DSCN3922.jpg, originally uploaded by BenTG.

Here comes two of you,
which one will you chose?
One is black, one is blue.
Don't look just what to do.

(Velvet Underground, 1969)

Since 2001, the city of Bosotn has cut its spending on youth jobs by more than half. Anyone who reads the Boston papers knows that youth violence, particularly among Blacks and Latinos in Roxbury and Dorchester, has been skyrocketing.

The graphic above is from the United Youth and Youth Workers of Boston website. Please sign their petition urging Boston city officials to allocate $5 Million from the FY07 City Operating Budget for summer and year-round youth jobs.

Youth jobs are crucial to stopping violence. In the short term, they provide a positive alternative to young people of all types -- helping those who have already made negative choices, turn their lives around; and helping other young people who are on the fence, stay positive.

In the long term, jobs build the skills and futures of young people, giving them the tools and relationships to stay positive long after a summer job has finished. Indeed, youth jobs do far more than prevent violence: they invest in young people, giving them the resources to thrive as they become adults and community leaders.

DSCN1170, originally uploaded by BenTG.

Dollars & Sense co-editor Chris Sturr wrote to me today to let me know that "Gone to Mississippi," the feature I wrote about my trip to the Gulf Coast, is now online. This is the opening section:

"You have to come here... you just can't understand unless you see it... please come," Gayle Tart said to me. Kermit Moore, an organizer from the Mississippi Workers' Center for Human Rights, had referred me to Tart, an African-American attorney in Gulfport, for a perspective on Hurricane Katrina's impact in Mississippi.

Her urgency was persuasive. In late January, after I had traveled around the Gulf Coast region for a week, I met Tart in a private home in Gulfport. "Now we can talk," she said. "Until you saw what I saw, I couldn't talk to you. You had no way of understanding."

Tart was right.

Two things I could not understand from where I sat in Boston were the true extent of Katrina's geographic reach in Mississippi, Louisiana, and Alabama—wiping out an entire region of the country—and the scale of human costs, compounded by government policies, local, state, and federal.

Even before the trip, I knew something wasn't right about the media's coverage of Mississippi. I heard entire towns were wiped out, but I didn't hear anything about African American communities, even though Mississippi has the highest concentration of African Americans in the United States. Even along the Gulf Coast, one of the whitest parts of the state, there are many heavily African-American areas. For instance, Gulfport, the second largest city in the state, is one-third African American; parts of the city are over 90% African American. But Katrina's impact on African-American communities on the Mississippi coast was virtually absent from the news.

On October 11, Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour announced the formation of his Commission on Recovery, Rebuilding and Renewal. "The Coast and South Mississippi will decide their own destiny," Barbour said, "but with strong support from the Commission, our Congressional delegation, state officials and many others."

But whom, exactly, will government support? "It took some seven weeks after that commission was convened to even have a committee on housing, even though housing was the main thing the goddamn storm knocked out," noted Derrick Evans, founder and director of Turkey Creek Community Initiatives, an innovative nonprofit community development corporation in the historic African-American settlement, now part of Gulfport. "They quickly fast-tracked legislation to allow the casinos to be rebuilt on land so that the casino companies and operators wouldn't abandon the Gulf Coast. An opportunity was missed to also require those folks, when they rebuild, to pay into an affordable housing trust fund, like the hotels do in Boston."

To travel through the Gulf Coast region is to move through a twilight zone where thousands of people are in limbo, with no sense of their future. In contrast to the damage Katrina brought in New Orleans, the storm was largely color-blind in its immediate destruction of Mississippi. Like New Orleans, however, there are racial and economic dimensions to everything in the aftermath—from the availability of resources for relief and cleanup to reconstruction plans.

"On September 29, 2005, four weeks after the storm, after weeks of begging FEMA and a visit to Washington, D.C., to get congressional support, a FEMA Disaster Recovery Center finally arrived in East Biloxi," said Ward 2 City Councilor Bill Stallworth, speaking before Congress last December. "That same week, the Red Cross set up an assistance center."

"In emergency room triage, you attend to the person with their arm hanging off, not the one with the splinter," Stallworth continued. "The Red Cross and FEMA seem to have a different mindset. The areas of Biloxi that were not as hard hit received a rapid response, while a good three and half weeks past the storm, we were still awaiting assistance."

