[News] New Orleans - The Grinning Skull

[Anti-Imperialist News]

The Grinning Skull

December 23, 2008 By Rebecca Solnit
Source: <http://www.tomdispatch.com>TomDispatch


What do you do when you notice that there seems to have been a 
killing spree? While the national and international media were 
working themselves and much of the public into a frenzy about 
imaginary hordes of murderers, rapists, snipers, marauders, and 
general rampagers among the stranded crowds of mostly poor, mostly 
black people in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina, a group of 
white men went on a shooting spree across the river.

Their criminal acts were no secret but they never became part of the 
official story. The media demonized the city's black population for 
crimes that turned out not to have happened, and the retractions 
were, as always, too little too late. At one point FEMA 
<http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2002520986_katmyth26.html>sent 
a refrigerated 18-wheeler to pick up what a colonel in the National 
Guard expected to be 200 bodies in New Orleans's Superdome, only to 
find six, including four who died naturally and a suicide. Meanwhile, 
the media never paid attention to the real rampage that took place 
openly across the river, even though there were corpses lying in 
unflooded streets and testimony everywhere you looked -- or I looked, anyway.

The widely reported violent crimes in the Superdome turned out to be 
little more than hysterical rumor, but they painted African-Americans 
as out-of-control savages at a critical moment. The result was to 
shift institutional responses from disaster relief to law 
enforcement, a decision that resulted in further deaths among the 
thirsty, hot, stranded multitude. Governor Kathleen Blanco 
<http://www.cnn.com/2005/WEATHER/09/02/katrina.impact/>announced, "I 
have one message for these hoodlums: These troops know how to shoot 
and kill, and they are more than willing to do so if necessary, and I 
expect they will." So would the white vigilantes, and though their 
exact body count remains unknown, at least 11 black men were 
apparently shot, some fatally.

The parish of Orleans includes both the city of New Orleans on one 
side of the Mississippi and a community on the other side called 
Algiers that can be reached via a bridge called the Crescent City 
Connection. That bridge comes down in another town called Gretna, and 
the sheriff of Gretna and a lot of his henchmen turned many of the 
stranded in New Orleans back at gunpoint from that bridge, trapping 
them in the squalor of a destroyed city, another heinous crime that 
was largely overlooked. On the Gretna/Algiers side of the river, the 
levees held and nothing flooded. Next door to Gretna, Algiers is a 
mostly black community, but one corner of it down by the river, 
Algiers Point, is a white enclave, a neighborhood of pretty little, 
well-kept-up wooden houses -- and of killers.

What do you do when you notice that there seems to have been a 
killing spree? By my second visit to New Orleans almost a year and a 
half after the hurricane that devastated the place, I had more than 
enough information to know that something very wrong had happened in 
Algiers Point. In a 
<http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/174800/rebecca_solnit_on_not_forgetting_new_orleans>report 
on New Orleans for TomDispatch in March of 2007, I wrote:

"During my trips to the still half-ruined city, some inhabitants have 
told me that they, in turn, were told by white vigilantes of 
widespread murders of black men in the chaos of the storm and flood. 
These accounts suggest that, someday, an intrepid investigative 
journalist may stand on its head the media hysteria of the time 
(later quietly recanted) about African-American violence and menace 
in flooded New Orleans."



I found that journalist in my friend A.C. Thompson who, backed by the 
Nation magazine, launched an investigation just concluded this week, 
21 months after I first approached him. His courageous and meticulous 
investigation tracked down victims and persecutors, clarified what 
happened on those days of mayhem in Algiers Point, sued to gain 
access to, and sifted through, the coroner's records that mentioned 
some bulllet-riddled bodies, and dug up some previously unreported 
police crimes. His stunning report in the Nation, 
<http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090105/thompson?rel=hp_picks>"Katrina's 
Hidden Race War," suggests that there's still more there to find.

A lot of the pieces of the Algiers Point killing spree were out in 
the open. Several weeks after Hurricane Katrina, community organizer 
and former Black Panther Malik Rahim 
<http://www.democracynow.org/2005/10/24/new_orleans_community_organizer_malik_rahim>had 
told Amy Goodman on her nationally syndicated program Democracy Now!, 
"During the aftermath, directly after the flooding, in New Orleans 
hunting season began on young African American men. In Algiers, I 
believe, approximately around 18 African American males were killed. 
No one really know[s] what's the overall count."

