WHO DAT?

Photos by Abdul Aziz.

Haiti - Still Starving After 23 Days, By Bill Quigley

You can walk down many of the streets of Port au Prince and see absolutely no evidence that the world community has helped Haiti.

Twenty three days after the earthquake jolted Haiti and killed over 200,000 people, as many as a million people have still not received any international food assistance.

On February 4, the UN World Food Program reported they had given at least some food, mostly 55 pound bags of rice, to over a million people. The UN acknowledges that it still needs to reach another one million people. The 55 pounds of rice are expected to provide a two week food ration for a family. Beans and cooking oil are scheduled to come later.

The Associated Press reported that people in Haiti at small protests were holding up banners reading "Help us, we're starving."

Over a million people are displaced. About 10,000 families are in tents, the rest are living under sheets, blankets and tarps.

One of the people living under a sheet is a brand new mother with her one day old baby. The New York Times reports that Rosalie Antoine, 33, and her one day old baby were living in a neighbor's yard with puppies and chickens under a sheet in the Bel-Air neighborhood of Port au Prince.

Haiti and the United Nations estimate 250,000 children under the age of 7 are living in temporary housing. Most need vaccinations.

Flavia Cherry, of the Caribbean Association for Feminist Research and Action, this week witnessed a pregnant double amputee give birth on the ground in one of the tent camps without any medical assistance at all. "This poor mother had nothing, no milk, no clothing for the baby, nothing!"

Even people who can afford to purchase food are having a difficult time. A 55 pound bag of rice costs 40 percent more today than it did before the earthquake. Dr. Louise Ivers, a Partners in Health physician in Port au Prince, reports a 25 kg (55 pounds) bag of rice that sold for $30 US dollars (1,207 Haitian Gourdes) before the quake, now costs $42 US dollars (1,690 Haitian Gourdes).

The World Food Program reports prices are still rising and people outside the earthquake zone are having difficulty meeting their basic food needs.

Twenty three days after the quake.

Bill is Legal Director for the Center for Constitutional Rights and a long-time Haiti human rights advocate. He can be reached at quigley77@gmail.com.

Analysis of Race in the 2006 Mayoral Elections, Part Five, By Katherine Cecil

As we enter the final days before New Orleans' historic municipal elections, Louisiana Justice Institute presents excerpts from Race, Representation, and Recovery: Documenting the 2006 New Orleans Mayoral Elections, by Katherine Cecil. We believe her analysis of the 2006 elections forms an important basis for understanding the current election.

Dubbed “Ray Reagan” for his conservative views and largely unpopular with the majority of black voters prior to Katrina, Nagin campaign strategists believed that African-Americans would vote for him, especially within the uncertain post-Katrina political climate. During this time it is possible to observe a significant shift in Nagin’s electoral rhetoric as well as his stance on policies that had begun to be interpreted by the black and white communities along racial lines. The most publicized shift was Nagin’s “Chocolate City” speech, given on Martin Luther King Day, in which Nagin attempted to reach out to African-American displaced citizens by calling for New Orleans to remain a majority-black town.

Audubon Nature Institute Chief Executive Ron Forman came to replace Ray Nagin as the conservatives’ candidate of choice shortly after the unveiling of the Bring New Orleans Back Commission plan and before the 2006 mayoral election period began. Forman was another Republican turned Democrat but also white and from Uptown. Alluding to the old-line and almost exclusively white carnival krewes drawing members from this area of the city, white Tulane political scientist Dr. Thomas Langston noted a correlation between the “flags of Mardi Gras royalty” alongside the “Vote for Ron Forman” signs.

Like Nagin, Forman had not previously held political office, which his supporters saw as a strength. He had exhibited business and organizational skills in the private sector that they wished to see applied to the running of city government, and significantly, with the racial demographic shifts post-hurricane, his campaign managers disregarded the prior necessity of coalition building that had been essential to ensure victory within recent history. Also like Nagin, through his social and business connections, Forman had ties to the white economic powerbrokers within the business community, and he was to promote a platform that highlighted economic development over equity and downplayed social justice issues.

Lieutenant Governor Mitch Landrieu, a more progressive Democrat and son of the last white mayor, was the incumbent’s main viable opponent, and he emerged to Nagin’s political left. Appearing more capable of garnering significant support from the center, Landrieu entered into the race as the candidate with stronger Democratic credentials than either Forman or Nagin, which was an advantage in a hitherto distinctly Democratic city.

