NEW ORLEANS – Cynthia Willard-Lewis
walked through the city’s Lower Ninth Ward and pointed
to mounds of splintered rubble, twisted steel and what
was left of crushed shingled roofs and storm-battered
homes.
"We’re fighting for basic services,"
Willard-Lewis, an outspoken member of the New Orleans
City Council, told BlackAmericaWeb.com
as she stepped around mud and nails. "We’re fighting for
electricity, water, garbage pickup, schools and health
care. We’re fighting for human services."
Eight months after Hurricane Katrina
ripped through the black low-income enclave with
unprecedented fury, signs of the nation’s largest
housing crisis since WWII are evident by the heaping
piles of toxic debris that stretch for miles.
Not much has changed in the way of
progress, blacks say, since the stormed hit town last
August.
Some houses still sit several yards
from their concrete foundations; water spurts through
busted pipes near downed power lines that snake along
muddy sidewalks.
On land that is covered with stacks of
scrap wood, there are simple reminders of black family
life: Stuffed animals and small religious statues. But
the smell of mold hangs in the air, and officials say
bodies may still be trapped under the weight of concrete
and sheet rock.
A celebrated elementary school named
for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., where black students
flourished in math and science, has yet to reopen. The
broken windows are boarded up; the inside halls are
filled with grime and fumes.
In other sections of the community,
abandoned cars, some of them upside down, are resting
near major roadways, in medians and on side streets,
while some are still smashed into properties, as if they
are frozen in time.
On one historic roadway, North
Claiborne, which was once a vibrant black commercial
corridor, hundreds of flooded cars are parked in an
underpass like a dusty vehicle graveyard. Some black
Katrina survivors use the cars to sleep in at night.
Many federal trailers designed for the storm’s new
homeless still sit empty due to a breakdown in
government bureaucracy.
To make matters worse, hurricane
season starts June 1, which could halt any plans to
repair parts of the city’s infrastructure. And if some
white developers and businessmen have it their way, the
historic black Lower Ninth Ward could be transformed
into a new attraction for the affluent: a golf course.
"This is a battle for the soul of our
city," said Willard-Lewis, who represents the city’s
Ninth Ward. She lost her house and almost everything she
owned during Hurricane Katrina. "This is a battle," she
said, "for fairness and equity."