Rahim's count seems high, but the real toll remains unknown. The 
young medics who staffed the Common Ground Clinic, co-founded by 
Rahim, also knew that there had been a spate of killings: like 
everyone else who came in, the killers and their associates had felt 
the need to tell their stories, as well as get their tetanus shots or 
blood pressure meds. The medics, whom Rahim credits with defusing a 
potential race war in Algiers by reaching out to everyone equally, 
told me they'd heard murder confessions from the vigilantes and their 
cohorts (but respected their confidentiality by not passing along 
names or identifying information).

CNN and the Times Picayune, New Orleans's paper of record, both 
published a photograph of a member of the "self-appointed posse" in 
Algiers Point napping next to five shotguns, an AK-47 assault rifle, 
and a pistol, but they never got around to asking if the band of 
white guys had actually used the guns. As it happened, not only did 
they use the guns, but they confessed -- or boasted -- on videotape 
to their shootings and killings, tape that ended up in a 
<http://www.rasmusholm.dk/>little-seen documentary called "Welcome to 
New Orleans." I passed along what I knew to A.C., but a lot of it 
hadn't been a secret, just easily visible dots no one was connecting. 
None was more visible than the attempted murder of Donnell Herrington.

What It's Like to Be Murdered

One balmy September afternoon, under the shade of the broad-armed 
oaks of New Orleans's City Park, Donnell Herrington told us what it's 
like to be murdered -- for the men who attacked him shortly after 
Hurricane Katrina drowned his city intended to kill him and nearly 
succeeded. Donnell is a soft-spoken guy now in his early thirties and 
he worries the question of why they shot him, of what they thought 
they were doing. On what possible grounds could you blast away with a 
shotgun at a guy walking down a public street who hadn't even seen 
you, let alone threatened you?

He knows they consider themselves justified, and he wrestles with the 
question, but each time it comes up he finally concludes it was a 
hate crime. It was because he was black.

"I didn't approach these guys in any way possible for them to react 
the way they did. It wasn't a reaction at all it. It was just a hate 
crime, because a reaction is when somebody try to bring bodily harm 
on you and you react in self-defense. When the guy actually stepped 
out and pulled the trigger, I didn't see him, I didn't even know what 
happened to me. The only thing I can remember is feeling a lot of 
pressure hit my neck and it literally knocked me off my feet."



The close-up shotgun blast had punctured his jugular vein and he had 
only a little time to get help before he bled to death. He told his 
friend and cousin to run, found his way to his feet, only to be shot 
in the back yet again. He fell down again, got up again -- a former 
athlete, Herrington is many kinds of strong -- and stumbled away, one 
hand to the blood spurting from his neck.

Herrington had been desperate to get out of the ravaged city where, 
two days earlier, he'd seen his grandparents' neighborhood flood, 
rescued them and a lot of neighbors by boat, left them to be 
evacuated from the elevated Interstate, walked across the Crescent 
City Connection to his home in Algiers on the other side of the 
Mississippi, found its roof crushed by a huge bough, and decided 
there was nothing left to do but get out himself. On September 1st, 
day three of the catastrophe, he had set out with his teenage cousin 
and a friend for the ferry landing in Algiers Point. There, they had 
been told, you could actually be evacuated when so many people were 
stranded in the heat and chaos of a drowned city. Not long into that 
flight they ran into the white men with guns.

On the one-year anniversary of the catastrophe, millions of Americans 
watched Spike Lee's When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts on 
HBO. Most of the film is made up of people talking straight into the 
camera about their Katrina, and one of the talkers is a sweet-voiced, 
brown-skinned guy: Herrington. He tells the camera:

"We walking down the street, which was in Algiers and I'm talking to 
my cousin. I had a bottle of water in my hand, and I'm talking to 
him, we're talking about different things and before you know it, I 
heard a boom, a blast. My body lifted up in the air, and I hit the 
ground, and, you know, my cousin was standing over me and he was 
howling and he hollering my name and asking if I was okay, and he was 
hysterical at this time, and looking at the blood on my shirt and my arms.