"We could see other areas with lights, and we didn't have lights," recalled an African-American accountant in Gulfport, Sam Arnold, who is currently a community organizer with International Relief and Development. "We were like two or three weeks in, and we could see the main highway [49], since our community is only two blocks off the highway. The businesses on 49 had lights, and we didn't have lights. And you know, you really can't function without electricity."

The immediate housing crisis for storm survivors is translating into land grabs in low-income neighborhoods. Most widely at risk are African-American neighborhoods, many of them of historic significance, though not widely recognized as such.

(Read the rest.)

The online version is currently no-frills, without any of the images that appear in the magazine. I've uploaded a PDF offset of Gone to Mississippi [2.2 MB], in case you'd like to see it.

The image, above, appears on the opening pages of my article. Go here to see it large.

It was dumbfounding to drive along the coast in Biloxi and find the Grand Casino on the north side of Highway 90. Before Katrina, the casino was on a barge, docked off the beach, south of the highway. The storm surge lifted the casino barge out of the water, over the beach and over the highway. If you stand at the western end of the barge and look east, you can see the yellow and blue neon sign, a half mile down the road, where the barge originally sat. The same thing happened to two other casino barges—the President Casino in Biloxi, which landed on top of a Holiday Inn, and the Gulfport Grand Casino.

DSCN3591.jpg, originally uploaded by BenTG.

I wish I had more time to write these days. Or maybe it's not so much a matter of time as it is a matter of psychic space and mental energy.

When I'm not at my job, a lot of the energy that I might have put into new blog posts has instead been poured into shooting photos and working on them in Photoshop.

I did not expect such broad enthusiasm about the photos I put up at the Haley House Bakery Cafe (thanks again, Lolita). It bowled me over to have strangers come up to me and ask to buy prints. But really what surprised me most was how moving it was to see large 11 x 14 prints of my photographs hanging on the wall. I had never made large-size prints before, and I had never displayed my work publicly.

When people started asking me about my background in photography, I found myself explaining that I first learned the basics from my father. I remembered standing with him, out in our large, suburban backyard, former marshlands turned bedroom communities for state workers like himself.

He was showing me how to work the Pentax 35mm I had received for my bar-mitzvah. He was explaining f-stops, shutter speed, depth of field.

Even as a small child, I stood under the red incandescent bulb in his basement darkroom, the latent image coming clear in the tray of developer.

Call it my new obsession. Call it research.

I've got another show coming up in August. The first one was about Katrina. I think this one will be about the American flag.

Bloggers and blog readers who have been around a few years will get the allusion I made in my previous post.

For those unfamiliar, here's the short version.

Also see Jack M. Balkin, Knight Professor of Constitutional Law and the First Amendment and Director, The Information Society Project at Yale Law School.

More info at EFF and Chilling Effects.

James E. Prince III, Editor and Publisher of the Mississippi newspaper and online news source, the Neshoba Democrat, wrote an email message to me last night, at 11:19 p.m., which referenced this HungryBlues entry, which I posted last July, and said:

Mr. Greenberg:

The post by Jonathan David Jackson is false and defamatory and I ask that you remove it immediately.

Jim Prince
--
James E. Prince III
Editor and Publisher
The Neshoba Democrat

P.O. Box 30
Philadelphia, MS 39350
601-656-4000
FAX 601-656-6379
jprince@neshobademocrat.com

Confused by this request, I wrote the following message back to Mr. Prince:

Dear Mr. Prince,

What part of Jonathan David Jackson's comment on my blog do you consider false and defamatory? Here is what he wrote, in full, in response to the post you reference:

I love the clear, careful reasoning as you build this case against a closet (or not so closet) bigot and expose the true complexity of these issues. I also admire the primary source documents that you post on the site. This essay is definitely one of your most insightful.

Posted by: Jonathan David Jackson | Wednesday, July 13, 2005 at 05:15 PM

Ben Greenberg

This morning James E. Prince III replied with a clarification and a threat of legal action:

I’m speaking of the comments below apparently by Suzy Sharino then. It’s actually difficult to tell who made these slanderous comments. But they need to be gone. I don’t think either one of us wants to get my lawyers involved.