But as New Orleans looked whiter in 2006 than it had since Moon had been in office, it became a prevailing undercurrent to this mayoral election that City Hall could “go white” for the first time since Moon Landrieu had left office nearly thirty years earlier. It was speculated that without the pre-storm African-American population levels, the city might have lost its majority black population of all socio-economic groups for the foreseeable future, and that a racial group that had not produced a winning mayoral candidate for many decades might now have an occasion to do so.

Indeed, the large number of white candidates entering into the field seemed to have the joint effect of simultaneously confirming black candidates’ reservations about white voter support in the absence of a black majority, while also testing this racial voting balance of coalition-building that had guided New Orleans politics since the federal safeguards of the modern Civil Rights era had begun to take effect. Furthermore, the dearth of viable black candidates as alternative challengers to the incumbent’s re-election bid compounded an emerging fear amongst African-American communities of losing political representation.

(You can read the complete essay online here.)

Born in the UK, and living in New Orleans since 2001, Katherine Cecil began her film career as a researcher and field producer. She formed her small company CecilFilm Productions shortly after Hurricane Katrina, and is currently working as a co-producer on a documentary looking into recent changes to the New Orleans public school system.

Analysis of Race in the 2006 Mayoral Election, Part Four, By Katherine Cecil

In these final days before New Orleans' historic municipal elections, Louisiana Justice Institute presents excerpts from Race, Representation, and Recovery: Documenting the 2006 New Orleans Mayoral Elections, by Katherine Cecil. We believe her analysis of the 2006 elections forms an important basis for understanding the current election.

In the months following Hurricane Katrina, there had been enough evidence coming from within New Orleans for many exiled and returned African-Americans to sense a narrow re-assertion of racial interests from amongst the white community, and many feared the rolling back of the recent few decades of political progress and representation.

Following the devastation wrought by the failure of the federal levees, talk of a geographical and demographic “shrunken footprint” entered into the public discourse of those who had returned as well as within rebuilding plans such as the one espoused by the Bring New Orleans Back Commission, which provided little inclusion for the return of flooded neighborhoods that had been predominantly African-American.

This term – along with others such as the “right to return,” which referred to every citizens right to come home – became key components of a 2006 New Orleans electoral glossary. As it became apparent that many socially and economically-disadvantaged evacuees lacked the means to return – or neighborhoods to return to – a white minority become cognizant of itself as a determining and political force that had not been possible since African-Americans had attained a voting majority. It is significant that the rhetoric that reflected this realization, regardless of the degrees in which it was expressed, conspicuously bypassed the earlier paradigm of coalition building that had been either necessary – or politically expedient – between the races while New Orleans had been a majority African-American city.

As Ray Nagin’s first term drew to a close the recovery discourses continued, and New Orleans headed towards a contentious election. White conservatives’ sentiments concerning a “new” New Orleans, where rebuilding efforts might make use of a now desolate and largely de-populated landscape to pursue opportunities of changing the city, were then amalgamated by more white liberal interests, but still remained exclusionary in nature and were hardly focused on re-populating the city exactly as it had been pre-Katrina. When used in the context of rebuilding efforts, phrases such as a “new New Orleans” and words such as “opportunity” became racially charged in a manner not seen before the storm, and many displaced citizens felt somewhat justifiably that at their root lay ulterior motives for reconstructing a city that would exclude them.

White conservatives and white liberals had both rallied behind Nagin as a political newcomer in 2002, and the composition of the BNOBC, which was formed in the months following Katrina, largely reflected the interests of the more business-oriented amongst this support. Dr. Lance Hill of the Southern Institute for Education and Research spoke of the nature of the BNOBC in relation to Nagin’s original political base, “Nagin appointed the BNOBC when I think that he was politically identified with and beholden to the wealthy white elite, and I think it was reflected by and large in the leadership of the Commission, and the Commission was not a democratic institution.” Nagin’s shifting relationship with the BNOBC plan, and his equivocation on the rebuilding permit moratorium subsequent to the plan’s unveiling was to prove significant in his ability to hold onto his white conservative electoral base.

Chaired by the Republican Real Estate developer Joe Canizaro, and supported by 2002 Nagin backer James Reiss, the BNOBC unveiled its first plan in early 2006. The plan advocated a reduction of the city’s footprint, and questioned the viability of restoring the most flooded neighborhoods, the majority of which had been predominantly African-American. The plan also promoted a moratorium on the issuing of building permits within these neighborhoods for the next four months during which time, still-displaced citizens were asked to gather together to prove the viability of their neighborhoods returning, also factoring in the long-awaited publication of FEMA flood-maps to gauge the necessity of raising the height of their homes.

