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<h1><b>The Grinning Skull</b></h1><font size=3>December 23, 2008 By
<b>Rebecca Solnit</b> <br>
Source: <a href="http://www.tomdispatch.com">TomDispatch</a><br><br>
<br>
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. <br><br>
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
<a href="http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2002520986_katmyth26.html">
sent</a> 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.
<br><br>
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
<a href="http://www.cnn.com/2005/WEATHER/09/02/katrina.impact/">
announced</a>, "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. <br><br>
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. <br><br>
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
<a href="http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/174800/rebecca_solnit_on_not_forgetting_new_orleans">
report</a> on New Orleans for TomDispatch in March of 2007, I
wrote:<br><br>
"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."<br><br>
<br><br>
I found that journalist in my friend A.C. Thompson who, backed by the
<i>Nation</i> 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,
<a href="http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090105/thompson?rel=hp_picks">
"Katrina's Hidden Race War,"</a> suggests that there's still
more there to find. <br><br>
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
<a href="http://www.democracynow.org/2005/10/24/new_orleans_community_organizer_malik_rahim">
had told Amy Goodman</a> on her nationally syndicated program
<i>Democracy Now!</i>, "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."
<br><br>
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).
<br><br>
CNN and the <i>Times Picayune</i>, 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
<a href="http://www.rasmusholm.dk/">little-seen documentary</a> 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. <br><br>
<b>What It's Like to Be Murdered</b> <br><br>
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?
<br><br>
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. <br><br>
"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."<br><br>
<br><br>
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. <br><br>
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. <br><br>
On the one-year anniversary of the catastrophe, millions of Americans
watched Spike Lee's <i>When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts</i>
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: <br><br>
"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. <br><br>
"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."<br><br>
<br><br>
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." <br><br>
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.
<br><br>
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." <br><br>
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. <br><br>
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. <br><br>
<b>"Like Pheasant Season in South Dakota"</b> <br><br>
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. <br><br>
That same year Charles Allan Gilbert
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Allisvanity.jpg">drew a
picture</a> 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. <br><br>
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. <br><br>
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 <i>Welcome to New Orleans</i>. It
<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S6ph5f5LbM0">showed</a> 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." <br><br>
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?" <br><br>
The man responds happily, "Seemed like it at the time."
<br><br>
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." <br><br>
A third says simply, "We shot 'em." <br><br>
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 <i>Nation</i> provided A.C. the resources to do it right. <br><br>
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
<a href="http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6063982">
gunned down</a> unarmed African-Americans themselves in the wake of
Katrina.) <br><br>
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
<a href="http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9754730/">cleaned out</a> 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. <br><br>
Looting is an incendiary, inexact word, suggesting mayhem far beyond the
acquisition of commodities. One Algiers Point vigilante claimed to fear
that <i>they</i> 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. <br><br>
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.
<br><br>
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. <br><br>
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.
<br><br>
<b>"Look Away, Look Away, Look Away, Dixie Land"</b> <br><br>
Why couldn't anyone in the mainstream see the story of vigilantes on a
rampage? Why didn't anyone want to see it? <br><br>
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. <br><br>
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. <br><br>
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. <br><br>
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. <br><br>
<br>
[People with information on murders in New Orleans in the aftermath of
Katrina are encouraged to write to Thompson and Solnit at
justiceinorleans@gmail.com. Anonymity will be protected.] <br><br>
<br>
<i>Rebecca Solnit's book about disaster and civil society, <b>A Paradise
Built in Hell</b>, 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
<a href="http://tomdispatch.blogspot.com/">here</a>.<br><br>
</i>[This article first appeared on
<a href="http://www.tomdispatch.com/">Tomdispatch.com</a>, 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 <a href="http://www.americanempireproject.com/">the
American Empire Project</a>, author of
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/155849586X/ref=nosim/?tag=nationbooks08-20">
The End of Victory Culture</a>, and editor of
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/1844672573/ref=nosim/?tag=nationbooks08-20">
The World According to Tomdispatch: America in the New Age of
Empire</a>.]<br><br>
<br><br>
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