Author: Eric Jensen, Managing Editor
After three years of graphic news coverage, charity photo exhibits and vivid verbal accounts, millions of Americans from around the country could give a relatively accurate description of the way New Orleans looked right after the levees broke. Far fewer, however, could describe how the floodwater felt. Co-founder of Common Ground Collective in New Orleans Brandon Darby is one of these few.
A crowd of students gathered around the Cooler stage last Tuesday, March 18 to hear Darby explain his involvement in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
Darby worked through Common Ground, a relief organization he helped organize just days after Katrina with former Black Panther and Louisiana native Malik Rahim, to combat the effects of racism and corruption in communities affected by the disaster. The organization focuses on working with residents, rather than for them. The organization’s official mission statement says that it aims to give “hope to communities by working with them, providing for their immediate needs and emphasizing people working together to rebuild their lives in sustainable ways.”
Darby spent two hours recounting an abbreviated version of his experiences since Aug. 29, 2005, when Katrina struck the Gulf Coast. “Have you ever seen that gelatinous liquid in a can of Vienna sausages?” he asked the audience. “That’s what the surface of the water was like.” Darby said he swam through it for hours. He went on to say that the water’s consistency was a product of chemical plant leaks and drowned bodies decomposing in the summer heat.
Darby said his good friend, Robert King Wilkerson, was trapped in the attic of his home in the Lower Ninth Ward for 11 days before Darby could get to the police officers and what he referred to as an “armed white militia” They didn’t allow civilians into the city to save their loved ones, and get King out of his house and to safety.
“It wasn’t easy,” he said. “I still get really angry thinking about it.” Darby listed off countless instances of police and government corruption manifested in the wake of the storm. He said that a great deal of such injustices were racially motivated, a detail he felt is a widely unrecognized post-Katrina issue.
He repeated the words of his friend, Mama D, which he said have resonated with him since he heard them. Darby said that in a conversation with a woman who wasn’t from New Orleans, Mama D’s voice began to rise as she discussed Katrina. When the woman advised her to quiet down and talk rationally, Mama D responded, “I’m tired of white people telling me to stop raising my voice.” Darby said that passionate expression is an integral part of New Orleans culture, and that showing anger should not be misconstrued as a signal of violence or insanity. “They have a right to be angry,” he said.
“People would come back to the Lower Ninth, look at their houses, cry and drive away,” Darby said. The goal of Common Ground was to enable these families to stay and rebuild.
Occidental College had Darby speak both this year and last year as a part of Rebirth Week, with help from his ties to Professor Caroline Heldman. She met Darby on Thanksgiving of 2005, and has been working closely with him since January of 2006. “We (illegally) camped out in a house in the Lower Ninth Ward in an effort to break an unlawful curfew that made it illegal for residents to be in their own homes after dark,” Heldman said. “The curfew was lifted the next day, and residents were able to move back into the area.”
Heldman and Darby also worked together on the Upper Ninth Project to gut over 2,000 flood-damaged homes, and collaborated to create the Police Corruption Hotline to hold New Orleans police accountable for racism and brutality. They also collaborated on the Angel Hotline, to respond to residents’ needs such as transportation and medical care, and opened the New Orleans Women’s Shelter, formerly called the Common Ground Women’s Shelter.
The list of Darby’s work in New Orleans goes on and on. “I think that most people in that situation would have done the same thing,” he said. “At least I hope so.”
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