This most controversial aspect of the BNOBC plan was the now infamous “green space map,” which appeared to propose that the most flooded residential areas return to swampland. Political observer and pollster Dr. Silas Lee noted the divisive nature of the proposed rebuilding strategy, “green space means elimination, because you’re replacing spaces and communities where people live which gave this city some unique character, with some open areas.” Others more involved in the BNOBC plan also expressed their reservations; Paul Rookwood, a principal of Wallace Roberts & Todd, the Philadelphia-based consulting firm charged with creating the BNOBC action plan for rebuilding the city of New Orleans, was quoted in an online interview:

We heard lots of ideas that didn't stand up to scrutiny. For example: that the deeply flooded areas should be transformed into wetlands. That doesn't make sense. The soil is compacted and contaminated, and you'd have to remove all the infrastructure — roads, buildings, and so on — and then attempt to recreate wetlands below sea level.

Combined with the BNOBC’s advocation of a moratorium on issuing rebuilding permits in the most devastated areas, both of these issues created an enormous amount of fear and distrust between the communities that were already back, and those that were still attempting to return home.

To add to this, Nagin’s white supporters had begun to abandon him between one of the closed-door meetings in Dallas shortly after the storm, and his January equivocation over those BNOBC recommendations that were unfriendly towards the African-American communities most devastated by the flood. This timing suggests that Nagin’s equivocation sent a final signal to those in the white New Orleans community who were advocating for a “smaller footprint” that he would no longer be representative of their newfound interests. The Mayor’s decision not to endorse wholeheartedly these more controversial recommendations of his own commission, while also advocating rebuilding “smartly,” reflected his uncertain position in the upcoming election, and this prevarication was further evidence of the political tightrope that he walked post-Katrina.

(You can read the complete essay online here.)

Born in the UK, and living in New Orleans since 2001, Katherine Cecil began her film career as a researcher and field producer. She formed her small company CecilFilm Productions shortly after Hurricane Katrina, and is currently working as a co-producer on a documentary looking into recent changes to the New Orleans public school system.

REAL CHRISTIANS DON’T STEAL CHILDREN!

17 Years, 25 Days. It’s been that long, yet it seems like just yesterday when a 15 year old high school student, her mom, and God, gave me the best gift ever imaginable. I became an adoptive mother. So I write this blog with some emotion, and I speak this truth from the perspective of a parent and a Christian – not a Thief.

See, real parents, real Christians don’t steal children. Let’s not mince words, and CNN – PLEASE – make your reporters ask the hard questions. The Idaho Baptist who entered Haiti illegally, took non-orphaned children from their parents, and planned to secret them cross borders are human traffickers. Not parents, and certainly not Christians.

My God teaches charity. So when I see Haitians starving, and parents desperate to feed their children, I know my obligation is to do everything I can to provide resources so that these men and women can provide for their children. For the $1,500 - $2,000 each of these Idaho residents spent to travel to Haiti to steal these 33 children – supposedly to give them better lives – they could have donated $33,000 to those parents.

And with this act of charity – with this understanding of the heart-wrenching grief those Haitian men and women had to have felt when releasing their sons and daughters to strangers from a different land, simply because they are too poor to feed the people MOST PRECIOUS to them – Rev. Clint Henry and the Central Valley Baptist Church congregation would have provided more evidence of humanity and the certainty of a God than many Haitians have seen in weeks.

Analysis of Race in the 2006 Mayoral Election, Part Three, By Katherine Cecil

As we enter the final days before New Orleans' historic municipal elections, Louisiana Justice Institute presents excerpts from Race, Representation, and Recovery: Documenting the 2006 New Orleans Mayoral Elections, by Katherine Cecil. We believe her analysis of the 2006 elections forms an important basis for understanding the current election.

In 2006, twenty-nine years after Moon Landrieu had left office, the pattern of coalition building looked as if it might radically change. The 2006 Primary election involved an inordinate number of challengers to Nagin’s re-election bid, and these twenty-three challengers reinforced the idea that to many white election observers, this election would be a referendum on the incumbent’s leadership skills as tested during hurricane Katrina. However to many African-American election observers and to Nagin’s chief campaign manager, the veteran political strategist Jim Carvin, the large number of white candidates running constituted a continuation of a re-assertion of narrow racial interests first signaled by the moneyed class within the white community in the early days following Katrina. Concerning this economically influential group that had backed Nagin in 2002, Carvin said, “They were delusional. They thought that they could re-capture City Hall, and I’m really talking about the moneyed class in New Orleans. They felt that Nagin was so crippled that he could not win.”

