In a Mississippi Day of Action, Questions Crowd the Long Road Home

Posted: 28 August 2006

by Coco McCabe

Residents determined not to be written off.

It was billed as a day of action in Mississippi, but at its core it was a day of questions. From the community walk-through in Gulfport and East Biloxi, to the packed town hall meeting attended by more than 450 people, the agonizing questions, asked in scores of different ways, were the same: Why is this recovery taking so long? Why is it leaving so many poor people out?

Organized by Oxfam America together with the Mississippi chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the events focused on the needs of people in coastal Mississippi one long year after Hurricane Katrina turned their lives upside down—robbing them of homes, jobs, and a whole way of life.

Some of that hardship was on display in a series of black and white photos ringing the meeting room. Shot by TIME magazine photographer Steve Liss, many of the pictures accompanied Oxfam’s recently released report on the Katrina recovery called “Forgotten Communities, Unmet Promises: An Unfolding Tragedy on the Gulf Coast.” The NAACP also released an independent but complementary report called “Envisioning a Better Mississippi: Hurricane Katrina and Mississippi—One Year Later.”

In terms of dollars, Katrina was the costliest storm in US history: an estimated $75 billion in damages. But those figures don’t begin to take into account the human toll—the months of uncertainty, of wrangling with sluggish and indifferent bureaucracies, of scrambling to pay the bills while trying to find the means to start over.

That toll—so clear on the faces and in the voices of residents filling every chair in the Good Deeds Community Center in Gulfport—fueled the questions fielded by George E. Curry, moderator for the town hall meeting and editor-in-chief of the National Newspaper Publishers Association News Service. A panel of national, state, and local leaders offered insights, suggestions on next steps, and toll-free numbers people could dial for help. Among the featured panelists were actor/activist Danny Glover; Bruce Gordon, president of the national NAACP; and Raymond C. Offenheiser, president of Oxfam America.

“I’m here because this is where I need to be,” said Glover, later urging the crowd to use the disaster as a catalyst to build the kind of world it wants on the Gulf Coast. “If we’re not there, everything will pass us by.”

And that was the worry, as it has been since Congress began to allocate billions of federal dollars to rebuild the region amid governmental promises to tackle the poverty that has held it in a stranglehold for decades. The flood of questions gave voice to those worries—questions about affordable housing and the needs of elderly and disabled people, about insurance and who’s regulating an industry that seems to have little regard for the hardships of a whole battered region, about wrecked wetlands and the life-saving function they could perform in future storms, about the critical need for child care.

Unasked Questions

More than two hours later, after time had run out, there were still questions waiting to be asked, waiting for answers. One of them was on the lips of Sheila McIntyre, as it may well have been for hundreds of other people gathered there.

“What about the economy?” she asked, digging through her handbag to pull out a bill from the electric company for July. Due? $401.34 “It’s too expensive. The people’s income is not keeping up with the economy. How are you going to live?”

Since the storm, McIntyre, her husband, and six children have been living in two FEMA trailers and portions of their Biloxi house. She has been out of work with a back injury and trying to make ends meet on her $500-a-month fixed income.

When bills like the July whopper get delivered to her door, there’s little she can do. She called the electric company and told them so.

“Cut it off if you have to,” she said.

Bills were running high in part because of the FEMA accommodations. Fumes that McIntyre suspects are formaldehyde have caused her such severe breathing problems that her doctor put her on oxygen and ordered her to stay out of the trailers. But using the oxygen was costly and both McIntyre and her husband, who has a heart condition, stopped.

Now their only therapy is prayer, and it’s doing heavy duty. McIntyre said she has come to the conclusion that most members of the family, regardless of their age, are going to have to pitch in with the finances.

“Everybody in the house got to be working,” said McIntyre, whose children are between 2 and 18 years old “You got to send your kids to work in order to live in Biloxi. School time is off. They’ve got to be going to work.”

Call to Action: Vote!

Staying afloat financially in the region, where rents have jumped 25 to 30 percent, is a challenge for a growing number of people. But for Laura Harden of Gulfport, Saturday night’s town meeting was a call to action.

“It might have motivated people to start complaining and find out where they need to go,” she said. “And try to get help to help themselves.”

One place to start is at the voting booth. Over and over again throughout the evening, panelists urged attendees to register, to speak up, to exercise their power in the next election—wherever it may be, at the town, state, or federal level.

Offenheiser reminded the attendees that in a democracy like ours, we are the government and it’s up to us to hold politicians accountable for their decisions and actions.

“Vote!” was the cry of the night.

We need “a different looking Congress and a whole different presidency,” Barbara Arnwine, the executive director of the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights in the Law, told the crowd.

“The only way he (Governor Haley Barbour) will respond: you write and put pressure on,” urged Mississippi State Rep. Frances Fredericks.

“Next week, we’re going to the city council meeting,” roared James Crowell, president of the Biloxi branch of the NAACP, to claps and cheers.

A Place Called Home

Elected officials have to know what their constituents want—and be held accountable—and in this recovery, housing is one of the critical issues. But people need more than shelter. They need a home.

The Rev. Martin Denesse said it so eloquently on a 15-minute video shot by TIME magazine photojournalist Steve Liss for Oxfam America and aired for the first time at the town hall meeting. Denesse was in the audience for the premier.

“You’re not writing me off,” he told the camera, speaking with passion and striking a deep chord among the crowd as it erupted in applause. They knew exactly what he was talking about. Though Denesse is from Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana, his longing to have a home again is no less profound than that of his Biloxi brothers and sisters.

“Katrina was just the beginning,” said Denesse, leading the meeting in a prayer after the video. “We’ve got a long road to go.”

It’s a road everyone in that meeting room, regardless of their ethnicity, is traveling down together. When a Latino man asked if there was anyone in the hall who had been unscathed by the storm, not one hand went up. Katrina didn’t discriminate, and for the recovery to be effective, it will have to embrace everyone.