A city on the comeback

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A city on the comeback

By Lynn Wheeler – March 19, 2010

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Editor's note: Lynn Wheeler, president of Wheeler Communication Group, LLC, and former Charlotte mayor pro tem, recently completed a weeklong civil rights tour led by Julian Bond.

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Day 6.
Our final day was spent in New Orleans. The 32 of us hopped on a tour bus around 9:30 a.m. (Yea, we slept a little late this day.) and were given a two-hour tour of the city by Lawrence Powell, a history professor at Tulane University. Powell has been commissioned by Harvard United Press to write a history of New Orleans.

Highlights of the day included:

• A view of the site where Homer Plessy, on June 7, 1892, was arrested as part of a planned challenge to the 1890 Louisiana Separate Car Act, a law passed by the state legislature in 1890 requiring “equal but separate” train car accommodations for blacks and whites. Plessy was a light-skinned black man --90 percent white— who could pass as white. After taking a seat on the white car of a train and telling the conductor he was black, he was arrested. The case made it to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1896. Eight of the nine justices upheld the law, saying blacks were socially unequal to whites. This majority decision in Plessy v. Ferguson served as the legal justification for racial segregation for more than 50 years. The ruling was overturned in 1954, thankfully, by Brown v. the Board of Education.

• We drove past the William Franz Elementary School, the first Deep South school to be integrated and the subject of the famous Norman Rockwell painting depicting 6-year-old Ruby Bridges as she goes to school in 1960. Her parents responded to a call by the NAACP to have her participate in the integration of the New Orleans school system. As a result, her father lost his job and her grandparents, who were sharecroppers in Mississippi, were thrown off their land.

• The bus took us deep into the city’s Ninth Ward neighborhood, site of the most serious flooding during Hurricane Katrina. Floodwaters there reached 12 feet. (Photo: Permanent markers show how high the floodwaters reached.) All phones with a 504 area code stopped working. The Red Cross refused to operate in New Orleans for six days because of the perceived dangers to their workers. Consequently, there was no triage. We heard stories of the incompetence of FEMA, which is considered a four-lettered word in the city. A local vernacular became “go FEMA yourself.”

Our bus driver, an African American, told a horrific story of busing people from several senior centers to Baton Rouge. He said the people on the bus were confused and terrified, and for the entire 10 hours as he drove, he was enduring screams and crying while trying to bus them to safely.

“I felt I was in a sci-fi movie without a Hollywood contract,” he said.

The driver said that once they reached Baton Rouge, he witnessed blacks being brutally handled and abused: “It seemed to be a vestige of slavery and Jim Crow.”

• We were driven by Fats Domino’s house (photo Insert) in the lower Ninth Ward. He had been a familiar presence around the neighborhood in his bright pink Cadillac. Fats, as you know, released a series of hit songs in the 1950 and ‘60, such as “Aint that a Shame,” “Blueberry Hill,” and “Whole Lot of Lovin.” He was known for a rolling piano and a wah-wah vocalization over a strong black beat. Encouraged to evacuate with news of the approaching hurricane, he chose to stay home with his ill wife. However, no one knew what happened to him for three days and assumed he had perished. Someone, thinking Fats was dead, spray painted on his house: “RIP Fats. You will be missed” The water in his neighborhood reached 8 feet, and finally he and his wife were rescued from their roof and taken to a shelter. He lost everything -- his famous piano and all his gold records. He now lives in Harvey, Louisiana.

All in all, I saw a formerly ravaged city on the comeback. Katrina wiped out 80,000 units of housing, and there is a long way to go. I saw a diligent rebuilding effort and new homes built by a foundation funded by Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie.

Nightlife is thriving, however, with jazz clubs and restaurants open all over the city.

(The Photo below shows the Danziger Bridge in eastern New Orleans, where police opened fire on a group of black men trying to flee the devastation of Hurrican Katrina. Two of the victims died. Two former police officers have since pleaded guilty to trying to cover up what happened.)