In the months following the storm, numerous articles and essays began to appear on the Internet referencing conspiracies to whiten New Orleans, and many attested to these as “real and substantial fears.” National print and online media reported talk of a “new” New Orleans which had began to surface within conversations amongst the largely white, wealthy, and Uptown populations that had returned to the city for the most part unscathed. Combined with the stark shift in New Orleans demographics, it was therefore little wonder that within the months following the storm locals would also witness the fracturing of a more inclusive rebuilding rhetoric, and this had fundamental implications upon how the 2006 elections played out. These less than inclusive interests at the hands of a hitherto white minority had been voiced in the early days after Hurricane Katrina, within a series of closed-door meetings in Dallas and Houston in which the meetings’ organizers had done little to reach out to prominent African-American officials in exile, and one of these meetings was widely publicized by print and online media outlets after the fact.

The most written about example of these sentiments was Christopher Cooper’s Wall Street Journal article titled “Old-Line Families Escape Worst of Flood And Plot the Future,” where Cooper quotes former Nagin supporter and Regional Transit Authority head James Reiss:

The new city must be something very different, Mr. Reiss says, with better services and fewer poor people. "Those who want to see this city rebuilt want to see it done in a completely different way: demographically, geographically and politically," he says. "I'm not just speaking for myself here. The way we've been living is not going to happen again, or we're out."

Reiss was Chairman of the majority white New Orleans Business Council and before moving into the world of money management and real estate he ran a lucrative automation and control systems manufacturer called TANO Corp for thirty years, and is defined by many sources as the archetypal old-line Uptown New Orleanian with downtown business interests; successful, well-connected, influential, and powerful behind the scenes of several mayoral campaigns, including Mayor Nagin’s 2002 election run.

The sentiments reported by Cooper in the WSJ article were in some shape or form shared by a significant number of prominent white citizens. Whether due to the dramatic alterations in racial demographics resulting from Hurricane Katrina, the outrage felt by vocal white citizens following the ineptitude of early disaster recovery, or as a mark of outright opportunism, the 2006 Mayoral Election involved an unprecedented number of white candidates qualifying. This factor had particularly interesting significance due to a trend noted by political scientists that “the historic pattern among New Orleans mayoral elections [is that] black mayoral candidates receive a majority of the vote cast by whites only in the absence of a viable white contender.”

Taking little account of the concerns of the predominantly African-American Diaspora, such opinions were first vocalized by prominent men within the white business community, and were then further voiced by the early rebuilding plans of the Bring New Orleans Back Commission (BNOBC), a body primarily made up of citizens appointed by Mayor Nagin before it had become apparent that he had lost support from within the white conservative community. Nagin had established the BNOBC following Katrina, and its purpose was to “finalize a master plan to advise, assist and plan the direct funding on the rebuilding of New Orleans.” The BNOBC’s mission statement specified its goal as directed “uniquely for every citizen;” however, the most controversial aspects of the plan did not represent the interests of those who had suffered most during the flooding.

(You can read the complete essay online here.)

Born in the UK, and living in New Orleans since 2001, Katherine Cecil began her film career as a researcher and field producer. She formed her small company CecilFilm Productions shortly after Hurricane Katrina, and is currently working as a co-producer on a documentary looking into recent changes to the New Orleans public school system.

Justice Department to Monitor Upcoming Election

In response to a complaint filed to the United States Department of Justice, the U.S. Attorney’s office is sending at least four representatives, including two attorneys, to monitor Saturday’s Municipal Primary Election. Attorneys Earnest McFarland and Steven Wright, and two other department personnel, will travel throughout Orleans Parish to monitor elections and to respond to complaints from voters.

After receiving numerous complaints from early voters attempting to exercise their right to vote for only one candidate in the election for Council-At-Large last week, the Louisiana Justice Institute (LJI) filed a Voting Rights Act complaint with the Voting Section of the Civil Rights Division of the United States Department of Justice. Voters complained that when they attempted to exercise their constitutionally protected right to vote for only one candidate, the voting machine showed the voters’ single selection in red with the message “NO SELECTION MADE” below the voters’ choice of a single candidate. Voters also reported that poll commissioners had suggested to them that their votes would not count unless two selections were made by the voter in the at-large election. Furthermore, the message on the screen could lead a reasonable person to believe that unless they cast two votes in the at large council election, none of their votes in the other races might be recorded or counted.

