Reconstructing the American South - After Katrina
Jim Downs. History Today. London: Jan 2006.Vol.56, Iss. 1; pg. 16, 3 pgs
The chaos that struck the Gulf Coasst in the aftermath of the 2005 hurricane season has created a stir
among American historians. Some have looked back to the trail of devastation left by other major
hurricanes in the twentieth century, and have even drawn parallels with natural disasters such as the San
Francisco earthquake of 1906. Some, making comparisons with historical events that are unrelated to
natural disaster or environmental destruction, have pointed to the possibility of Hurricane Katrina igniting
a social movement similar to the labor strikes of the early twentieth century and the Civil Rights
demonstrations of the 1960s. Yet others have argued that there is little historical precedent for what is
unfolding in Mississippi, Louisiana and, more recently, Texas, and that a new mode of analysis and
framework is required to situate these events.
While all of these perspectives
offer a fresh insight into the
aftermath of the hurricane, what
has not been much discussed is the
distinct history of New Orleans. A
reminder of this history reveals
how the events and discourse that
followed the hurricane's disastrous
impact - the massive dislocation,
the failure of the Federal
government to respond promptly,
and the sharp rise in poverty - are
not new; a similar pattern can be
traced in the aftermath of the Civil
War and the emancipation of
slaves in the 186Os. Of course,
those events unfolded over the
course of years, while the
hurricane destroyed and
dismantled an entire region of a
country within hours. But how
people - both in and beyond the government - are responding to this present disaster has resonances in
earlier US history.
Figure 1: 1866 cartoon depicting Andrew Jackson as a Roman
Emperor watching race riots in New Orleans
In April 1862, Union forces made their way up the Mississippi River past two Confederate forts and
captured New Orleans. Despite the victory, officials in the Union army wrote to their commanding
officers describing the sheer devastation of the city in which homes had been destroyed and bridges
collapsed. People - black, white, free and enslaved - were without shelter, food, or the means to leave, and
within a few days, yellow fever tore through the city. Reports of black vomit filling the city's streets soon
dominated the military correspondence. Union officials and local physicians called for immediate Federal
support to stop the disease from spreading, but officials in Washington were to slow to respond.
Eventually General Benjamin Butler, a leading official in the Union Army, was dispatched to New
Orleans, where he immediately devised a plan 'to purify and to clean the city' by employing all ablebodied men in the work of reconstruction. Such a plan, Butler assumed, would kill two birds with one
stone: those employed in rebuilding the city would no longer depend on the Federal government for food,
shelter, and support.
The problem, however, was that in the first weeks of his reconstruction efforts Butler only employed
white men. This left hundreds, if not thousands, of black men, women, and children without means of
survival, a situation that led to newspapers, military correspondence, and government reports describing
emancipated slaves as indolent and unwilling to work. Compounding matters, the Federal government
failed to deliver resources to New Orleans, straining Butler's seemingly tenuous plan.
A massive migration out of New Orleans ensued as formerly enslaved men, women and children poured
out of the city in search of work and shelter, or to find lost family members. They travelled down the
Mississippi, making stops on former plantations in the Natchez district, staying for days, sometimes
weeks, in the hope of eking a livelihood on the devastated and infertile lands north of New Orleans. They
also went east and west, and in any direction in between, in which the government promised employment.
By the end of the war in 1865 the lack of work, shelter, and food throughout the South had displaced
thousands of emancipated slaves. In an attempt to intervene, the Federal government created the
Freedmen's Bureau, an institution designed to help those suffering from the outcome of the war to find
employment, secure land, obtain medical treatment, and even receive an education. But thousands of
miles away from the starvation, sickness, and poverty that plagued emancipated slaves, Federal
government officials could easily overlook the conditions in the postwar South, and their slow and often
abysmal response thwarted the Bureau's efforts. Newspapers for the most part failed to comment and
report on the desperate condition of freed people. While some military officials attended to the needs of
former slaves, others blamed black people themselves for their destitute condition. In short, the Federal
government ignored the letters trickling back to Washington that described the massive dislocation
experienced by thousands of emancipated slaves, and the efforts to reconstruct the South failed to take
into account the evacuation of black people out of New Orleans that had come about as a direct result of
the physical and environmental conditions of the city.
Those who argue that what is happening in New Orleans today is new ignore this crucial piece of US
history. Such a view not only overlooks the failure of the Federal government to implement an effective
plan for reconstruction after the Civil War, but it also neglects the ways in which the displacement of
African-Americans from the South has historically coincided with social, economic, and political
transformations in the South in particular, and the country in general. Shuffling black people away and
out of the South has often been seen as the remedy for economic catastrophe. When the boll weevil
attacked cotton crops in the early part of the twentieth century it destroyed the South's major source of
income. However, because economic capital was not restored to the South but promised instead in the
North, black farmers were left with no other choice but to leave their homes and go north in search of
work. Equally, when immigration restrictions mounted during the First World War, northern factories
could no longer rely on a steady flow of immigrant workers, and so labor agents turned to the South and
aggressively recruited black men to leave their families and homes to work in the North. At many other
moments of turmoil or crisis, from the Great Depression to the second World War, the response has
always been to leave rather than rebuild the South.
