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The Politics of Poverty and History: Racial Inequality and the Long Prelude to Katrina
Kent B. Germany
| On August 6, 1965, Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act. His pen capped thirteen months of landmark legislation to fight segregation and poverty. A month later, a hurricane named Betsy grew to almost category 5 strength and threatened the Deep South. In its path to New Orleans stood an oil rig named Maverick, the pride of George H. W. Bush's Zapata Offshore Oil Company. On the night of September 9, the storm came ashore with a fifteen-foot surge just south of New Orleans and soon crested levees in the city's Ninth Ward and in St. Bernard Parish. Nasty water soaked into homes in a three-hundred-block area, prompting Gov. John McKeithen of Louisiana to call Betsy "the greatest catastrophe in our State since the Civil War." Sen. Russell Long told President Johnson that Betsy had "picked the lake up and put it inside New Orleans." Ultimately, the hurricane killed seventy-five people, most of them in Louisiana.1 In the salt water south of town, the Maverick met a similar fate. Holding out hope, George H. W. Bush searched for his state-of-the-art steel rig for so long that his "eyes hurt." The ocean had erased the best the Texans could offer, but fortunately for them, the company was able to collect an almost $6 million insurance payment (about $36 million in 2006 dollars). A few months later, Bush sold his part of Zapata, ran a successful campaign for a new Houston congressional seat, and began a historic career in government. His oldest son, George W., was nineteen and a student at Yale University, soon to become president of his old fraternity.2 |
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Forty years later, this son surveyed a new surge from the same sea, this tide almost twice as high as the one that sunk his father's steel. On September 2, after a series of aerial surveys, President George W. Bush finally put his boots on the ground in the city—or at least on city-controlled property at the Louis Armstrong International Airport—and winked to the world about his fond memories of fun trips to New Orleans.3 He did not, however, specify which New Orleans was the source of his nostalgia. Surely it was not the old, segregated city of his youth that had gone through a brutal contest to reorder race, remove Jim Crow, and redress inequality. Perhaps it was the architecturally stunning Garden District version with diverse columns and antebellum dreams or the shiny New South city with its tourist-obsessed progressivism and corporate-choreographed night life. Bush's quip was an ill-advised throwaway line, but it helps underscore the role of historical understanding in establishing political priorities. The politics of the post–Hurricane Katrina recovery is in many ways a battle over history, a struggle to set the emotional and intellectual rationales that eventually dictate decisions. More than ever, conceptions of the past help decide who gets to decide. |
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