Tracie Washington, Managing Director of LJI, stated, “Louisiana Justice Institute is pleased that the United States Department of Justice has responded so quickly to citizens’ complaints. We understand voters were confused about Council-at-Large ballots. Further, we understand there were complaints that machines were shutting down as ballots were cast.”

The right of a voter to choose only one candidate in multi-candidate election (also known as “single shot” or “casting a bullet ballot” is specifically protected by Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.

As we embark upon a new era of New Orleans’ recovery process, this is one of the most important elections in the history of this great city. New Orleans area voters must be assured this election is legitimate, and that all of the voting procedures and regulations are in strict compliance with the Voting Rights Act and other applicable laws.

Any complaints concerning the inability to cast a vote for a single Council-at-Large or other irregularities in voting, please contact Earnest McFarland (earnest.a.mcfarland@usdoj.gov) or Steven Wright (steven.wright@usdoj.gov) of the Department of Justice, or fax complaints to the Department of Justice at (202)307-3961. In addition, you are welcomed to contact the Louisiana Justice Institute at (504)872-9134 with any complaints or questions.

Upcoming Event: The Episcopal Church in Louisiana and the 19th Century Slave Trade

As a part of Trinity Episcopal Church's Wednesday Night Program, the Church has organized a presentation titled "The Episcopal Church in Louisiana and the 19th Century Slave Trade." The following is a press release on the event:

"On Wednesday evening February 3. 2010m at 6:30 PM Trinity Church is presenting a program on how churches in our diocese supported slavery in various ways in the 19th century. Until the Civil War, slave holders' wealth was an essential part of south Louisiana;s economy. A historian at Tulane University, Michael Goldston, has been working with the Episcopal Diocesan Anti-Racism Committee, helping us to learn more about slavery and the Episcopal Church.

Our work is part of the National Church's effort to face up to our past so that we can move forward towards a deeper reconciliation. On February 3, Michael will give a talk on his detailed primary research. Panelists to respond are: the Rev. Phoebe Road, Nell Bolton, and Corinne Barnwell. Another expert who will respond is Rosanne Adderley, Ph.D., historian at Tulane University. For more information, call William Barnwell at (504) 862-0311. "

Analysis of Race in the 2006 Mayoral Election, Part Two, By Katherine Cecil

As we enter the final week before New Orleans' historic municipal elections, Louisiana Justice Institute presents excerpts from Race, Representation, and Recovery: Documenting the 2006 New Orleans Mayoral Elections, by Katherine Cecil. We believe her analysis of the 2006 elections forms an important basis for understanding the current election.

Suffering fierce criticism over his less-than-admirable leadership skills during the aftermath of the storm as well as for the city’s lack of hurricane evacuation preparation, Mayor Ray Nagin had become politically vulnerable. New Orleanians, returned and still displaced, were to witness a close election in which Nagin’s top four challengers were white. One of the challengers was Louisiana Lieutenant Governor Mitch Landrieu, the son of the last white mayor who had left office nearly thirty years earlier. Times-Picayune staff writer Frank Donze wrote, “Six months ago, incumbent Ray Nagin appeared headed for a problem-free re-election. But the city’s struggle to recover from the catastrophic storm – along with critics attacking Nagin’s performance – has turned conventional wisdom on its ear, leaving him in a fight for his political life.” However, history was on Nagin’s side, and as John Mercurio pointed out on NPR Weekend, “no mayor in New Orleans in the past sixty years has been turned out of office and no first term mayor in the past eighty years has lost office.”

Moon Landrieu’s 1977 departure from City Hall signaled the beginning of the period in which African-Americans would attain a voting majority within New Orleans, and since the early 1980s, elections have involved a variety of cross-racial voting reflecting variations upon the same theme: New Orleans voters have formed trans-racial political coalitions in the election of alternating progressive and reactionary mayors that reflected the mood and tenor of the times. In 2002, Ray Nagin fit within this moderate to conservative continuum.

In elections where black and white voting population levels were not at parity, mayoral victories largely constituted a merging of different black and white interests where policy and platform were more in the foreground than race, where white voters co-opted candidates of color in whom they could find representation to their benefit, where distinctive socio-economic and racial groups made compromises to promote their respective agendas, and at times, merely representation without specific agendas. As political scientists Baodong Liu and James Vanderleeuw found in their research, “whites may develop a strategic approach to maximize their own political power while their ideology may or may not remain the same.” Indeed, if politics is the art of strategically applied comprise within the public sphere, then politics involving significant minority populations, in both senses of the word, would need to be more pronounced in the art and application of concession.

