Katrina: After the Flood (42 page)

Legions of outsiders showed up to help in the Lower Ninth. Most of them were from a group called the Common Ground Relief Collective, founded shortly after the storm by Malik Rahim, a former Black Panther with a thick mane of gray dreadlocks. Rahim put volunteers to
work cleaning out a church in the Upper Ninth, where they set up a base of operations. A nearby empty lot was transformed into a one-stop hurricane-relief center. A motto spray-painted on a sign read
SOLIDARITY
,
NOT CHARITY
. Common Ground volunteers handed out bleach to help people kill the mold and established a tool-lending library that included sledgehammers, crowbars, and respirators. They provided canned foods and later upgraded to hot meals. They gutted a nearby school and turned the classrooms into dormitories for volunteers by setting up twenty or so government-issued metal cots in each. In all, Common Ground volunteers gutted three thousand homes, businesses, and churches in the Ninth Ward. “The most glorious time of my life,” Rahim said.

MALIK RAHIM WAS BORN
Donald Guyton, a name he later rejected as a slave name. His mother washed floors at Charity Hospital, his father wasn’t a presence in his life. He grew up in the black part of Gretna. One of his most vivid childhood memories, he said, was a battle over the right of black kids to swim in the city’s sole public pool. The answer was to build a second one, “on top of the city dump and next to the garbage incinerators,” Rahim said. He left before finishing high school and at seventeen enlisted in the army. “I started seeing the same thing in Vietnam I was seeing here,” he said. “I refused to fight.” He was discharged with no rank and found his way to a pipeline-construction site near New Orleans. “I asked about becoming a welder and I was told, ‘We don’t hire no niggers as welders.’ ”

Rahim was twenty-two years old when in 1970 he joined the New Orleans Black Panthers. The Panthers established a breakfast program in the Desire housing project in the Upper Ninth. They opened a clinic to test for sickle-cell, a genetic health scourge in the black community, among other efforts. But the local police perceived them as a threat and sent in a SWAT team to evict them, by force if necessary. After a brief standoff, the police asked for reinforcements, but by that time the project’s residents had blocked the way. “People really appreciated what the Panthers were doing for the community—the breakfasts, the clinics,” said Barbara Major, who was in high school then and living across from
the Desire projects. Rahim was the Panther’s defense minister—the second in command of his chapter. The police arrested him and several others for attempted murder. The charges were eventually dropped and Rahim took off for the West Coast.

In California, Rahim fell in with a group of activists seeking to take over a small, unincorporated town outside San Francisco and transform it into a black mecca. Nairobi, they would call it. They got as far as starting their own African-centered college before the idea fizzled. “I started doing things I’m not proud of,” Rahim said. The low point was an armed-robbery conviction and a five-year sentence in a California prison. “I met an older inmate there, a dude who’d been down for more than twenty years, who convinced me that I was going to keep coming back unless I changed my ways.” After serving his sentence, Rahim moved back to New Orleans, into the house his mother had bought in Algiers on the West Bank. He started an ex-offenders program and worked with Sister Helen Prejean, an outspoken critic of capital punishment and the author of
Dead Man Walking
. Rahim joined the Green Party and in 2002 ran for City Council on a platform that stressed a living wage, improved conditions in public housing, and the expansion of crime-prevention programs aimed at juveniles. He drew four thousand votes in a losing effort.

Rahim inherited the Algiers home when his mother died the year before Katrina. He chose to remain there through the storm not despite warnings of catastrophe but because of them. “How could I classify myself as a community leader if I leave when people might need help after the storm?” he said. He crossed the Crescent City Connection to help fish people out of the water on the other side of the bridge. Closer to home, Rahim needed his wits just to survive a harrowing few days living at the uneasy border between the blacks of Algiers and the whites of Algiers Point, a small enclave of well-preserved historic homes along the Mississippi. On the Wednesday after the storm, Rahim heard frantic knocking at his door. A neighbor, black, said he was scared for his life after fleeing, he said, a group of armed white men. Rahim didn’t believe him until he rounded the corner and saw several men, rifles or guns in hand, walking the streets as if on patrol.

