentionally left behind — to suffer, to starve, to drown — is not new in New Orleans. The predominantly black Lower Ninth Ward suffered heavy damage from Hurricane Betsy in 1965, and speculation has lingered for decades that it was sacrificed so that whiter parts of the city would survive.

“Communities of color have always favored urban legends, because all too often they have corresponded to reality,” says Mike Davis, a San Diego historian and writer who spent a week in New Orleans in September.

In an article in The Nation, Davis and New Orleans architect Anthony Fontenot drew up a list of 25 questions — many of them provided by furious black New Orleans residents — about failures during the evacuation of the city.

‘Planned neglect’
“Locals are more inclined to discern deliberate design and planned neglect — the murder, not the accidental death, of a great city,” they wrote.

Among the questions: Was the Superdome purposely stocked with not enough food, to force poorer residents to flee the city? And why did officials let food stocked in restaurants in the dry French Quarter spoil while the stranded starved?

More to the point, there is unmistakable suspicion that the Industrial Canal levee was somehow deliberately broken during Katrina in order to flood the heavily impoverished Lower Ninth Ward and save whiter parts of the city.

“I really don’t believe it was Mother Nature’s doing,” says Michelle Bailey, a Ninth Ward evacuee in Houston who was rescued off her rooftop.

Those sentiments have been echoed by others — notably Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, who has speculated that the levees were bombed from underwater to flood out black neighborhoods.

Ninth Ward, the orphan
The very construction of the Industrial Canal in 1922 helped to choke off poorer New Orleans blacks, historians say.

“Ever since then, that part of the Ninth Ward has been orphaned,” says John M. Barry, author of “Rising Tide,” an acclaimed account of the devastating 1927 Mississippi River flood.

“That canal is a manmade body of water that’s separated from the rest of the city. They’ve gotten no services ever since. Part of that is because they’re poor and black. Nobody cared. Some of that area was developed, but a lot of it wasn’t.”

After the 1927 flood, hundreds of thousands of blacks along the Mississippi delta were forced into filthy refugee camps, often without food or water, sometimes ordered at gunpoint to work on levees and relief projects.

Historians have said the response of Republican President Calvin Coolidge — who was criticized in the press as failing to grasp the enormity of the crisis — helped spur the seismic shift of black voters to the Democratic Party.

But in 2005, many poor black New Orleanians are disappointed in all public officials — Republican and Democrat, white and black.

Hal Clark, who hosts “Sunday Journal” on New Orleans’ WYLD-FM, a show with a strong African-American audience, recalls the election of Ernest Morial, the city’s first black mayor, in the late 1970s.

“There was a lot of hope, or what have you, that we would get a piece of the pie,” Clark says. “But that hasn’t happened.”

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