Anarchism rises amidst the wreckage of Katrina

by Jordan Green

From Yes Weekly

Plans switch up from minute to minute to accommodate the
unpredictable crosscurrents of human need at Common Ground,
a volunteer-run relief organization with projects spread
throughout New Orleans and southeastern Louisiana.

Matt Robinson, a 37-year-old volunteer from Carrboro, NC,
who showed up in New Orleans around Thanksgiving last year
is assigned the job of site coordinator on the morning of
this third Sunday in May at St. Mary's of the Angels School
in the Upper 9th Ward. The structure is a drab, three-story
brick Catholic school building transformed into a relief
center, with volunteers' cots filling the upstairs
classrooms, an ad hoc kitchen set up under tarps off to the
side, a gymnasium that serves as a dining hall and bulk food
storage area, and tool sheds and decontamination stations
spread over the parish property.

As it happens Robinson's shift is spent mostly away from the
former school. Before the 7 a.m. morning meeting begins and
the volunteers receive their assignments, the site
coordinator drives a female volunteer who has fallen ill to
get medical assistance. The morning's work becomes consumed
with a series of errands, and it's early afternoon before
Robinson returns to sit down to a plate of kidney beans,
green beans and tofu in the dining hall.

In the meantime the Rev. Bart Pax, a stoutly built
Franciscan priest with graying hair and heavy glasses, shows
up to thank the volunteers and invite some of them to attend
10 o'clock mass at the church across the street.

About three months after the Upper 9th Ward officially
reopened, a Common Ground organizer came to him asking for
space to house volunteers, Pax says. As the priest struggled
to figure out how to rebuild the looted school building in
this isolated and poor African-American section full of
substandard houses built in the early twentieth century, at
low elevation even for a city mostly lying below sea level,
Common Ground appeared as a blessing.

“From what I hear, they think I worked a miracle to get them
to come,” Pax says of those who are struggling to rebuild
homes here. “I didn't do anything. They are really grateful
for the goodness of these young people. So many young people
have taken on that curse of our society, that if you care
you're no good. It's not the money, not the glory that these
young people are after. It's just to give.”

St. Mary's might be considered a logical place to begin the
long journey of rebuilding this ravaged community: many of
the residents spent three days on the school's rooftop in
late August and early September 2005 as floodwaters swirled
through the streets before first responders airlifted them
to safety in helicopters.

“By Monday morning these streets were running with clear
water,” Pax says. “By the evening it had reached the steps.
My staff and I agreed we would stay; we didn't have to.
Sunday night there were seventy people here. By Monday there
were well over a hundred, including forty children. I
brought four loaves of bread, and we had peanut butter and
jelly sandwiches. Some of the neighbors emptied their deep
freezes, and Tuesday afternoon we had a gumbo. We cooked it
up on the roof.

“Wednesday morning there was a moment of great tension when
our people heard the looters were firing at helicopters
downtown, and they got very panicky,” the priest continues.
“They were worried the helicopters would be afraid to land.
Some of the men got the idea: let's put the women and
children on the rooftop waving white flags. On Wednesday the
helicopters dropped supplies and started evacuating people.”

The relationship between the parish and Common Ground, an
organization co-founded by a former Black Panther that has
attracted legions of anarchists from local activist networks
across the United States, has gone through some growing
pains, Pax says.

“One of the deep concerns I've had is that St. Mary's would
be a refuge for the malcontents of the city,” Pax says.
“Drug dealers and alcohol are around. We couldn't have that;
that's not rebuilding. The core leaders here have made sure
that didn't happen.”

Establishing a fruitful working relationship with
ecclesiastical authority is one of Common Ground's
accomplishments; reaching an accommodation with the New
Orleans Police Department could be considered even more
impressive considering that the police ceased to be an
official presence in many areas where the anarchists defied
federal curfews to provide essential services.

“We gave police officers water and we gutted some police
officers' houses, which was kind of tough because some
anarchists were like, 'F*ck police,'“ says Robinson, a
slender man with a mop of hair over his brow, a light beard
and the sinewy, tanned arms characteristic of many of the
volunteers. He'd spent the past five years working with a
family in North Carolina that inlcluded children with
behavioral disabilities. He came down with a group of
friends, got hooked up with Common Ground through a referral
from the anarchist group Food Not Bombs and decided to stay.

Just as some law enforcement members and clergy were forced
to look beyond the combustible label of 'anarchism,' many of
the activists decided to revisit some of their prejudices
against the police.

“Cops are human beings,” Robinson says. “They suffered as
well. Many of them stayed here at great personal risk to
help their neighbors. If you can't acknowledge the humanity
of people you disagree with then you really shouldn't be
trying to create a revolution.”

Initially Common Ground ran into difficulties with police
when they first started setting up first aid stations in the
West Bank neighborhood of Algiers, and later when they moved
into the 9th Ward, but since then, core leaders say, some
officers have shown support, if only by looking the other
way. With the population of many devastated neighborhoods
reduced to a fraction of their former populations, law
enforcement is often not a visible presence anyway.