Jim Prince

Earlier this afternoon, I answered with this email:

Dear Mr. Prince,

I am surprised that you, as editor and publisher of a newspaper, would write an demand letter that is so vague. I would have assumed that you know the mechanics of demanding retractions for specific statements.

It would be less surprising to me, perhaps, if you are unaware that neither bloggers nor their ISPs are libel [sic] for comments left by third parties, such as Suzy Sharino.

If you have a specific request to make of me, please make it with the appropriate rationale, so I can consider it. Be advised, however, that since the statements that you mention were made be [sic] a third party, retractions are purely a matter of my discretion. Your threats have no sway with me. You are of course welcome to make a comment on my blog to rebut any of Suzy Sharino's statements.

Ben Greenberg

Just a coincidence? Maybe, except it's at least two coincidences... Tell me what you think...

Yesterday on TalkLeft:

http://talkleft.com/new_archives/014801.html

Chicago's Abu Ghraib

Let's not forget prisoner abuse begins at home. [emphasis added --BG]

It's called Area 2. And for nearly two decades beginning in 1971, it was the epicenter for what has been described as the systematic torture of dozens of African-American males by Chicago police officers. In total, more than 135 people say they were subjected to abuse including having guns forced into their mouths, bags places over their heads, and electric shocks inflicted to their genitals. Four men have been released from death row after government investigators concluded torture led to their wrongful convictions.

In December on HungryBlues:

http://hungryblues.net/2005/12/09/torture-begins-at-home/

Torture Begins At Home

US sanctioned torture is one of the pressing human rights issues of our time. I very much admire and am grateful for the moral vigilance with which some are responding to this administration's attack on democracy and human rights in its war on terror. Yet I also wish for a day when there is comparable popular awareness of and outrage about the long standing, institutionalized human rights abuses that take place within US borders. The most recent example of the latter to come my way was in Salim Muwakkil's latest article in In These Times:

The latest domestic example is Chicago, where for nearly two decades (from 1973 to 1991) the police department virtually condoned the torture of more than 100 black criminal suspects. Those illegal techniques led to the wrongful conviction of dozens of black men, and even prompted Amnesty International in 1990 to call for an inquiry into police torture in the city.

If you're in the Boston area, this event looks like an important opportunity to get some current information about life in New Orleans. A friend of mine who is a student at UMass sent me the announcement. Hope to see you there...

WHAT'S HAPPENING IN NEW ORLEANS?

COMMON GROUND COLLECTIVE at UMASS BOSTON

When: Thursday, May 11 from noon to 2:00 p.m.

Where: UMass Boston Wheatley Hall Student Lounge, Room 0148, 4th Floor

Please stop by for as little or as much time as you can!

Adjunct Dispute Resolution Professor Phil Woodbury, who has spent time working in post-Katrina New Orleans, will introduce the work of the Common Ground Collective. Also present will be a long-term Common Ground

volunteer and a lifelong resident of the 9th ward. They will speak about the storm, the failed government response, and Common Ground's work.

Common Ground's mission is to provide short term relief for victims of hurricane disasters in the gulf coast region, and long term support in rebuilding the communities affected in the New Orleans area. Common Ground is a community-initiated volunteer organization offering assistance, mutual aid and support. The work gives hope to communities by working with them, providing for their immediate needs and emphasizes people working together to rebuild their lives in sustainable ways.

Common Ground was founded by New Orleans residents immediately after Hurricane Katrina. Thousands of volunteers have been mobilized to provide hurricane relief and long term organizing in New Orleans and surrounding areas. In addition to providing water, food, clothing and other emergency services, Common Ground has established a free medical clinic with two satellite centers, helped gut and clean churches, houses, and schools, prevented bulldozing in areas of the 9th Ward, established an after-school program, and much more.

Please come with your curiosity and your questions. Learn more about Common Ground at www.commongroundrelief.org

Technorati Tags: activism, katrina, nola

Tens of thousands of voters will be disenfranchised in the April 22nd
election in New Orleans, most of them Black. State officials know it, and
they know how to prevent it - by providing satellite voting for displaced
New Orleanians outside the state of Louisiana.  But despite large grassroots
efforts demanding satellite voting, the state has refused to take the
necessary measures for ensuring a valid election process and setting up
satellite voting. The only thing preventing this important election from
becoming a fair election is one signature by one person: Gov. Kathleen
Blanco.

