In October, I was in Mississippi again, following leads in my investigation of the 1964 murder of Clifton Walker, a black man from Woodville, MS. Driving home from the swing shift at the International Paper plant in Natchez, MS, Walker was ambushed by Klansmen, who stopped his car on a deserted road and blew his [...]
Tag Archives: louisiana
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 [...]
July 4, 1964
July 4, 1964 was the last time Julia Dobbins saw her brother, JoEd Edwards. Eight days later, he went missing. Rumors were that the Klan took away the 21-year-old Black man and murdered him. His mother died in 1990 never having learned what truly happened to her son. July 4, 1964 was the thirteenth day [...]
Edging towards Justice in Concordia Parish, LA
Stanley Nelson of the Concordia Sentinel reports major developments in the investigation of the 1964 murder of a Black man, named Frank Morris in Ferriday, Louisiana. Federal and parish prosecutors are combining forces in the investigation of the 1964 murder of black Ferriday shoe shop owner Frank Morris and the case may go before the [...]
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, [...]
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 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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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, [...]
Subscriptions (RSS)
BLOG POSTS
COMMENTS
PODCASTSElsewhere
- St. Petersburg Police Bind Hands And Feet Of 5-Year-Old African-American Girl
- Lynching In Tuskegee —blog this now!!
- More On The Prisoners From Orleans Parish Prison
- “Uppity,” That’s Racist for “Kill”
