Ad Policy
Skip to content
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Instagram
  • Donate
  • Log In
  • Special Issue: The New Politics of Abortion
  • Migrant Voices
  • Podcasts
  • The Nation The Nation

    • Politics
    • World
    • Climate
    • Culture
    • Shop
  • Police and Law Enforcement

    Slide Show: Reconstructing the Story of the Storm

    • Current Issue
    • Newsletters
    • Subscribe
    • Search
    • Facebook
    • Twitter
    • Email
Toggle Menu

The Nation

Share
  • fb
  • tw
  • mail
  • msg
  • wa
  • sms
  • Politics
  • World
  • Climate
  • Culture
  • Shop
  • Subscribe
  • Current Issue
  • Newsletters
  • Donate
  • Log In
Facebook Twitter Instagram

By using this website, you consent to our use of cookies. For more information, visit our Privacy Policy

Log In

Forgot Your Password?
loader
New to The Nation? Subscribe
Print subscriber? Activate your online access
  • Police and Law Enforcement
  • Photo Essay

Slide Show: Reconstructing the Story of the Storm

Slide Show: Reconstructing the Story of the Storm

By The NationTwitter

August 26, 2010

  • fb
  • tw
  • mail
  • Print
  • msg
  • wa
  • sms

Ready to fight back?

Sign up for Take Action Now and get three actions in your inbox every week.

You will receive occasional promotional offers for programs that support The Nation’s journalism. You can read our Privacy Policy here.

Thank you for signing up. For more from The Nation, check out our latest issue.

Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month!

Support Progressive Journalism

The Nation is reader supported: Chip in $10 or more to help us continue to write about the issues that matter.

Fight Back!

Sign up for Take Action Now and we’ll send you three meaningful actions you can take each week.

You will receive occasional promotional offers for programs that support The Nation’s journalism. You can read our Privacy Policy here.

Thank you for signing up. For more from The Nation, check out our latest issue.

Travel With The Nation

Be the first to hear about Nation Travels destinations, and explore the world with kindred spirits.

Sign up for our Wine Club today.

Did you know you can support The Nation by drinking wine?
Ad Policy

Editor’s note: To mark the sixth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, we are presenting once again this slide show of images and recollections, first published on August 26, 2010.

 

Five years ago, Hurricane Katrina slammed into the Gulf coast, ravaging communities from Louisiana to Florida. But hardest hit was New Orleans, where the hurricane’s legacy of destruction remains most powerful today. "We’re still coming to terms with what happened in New Orleans on August 29, 2005, and there-after," writes Rebecca Solnit in her Nation article "Reconstructing the Story of the Storm," "struggling to get the facts straight and to figure out what it said about race, disaster and even human nature. How we remember Hurricane Katrina is also how we’ll prepare for future disasters, so getting the story right matters for survival as well as for justice and history."

 

Solnit’s writing has attempted to recast the narrative of post-Katrina New Orleans, giving voice to those whose lives will forever be altered by neglect, brutality and lies. We excerpt and illustrate her recent Nation article in the slides that follow.

 

Credit: AP Images

In August 2005, 90,000 square miles of the Gulf Coast were devastated; more than 1,800 people died; 182,000 homes were severely damaged in New Orleans alone, where 80 percent of the city was flooded. Hundreds of thousands went into an exile from which some will never return. A great and justified bitterness arose in African-Americans who were demonized by the media and the government and who felt that they had not been treated as citizens or even as fellow human beings. An African-American woman at an antiwar rally in the nation’s capital a month later carried a sign saying, “No Iraqis left me on a roof to die.”

 

Credit: AP Images

The story of Hurricane Katrina as originally constructed served authoritarianism, racism and a generally grim view of human nature. The gist of the media’s stories was that in the absence of authority, people went berserk; the implied solution was the reimposition of authority—armed, ruthless and intense. Heavily armed Blackwater mercenaries were dispatched to New Orleans, where, as Jeremy Scahill reported in this magazine, they shot at citizens with little fear of repercussion. While the focus was on young men of color as the peril, police and white vigilantes went on a murder spree that was glossed over at the time.

 

Credit: Reuters Pictures

New Orleans became a prison city; the trapped citizens became prisoners without rights. Those in the Superdome, for example, were prevented from leaving the stinking, scorching zone as people dropped from heat and dehydration. The literal prisoners, adult and juvenile, in the New Orleans jails were abandoned to thirst, hunger and rising floodwaters. Hospitals packed with the dying were not allowed to evacuate; citizens were not allowed to walk out of New Orleans on the bridge to Gretna because the sheriff on the other side was there with cronies and guns, keeping them out.

