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Category Archives: louisiana

Cold Case Justice Initiative

In doing my work on racial violence in Southwest Mississippi in the 1950s and 1960s, it is exciting to get to know some of the other people doing similar work.
Syracuse University College of Law Professors Janice McDonald and Paula C. Johnson direct the Cold Case Justice Initiative, which has been playing a role in the […]

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 lower 9th […]

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 “protect the […]

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 die-off, […]

Elle, PhD is Waiting in Louisiana

Elle, PhD is has ventured to answer Langston’s still prescient question, “What happens to a dream deferred?”
If you know about small communities in the South, you know that Jena is not an aberration of racial progress but rather a manifestation of festering tensions that have never gone away. What’s amazing about Elle’s blog post is […]

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 name to […]

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 has been locked […]

Haley Barbour Wants to Divert Even More CDBG Katrina Funds from Low-Income Housing

Facing South reports on the latest development in Mississippi’s road to non-recovery from Hurricane Katrina.
A Mississippi agency wants to divert $600 million in federal funds from a housing program created to help low-income homeowners who suffered losses in Hurricane Katrina and use it to spruce up the State Port at Gulfport, the Associated Press reports.
The […]

The Shock Doctrine

I became aware of Naomi Klein’s work in the first month after Hurricane Katrina, when she had made a remarkable discovery about New Orleans: in neighborhoods that had been declared habitable by Mayor Nagin there were 23, 267 uninhabited apartments that could be rented to evacuees. I said then:
If each unit houses three people, that’s […]

Finding Our Folk

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Why Kill a Tree to Grow a Flower?

Cypress swamps are clear-cut and entire trees are ground up to make cypress garden mulch. Wal-Mart, Home Depot, and Lowe’s are driving destruction of the Gulf’s best natural storm protection by selling cypress mulch all over the country. It’s time they stopped.
Get more info and ideas for activism at the Gulf Restoration Network.
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