The 1969 and 1973 elections in which Moon Landrieu was voted into office involved concessions of this kind, and in the 1969 runoff, he was elected as a progressive Democrat from a coalition of 90 percent of the black vote and 39 percent of the white vote. Moon Landrieu’s legacy came to be defined by his active promotion of African-Americans within his Administration, as department heads and as prominent political participants. After two terms in office, Moon Landrieu was followed by another progressive Democrat and the first African-American mayor of New Orleans, Ernest Nathan “Dutch” Morial in 1977 and again, in 1982. During his first term, Morial had garnered 19 percent of the white vote and 95 percent of the black vote, which saw a union between progressive white voters and African-American voters, and his rise to power signified a new time in city politics, allowing for unprecedented levels of black representation within local political power structures.

Greatly contrasting to his rival and predecessor, the more reactionary Sidney Barthelemy pioneered his own brand of racial politics, and in 1986, he pushed a pro-business agenda that appealed to white conservatives, and he was brought to office receiving most of his support from the white community, while Bill Jefferson, his principal opponent in the election, had garnered a much larger majority of the African-American vote. In his first election, Barthelemy had merged conservative middle-income white and black voters, and through this coalition conservative interests again found representation in City Hall. This coalition didn’t necessarily include a program for the betterment of all New Orleanians, and as the historian Arnold Hirsch writes of the Barthelemy election, “Morial’s progressive biracial coalition had been transformed into a conservative one that knit together whites and a patronage-oriented black leadership that had no agenda beyond its own perpetuation.”

However, when the white candidate Donald Mintz entered the race in 1990, thinking the incumbent sufficiently unpopular to allow for more crossover voting, Barthelemy switched from being the candidate to receive the most white votes to become the candidate to receive the most black votes, and the contrast of these two elections illustrated the mutability of the candidate’s race as a factor depending upon his or her agenda, his or her primary base of support, and the competition of the opponent in the runoff. Indeed, “Four years later, facing white challenger Donald Mintz, Barthelemy depended on near-universal black support and scant white backing to win.” Intriguingly, it is said that Dutch Morial died before a much-anticipated endorsement of Mintz, and that had he done so, this might have significantly altered Barthelemy’s ability to garner black votes during his re-election bid. When Marc Morial followed in his father’s political footsteps, and entered City Hall in 1994 and again in 1998, the Mayor’s office was led back to a more progressive coalition, which saw a union of white progressives and African-American voters.

The pendulum of moderate progressives to conservative coalitions swung again when Ray Nagin entered into politics in 2002. Nagin had not previously held elected office and came from the private sector. As Vice President of the New Orleans cable company, Cox Communications, he had been a member of the New Orleans Business Council, a majority white organization that represented the top sixty-five businesses in Greater New Orleans. Like Barthelemy, the Republican turned Democrat Ray Nagin came from a pro-business platform and had no agenda for ameliorating the economic opportunities for the majority of African-Americans within Orleans Parish. Nagin was funded largely by a white conservative business elite, and was elected Mayor of New Orleans with 86 percent of the white vote and 40 percent of the black vote, winning against the popular New Orleans Police Department Superintendent Chief Richard Pennington, whose ties to Marc Morial were seen by the majority of white conservative voters as antithetical to their interests, despite his success in reducing crime rates.

As a light-skinned and Catholic person of color, Nagin’s “Downtown” and often-debated “Creole” credentials drew other interesting parallels to the conservative Barthelemy, a mayor viewed by local black media outlets as having enough links to the “Uptown white power structure” to be controlled by it. Like Barthelemy, Nagin was seen as a candidate whose interests intersected largely with those of the white community of most socio-economic levels, and although his first Administration was marked by some effort to oust local corruption, Nagin’s aim was mainly targeted towards African-Americans and the working-class, most notably tax evaders and unlicensed New Orleans cab drivers. But although the majority of black support went to Pennington, Nagin was also elected to office by middle-income African-American and white voters, and like each of the recent mayors before him, Nagin built a coalition in order to win. Had Hurricane Katrina not devastated the city of New Orleans, Nagin would have maintained his more conservative alliance between black and white voters and would have been re-elected to a second term without significant opposition. However, as the 2006 election was to reveal, the city is to a large extent still redefining the nature of these coalitions, and the deterioration of inter-group trust within race relations post-disaster played a prominent role in the election and early recovery period.

(You can read the complete essay online here.)

