Hurricane Katrina Revealed The Weakness Of Those Who Failed New Orleans. The Aftermath Revealed Its People's Strength

Marc H. Morial 
President and CEO
National Urban League

"The images are just burned into people's minds and hearts and souls about what those days and weeks looked like with the city underwater. The thousands of people that were stranded at the Superdome − I mean, that was a catastrophe and a real failure of the local, state and federal government." – former Sen. Mary Landrieu

The images of desperate New Orleanians stranded on rooftops, sweltering in overcrowded shelters, floating on makeshift rafts, shocked and horrified Americans when Hurricane Katrina struck.

A greater horror lurked behind the images, one that was many decades in the making.

We saw it in the news reports that described white residents stealing from grocery stores as “finding” food for their families, while Black residents doing the same thing were “looting.”  We saw when armed police blocked an escape route and fired on a mostly-Black group of evacuees, including people in wheelchairs and babies in strollers.  We heard it in the callous glee of a Congress member who crowed "We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn't do it, but God did."

And we saw it in a plan to permanently ethnically cleanse New Orleans of its Black community.

Hurricane Katrina evokes two words in my mind. One is betrayal. The other is renewal.

The devastation that Katrina left in her wake cannot be blamed on the staggering wind or torrential rain. The fault lies with incompetence, indifference, and even contempt – from the local government that failed to put a plan in place or order a timely evacuation to the slow and inadequate response from FEMA and the National Guard to elected officials at every level who simply didn’t think poor, Black communities were worth saving.

The seeds for this destruction were sown long before the hurricane began gathering strength over the Gulf of Mexico.  Poor Black people were confined to flood-prone former swampland. Redlining denied them the resources to escape and kept their property values low. The levies that protected them were poorly designed and shoddily constructed, leaving 80% of the city underwater when they failed.

“One of Katrina’s most important lessons is about social injustice. The disproportionate suffering in Black communities wasn’t a natural disaster but a predictable result of policies concentrating risk in marginalized neighborhoods,” disaster planning experts at Texas A&M University wrote.

Betrayal.

Yet, in the face of all that injustice, New Orleans’ spirit never dimmed. The fight to rebuild their communities was fraught with the same indifference, incompetence, and injustice that left those communities vulnerable in the first place. But they never gave up.

Renewal.

Poverty and racism continue to challenge my beloved hometown. But the strength and resilience that fueled its recovery after Katrina will always be with us, just as essential to its identity as jazz, gumbo, and Mardi Gras.

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 34TBE 8/30/25 ▪ 117 West 125th Street ▪ New York, NY 10027 ▪ (212) 558-5300

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