Wendell Pierce and Gary Rivlin talking:
I remember the greatest crime that ever happened, I think, was 10 years ago, when none of the large insurance companies honored the homeowner policies. My parents paid Allstate for 50 years, when they moved into Pontchartrain Park in 1955 up to the day we evacuated, and we’re still paying after the flood, because my mother said it can burn down at any time. And for those 50 years of premiums, they received $400. They said, “That’s all we’re going to pay.” There was a lawsuit, a class-action lawsuit, years later that everyone participated in to try to get some sort of mediation, and we lost the class-action suit. So, all of those insurance companies that sold insurance to my parents for years, saying that “You will be made whole. Have some flood insurance, and along with your homeowners’ insurance, when you put them together, you will be made whole,” they only gave them $400 after 50 years of paying premiums. Allstate is the insurance company.
In 2005, Katrina, the most expensive disaster in U.S. history. According to the Bloomberg wire service, record profits for the insurance companies that year. I think Mr. Pierce just told us why.
I think back to how my parents’ generation created Pontchartrain Park, the neighborhood that I grew up in. It came out of that same sort of racist neglect during Jim Crow. You could only go to the park only one day of the week if you were black, and that was Wednesdays, Negroes’ day, Negro day. And Pontchartrain Park was in response to that, of the advocacy of the civil rights movement, so that we could have access to this post-World War II suburbia that was happening after the war. My father, who fought in World War II, came back, took advantage of the G.I. Bill and created Pontchartrain Park—a golf course, a thousand homes around it, where they would have access to what was that Levittown sort of suburbia that was happening in America.
We were in some of the deepest part of the flooding, and we took it upon ourselves to initiate our own redevelopment, resident-initiated, the Pontchartrain Park Community Development Corporation. So now we have these homes and are trying to bring people back. We’re restricted by those who don’t have our best interest at heart, because we’ve turned away people with cash, saying, “Here we are and want to buy a home in your community, come back. Just like you, Wendell, I heard the call.” This Joshua generation, honoring that Moses generation that gave us a great foundation, a great place to grow up in, and we have to turn away people with cash because of these policies that are restricting us from selling to any sort of middle-class or working-class person who wants to come, because they’re using our redevelopment to displace all of those from public housing. So we’re restricted to only take in those who are in need from public housing, as they take back and reclaim the center of the city and other parts of the city that had public housing that they want. I call it the new blight, because two-thirds of it sits empty at market rate, where you have only one-third that is public housing. So you see, over the course of generation and generation and generation, racist policies that are not in the best interests of communities that are doing everything possible to thrive on their own. And so, you have to be ever vigilant, from my grandparents’ generation, where people were coming—night riders coming and burning cars in the black community in Assumption Parish, to my mother’s generation and my parents’ generation, who brought us up in Pontchartrain Park.
And now, as we mark this 10-year anniversary of Katrina, the most profound thing about this commemoration is the fact that we have another window of opportunity to get it right. And while some people have said that I am a voice of cynicism, that I am not being as celebratory as everyone else, you’re absolutely right, because I choose to look at what is going wrong and saying we have an opportunity now to attack those issues and those policies that are going to have a negative impact, and let’s try to bring back those people who want to come home, that 100,000 displaced New Orleanians who love New Orleans. And being a culture matron, as an actor, to know that most of the culture you’re familiar with in New Orleans comes from that history of oppression and is known around the world. Second lines were because black communities were redlined by insurance companies, so we put together own social aid and pleasure clubs. You understand the pleasure part. The social aid was to make sure that we pooled our monies so that we can take care of ourselves. So, that’s the thing that I want to remember the most—the legacy of the culture that came before, the fighting those that don’t have our best interest at heart and looking forward to the future.
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Wendell Pierce, New Orleans native, acclaimed actor, Tony Award-winning producer and community activist. His new book is The Wind in the Reeds: A Storm, a Play, and the City That Would Not Be Broken. Pierce starred in the HBO dramas Treme and The Wire, as well as the Oscar-nominated film Selma. He founded a nonprofit called Pontchartrain Park Community Development Corp. to build new affordable solar and geothermal homes for families displaced by Katrina.
Gary Rivlin, former New York Times reporter, an investigative fellow at The Nation Institute and the author of four award-winning books: Fire on the Prairie, Drive-By, The Plot to Get Bill Gates and Broke, USA. His latest book is Katrina: After the Flood.
— source democracynow.org