Born in the UK, and living in New Orleans since 2001, Katherine Cecil began her film career as a researcher and field producer. She formed her small company CecilFilm Productions shortly after Hurricane Katrina, and is currently working as a co-producer on a documentary looking into recent changes to the New Orleans public school system.

New Orleans Coalition Sends Second Shipment of Aid to Haiti

Early this morning, a group of New Orleanians left for Haiti, bringing relief. As journalist Katy Reckdahl reported in today's Times-Picayune,

This morning, an eight-person team of New Orleanians is scheduled to fly to southeast Haiti, where they plan to set up a base camp and begin assessments of infrastructure and buildings. If all goes as planned, the Haiti Emergency Village Project, a coalition of 40 New Orleans organizations, will work with Haitians to quickly build villages for survivors of the Jan. 12 earthquake, using skills learned after the 2005 flooding of New Orleans. Their efforts are facilitated by the Louisiana Disaster Recovery Foundation and financed by private donors.

We first reported on this local coalition, convened by Louisiana Justice Institute's Co-Director Jacques Morial and Charles Allen III, Director of the Center for Sustainable Engagement and Development, last week on this blog. This is the second trip of aid, sent from New Orleans, arranged by this coalition.

Race, Representation, and Recovery in the New Orleans Mayor's Race, by Katherine Cecil

As we enter the final week before New Orleans' historic municipal elections, Louisiana Justice Institute presents excerpts from Race, Representation, and Recovery: Documenting the 2006 New Orleans Mayoral Elections, by Katherine Cecil. This important paper formed the basis of much of Cecil’s research in completing her soon-to-released documentary RACE, on the same subject. We believe her analysis of the 2006 elections forms an important basis for understanding the current election.

In 2002, Ray Nagin was elected mayor of New Orleans with 86 percent of the white vote, and 38% of the African-American vote. In 2006, Mayor Nagin was re-elected with 83.3 percent of the African-American vote and just 20 percent of the white vote.

Race, Representation and Recovery explores the rhetorical and visual manifestations of race as they figured in the months prior to and within the 2006 New Orleans mayoral election discourses.

INTRODUCTION, PART ONE

Since the end of Maurice “Moon” Landrieu’s term in May 1978, New Orleans had seen black leadership in City Hall, but suddenly, this pattern looked set to change. In the run up to the qualifying period for the 2006 mayoral elections, it had become apparent that the city's 484,674 population had been reduced to perhaps a third of this with citizens displaced all over the United States. The pre-Katrina racial demographic percentages of 66.6% African-American and 26.6% white, had now changed to a more even balance between the races. In the 2006 primary election there was a 15.8 percent decline in black registered voters since the 2002 mayoral runoff in contrast to a 5.1 percent decline in the number of white registered voters. Academic studies have shown that in cities where the racial makeup of voters is “racially competitive,” or at more even levels, racially divided or “block voting” is at its most pronounced. New Orleans mayoral election observers witnessed this factor in 2006, but other dynamics came into play to make this election more complex.

A large number of displaced and returned residents thought that a mayoral election should not even take place until enough people could return home, and that holding one at this time violated the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which stated that no practice or procedure could deny or abridge the right to vote on account of race or color. To these concerned citizens, the election was therefore illegal. Other factors arose in 2006 that were to draw historical comparisons with direct disenfranchisement techniques such as the poll tax or literacy tests that were used in the past by white officials to minimize African-American voter participation in the South. There was also convincing evidence that the lack of sufficient government funding to assist the Secretary of State in reaching out to displaced voters violated the international Convention on Civil and Political Rights. In a historically racially polarized environment made worse by the horrors of Katrina, how would the rhetorical and visual manifestations of race factor into these historic elections?

As a result of the Federal levee failures, hundreds of thousands of citizens had become evacuees scattered throughout nearly every state of the Union, and as the re-manned pumping stations drained the water from within Orleans Parish, Americans witnessed bickering and finger pointing between leaders at city, state, federal, and presidential levels. To add to this, the deplorable situation so many citizens found themselves in during the immediate aftermath of the storm exacerbated an already racially polarized city, opening up old wounds of suspicion and distrust. After the evacuation of many flood survivors, New Orleanians were then stranded outside of Louisiana in the hundreds of thousands, many separated from their jobs, identification, mailboxes, or permanent addresses.

Furthermore, prior to Hurricane Katrina, a vast number of New Orleans citizens had been living well below the national poverty line, which meant that a significant number of evacuees did not have the benefit of a savings account, transportation, e-mail, or internet access, and many slept on air mattresses waiting for FEMA hurricane relief checks in order to secure a rental for themselves and their children. These citizens, who were the worst off after the storm, were overwhelmingly African-American.

