Five days before Hurricane Katrina struck, 100 people gathered at a local Catholic Church in eastern New Orleans. They were there to talk about the city's astronomically high poverty rate. This was not a dry gathering of academics, local and state officials, and business leaders. They were community residents, welfare recipients, ex-offenders and antipoverty activists. Most were black. Many did not have cars and had to take buses to get to the meeting. That wasn't unusual. Nearly one out of three city residents doesn't have a car. The participants felt they were in a race against time to combat the crisis--the poverty rate in New Orleans is more than double the national average. The city's poor had grown more numerous and more desperate than ever.

Whenever I have visited friends who live in neighborhoods away from the glitter of the French Quarter and other tourist spots, I've been struck by the dire poverty, the legions of homeless, the large number of abandoned and run-down buildings, the pockmarked streets and sidewalks. New Orleans is the classic tale of two cities: one showy, middle-class and white; the other poor, downtrodden and low-income black. It was a city that didn't wait for a disaster to happen; grinding poverty and neglect had already wreaked that disaster on thousands.

What happened after Katrina added to the misery was predictable. Bush's bumbling and the bungling of FEMA turned relief efforts into a nightmare. That virtually guaranteed that some blacks out of criminal greed and others out of sheer desperation and panic would take to the streets in an orgy of looting and mayhem. It was equally predictable how some state and federal officials, and some in the media, would respond. They instantly branded the looters animals and thugs. Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco said soldiers should shoot to kill to restore order.

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