Check out this video about my friend Lolita’s quest for her family photographs. (DDFRtv visits Lolita Parker Jr @ Boston from Digital Diaspora Family Reunion on Vimeo.) What the video does not fully explain is that Lolita is herself a professional photographer. Though we’re both from Boston, I met Lolita in Turkey Creek, MS at Derrick [...]
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Save the Blacks
This is brilliant coverage of the fight of Turkey Creek, Mississippi African Americans to save their community. Turkey Creek was founded by freed slaves in 1866. Their descendants have been fighting dispossession by developers and environmental racism for years. I interviewed Wyatt Cenac’s guide, Derrick Evans, in January 2006, 6 months after Hurricane Katrina devastated his community with [...]
All We Have (Treme)
If you’ve watched the 1st season of Treme then you know: incredible writing and acting in a hard-hitting rendition of post-Katrina life in New Orleans. This edit of clips by here’s luck makes an emotional arc out of the experiences of the main female characters. It is, as here’s luck calls it, a prayer for [...]
4 Years After Hurricane Katrina
On August 29, 2005, the eye of Hurricane Katrina made landfall in Waveland, Mississippi, and the western side of the storm grazed New Orleans. Five months after the storm, I visited the Mississippi Gulf Coast. According to a National Hurricane Center report on Katrina, “in many locations, most of the buildings along the coast were [...]
When Does the Gulf Coast Recovery Start?
Things only seem to be getting worse. I just received this email update from the KatrinaRitaVille Express: House republicans moved today to pre-empt lawsuits against manufacturers of FEMA trailers, while whistleblowers from one supplier speak candidly about the dishonest government and company practices they were involved in. Meanwhile, FEMA and local officials in coastal AL, [...]
The Greatest Social Experiment in America
The week before I was going to head to New Orleans for this year’s Nonprofit Technology Conference one of my twitter friends who was also going to NTC pointed to Eboo Patel’s Washington Post blog post about post-Katrina recovery in New Orleans. Patel catalogs the devastation pretty well: My friend Alycia drove me through the [...]
What Is This You Bring My America?
Last Sunday, the New York Times reported that among hundreds of recently declassified intelligence documents from the 1950s was a 1950 proposal by former FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to suspend habeas corpus and imprison some 12,000 Americans he suspected of disloyalty…. Hoover wanted President Harry S. Truman to proclaim the mass arrests necessary to [...]
The Worst Environmental Disaster in the United States Since the Exxon Valdez
What’s the headline refer to? Hurricane Katrina’s deforestation of the Gulf Coast, primarily Mississippi. New satellite imaging has revealed that hurricanes Katrina and Rita produced the largest single forestry disaster on record in the nation — an essentially unreported ecological catastrophe that killed or severely damaged about 320 million trees in Mississippi and Louisiana. The [...]
No Money for the FEMA Trailer Park Children
By Briley Richmond Ocean Springs, MS Sunday, October 21, 2007 The Mississippi Press A 6-year-old child, Blake Pendergrass, was struck and killed by an automobile in Escatawpa the other day. Escatawpa is about 20 miles from my home in Ocean Springs. I didn’t know him. I would imagine something like that happens somewhere in America [...]
Alphonso Jackson Uses HUD to Destroy Lives and Make Friends Rich
The AP reports: The FBI is examining the ties between Housing Secretary Alphonso Jackson and a friend who was paid $392,000 by Jackson’s department as a construction manager in New Orleans, three federal law enforcement officials said Thursday. Jackson’s friend got the job after the HUD secretary asked a staff member to pass along his [...]
Shameless Lying Liars Ready to End Public Housing in NOLA
Selective involvement of federal government in local affairs at its finest. HUD’s Wrecking Ball Tightening the Noose Around New Orleans By BILL QUIGLEY Odessa Lewis is 62 years old. When I saw her last week, she was crying because she is being evicted. A long-time resident of the Lafitte public housing apartments, since Katrina she [...]
Groups Respond to Proposed Use of MS Low-Income Housing Recovery Funds to Expand Port of Gulfport
I posted previously on MS Governor Haley Barbour’s support for the plan divert federal Community Development Block Grant funds to a port expansion in Gulfport. The following is section III of the comment to the MS Development Authority and HUD, by Gulf Coast and national advocacy groups: MISSISSIPPI HAS FAILED TO ADDRESS THE HOUSING CRISIS [...]
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- St. Petersburg Police Bind Hands And Feet Of 5-Year-Old African-American Girl
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