“I went straight to one of them that I knew, he was one of my neighbors,” Rahim said, “and asked him, ‘Man, what’s going on? What you carrying all these guns for?’ He tells me, ‘We’re protecting the neighborhood.’ And this other guy walks over and says, ‘You don’t owe this nigger no explanation.’ ” Hearing a commotion, an older white woman opened her door, a moment that Rahim is convinced spared his life. The white men came looking for him a few hours later, Rahim said, but by that time he had picked up what he described as “reinforcements” and the men left. That week, Rahim said, he came across the bodies of several black men who had been shot, including one around the corner from his home.
^II
A Danish filmmaker in Algiers working on a documentary he called
Welcome to New Orleans
interviewed a group of armed whites at a popular Algiers Point bar a week after Katrina. “It was like pheasant season in South Dakota—if it moved, you shot it!” one crowed.

Rahim still had family in Gretna—older relatives who might need his help had they been unable to evacuate ahead of the storm. But that meant getting past the checkpoints the police had set up at the Algiers-Gretna border. Every street was barricaded, Rahim said; because they didn’t have enough police cruisers, they used fire engines and garbage trucks. “They had police on dirt bikes and in their cars, riding up and down, making sure no blacks were going over into Gretna,” Rahim said. Ultimately he would gain entry using Rasmus Holm, the Danish filmmaker working on his documentary. “He opens his mouth, you know this dude isn’t from anywhere near here,” Rahim said. “But Rasmus says he’s hired me to work on his house and they let us through.”

While he was in California, Rahim had gotten to know Mary
Ratcliff, the editor of a small, black newspaper called the
San Francisco Bay View.
Three days after Katrina, Ratcliff called Rahim. She didn’t figure she’d reach anyone living in the city’s 504 area code, but Rahim answered. The words gushed out as Ratcliff typed. “This is criminal,” he began. “Gangs of white vigilantes riding around in pickup trucks, all of them armed.” He was angry that tens of thousands of people were still trapped in New Orleans. They had working water and sewer systems on his side of the river, Rahim said. The West Bank had remained dry. “Our parks and schools could easily hold forty thousand people, and they’re not using any of it. People are dying.” Rahim closed with an appeal for supplies, donations, and volunteers.

In 2005, there was no Twitter, and Facebook was still mainly a plaything of the college set. The term
social media
was only spoken inside the bubble of Silicon Valley. Mary Ratcliff included Rahim’s address and phone number in the article she posted on
Bay View
’s website and in an e-mail she blasted to a wide circle of contacts. Within the week, Rahim was a guest on
Democracy Now!
—a popular left-leaning news program carried by hundreds of cable stations around the country. “The volunteers started coming,” Rahim said, “and I kept finding them things to do.” People claimed any bit of floor space they could find to put down a sleeping bag in the three-bedroom home Rahim had inherited from his mother. Dozens camped outside—in his backyard, on the front lawn, and on his front and back porches. “I had seventy people scattered around the property,” he said, “and just about every one of them white.” Another forty stayed in the donated tents they set up next door. Ultimately, somewhere around twenty-five thousand volunteers arrived to help in the two years Rahim was running Common Ground—or thirty thousand if you include those who came after he was pushed out of the organization he had formed.

Several of the first volunteers to show up at Rahim’s door were community-health people with a van filled with medical supplies. Rahim set them up in the abandoned storefront mosque down the street. They spray-painted
FIRST AID
on the door, and ten days after Katrina, they were helping diabetics requiring insulin, victims needing a wound dressed, and the like. Eventually, the clinic found a more permanent home in a corner storefront painted blue and pink. “The little clinic that could,” the
New York Times
declared two years after Katrina—an oasis in a “shattered health care system.”
^III