The post-disaster difficulties experienced by those in involuntary exile during the early months following the storm and their struggles in recreating the necessities vital to the recreation of a healthy environment for themselves and their loved ones cannot be overstated. The extensive flooding that resulted from the levee failures had devastated hundreds of thousands of lives and homes. It disrupted the basic functions of the city from the rule of law to the normal school day. It had also destroyed hundreds of polling stations and voting machines, and less than six months after the chaos of the immediate aftermath of the Hurricane, and just over two months following the presentation of a controversial plan advocating the shrinking of the city’s geographical footprint, New Orleans entered into the 2006 Mayoral election cycle. Numerous national and international news outlets maintained the correspondents they had put in place following Katrina, and this local election captured national and even international audiences.

(A second excerpt from this essay will be posted tomorrow. You can read the complete essay online here.)

Born in the UK, and living in New Orleans since 2001, Katherine Cecil began her film career as a researcher and field producer. Cecil has worked on programs and news shows for PBS, Louisiana Public Broadcasting, National Geographic, Associated Press, Greek public television, and Democracy Now!, and was Field Producer and Associate Producer on the documentary “LINDY BOGGS: STEEL & VELVET.” She formed her small company CecilFilm Productions shortly after Hurricane Katrina, and is currently working as a co-producer on a documentary looking into recent changes to the New Orleans public school system. Cecil is a member of the National Press Photographers Association, the Louisiana Association of Broadcasters, and the Press Club of New Orleans, and holds degrees from City and Guilds of London Art School, University College London, Tulane University, and the University of New Orleans.

Haiti: Hell And Hope, By Bill Quigley

Smoke and flames rose from the sidewalk. A white man took pictures. Slowing down, my breath left me. The fire was a corpse. Leg bones sticking out of the flames.

Port au Prince police headquarters is gone, already bulldozed. A nearby college is pancaked. Government buildings are destroyed. Stores fallen down. Tens of thousands of buildings destroyed. Hundreds of thousands homeless. Giant piles of concrete, rebar, metal pipes, plastic pipes, doors and wires.

Corpses are still inside many of the mountains of rubble. No estimates of how many thousands of people are dead inside. Electrical poles bend over streets, held up by braids of thick black wires. On some side streets the wires are stll down in the street.

Buildings take unimaginable shapes. Some are half up while the other side slopes to the ground. Some like collapsed cakes. Others smashed like children's toys.

Everywhere are sheet shelters. In parks, soccer fields, in the parking lot of the tv station, tens of thousands literally in the streets and on sidewalks. Thousands of people standing in the hot sun waiting their turn. Outside the hospital, clinics, money transfer companies, immigration offices, and the very few places offering water or food.

Troops and heavy machinery are only seen in the center of the city.

After days in port Au prince I have seen only one fight - two teens fighting on a streetcorner over a young woman. No riots. No machetes.

Hope is found in the people of Haiti. Despite no electricity, little shelter, minimal food and no real goverment or order, people are helping one another survive. Men and boys are scavenging useful items from the mounds of fallen buildings. Women are selling mangoes and nuts on the street. Teens are playing with babies. Beautiful hymns are lifted as choirs calling to god in every sheet camp every evening. People pray constantly. The strikingly beautiful tap tap cabs trumpet in god we trust or merci Jesus on bright colors.

Everyone needs tents and food and medical care and water. But when you talk to them, most will lead you to the ailing great grandma or the malnourished child.

I asked Lavarice Gaudin, who helps the St. Clares community feed thousands each day through their What If Foundation, "What should outsiders do?" Lavarice said "Help the most poor first. Some who labored their whole lives to make a one bedroom home will likely never have a home again. Haiti needs everything. But we need it with a plan. Pressure the Haitian goverent, pressure USAID to help the poorest."

International volunteers who work hand in hand with Haitians are welcomed. Others not so much. Lavarice saw the associated press story that reported only one penny of every us aid dollar will go directly in cash to needy Haitians. "I can understand that they distrust the government but why not distribute aid through the churches and good community organizations?"

"We hope this will help us develop strong leadership that listens and responds to the people," he says. "No matter what, we will never give up. Haitians are strong hopeful people. We will rebuild."

Bill is Legal Director for the Center for Constitutional Rights and a long-time Haiti human rights advocate. He can be reached at quigley77@gmail.com.