 

Credit: Reuters Pictures

Real people got caught in the crossfire. Take 33-year-old Donnell Herrington, who was walking to the evacuation site in Algiers Point when a white vigilante with a shotgun attempted to murder him. Herrington was shot in the neck, hit so hard the blast lifted him off the ground, and then shot again in the back as he tried to escape. His assailants were part of an organized militia that presumed any and all black men were looters and decided that they were justified in administering the ad hoc death penalty for suspected or potential petty theft. No one reported on these vigilante crimes in the first round of coverage.

 

Credit: Chandra McCormick and Keith Calhoun

Or take Henry Glover, a 31-year-old father of four whose charred remains were found in a burned shell of a car a week after the storm. A.C. Thompson first reported on the mysterious circumstances surrounding Glover’s death in his Nation article "Body of Evidence." Thompson also joined forces with Times-Picayune reporter Laura Maggi, who reopened the Danziger Bridge case, in which police shot several unarmed African-Americans after the storm, including a middle-aged mother who had her forearm blown off, a mentally disabled man who was shot in the back and killed, and a teenage boy, also killed (several others were wounded).

 

Credit: Chandra McCormick and Keith Calhoun

Justice Department officials have charged eleven policemen for the Danziger Bridge case and five for the Glover case, and most recently sent warning letters to two more for the post-Katrina case in which Danny Brumfield was shot in the back and killed. In total they’ve opened up six civil rights cases for New Orleans police crimes post-Katrina, and a federal probe of the department is under way.

 

Credit: Reuters Pictures

Then there’s the catastrophe’s impact on national politics. The Bush administration’s outrageous incompetence and indifference prompted a hitherto intimidated press and nation to begin criticizing not just the failed response but the Iraq War and the administration overall. The levees broke and so did the bulwarks that protected the president. The racism and poverty that the catastrophe revealed laid the groundwork for newcomer Barack Obama to ride to victory in 2008.

 

Credit: Reuters Pictures

Katrina brought many kinds of destruction and a little rebirth, including the spread of green construction projects, new community organizations and perhaps soon, thanks to the work of Thompson and others, some long overdue justice for police crimes. It’s too soon to tell what it will all mean in a hundred years, but it’s high time to start telling the real story of what happened in those terrible first days and weeks.

 

—Rebecca Solnit

 

Credit: Reuters Pictures

The NationTwitterFounded by abolitionists in 1865, The Nation has chronicled the breadth and depth of political and cultural life, from the debut of the telegraph to the rise of Twitter, serving as a critical, independent, and progressive voice in American journalism.


To submit a correction for our consideration, click here.

For Reprints and Permissions, click here.

To Read The Full Story Keep Reading
Subscribe Log in
Ad Policy
x

Latest from the nation

Yesterday 11:45 am

Speaker Pelosi Seeks Articles of Impeachment

John NicholsTwitter

Yesterday 11:07 am

It’s a Race Against Time for Labour in Next Week’s Momentous UK Elections

Rachel Shabi

Yesterday 10:47 am

The Republicans’ Star Impeachment Scholar Is a Shameless Hack

Elie MystalTwitter

Yesterday 10:36 am

Who Is Making US Foreign Policy?

Stephen F. Cohen

Yesterday 9:49 am

The GOP Grievance Machine’s Desperate Attempt to Upstage the Case for Impeachment

Joan WalshTwitter

editor's picks

VIDEO: People in Denmark Are a Lot Happier Than People in the United States. Here’s Why.

The NationTwitter

Historical Amnesia About Slavery Is a Tool of White Supremacy

Mychal Denzel SmithTwitter

The Nation

Follow The Nation

Get Email Updates

Sign up for our free daily newsletter, along with occasional offers for programs that support our journalism. You can read our Privacy Policy here.

Sections

  • Politics
  • World
  • Economy
  • Culture
  • Society
  • Environment
  • Take Action

The Nation

  • About
  • Privacy Policy
  • Advertise
  • Comments Policy
  • Contact Us
  • Help
  • Jobs and Internships
  • Support The Nation
  • Nation Shop
  • Nation Travels
  • Nation Cruise
  • Nation Wine Club
  • Nation Classroom

Magazine

  • Current Issue
  • Masthead
  • Archive
  • Subscribe
  • Gift Subscriptions
  • Academic Rate
  • Subscription Services
  • Reprints

Copyright (c) 2019 The Nation Company LLC