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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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 [...]
What the FBI Showed Him
Last weekend, on February 6, Catherine Walker and I were emailing back and forth about our plans to interview people familiar with the unsolved civil rights murder of her father Clifton Walker 46 years ago. Around mid-afternoon we had a breakthrough; Catherine wrote to tell me about her conversation with the son of a possible [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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, [...]
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.
How not to Build Racial Unity and Counter Racism in New Orleans
Commentary by Lance Hill April 26, 2007 There is a long overdo discussion beginning in New Orleans on how to address race and class issues and bridge the growing racial divide in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. For many months there was little recognition in the mainstream media that displaced African Americans felt locked out [...]
Success! Thank You for Your Calls!
Thank you to all who called Barney Frank to ask him to allow New Orleans Public Housing residents to speak at today’s meeting of the House Committee on Financial Services. And thank you to Barney Frank for recognizing the importance of including testimony from a resident at today’s hearings. I received the following report from [...]
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- St. Petersburg Police Bind Hands And Feet Of 5-Year-Old African-American Girl
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