Throughout the long history of Southern exodus, whether in the aftermath of the Civil War or Hurricane
Katrina, there is a rhetoric that says that black people want to leave, that they don't want to go back home,
that they have lost everything. This might have been a plausible argument in the nineteenth century, when
black people's homes were also the sites of their recent enslavement, but more than a century on such an
explanation does not always carry conviction. Hurricane Katrina may indeed have destroyed all the
material possessions of the evacuees, but what about the value of those things that cannot be so easily
tabulated on a Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) database? Historically, the black
community in the South, particularly in New Orleans, has enjoyed strong kin networks that extend
beyond mere bloodlines to include neighbours, fellow parishioners and friends. After slavery, the
rebuilding of kin networks provided the framework for black political mobilization in the South. During
the height of segregation and the intense violence surrounding the Jim Crow Laws in the twentieth
century, kin networks offered refuge in the form of churches, mutual aid organizations and, at times,
economic support. The lines of kin network are not always visible, particularly at moments of intense
dislocation, but they sustain themselves nonetheless. They have been, and continue to be, reason for black
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people to return to the South. In the 1970s, when an estimated one million people left the South, Gladys
Knight sang of the midnight train to Georgia. The billboard hit described a man leaving Los Angeles to
return to the South. This countermigration narrative, as cultural historian Farah Jasmine Griffin describes
in her book, Who Set You Flowin'? (1995) reminds us of the many moves back to the South and
challenges the idea that black people do not want to return to their former homeland.
In their telling of the decision of black people not to return to the devastated South, the media and
government officials have spilt a great deal of ink in portraying it as a violent and dangerous place.
Reports of Katrina concentrated on the chaos in the Superdome refugee centre to epitomize the danger
and violence of black people; gangs allegedly wrested authority from the police, while women and
children were raped inside the rest-rooms. Outside the Superdome, blacks were said to be looting local
businesses and stores. While it remains unclear what actually transpired, and who was engaging in such
behaviour, this rhetoric is not lacking a historical precedent. Discourses about black men as potential or
actual rapists of white women have been deployed ever since emancipation as a means of justifying the
surveillance of black people. Furthermore, groups of black people, in general, have historically been
represented as violent, which is part of the reason why the architects of the Civil Rights movement
emphatically adopted a pacifist strategy in agitating for equality.
Portrayals of black people as violent have historically obscured the lived realities of the overwhelming
majority of the black community. In the Superdome, and now in the refugee camps, we don't hear about
how black people have come together under the banner of religion how they organized prayer groups and
services. Instead, we hear of rape and looting. We don't hear of local black electors coming together to
consider how the massive dislocation of black people will impact on the political realignment in the state.
Instead we hear about toilets overflowing and elderly people dying. Throughout US history, black people
have organized politically on the ground. As historian Walter Johnson notes in Soul by Soul (1999),
enslaved black men and women in the slave pens awaiting to be called to the auction block mobilized
politically by sharing information about owners, plantation life and escape routes. With the ending of
slavery in the 186Os, black people living in makeshift homes and shanties in the muddy swamps of the
Mississippi Valley held outdoor meetings in the smouldering heat and the pouring rain to discuss how
they would gain the right to vote. Now, in 2006, not to see the political action percolating at the seams of
the Superdome or on the bus lines to Utah is to miss a crucial and important way in which black people
have organized politically.
Part of the reason that black people's efforts to mobilize
politically are absent from the dominant media outlets is
due to the ways in which black people have historically
been represented as destitute, devastated and
impoverished. Any images that stray from this view tend
to be dismissed, while those that corroborate such a
perspective are over-emphasized. In other words, the
scenes of hundreds of black evacuees, distraught from the
ravages of the hurricane, that flashed up on television
screens across the nation aroused familiar pictures in the
American imagination.
Because novels, travel journals and newspapers
consistently described the condition of slaves as
desperate, nineteenth-century Americans had become
accustomed to such representations of black people, and so reports describing the desperate condition of
ex-slaves in the aftermath of the Civil War did not shock government officials or impel them to take
immediate action. Similarly, Federal leaders in Washington reacted slowly after Katrina's initial onslaught
because the pictures of New Orleans' starving, crying and distraught black population did not alarm them,
Figure 2 An elderly man in New Orleans
contemplates the destruction of his home
after Katrina
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such was the effect of the long history of showing black people in this way.
Moreover, when government action was taken - in recent months as well as in the 180Os - it was often
circumscribed with statements articulating a fear that black people would take advantage of such help. For
many observers of Hurricane Katrina, the sight of black people receiving muchneeded food, clothing, and
other handouts only reconfirmed their belief that welfare initiatives must be sparing - otherwise,
according to their logic, black people would lose their ambition to work for themselves. Such a sentiment
is not new and can be directly traced to the words of one nineteenth-century military official who warned
his fellow comrades after the Civil War that 'the charity of the government must be guarded'.
Comparisons with the nineteenth century, then, suggest that the events in the Gulf Coast are not entirely
new. How government officials responded to the catastrophe wrought by the hurricane, and the language
they used to describe its aftermath, evoke many familiar historical parallels.
What is new, however, is the constant media attention given to these events. Of course, much of the
relentless coverage of the aftermath has followed certain predictable patterns in which black people are
poorly represented. There is, nonetheless, a silver lining to these otherwise desperate clouds. After the
Civil War, nineteenthcentury newspapers did not follow events in the post-war South closely; there were
no morning news shows featuring political pundits who were forced to consider conditions in the South
on a daily, if not hourly, basis; celebrities and artists did not gather to raise money for relief; world
leaders did not send letters of sympathy or monetary donations. Today, reports on the aftermath of the
hurricane are, as they should be, dominating the media and, at the very least, registering on the Federal
government's radar; we can't say that about the conditions of ex-slaves in the 186Os.
This is not to argue that we should be uncritically grateful for how things are unfolding today; there is still
significant room for improvement as the tropes of racism, classism, and the country's prejudices toward
African-Americans continue to inform our ways of thinking and to influence how we responded to
Katrina. That AfricanAmericans remain the victims of such catastrophes reminds us that the health,
social, and economic problems endured by emancipated slaves continued for generations. But now
perhaps, with all this attention on conditions in the Gulf Coast, reconstruction might finally come to the
entire South.
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