Dear Honorable First Lady Laura Bush:
On October 18, I touched down at the Louis Armstrong International Airport, still shaky from an aerial view of the destruction of New Orleans. While I booked a shuttle to the Marriot in the French Quarter, the woman at the kiosk announced that you would be attending the same convention. My heart raced.
I was in New Orleans to present the findings of six months of investigative research and reporting, "Big, Easy Money: Disaster Profiteering on the American Gulf Coast," which had been published by CorpWatch, a not-for-profit organization that investigates and exposes corporate violations of human rights, environmental crimes, fraud and corruption. Since those violations are so often linked to federal cronyism and the world's wealthy elite, I wondered how you might respond to the subject matter. While waiting for the shuttle, I pondered your mystique as the most respected figure in the Bush Administration, and the possibility of meeting you in such an unexpected place--a symposium entitled "Race, Place and Environment after Katrina: Looking Back to Look Forward."
Organized by the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice (DSCEJ) and Dillard University, spearheaded by Dr. Beverly Wright and Dr. Robert Bullard, both of whom have devoted their lives to the issues of environmental justice and equality, the symposium was conceived as a think-tank geared at making policy recommendations for the rebuilding effort. Over the course of the last six years, protestors have been separated from sycophants; doublespeak has permeated the national discourse on key issues and unsolvable social arguments have taken precedence over national and international humanitarian crises. But now, I thought, national consciousness was expanding - and even the White House was taking notice. With the soul of the modern civil rights and environmental justice movement gathered together to focus on the future, it seemed only right that the White House would have dispatched its best representative.
If only.
A banner at the Marriott welcomed participants to the Preserve America Summit scheduled simultaneously at the hotel. You, the Honorary Chair of Preserve America, would be designating three new communities and highlighting the program's first regional grants of $427,000. Your husband, our President, signed the Executive Order for the program on March 3, 2003, to "establish federal policy to provide leadership in preserving America's heritage by advancing the protection, enhancement and contemporary use of historic properties owned by the federal government for economic development and other recognized public benefits."
It turns out that you wouldn't be attending the DSCEJ symposium after all. While I can understand that you were otherwise engaged, it's a shame that you came so close, yet missed the sparks cast by the passion of Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks, among many others, who have since ignited flames in today's civil rights leaders. On May 21, 2005, you addressed a group of Arab political and business leaders at the World Economic Forum in Jordan, stating that every person must be given the ability to read, and "even more than that, the freedom to read what they wish, to form their own opinions, and to speak their minds without fear." Had you been able to attend the DSCEJ symposium, you would have learned that the crisis facing New Orleans schools has become so dire that students in the city's John McDonogh High School held a press conference in October to raise awareness about the catastrophe. One student compared the school to a prison. The ability to speak without fear, much less to cultivate informed opinions, has been severely jeopardized by the crippled public school system of New Orleans.
It's impossible to be in two places at once, and there's no doubt that the Preserve America Summit created critical synergy for a significant endeavor, but the DSCEJ event demonstrated that Katrina, and the flood of negligence in the aftermath of the storm, kept the trail of human rights ablaze by snapping the neck of an already broken system of poverty and corruption in the Gulf Coast. The juxtaposition between the two simultaneous events struck many in attendance at both conventions, some of whom I had the opportunity to interview in the lobby, where chandeliers reflected pools of brilliant light onto shimmering floor tiles, in contrast to the splintered shotgun shacks and other ruined infrastructure scattered throughout the city.
Ole Varmer of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), a participant at the Preserve America Summit, said that the tone of the event was "optimistic."
"Lady Bird Johnson's legacy was to beautify America with wildflowers," Varmer said. "I think Laura Bush wants this to be her legacy. We're in New Orleans because New Orleans needs help. We're here to explore the idea of cultural tourism. How do we reach out to communities to get them to value their heritage?"
Assembled on the third floor of the Marriott, just above the second-floor Preserve America Summit, were some 250 people, including scientists, sociologists, attorneys, professors, physicians, researchers and powerful activists, who already know the answer to that question. Many had lost homes and family members during Katrina and all acknowledged that New Orleans runs the risk of becoming a sterile shell of the richly textured culture that once bloomed in that place. Eventually, the city might be visited by tourists looking for relics of the dead past, traversing streets too dangerous for strolls in bygone years--the same way the neon glimmer of Times Square outshines the history of addiction, violence and assorted depravity that once took place on its grimy blocks.