Hillary Charlot and two other displaced survivors are set up below the steps
of the State Capitol.  They are taking part in a hunger strike to pressure
Governor K. Blanco to sign an executive order to postpone the election until
satellite voting can be put in place.  They will stay until Governor Blanco
takes appropriate action to ensure a fair election, or until the day of the
election.

Please Join Us

For the evacuees' voice to be effective, they need as much support as they
can get.  If you can, please join them in Baton Rouge today through the
scheduled 4/22 election date, either to participate in the hunger strike or
to stand in solidarity with them and the cause for a just election.

Contact James Rucker (415.505.9048 or james@colorofchange.org) if you have
questions or are able to provide help in any way.

Forward this to anyone you know who might be interested in participating in
or supporting the effort.

(Via Jordan Flaherty.)

March 29, 2006

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

CONTACT: Chris Sturr

or Amy Gluckman

617-447-2177

VOICES FROM THE GULF COAST

THE STORIES YOU HAVEN’T HEARD

ABOUT

HURRICANE KATRINA & GULF COAST RECONSTRUCTION

When Hurricane Katrina struck six months ago, the mainstream media was shocked to discover the scope of poverty in New Orleans. And that’s about as deep as the coverage has gone.

Dollars & Sense: The Magazine of Economic Justice has just released its 56-page special issue (March/April 2006) on Katrina. In it, you’ll discover how Katrina exposed—and has intensified—a whole range of unjust systems of racial and economic domination.

Did you know:

• When Katrina struck, the New Orleans jail housed about 6,800 prisoners, including violent felons but also plenty of people awaiting arraignment or trial, like a guy arrested for reading Tarot cards without a permit and homeless people arrested for begging or sleeping on the street. Prisoners were locked in first-floor cells as the water rose; some spent days standing in sewage-filled cells with little food or water. Meanwhile, the facility’s scant two-page evacuation plan was on “this guy’s computer” that got flooded.

But the story goes back much farther. The jail’s population has increased eightfold since the mid-1970s—while the city’s population has dropped. Why? Because the parish sheriff makes money for each prisoner he houses. As one sheriff commented, “fewer inmates translates into less revenue for the jail.” Locking up fewer New Orleanians would mean shrinking the sheriff’s fat patronage-based fiefdom.

• When Katrina struck, it devastated nearly the entire Mississippi coast, in some places for miles inland. Thousands lost their homes. But state and federal relief and reconstruction plans are doing little to help people rebuild their homes or find other housing. In Mississippi, Gov. Haley Barbour decided to spend the state’s entire $5.3 billion federal Katrina relief grant on retroactive flood insurance for otherwise insured homeowners—not a penny for renters, uninsured homeowners, or to repair public housing.

But the story goes back much farther. For years, redevelopment plans in coastal cities like Biloxi and Gulfport have been endangering low-income and black neighborhoods. “There are people here who’ll tell you that developers and local politicians have been trying to flood us out of existence, because with each piece of land, they haul in a bunch of red clay, which is semi-impervious, dump it in the wetlands to build up land on which to put a slab or a parking lot, then on the slab they put a building, a big ‘ole Wal-Mart or something,” says Mississippi historian and community organizer Derrick Evans.

• When Katrina struck, the flooding in New Orleans left behind a layer of toxic sediment—contaminants include arsenic and diesel-fuel substances—in neighborhoods throughout the city. The EPA has not begun any cleanup of the sediment. Government agencies are recommending that returnees wear protective gear like Tyvek suits when they work on their homes but, as environmental justice activist Monique Harden notes, “not one government agency provides this protective gear to people returning to the area.”

But the story goes back much farther. For years, low-income and black communities in Louisiana have faced the massive legal(!) dumping of toxic pollutants. In fact, the historic African-American community of Mossville, La., is the focus of the first-ever environmental human-rights lawsuit brought against the U.S. government, now pending before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights of the Organization of American States.

These are just some of the in-depth stories you’ll read in this special issue of Dollars & Sense. The issue includes:

• Repopulating New Orleans – How did San Francisco do what a top economist says New Orleans cannot?

