The Lower 9th Ward was the first to flood. Again. But this time Jamel Oatis wasn’t stuck in her home hoping and praying someone would come and save her.
She was at the same shelter in Lafayette that gave her refuge after Hurricane Katrina, watching her neighborhood go under water a second time, because of Hurricane Rita.
“I love my city, but it’s not right,” she said. “The poorest people are hurting again. Now we really don’t have nothing. If there was anything left, it’s gone now.”
Flooding destroyed thousands of homes and dozens of neighborhoods, but it also wiped out nearly every historically black community in the city. It has forced out a huge population of the city’s black residents from all economic levels.
From the time the first storm hit, New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin had said the hurricane was not discriminatory in its wrath.
Now Nagin’s 16-member reconstruction committee must consider how it will resurrect the city, rethink New Orleans’ inequities in housing and ensure that the rebuilding isn’t discriminatory. The committee has the difficult task of preserving the unique history and culture of New Orleans that emerged from segregated communities while creating areas where everyone can live on safer land.
The flooding revealed something about the city’s history and geographic landscape: Since its inception, blacks here have always lived on the most vulnerable land, experts say. A combination of segregation, discrimination, economic factors and just plain timing forced blacks to create communities on unstable land easily destroyed by a natural disaster, said Silas Lee, a local political analyst familiar with the city’s landscape and history.
“The question is how can we rebuild, and how can the culture and history be retained and restored as the city is being rebuilt?” Lee said. “We have to bring the people back who maintain and contribute to the culture, and I’m afraid a lot may not return.”
The storm destroyed Gentilly, a New Orleans neighborhood where Creoles–residents with a blended French and African heritage–have opened hair salons, restaurants, cafes, churches and other businesses.
Most homes in the Lower 9th Ward–a poor, sometimes dangerous community where some of the city’s creators of booty-shaking block party jams first became popular–didn’t survive the flooding that followed Katrina.
“When African-Americans settled in the city, they were not concerned about flooding,” Lee said. “It had to do with those who were wealthy having access to workers. It just so happened that the black labor force moved to those areas that happened to be flood prone.”
The hurricane destroyed white communities such as St. Bernard Parish too. But it was no geographic accident that historically black communities like Treme went under water while the neighboring French Quarter remained dry, said Karen Huff, head of the Black Historical Society of San Diego, the largest black historical preservation group in the U.S.
“For a long time, there were land covenants that restricted the sale of property to people of African descent,” she said. “Now we’re seeing a devastation of African-American culture.”
That culture was part of the beginning of the French Quarter, built in the late 1700s. That portion of town was settled by Europeans who selected it because it was a naturally created levee and higher than the rest of the land near the Mississippi River. As the number of settlers increased, they built on the highest land, today known as the Garden District and parts of Uptown. Those neighborhoods were among the only sections that didn’t flood after Katrina, said Michael Desmond, an associate professor of architecture history and urban design at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge.
Claiming the leftovers
By the time Les Gens De Couleur Libre, or the free people of color, arrived in New Orleans, the best land was already gone. A swampy marsh was drained, and blacks began claiming property and building neighborhoods right next to the French Quarter.
Treme is one of the oldest black neighborhoods in America and the first place blacks were able to buy land and have homes when slavery still existed. It later became the birthplace of jazz and was home to Congo Square, where slaves working on the river would congregate during their off time. The sounds and flavors of this neighborhood spread into the French Quarter, Huff said.
“We brought jazz, blues and gumbo to the French Quarter,” she said. “There was always a fascination with African-American culture, but it was at arm’s length. They presented the culture but without an African face.”
Local residents have always known that when people headed west of the French Quarter and crossed Rampart Street and St. Claude Avenue, they were entering a black community. But it was long forgotten that those streets also marked a division between the higher, more valuable ground and the lower, less expensive land.
“People were looking for affordable housing, and unfortunately, whether the area was flood prone . . . didn’t matter,” Lee said. “Yes, people knew New Orleans was always vulnerable to hurricanes. But we had never seen a situation to this magnitude. When people built their homes, they thought about destruction by wind, not destruction by water.”
As the rest of the city developed, the pattern continued. White residents snatched up land on higher, more secure ground. Their black servants built communities nearby so they could easily get to work. Even the better-off black business owners who catered to whites set up in the lower areas.
Poorer blacks built in areas like the Lower 9th Ward, where the land was so low it was cheap enough for even poor blacks to own property.
The settlement pattern made New Orleans literally a checkerboard community where segregated black and white neighborhoods were positioned close together but separated by race and land elevation, Desmond said. The housing pattern made the city vibrant, because it was one of the few places where blacks and whites had communities side by side.
“It’s a mixed palette that didn’t occur anywhere else,” he said.
When white residents began to abandon the urban landscape, they moved to Metairie, an area settled by white farmers. Quickly the area turned into a bustling suburb with shopping malls, restaurants and stores just a short distance away from New Orleans’ port and main business district.
By the time black residents were on the same economic footing in the 1960s and able to afford to design their own homes with swimming pools and tennis courts like those in Metairie, the only developable area close to downtown was eastern New Orleans, Desmond said. Metairie and New Orleans East were about the same elevation, he said. But the East was far riskier territory, which made the land cheaper and allowed more blacks to create an upper-class community.
“The land in New Orleans East was vulnerable because it sticks out like a thumb into Lake Pontchartrain and Lake Bourgne and then marshes. It’s surrounded by water on three sides. It’s the most vulnerable part of the city,” Desmond said.
Shortly after the water started rising in the city, Huff hurried into New Orleans hoping to save what many had forgotten about–the historical paperwork, portraits and artifacts that documented African-American history in the city. Dozens of homes went under water that could have contained letters of now famous musicians, pictures from decades ago and freedom documents from former slaves who bought their freedom.
`A loss to the culture’
“We’re facing right now the prospect of the largest loss of African-American history, culture and sites ever in this country,” Huff said. “When you start to look at that and then think about the mass exodus of African-Americans out of New Orleans, you can’t help but wonder how it’s going to devastate the cultural landscape of the city. A lot of the African-Americans provided the service jobs. They worked in the hotels, the restaurants. They were the janitors. They provided the music, the dancing, the artwork. Now a large percentage of those people are gone. That means a loss to the culture.”
At a recent news conference, Nagin said he’s eager to get the people of the city back, and he wants New Orleans as diverse as before Katrina. The exodus, he said, won’t change the cultural mix of the city.
“I intend to have a city that is diverse and very unique,” he said. Still, he conceded, some polls show that many residents, black and white, don’t intend to return. And he doesn’t know how to change that.
“I have mixed emotions,” he said. “I can understand. They’ve gone through a traumatic experience. Some of them are comfortable where they are.”
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lbowean@tribune.com
