Hurricane Katrina was one of the most devastating and costly natural disasters ever in the United States. It left 80 percent of New Orleans under water. In his new book, historian Douglas Brinkley uses oral histories from Katrina survivors and rescuers and Gulf Coast residents to record the dramatic events that occurred during the eight days after the hurricane made landfall in Louisiana on August 29, 2005.
Your book is written as an oral history of Katrina. What do you hope that future historians will gain from your research?
It's written to do a couple of things. One is to use oral history testimony of people. In fact, I wrote the book in the past tense, and I don't get into anything past those eight days of the rebuilding of New Orleans. I'm looking at specifically those eight days. And then, what I'm trying to do with Tulane's oral history project is to collect as many voices of Katrina as quickly as we can.
Many Americans outside of New Orleans wondered why people didn't evacuate sooner, and many of those who were trapped during the hurricane couldn't leave because they didn't have cars. You discuss this in your book, so can you explain why so many people don't own cars in New Orleans?
Well, it's because you have widespread poverty in America, and there's a real underclass to New Orleans, which the city boosters try to sweep under the rug. It's a city teeming with poverty, and if the poor don't have automobiles, it's because they have a ticket or a traffic violation, and they haven't paid it; or, the seniors are just too old to drive. Some people were caretakers -- a daughter who stayed because her mother was so sick that she couldn't be moved. You had lonely people who were just stuck or waiting for their Social Security checks. They were supposed to get a check August 31, so on the 29th when the storm was coming, they didn't want to leave town with no way out, no clear places to get buses, and with empty pockets. We make the assumption that we're all watching the Weather Channel, we all have cable TV, and read newspapers, but there's a whole segment of the population that just feel like “we don't do hurricanes in New Orleans” so if they've lived there for 40 years and survived them all, then they'll survive this one. They just weren't prepared for the magnitude that occurred.
You mention that the Ninth Ward in New Orleans was hit hard by flooding after Katrina. The media portrayed it as being a section of complete and abject poverty. You describe it as a culturally rich and socially complex area of African American neighborhoods that were filled with jazz musicians, homeowners, and well-educated residents. How will the loss of these residents affect New Orleans?
The soul of New Orleans is gone. What you're left with is a lot of ruins and remnants of a culture that once was. Cities are about their people. Even though the architecture is gorgeous in the old town and one can still look at the balconies in the French Quarter, with whole great African American neighborhoods abandoned, you don't feel that freedom spirit in the air, the laughter, the gaiety, the music, the kind of humming in the air that made New Orleans an exotic port city. Its spirit is gone somewhere else, and it went with the people. Hundreds of thousands of those people will probably never return. The reformulated city is much smaller and will take on a different vibration. But something died on August 29.
How do you think race and class relations have changed in New Orleans since Katrina?
Probably the same old story. The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. It's still an African American majority city, by about 57 percent, but that's a changing statistic, and you're starting to feel the racial tension. The mayor of the city is so desperate for re-election that he has to throw out the “Chocolate City” card into the fray. It's race baiting. Some of it I understand. I think that from the African American perspective, the feeling is that they lost their neighborhoods, their homes, their jobs, their heirlooms, and loved ones, but they don't want to lose the right to have an African American mayor. The fact that the mayor is Ray Nagin is complex because he used to be known as “Ray Reagan” in the African American community. He was considered to be a black conservative who paid little attention to the poor. In fact, on the eve of Katrina, he was getting lawyers because he didn't want to be sued by the hotels but did nothing to evacuate the poor. I think a lot of people unfortunately saw the mayoral election with race in mind. In truth, it's a sad place we're at right now in the city. Katrina tore off the façade of New Orleans. The racism is not new because of Katrina; it's just been made more visible. It's been a highly racist community, and yet the white elites imagine that they're not racist, that plantation mentality that permeates the town. Even with Mardi Gras parades, there are white parades and the black Zulu parades. To pretend that that kind of racism only exists in Alabama and Mississippi and doesn't spill over into New Orleans is not right.
Why did it take the Bush administration so long to realize how devastating Katrina was?
The problem was that it was August, so everyone was on vacation. I think that President Bush had dealt with a spat of hurricanes in 2004, and [Gov.] Jeb Bush and Mike Brown had done a pretty good job of handling those. I don't think Bush knew that the situation after Katrina was worse. I don't think he understood that the breached levees meant that 80 percent of New Orleans was under water. Added to that, I think that there were just some great public relations bungles: the famous Air Force One flyover. He needed to put his boot heels on the ground and touch the floodwaters. After all, Lyndon Johnson in 1965 during Hurricane Betsy came to New Orleans and in the black of night put a flashlight in front of his face and said, “Hello, this is your President. I am here.” [Bush] didn't do that, so he immediately started to become disconnected. We all knew that FEMA had failed us. They were supposed to have buses on Monday at the Superdome. They never showed up. That's just one of many bungles of FEMA. If you want to play that you're a Truman-esque type of President and say that the buck stops here, then you have to be responsible for Michael Chertoff's slow and lethargic response and Michael Brown seemingly in over his head. They were his appointees. The President can't just say that they broke down; it was a breakdown of his administration. There was a feeling that FEMA could be thrown under the Homeland Security umbrella and treated as the least important organization. Suddenly, FEMA was needed and they weren't there. By contrast, I write in my book about how the U.S. Coast Guard did a sterling job of first responding and didn't lose a boat or an aircraft.
Many of the Gulf states are red states, or Republican voting states. How do you think that the lack of a concerted federal response has affected people's attitudes about the Republican administration?
It's [Louisiana] becoming a red state. Louisiana was purple, and it's turning red now. It lost a large portion of largely Democratic African American constituents. It was a tied state with one Democratic and one Republican senator. If you look at who funded Nagin's campaign, it's been the right. He is a Republican candidate. He was immediately in touch with Karl Rove after the storm. The politics were to blame Governor Blanco for everything and make Nagin the guy who you can distance yourself from when he's being erratic but who will kill the Democratic Party in the state. The Democratic Party suffered more from Katrina than the Republicans because they've lost voters, and that's why there's such a concerted effort by the Republican Party to scapegoat Blanco for everything. But that didn't work. The media didn't fully buy into it. Then, Michael Brown became the all-purpose scapegoat. The blame game was occurring. The administration didn't care a lot about FEMA, and Brown was not close to Karl Rove. In fact, he was a kind of enemy of Rove and the feeling was to let Brown be the human piñata. That satisfied Blanco; it took the heat off of her. It satisfied Democrats who wanted to beat up on the Bush administration through FEMA. So people tend to hold FEMA responsible, not President Bush.
LaNitra Walker is a doctoral candidate in art history at Duke University.
