A Note from the Editor

This is an unusual and important issue of the Journal, dedicated to the Public Health Implications of Hurricanes Katrina, Rita, and Wilma. The issue is anchored by an introductory essay by Dr. Wayne J. Riley, whom it is my privilege to introduce to the Journal's readership as the 10th President of Meharry Medical College. Dr. Riley, previously vice president and vice dean for health affairs and governmental relations at Baylor College of Medicine, assumed the presidency of Meharry Medical College on Jan. 1, 2007.

Dr. Riley graduated from the Morehouse School of Medicine in 1993 with his MD and completed his residency at Baylor in 1996. He also holds a BA in anthropology, with a concentration in medical anthropology, from Yale University, an MPH in health systems management from the Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine, and an MBA from Rice University's Jones Graduate School of Management. Dr. Riley is certified and a diplomat of both the American Board of Internal Medicine and the National Board of Medical Examiners, and is a fellow of the American College of Physicians.

Readers will find a more lucid and meaningful introduction to Dr. Riley in the essay he wrote for this volume; its happy by-product is a message about our new president's dedication, skillfulness, and love for the mission of caring for the underserved. His story is the anchor for this issue, and photographs with which he supplied us (of care being delivered in the Houston Astrodome to evacuees from New Orleans) appear as page breaks between the sections.

Turning to the theme of this special issue, we are called upon to recall purposefully the events and images surrounding Hurricane Katrina at the end of August 2005 and the following months. Those events and images, seared by television into our collective consciousness, crystallized the concerns of this Journal: a marginalized people underwent physical danger and emotional trauma in New Orleans and on the Gulf Coast to an extent that more privileged residents escaped. Many died and many more lost loved ones. The effects of the disaster on people living in poverty and minority group members, in contrast with its effects on the well-to-do, replays the Journal's constant theme. The difference is that this time, for a few weeks in August and September 2005, the nation and the world were riveted, and horrified, by these facts, which as a general rule are recognized with a sigh, if at all.

Dr. Robert Bullard, a member of JHCPU's Editorial Board and a national leader in environmental justice, makes the point in an interview with Gregory Dicum of Grist: Environmental News and Commentary, that what the world saw in Hurricane Katrina was not something new but part of an enduring pattern of environmental injustice.¹ He points to the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and the Lake Okeechobee Hurricane of 1928 as telling precedents. Following up on Dr. Bullard's discussion, we learned about those events of nearly eighty years ago.

The Great Mississippi Flood, chronicled in a 1997 award-winning book by John Barry, titled Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood and How it Changed America,² tore across the center and southern parts of the United States as a result of record rainfall. Earlier that spring, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers expressed its certainty that the levees would hold,^2,4 but on April 21, 1927, the levee in the Mississippi town of Mounds Landing broke, submerging most of the county and the city of Greenville, twelve miles downriver. (Subsequently, many more government-built levees failed.)

Searching for marooned people throughout the county, rescue boats brought over 10,000—mostly Black—to the Greenville levee, which was high enough to be out of the water but only eight feet wide.^2-3 White planters blocked the attempted evacuation of Black sharecroppers by boat, fearful that they would lose their oppressed labor force once life resumed. When relief supplies arrived, they were dispensed according to race, with many Black residents not getting any at all. Black men were forced...