"And I looked up and saw a white guy with a white t-shirt in his 
hands coming toward me, so I managed to get up by the grace of God. I 
managed to get up, and they had some debris in the street, and so 
when I turned away from the guy he turned toward me with the shotgun, 
looked like he was trying to reload. So as I turned away from him I 
jumped over the debris and I heard another bang. Some of the 
buckshots hit me in the back, and I hit the ground again."



In the film, Herrington pulls up his shirt and shows his torso, 
peppered with lumps from the buckshot. And then he gestures at the 
long, twisting, raised scar wound around his neck like a centipede or 
a snake: "And this is the incision from the surgery from the 
buckshots that penetrated my neck and hit my jugular vein."

A victim of a horrific attempted murder told his story in a national 
television special and, though I'm sure lots of viewers wanted to do 
something, those who really could have done something did nothing. 
Lee's film cut away to then governor Kathleen Blanco vowing more law 
and order against the supposedly rampaging African-American menace of 
New Orleans.

Herrington is a kind man; one of the first things he said to us was, 
"I asked God to forgive those guys that done this thing to me. It was 
kind of hard to even bring myself to that but I know it's the right 
thing to do, but at the same time those guys have gotta answer for 
their actions."

He was a Brink's truck driver at the time of Katrina, a man with a 
clean record routinely in charge of hundreds of thousands of dollars 
in cash, and he attempted to evacuate Katrina with a pocketful of his 
own cash -- which only underscores how preposterous it was for his 
prospective murderers to see him as a thief. He nearly bled to death 
before a local couple drove him to the nearest medical center, where 
his throat was sewn up. More than three years later, it's clear that 
the trauma is still with him.

His friend and cousin were chased down, threatened with pistols, 
called "nigger," but finally allowed to go, traumatized by their own 
brush with men who made it clear they'd be happy to kill them.

"Like Pheasant Season in South Dakota"

In 1892, Homer Plessy, a light-skinned black man, was arrested in New 
Orleans for riding a streetcar then reserved for whites only. A 
precursor of Rosa Parks, he pursued a landmark lawsuit that went all 
the way to a racist Supreme Court, which issued the infamous 
"separate but equal" doctrine that stood until the civil rights 
battles of the postwar era.

That same year Charles Allan Gilbert 
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Allisvanity.jpg>drew a picture of 
a beautiful woman sitting in darkness at her dressing table, her head 
with mounded hair and its reflection arranged so that if you look at 
the celebrated drawing another way you see a grinning skull whose 
teeth are the rows of bottles of perfume and powder. For a year or 
more -- Katrina was one of the biggest news stories of the past 
century -- journalists swarmed like ants over New Orleans. The 
national and international news media, left, right, and center, big 
and small, print and radio, television and film, saw the beautiful 
woman and saw as well bogeymen in the shadows of their own lurid 
imaginations. And they declined to see the big white skull laughing at them.

That death grin can, however, be caught on the faces of the tipsy 
white people who confess on camera to murdering their neighbors. 
Separate but equal may have been abolished in the courts, but these 
people were gunning down African-American men just for walking in the 
streets in the aftermath of the storm -- segregation by bullet -- 
gunning them down on the grounds that no black man had the right to 
be there and any of them was a menace.

On one of my visits to New Orleans after Katrina, I met with Rahim, a 
solid older man with long dreadlocks who told me in his rumbling 
voice of the bodies he'd seen in the streets of Algiers and gave me a 
copy of the documentary Welcome to New Orleans. It 
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S6ph5f5LbM0>showed one of the corpses 
rotting, in plain sight, under a sheet of corrugated sheet metal. It 
also showed white vigilantes whooping it up and talking openly about 
what they had done. At a barbeque shortly after Katrina struck, a 
stocky white guy with receding white hair and a Key West t-shirt 
chortles, "I never thought eleven months ago I'd be walking down the 
streets of New Orleans with two .38s and a shotgun over my shoulder. 
It was great. It was like pheasant season in South Dakota. If it 
moved, you shot it."

