Katrina: Leeves and Racism

“Whether you are returning home or coming for a visit, welcome to the wonderful city of New Orleans, where the current temperature is a sunny seventy-five.  Thank you for flying JetBlue.” announced the pilot, as the plane pulled into the gate and my family began to deplane.  Five years ago, I first came to the city of New Orleans to tour Tulane University, hoping to find the city in which to spend the next four years.  On my trip, my family and I visited areas such as Bourbon Street, Magazine, Audubon Park, and the Garden District.  After filling ourselves on beignets, po-boys, and crawfish, I returned home amazed at how much New Orleans had recovered since the levees broke in 2005.  I then committed to Tulane and decided to spend the next four years of my life living in New Orleans.

Lower Ninth Ward Damage, Photo by: Ollie Jones

After living in New Orleans and visiting some of the most historically rich areas in the country, my initial assumption was challenged.  The Lower Ninth Ward, a neighborhood which is 92% Black, is a prime example.  When the levees broke, the Lower Ninth Ward flooded causing people to evacuate or be trapped in their homes.  After the flooding, 80% of the city was underwater with an average flood level of 6 feet of water, the Lower Ninth Ward had areas covered in almost 12 feet of water.  Gwendolyn Guice and Josephine Butler were the first Lower Ninth Ward residents to return to the city in 2007.  Two other neighbors eventually joined them, but all four died by 2015.  More than 75,000 Black people never returned to the city after 2005.  Five years prior to Hurricane Katrina there were just under 5000 houses logged in the Lower Ninth Ward.  In 2010, five years after the flooding a census logged just over 1000 houses.  The Lower Ninth Ward is just one example of a Black community that was disproportionately affected by the flooding.

New Orleans was founded in 1718 and soon became home to one of the largest slave markets in the Deep South.  As wealthy white families moved to the city, they were able to build homes in areas located on high ground, information that was made accessible by surveyor’s maps.  After the Civil Rights movement, once Black people could buy and own property, they were forced to build their homes on the leftover land primarily consisting of marsh, swamps, and wetlands.  This restricted Black communities to the areas more susceptible to damages caused by natural disasters.

New Orelans Flood Zones, Photo by: Saul Tannenbaum

This was the beginning of the racially exclusive neighborhoods that still exist in present day New Orleans.  The next step that expanded this divide was the implementation of racial zoning laws in the early 1900s.  These laws prohibited Black families from moving into white neighborhoods without the overall written consent of the existing community.  The neighborhood of Lakeview, a community consisting of 88% white people to this day, implemented these restrictions.  A report released in 2018 from The New Orleans Prosperity Index: Tricentennial Collection states that “the Lakeview neighborhood required the purchaser to agree “that no lots are to be sold to negroes or colored people.”

After 1927 when these types of laws became illegal the city of New Orleans still found ways to keep Black people from moving into white neighborhoods by manipulating current laws and ordinances to continue this segregation.  The Lakeview neighborhood, for example, kept certain terms, specifically excluding Black people, from their 1913 deeds without explicitly stating them.  Lawmakers also achieved this by creating “neutral zoning”.  The act of “neutral zoning” protected single-family middle-class areas that heavily consisted of white families.  As “neutral zoning” preserved predominately white communities it promoted the overcrowding of Black neighborhoods.  These practices separated the Black communities from the white and boxed them into their own geographic neighborhoods which were in low-lying areas of the city.

Flooding in New Orelans after the levees broke, Photo by: Mark Moran

In 2005, Hurricane Katrina made landfall forty miles outside the city of New Orleans.  The impact of the storm was not predicted to decimate the city as much as it did, but then the levees broke.  The levees were designed, and supposed to, withstand Category Three hurricanes, but the failing infrastructure of the city was reflected in the construction of the levees.  These safety measures that were expected to protect the communities below sea level, putting it lightly, failed miserably, costing thousands of people their homes and lives.  The flooding decimated the low-lying areas of the city.  Out of the 1170 deaths recorded 53% were Black and 68% were Black within Orleans Parish.  The flooding also displaced hundreds of thousands of people, over 175,000 Black residents, most of whom never returned.

Black homeowners were three times as likely to experience property damage from the flooding then their white neighbors, due to homes being placed into these low-lying areas of New Orleans.

This piece was edited by Chandler Welch as part of Professor Kelley Crawford’s Digital Civic Engagement course at Tulane University.