12.
We wanted Katrina to spark a global uprising. This time we will win, an elder said during a national meeting a few weeks after. I knew it was not true. I wanted it to be, but we were not prepared to win.
After we shut down the WTO in 1999, the timeline ripped open again on September 11, 2001. We attempted to organize so that 9/11 could be a reckoning with United States imperialism rather than a justification for more brutality and loss. We did not succeed. And then Katrina happened. The flood filled our homes. Right here. Exposing the reality. These systems were designed to break. They said it on the cover of Newsweek, for god’s sake. Poverty and Race.
We organized one million meetings. Southern leaders were called in to facilitate tense circles of angry people. A friend from Mississippi, the brother of a trumpet player, told me at the hotel bar during a meeting a few months after Katrina: If we don’t come together on this and do something, our spirits will drown. I believed him, and we started planning.
We could not throw our bodies at this one. We could not make change happen by marching and mobilizing. Walls had been blasted open, and we could no longer choose one issue at a time. We had to build what we needed.
And many people rose up and saved each other.
13.
No one is coming for us.
The Secretary of State went shoe shopping with a tennis star five days after Katrina hit and the horrors had begun. (Remember when Bush told us to go shopping after thousands of people were killed in 2001?)
The government did not send funds to the community relief efforts. But the FBI managed to send undercover agents to infiltrate the most successful mutual aid network in Algiers. (Remember when police rampaged that same Black neighborhood of Algiers in 1980, murdering four people and torturing others?)
The governor of Louisiana issued a shoot-to-kill order to the national guard flooding the state. And everyone else. (Remember Blackwater?)
According to the supplemental report:
All of this office’s requests for more information about who hired Blackwater, and for what reason, have gone unanswered. However, one official of the City of New Orleans told Congresswoman McKinney that the Department of Homeland Security sent them to the city.
Organizers look for patterns.
14.
Dear movements rising to face this moment in 2025:
We must remember Katrina.