Common Ground's southeastern Louisiana relief effort might
be the first time in the past hundred years that anarchism
has been attempted on a systematic community-wide level in
the United States since the heyday of the Wobblies in the
labor movement and the Chicago Haymarket uprising of 1886.

“There's never been any effective anarchist organization in
the US,” Robinson says. “We've been forging this new path.
Despite structural challenges and organizational flaws,
we've gutted hundreds of houses to save homeowners hundreds
of thousands of dollars. This is a community that is not
financially wealthy. It gives people encouragement to move
back. We've done more than FEMA ever did. The fact that the
most powerful country on earth was unable to deliver
drinking water for a week [after the hurricane] is inexcusable.”

Common Ground has also found itself engaged in a complex
two-step with the federal government, one moment defying
curfews, the next receiving basic supplies from the military.

“This [US Army] sergeant started unloading
Meals-Ready-to-Eat, baby formula and women's feminine pads,”
recalls Noah Morris, an activist originally from Rhode
Island who arrived in New Orleans on Sept. 9. The Army's
job, he says, was to conduct a house-to-house census, but
the unit went beyond its orders.

“We saw what you're doing; it's a real good thing,” the
sergeant told Morris. “Why don't you take this? You can
probably do more with it than us.”

Morris recalls scratching his head, trying to figure out the
Army sergeant's motivation.

“You guys stole the FEMA supplies and you can't give 'em
back -- is that it?” he asked. The sergeant's Army cohorts
grinned, but no one was willing to verbally confirm his
suspicions.

One of Morris's fellow Common Ground volunteers stuck her
head out of a tent and asked the sergeant, “Do you know
we're anarchists?”

Morris remembers the sergeant being gruff and businesslike,
quizzing him, “You're promoting anarchism?”

“That's what you're doing by taking the initiative and just
doing this without following orders,” Morris replied.

The bulk of Common Ground's work in the Upper 9th Ward is
now gutting houses, an arduous and dusty job that requires
volunteers to don white Tyvek body suits, respirators and
goggles to tear out flooring, ceilings, drywall and
insulation within the dim confines of hurricane-ravaged homes.

“Gutting, gutting, gutting -- I can't emphasize enough how
important it is,” says Brian, a core leader who like many in
Common Ground declines to give his last name. “House gutting
is the number-one thing residents have been asking for.”

There are currently about 330 volunteers working with Common
Ground, says Jeremiah Johnson, a 23-year-old Hendersonville,
NC, native who has been in New Orleans since February.
Johnson postponed his graduation from Harvard University,
where he's studying government, to volunteer. Spring break
in March brought 2,900 volunteers, punching up the total
number who have cycled through Common Ground since its
inception to 8,000.

The organization has set up dozens of worksites across New
Orleans, ranging from two in Mid-City to a handful in the
Upper 9th Ward and a relatively new site in the Lower 9th
Ward. On May 21, volunteers were deploying to Houma, a
majority-white city southwest of New Orleans whose
population numbered about 30,000 before the hurricane. To
the east in St. Bernard, a low-income, majority-white
parish, a breakaway effort called 'Hope Camp' that shares
some resources with Common Ground and utilizes the same
network of food banks, has been launched.

In a city where efforts by grassroots groups are as
fractured as those of official agencies, and conditions from
one neighborhood to the next vary to drastic degrees, not
everyone in the city is aware of Common Ground's work. Among
those who are, there is not necessarily agreement about the
merits of the group's work.

Russell Henderson, a resident of the Fauborg Merigny
neighborhood who teaches at Dillard University and works
part-time as a children's advocacy lobbyist at the Louisiana
State Legislature, calls Common Ground “left-wing
nihilists,” but he notes that they were there for him when
he returned to his home a month after the hurricane.

“Having a white kid from New Jersey coming and gutting a
house is futile,” he says. “In the beginning they were
feeding people. People were not being fed. They had a health
clinic for people not getting health care. I think it was
important. When I came back I was always looking for food
and water, and they had it.”

In contrast to Common Ground, the Red Cross and federal
responders appeared more interested in securing their own
safety than providing services.

“What they did to us was unconscionable,” Henderson says of
the Red Cross. “Until mid-October you could go stand in line
in Houston and Jackson, Mississippi -- if you were in
Portland, Oregon, you could get some help from the Red
Cross. The only state in the union where you cannot get help
from the Red Cross is Louisiana. If someone wants to go
steal something I don't care. They were not on the ground.
They refused to go in. I finally got through to the Red
Cross national office, and you know what they told me? 'If
we tried to set up, there would be a riot.'“

Rebuilding has not occurred uniformly from neighborhood to
neighborhood. As in much of the eastern third of New
Orleans, every house in the Upper 9th Ward bears the
spray-painted notation of “TFW,” first responders' code for
“toxic flood water.” With only a few exceptions, no one has
managed to rebuild their homes; about half the residences
are fronted by white FEMA trailers. Commercial businesses
are virtually nonexistent.

