Working the Streets of Post-Katrina New Orleans: An Interview with Deon Haywood, Executive Director, Women with a Vision, Inc.

While most people living in the United States watched, with sympathy and horror, the dismantling of New Orleans's infrastructure in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the levee breaks displacing nearly all its residents and killing nearly sixteen hundred people, leaving behind those without even the most basic necessities, few are aware of the seismic shifts the city has undergone during the recovery process. Activist and political journalist Jordan Flaherty succinctly expressed what many of us felt during the initial recovery period, following the storm: "There were practically no conversations that didn't reference Katrina. The storm defined every aspect of life in the city, not just the large-scale damage done but also in the small details. Traffic lights hadn't been fixed. Street signs were gone. Packs of abandoned dogs roamed the streets. . . . Walking in your own neighborhood in those initial few months, you couldn't believe you were in New Orleans. You couldn't believe you were in the United States" (2010, 54).

As residents who were able to return to their homes focused on managing the day-to-day challenges that the storm engendered, city officials began the arduous process of restoring basic civil services such as housing, education, and care at health facilities, in addition to tackling the mountains of debris that lined the city streets. At main thoroughfares, plastic signs were crowded together at intersections, advertising any kind of imaginable service, from tree cutting to legal services to gutting houses. Out-of-towners, primarily men—manual laborers, contractors, and white-collar professionals—descended on the city, camping out in abandoned parking lots or squatting in neglected houses, taking up residence in hotels in Baton Rouge or towns across Lake Pontchartrain. Neighborhood associations became more active as residents united to have basic utilities restored, street lights fixed, and debris removed. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers hosted town hall-style meetings, addressing questions and comments from agitated crowds; high-profile urban planners, hired by the city, developed a rash of visionary plans for the city's future; and law enforcement officials (with the help of the National Guard) imposed a mandatory curfew, attempting to curtail the rampant theft occurring in the city's most desolate and destroyed neighborhoods. All this was occurring as people mourned the dead and still missing in neighborhoods that looked as though they had been blasted by bombs.

Between 2006 and 2010, a new political, social, and economic landscape emerged in Katrina's aftermath, affecting every aspect of urban life, including the replacement of nearly all public housing with mixed-income developments, the firing of thousands of unionized teachers and subsequent emergence of a charter school system, and the return of violent crime in abandoned, largely low-income African American neighborhoods. These issues became hot topics for New Orleans's activist groups, many of whom created alliances that would protect the city's most vulnerable populations and neighborhoods. Sadly, but not surprisingly, the hard work of rebuilding social and political networks carried out by social justice groups such as Critical Resistance, Common Ground, and People's Hurricane Relief Fund and women's groups such as INCITE: Women of Color Against Violence, the Women's Health and Justice Initiative, and Women with a Vision (WWAV) went unnoticed in the mainstream media.¹

More than five years later, problems surrounding the recovery persist, as activists and legal and social justice advocates continue to organize around issues related to police brutality, high incarceration rates for young African Americans, sexual violence, and housing discrimination based on race, gender, and economics. In August 2010, I attended the event Community and Resistance: Five Years After Katrina at the Community Book Center, a hub of African American activism and resistance in the city's Seventh Ward, to hear grassroots activists, artists, and journalists speak about the pressing social problems still facing New Orleans. It was at this event that I first heard Deon Haywood, executive director of WWAV, speak about the 1805 Louisiana Statute 89.2, commonly known as Solicitation...