A tough woman with short hair and chubby arms adds, "That's not a 
pheasant and we're not in South Dakota. What's wrong with this picture?"

The man responds happily, "Seemed like it at the time."

A second white-haired guy explains, "You had to do what you had to 
do, if you had to shoot somebody, you had to shoot. It's that simple."

A third says simply, "We shot 'em."

I vowed to Rahim then that I would get the murders investigated. 
After all, it wasn't just rumors; it was a survivor telling his story 
on national television and apparent murderers telling theirs in a 
documentary. Despite the solid evidence, no one was following up -- 
not the Pulitzer-winning journalists I contacted through friends, nor 
the filmmaker who captured Herrington, nor the national radio host 
Rahim spoke to of mass murder, nor the coroners who had some very 
interesting corpses on their hands, nor the New Orleans police who 
talked to Herrington in the hospital and whom he approached 
afterward, no one until the Nation provided A.C. the resources to do it right.

The worst crimes in disasters are usually committed by institutional 
authorities and those aligned with them. They fear an unpoliced 
public and believe private property so sacred a right that they're 
willing to kill to defend it, or in this case, just on the off-chance 
that a passerby might fancy their television set. This is the 
conclusion of the sociologists who have been studying disasters for 
decades, many of whom I've spoken with in the past few years. And 
this is the pattern of disasters, like the 1906 San Francisco 
earthquake, in which the public behaved well but the military -- 
which essentially became a hostile occupying army -- terrorized the 
public in the name of preventing looting, shot many innocents, and 
may have killed scores overall. (In some outrageous incidents, New 
Orleans police evidently 
<http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6063982>gunned 
down unarmed African-Americans themselves in the wake of Katrina.)

Looting is a term that should be abolished. In major disasters, when 
the monetary economy evaporates and needs are desperate, taking 
water, or food, or diapers, or medicine from shuttered stores -- 
which is what much of the so-called looting consisted of -- is 
largely legitimate requisitioning. The rest is theft, and in the days 
after Katrina there was also some theft -- by the New Orleans police, 
for example, who <http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9754730/>cleaned out a 
Cadillac dealership and helped themselves to goods in a WalMart, as 
well as by stranded citizens who figured they'd been abandoned or 
imprisoned in the ruined city and that all rules were gone.

Looting is an incendiary, inexact word, suggesting mayhem far beyond 
the acquisition of commodities. One Algiers Point vigilante claimed 
to fear that they would come for his elderly mother, but most of the 
flooded-out evacuees were looking for food, water, information about 
family members, and a way out of the wreckage. Another vigilante told 
A.C. that they could tell the three black men they blasted with a 
shotgun were looters because they were carrying sports apparel with 
them. That the victims might be evacuating with their own clothing 
did not occur to these homicidal fabulists, nor did they seem to 
think that shooting men who might possibly have taken something of 
modest value from elsewhere was an overreaction.

The vigilantes of Algiers Point seem to have killed, by their own 
admissions -- or boasts -- several African-American men. A.C. was 
able to get first-hand accounts of eleven shootings, and my initial 
sources had told me they heard admissions of about seven killings. 
One militia member shot a black man dead at close range as he 
attempted to break into a corner store, another member told A.C., the 
only time one of the shootings seems tied in any way to a potential 
property crime. The police and coroner produced almost no record of 
what went on there and then.

The vigilantes of Algiers Point were classic white-flight people. 
They had spent decades regarding the central city with terror and 
resentment, and so saw Katrina not as a tragedy that happened to the 
neighbors, but as a moment when the dangers confined to the other 
side of the river were swarming across it. Because the riot was 
already in their heads, they became the crazed murderers they claimed 
to fear -- though fear may not have been the driving motive for all of them.

A.C. was told that they turned themselves into an informal militia 
after one of their number was brutally carjacked by a black man, but 
another source told me that her relatives were gleeful about the 
chance to fight a race war against African-Americans and encouraged 
to do so by law enforcement. Like Rahim, she calls what went on 
"hunting" and spoke of a photograph she was sent of a vigilante 
posing like a big-game hunter next to a black murder victim. Which 
suggests the catastrophe of Katrina was just cover for getting away 
with a Klan-style killing spree.