Mack Hewitt, a 55-year-old homeowner in the Upper 9th and
one of the few who have moved back into their house, recalls
that President and First Lady Bush stopped to have lunch
with the governor and mayor at Stewart's Diner on North
Claiborne Avenue a few months back as Secret Service agents
lined the street. And yet today, a Saturday afternoon when
New Orleanians are going to the polls to re-elect Mayor Ray
Nagin, the restaurant is closed.

Signs of life are gradually returning to the Upper 9th. The
blocks of Gallier Street that run alongside St. Mary's of
the Angels Catholic Church boast FEMA trailers in front of
almost every house. On Sunday afternoon Spanish-speaking
roofers strain beneath packs of shingles, heaving them up
ladders to rooftops. Young men from the neighborhood cruise
the streets, in curious juxtaposition to the punks dressed
in Dead Kennedys shirts blasting the music of Woody Guthrie
from a portable radio.

Progress has been much slower in the Lower 9th Ward, an
isolated area separated from the rest of the city by the
Industrial Canal, whose floodwalls were breached on the
morning of Aug. 29. Common Ground has set up its Blue House
relief center near an area at the end of North Derbigny
Street where the Army Corps of Engineers continues to repair
the floodwall. Approaching the relief center a house has
been spray-painted with admonition: “Possible body.”

Throughout the area, houses -- their structures shredded --
lie in contorted heaps. Their condition proves them to have
been ripped from their foundations and smashed into each
other or deposited in the street. A car lying on its side
bears the spray-painted word “Baghdad,” indicative of how
many volunteers and residents feel about the storm and the
federal response.

Similar to Common Ground, the non-profit group ACORN engaged
in efforts earlier in the year to stop the city of New
Orleans from bulldozing ruined houses before residents could
reclaim sentimental items from the wreckage, locate the dead
and find closure. ACORN, like Common Ground, is offering to
gut houses for free as a first crucial step toward allowing
residents to return.

The area between North Derbigny Street and the Mississippi
River was only certified by the city as safe to have the
water turned back on in mid-May, so residents like Michael
Burns and his wife had yet to receive their FEMA trailer.
Although their house has been gutted, they're still waiting
to see if their insurance payment will be enough, and to see
whether this year's hurricane season, which officially
begins Thursday (June 1), will bring further devastation.

“It takes one day, one step at a time,” Burns says. “We're
waiting to see what the next storm season brings. We don't
want to take and put our stuff back together and have it
ripped back apart.”

North of Derbigny Street, the city is still refusing to turn
residents' water back on, to the displeasure of ACORN and
Common Ground.

“You see that sign?” asks Carol Campbell, a former renter
who identifies herself as the mother at Common Ground's Blue
House, gesturing to a hand-painted sign erected outside on
the curb. “It says, 'Not as seen on TV.' They lied to us.
They're telling everybody they can come back, but that's not
true.”

Henderson, the children's lobbyist and Dillard professor, is
not among those advocating for the repopulation of the Lower
9th Ward. He points out that while the racially mixed uptown
areas from the French Quarter westward, known to many as the
“sliver by the river,” escaped much of the devastation
because of its relatively higher elevation, large swaths of
the city's black middle-class who lived in the heart of the
city -- areas like Gentilly -- and eastward -- Eastern New
Orleans and the 9th Ward -- were wiped out.

“We have lost our entire African-American middle class:
teachers, firefighters,” he says. “Ninety percent of my
colleagues at Dillard lost everything. Ninety percent of my
students live in a hotel nine months after the storm.”

Henderson advocates building hundreds of high-rise housing
centers on the high ground along the Mississippi River
stretching west into Jefferson Parish, an area like St.
Bernard Parish that is a demographic product of the white
flight that followed integration in the 1960s and '70s.

“ACORN and these people talking about people having the
right to return to the Lower Nine so they can drown in the
next storm? It's bogus,” he says. “They don't have a right
to return to the Lower Nine; they have a right to return to
New Orleans.”

The atmosphere from Henderson's Merigny to Campbell's Lower
9th Ward remains weighted with an atmosphere of grim
resignation and betrayal. Nine months after Katrina, the
road to recovery still stretches endlessly ahead and a sense
of permanent crisis has set in.

“Right now we're in need of everything,” says Campbell, the
house mother at Common Ground's Lower 9th Ward relief
center. “Right now we've got bones and bodies in those
houses. They've been in there so long they're liquid and
they don't even smell. My house looks like a peanut butter
sandwich. It was far more than devastating.”

For a former renter like herself, the storm was doubly cruel.

Campbell turns to another woman, also a displaced resident,
taking shade underneath a tarp in front of the relief
center, and acknowledges that full recovery is a difficult
goal to envision.

“When things come back up,” she says, “I'm still running.”