Other volunteer efforts popped up in the months after Katrina. The Peoples Hurricane Relief Fund was founded by a group of black locals. They were fighting the demolitions in the Ninth Ward, as well as organizing protests to demand that public housing be reopened. ACORN was a presence in the Lower Ninth, and many people were coming to New Orleans as part of a church group or some other civic affiliation. Reportedly, more than ten thousand college kids came to help gut homes and businesses that spring break. Becky Zaheri, a lifelong New Orleanian and stay-at-home mom prior to the storm, created Katrina Krewe, which drew hundreds of volunteers twice a week to a trash-strewn neighborhood. Habitat for Humanity made a multimillion-dollar commitment to work on housing for displaced musicians. The big, established charities such as the Salvation Army and the Red Cross came under criticism in the weeks after Katrina. The Red Cross’s white, older volunteers, residents claimed, largely ignored the black community. Though the agency drew around 60 percent of the $3.6 billion people donated to the hurricane-relief effort in the first six months after the storm, it was accused of doing far less than half the work of tending to storm victims.

Yet no group matched Common Ground and the breadth of services it offered. People were concerned about the poisons the floodwaters left behind, so Common Ground started a toxins-testing service and gave away red worms and plants that help leach harmful chemicals from the soil. The group created a pest-control unit and launched a pirate radio station dubbed Radio Algiers (“reporting from the West Bank of occupied New Orleans”). They established a free legal clinic and a women’s shelter. The exploitation of immigrant workers became a concern so the collective recruited lawyers for those brave enough to file a complaint. In the Lower Ninth, a Rahim lieutenant declared, their goal was nothing short of at least one restored home on every block to thwart developers looking for undeveloped tracts of land.

The Common Ground workers were easy to identify in post-Katrina New Orleans: swarms of whites, sometimes dressed in masks and gloves if not moon suits, gutting a home in a mostly black neighborhood. An inordinate number of these volunteers had dreadlocked beards, face piercings, and/or tattoos. The core group helping Rahim run the collective were leftist activists, at least a few of whom described themselves as “revolutionaries.”

Rahim was initially worried how his flocks of white volunteers would be received inside the black community, but they were embraced wherever they showed up. “I wouldn’t’ve believed it if I didn’t see it myself,” Rahim said. He mentioned a young white man he called Jimmy Mac who lived with him for several months. Somehow, Jimmy had gotten his hands on a Penske truck, which he would drive to Mississippi every day. He’d fill it with food and medical supplies and drive back to New Orleans. “He’s doing all this at his own expense,” Rahim said. “No one’s paying his gas, we’re not paying the charges on the truck. We’d just give him a list of places around town that needed supplies, and he’d go into the African-American communities and pass out whatever he managed to pick up.” Those places included the Fischer housing projects on the West Bank, which had remained dry. “Fischer is one of the toughest places in town,” Rahim said. “But no one would think of touching Jimmy Mac. He’d go through and it was like he walked on water.”

Common Ground didn’t limit itself to the Ninth Ward. Ultimately, the collective had people working in nineteen parishes around Louisiana. They’d set up outposts, too, along the Gulf Coast in Mississippi and Alabama. Bruce Springsteen donated $100,000 to the cause and Dave Chappelle $150,000. Michael Moore gave $120,000 and paid Rahim’s cell phone bill.

“My own version is that New Orleans was on the verge of a race war back then,” Rahim said. “What stopped it was the fact that we had young white kids that came down and did what nobody else would do.” That was the miracle of Katrina for Rahim: that so many white outsiders saw New Orleans as if it were also their problem. “If I was them, I would’ve said, ‘Fuck them. They got their black mayor. They got their black City Council. Let them work their own selves out of this mess.’ ”

I.
Senator Mary Landrieu, who arrived with her brother Martin, was also there that night. “She gave me her cell phone number and told me, if I need anything, call her,” Uddo said. Landrieu would phone Uddo throughout the recovery “just to see how I was doing and check in.”

II.
Investigative reporter A. C. Thompson was among those stopping by Rahim’s home to watch a tape he made after discovering the body around the corner. Thompson’s terrific article, “Katrina’s Hidden Race War,” appearing in the
Nation
magazine three years after Katrina, suggested there was evidence of eleven shootings in Algiers after Katrina. “In each case the targets were African-American men, while the shooters, it appears, were all white.”

III.
In 2007, the Common Ground Health Clinic broke with the rest of the collective and thrived as a free-standing institution.