"Look Away, Look Away, Look Away, Dixie Land"

Why couldn't anyone in the mainstream see the story of vigilantes on 
a rampage? Why didn't anyone want to see it?

Racism is the obvious answer, the racism that made the killings 
invisible to some and made others think they weren't an issue. The 
racism and corruption of the New Orleans law enforcement system is 
old news, and it's not surprising, though it is shameful, that 
stories like Herrington's didn't even trigger police reports, let 
alone investigations. But the whole world was watching New Orleans 
and, at one point or another, every major news outlet in the country 
had someone on the ground there. Maybe a deeper racism made these 
crimes unimaginable, even when enough evidence was there, even when 
the skull was laughing out loud. Certainly the murderers have, until 
now, lived with a strange sense of impunity that has made them cocky 
and candid about what went down in Algiers Point in the wake of the storm.

These were the people who broke down in the aftermath of Katrina, who 
reverted to savagery, not the crowds stranded in the Superdome, or 
the Convention Center, or on the elevated freeways, or in schools and 
other inadequate refuges from the flooding that overtook New Orleans. 
It's important to keep in mind, despite the false stories the media 
spread in the immediate aftermath of the hurricane, and this grim, 
true story three years later, that the response to Katrina was mostly 
about altruism, courage, and generosity. That was the case whether 
you are considering people like Herrington, who stayed behind to take 
care of others, or the "Cajun Navy" of white guys with boats, who 
headed into the city immediately after the storm to rescue the 
stranded, or the many who took in evacuees or otherwise tried to 
help, or what, by now, must be hundreds of thousands of volunteers 
who arrived in the months and years after the storm to cook and build 
and organize to bring New Orleans back.

It's also important to keep in mind that, while the small minority 
who became a freelance militia murdered casually, the catastrophic 
loss of life in Louisiana -- about 1,500 people, disproportionately 
elderly -- was largely due to decisions made by another small 
minority: elected and appointed government authorities, from Mayor 
Ray Nagin, who hesitated to call a mandatory evacuation and never 
provided the resources for the most destitute and frail to evacuate, 
to FEMA director Michael Brown, who posed and dithered while tens of 
thousands suffered, to New Orleans's police chief and Louisiana's 
governor, both of whom chose to regard a drowned and overheated city 
as a law-enforcement crisis rather than a humanitarian relief challenge.

In many, many cases, supplies and rescuers were kept out of the city, 
hospitals were prevented from evacuating the dying, and the ability 
of civil society to do what the government would not -- save the 
stranded, succor the sick -- was hindered at every turn. But this 
story we know. Now, it's time to know the other half, the grinning 
skull, the version that turns everything we were told in the first 
days upside-down and inside out, the story of murders in plain sight 
almost no one wanted to see. Look at them. Now, may some measure of 
justice be done.


[People with information on murders in New Orleans in the aftermath 
of Katrina are encouraged to write to Thompson and Solnit at 
justiceinorleans at gmail.com. Anonymity will be protected.]


Rebecca Solnit's book about disaster and civil society, A Paradise 
Built in Hell, will be out in time for Katrina's fourth anniversary. 
It includes a much more extensive report on the crimes of Katrina, as 
well as the achievements of civil society in that disaster and 
others. To listen to a TomDispatch audio interview in which Solnit 
discusses how the importance of the story of the New Orleans killings 
dawned on her, click <http://tomdispatch.blogspot.com/>here.

[This article first appeared on 
<http://www.tomdispatch.com/>Tomdispatch.com, a weblog of the Nation 
Institute, which offers a steady flow of alternate sources, news, and 
opinion from Tom Engelhardt, long time editor in publishing, 
co-founder of <http://www.americanempireproject.com/>the American 
Empire Project, author of 
<http://www.amazon.com/dp/155849586X/ref=nosim/?tag=nationbooks08-20>The 
End of Victory Culture, and editor of 
<http://www.amazon.com/dp/1844672573/ref=nosim/?tag=nationbooks08-20>The 
World According to Tomdispatch: America in the New Age of Empire.]




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