Hurricane Katrina’s devastation of Gulf Coast communities is painful for Blacks to watch, for obvious reasons and ones that seem not so obvious to white fellow citizens.

History returns to haunt. Almost all Blacks are themselves Southerners or the descendants of Southern families freed by the Civil War, lifted from peonage by the Great Migration. And almost all have relatives, friends and college classmates still in the affected states of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Texas. Now, with the lives of thousands jeopardized by floods, destruction of homes and businesses, and ailments spread by contaminated water, comes the disheartening news of widespread lawlessness among the hurricane’s victims.

This we get while watching a disaster unfold that should never have happened in the first place. TV pictures keep showing lines of Black evacuees, not looting or shooting at police, but holding on as best they can, waiting for the emergency help their government has rushed to other disaster victims, in America or halfway around the world. Waiting still, even as their leaders from Washington congratulate themselves on their coping skills. The image of Black looters and criminals keeps getting resurrected, while the images of Black leaders driving the recovery efforts is minimized.

New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, struggling to keep order after an estimated 70 percent of his police force walked off, is still working, in a city with filthy water covering 70 percent of its streets. Lt. Gen. Russell Honoré, a graduate of historically Black Southern University, took charge as soon as he was sent, changing the dynamic on the streets as he ordered soldiers and civilian police to point their guns toward the ground: “This is not Iraq.” Brig. Gen. Robert Crear, who actually capped oil wells in Iraq, cleared up in days a problem the armchair experts said would take weeks: blocking the gaps in two levees whose failure let Lake Pontchartrain flood the whole of the New Orleans basin, so pumping operations could begin.

Ex-Army Lt. General Joe Ballard, another Louisianan and the first Black commander of the Corps of Engineers, makes the most painful point of all: This disaster, predicted by “every Corps of Engineers commander since 1927,” did not have to happen.

What he’s talking about is that New Orleans’ levees, built in the mid-1950s to withstand a Category Three storm, could not in fact stand up to that much battering. The Mississippi River, made to run straight by high levees after devastating floods in 1927, washed away barrier islands that should have protected the city from the full brunt of Nature’s fury. With the barriers gone, Army engineers kept asking their leaders in Congress and the White House for money to build up the levees to prevent exactly the kind of flooding New Orleans has endured.

Gen. Ballard, for his part, put forward a plan that Congress denounced as wasteful in the extreme. He wanted to spend more than $100 million to build up the levees to withstand a “100-year storm,” but was excoriated as a would-be big spender, and retired after that.
Now that a 100-year storm has proved his point, Congress has targeted $68 billion for a cleanup many experts believe will cost $150 billion, and Gen. Ballard’s spending plan looks to have been the more prudent investment. Who’s the big spender now?

It was all so unnecessary, especially the negative characterizations of the Blacks, who are after all American citizens. So few of gave up to lawlessness, amid a catastrophe so great its police force disintegrated, that the continued focus on criminality is an affront to the dignity and nobility so many have displayed. That, sadly, magnifies the tragedy we witness.

Garland Thompson is Editorial Director and Tyrone D. Taborn is Editor-in-Chief of US Black Engineer magazine.