• Gone to Mississippi – A journey along the state’s devastated coast

• Activist Perspectives on Katrina: Three Interviews

Mississippi historian and activist Derrick Evans – “Ground Zero of Someone Else’s Future”

East Biloxi community activist Jearlean Osborne – “The Storm of Life after Katrina”

Environmental justice activist Monique Harden – Katrina Hits Cancer Alley

• Down by Law – Orleans Parish Prison before and after Katrina

• Bringing Them All Back Home – Housing in New Orleans, six months later

• SPECIAL PULLOUT CENTERFOLD – Rogues’ Gallery of Katrina Profiteers / Map of the Katrina Diaspora / Roster of progressive Gulf Coast organizations

• And more!!!

Authors and editors available for interviews – contact Chris Sturr or Amy Gluckman at (617) 447-2177.

Founded in 1974, Dollars & Sense explains the workings of the U.S. and international economies and provides left perspectives on current economic affairs. It is edited and produced by a collective of economists, journalists, and activists who are committed to social justice and economic democracy. 

The March/April special Katrina issue of Dolars & Sense magazine will be in print any day now. In the meantime, a few of the articles are available online. One of the articles we've posted is my interview with historian and activist Derrick Evans. Derrick lives in Turkey Creek, MS, a post-emancipation African American settlement, incorporated as part of Gulfport, MS a little over ten years ago. He is the founder and director of an innovative community development corporation, Turkey Creek Community Initiatives.

Here's an excerpt from the interview:

DE: Even though I grew up here, I didn't know even a fragment of a fraction of what there is to know about the ecological identity of the place here, and it has turned out to be very important information that then translates into good urban planning.

There's a cultural landscape, there's a sociological landscape, there's the class and race distribution, and there's also the ecological profile. And what you'll find is that the unresolved problems pertaining to any one of those issues can be overlain on a map: that the lowest-lying land is typically where black folks, generations ago, would have acquired their land; where they would have settled and developed their communities, which would have been the least disturbed by 20th-century infrastructure; and that now, in the wake of a "Mississippi miracle," the economic revitalization of the coast, for example, the advent of dockside casinos, would be the most ripe or prime for redevelopment. Not at all unlike Roxbury in Massachusetts. Roxbury lies smack in the middle of the only direction for the city of Boston to revitalize, regardless of what the priorities are, whether it's to build more skyscrapers or provide more housing for middle- and higher-income folk. Likewise, we here are sitting in the same boat as Harlem, or neighborhoods in San Francisco and elsewhere, sitting in ground zero of somebody else's future.

So I've formed partnerships with some pretty nontraditional "civil rights activists"--like ladies from the Audubon Society, who now stand with us to protect the creek. Now that it's publicly utilized for birding and for kids to go canoeing and learn about native habitat, that helps ward off sprawl. The church here, Mount Pleasant, got involved and created an environmental ministry because of this trans-formation of looking at ourselves and the ecological context around us.

This is really important because this is a low-lying area, a very small watershed. We get 70 to 80 inches of rainfall per year that falls into a 17,000-acre bowl. A lot of water, small area--not a good place for a whole lot of what we call "impervious surfaces" like rooftops, parking lots and roadways without some provision being made to re-create the natural function of the watershed so that low-income communities like Turkey Creek, North Gulfport, Forest Heights, or even more affluent areas like Long Beach to our west, don't flood, which historically they didn't.

There are people here who'll tell you that developers and local politicians have just been trying to flood us out of existence, because with each piece of land, they haul in a bunch of red clay, which is basically impervious, dump it in the wetlands to build up land on which to put a slab or a parking lot, and then on the slab they put a building, a big 'ole Wal-Mart or something.

During Katrina, my mother was rescued from a house--the water reached her chest. She was with her 95-year-old husband, who never had and never would evacuate before any storm out here, because there was never a need. We have traditionally had woods behind us for thousands of feet as a windbreak, and hundreds of acres of wetlands to handle the runoff. But nobody had even done a comprehensive assessment of the total loss of wetlands to make it clear that houses three and a half miles north of the beach would be flooded to the degree that they were.

(Whole thing.)

If you don't already have a subscription, you'll be able to pick up the March/April issue at one of these newsstands. (If you made a donation for my travel to MS, you'll be receiving a copy with your thank-you.)