The notable difference is that the loss of New Orleans will result in nothing less than the devastation of an entire culture--one of the most creative celebrations of liberty that the world has ever seen, despite the crushing pressures of continuous racism and ignorance. Victory over enslavement is a literal reality but also a metaphor for the ceaseless oppression of the human condition. This fragment of our young nation's history should be a source of great pride for all Americans. Instead, images of maniacs firing guns at first responders or stealing televisions have been allowed to stand as gravely mistaken misrepresentations of an entire culture. It was as if 250 people were experiencing a form of cardiac arrest on the third floor of the Marriott while hundreds had assembled on the second to discuss the miraculous healing power of defibrillators. The goal of Preserve America is noble but threatens to be meaningless - occupied mainly by ghost-towns and tourists - if it fails to reach people's hearts in time.
A Mardi Gras Indian costume can be hung on the wall of a museum so visitors can come and look at it, or the actual Mardi Gras Indians can be kept alive and intact so they can pass their knowledge and rituals along. Schoolchildren can glimpse back in time at the massive bones of extinct species and run across the site of the battle of Gettysburg without fear of bayonets and bullets. If our nation doesn't act to revitalize New Orleans, they may be doing the same in that city one day, noshing on bland gumbo in a museum cafeteria while looking at postcards of a lost civilization--never realizing the triumph of the human spirit it embodied.
"New Orleans is in danger of losing its soul," Dr. Beverly Wright warned the audience. The founding director of the DSCEJ, Wright commands a room. Despite well-channeled ferocity and, at times, candid tears, she exudes a sense of joyous calm that is only underscored by the fact that she suffered death in her family pre-Katrina before losing her home to the flood. Her message was direct: "The lethargic and inept response to the disaster will result in a permanent, systematic destruction of the African-American community."
Mrs. Bush, you also made a significant comment at the Preserve America Summit that demonstrates your awareness of the importance of culture: "The historical narrative we preserve includes the contributions of many cultures, and tells the stories of all Americans. As we protect communities from across the United States -- from the seaport of Gloucester, to farming communities in Texas, to mining towns in Colorado, to New Orleans -- Americans are preserving the local culture that defines their communities. And they're preserving history that is part of who we all are as Americans."
You announced that Louisiana Rebirth: Restoring the Soul of America, received $150,000. This twofold projects aims to "create an annual event called Main to Main, which will promote the cultural heritage and economic well being of each of Louisiana's 25 Main Street communities on the first weekend of each November. Second, it will help create an innovative interactive website presenting the archeology of the French Quarter ...to present the largely unseen and unwritten history of New Orleans." As this latter effort is undertaken, I strongly recommend contacting the DSCEJ for guidance in reconstructing the city's unseen and unwritten history so that the progress being made on the ground can mirror the effort to educate the public about one of the nation's most intriguing places.
During the DSCEJ event, Mtangulizi Sanyika of the African American Leadership Project offered a definition of culture as "people, and how they function." "Sometimes we confuse art with culture," he pointed out. "The genius of the New Orleans culture is that it bubbles up from the bottom. It comes from the neighborhoods, the churches and the people in barrooms. At the very heart of culture is...when average, ordinary people experience what it means to be a human being. History is a flow of culture and civilization."
The French Quarter is welded with proof of the exquisite skills of African people who were captured and trafficked when early settlers couldn't master the heat. The wrought-iron "sankofa," a heart with spirals inside and out, appears throughout the quarter. In order to build the future - the sankofa reminds us - the past cannot be forgotten. If the worthy goal to Preserve America will serve as your legacy, then the program ought to seriously consider embracing the sankofa for the new interactive website as a gesture of commitment toward acknowledging this nation's history of enslavement and liberation, and allow it to stand as an emblem for the future of a city, and region, that contains one of America's richest cultural heritages. This could serve as a beacon for the economic development of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast.
As First Lady of our great, free country, you have the power, influence, and resources to ensure the people of New Orleans, the American public, and the world at-large that the rebuilding of our Gulf Coast - the resurrection and preservation of our difficult and celebratory history, as well as the wetlands and levees meant to protect it - will not be taken in stride, or handed over to elite developers and corporate interests at the peril of the people.
If people cannot return home to a safe environment with new opportunities, then the entire concept of preserving this country will be as obsolete as the ruined houses and broken culture currently slated for demolition. The chance to pull the world together was missed after September 11, 2001, but the Katrina moment is still here, catalyzing a chance to fully embody the true American dream of liberty and justice for all--not in the absence of conflict, but because of it. In a letter from the Birmingham Jail, dated April 16, 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. wrote, "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."
In New Orleans, justice seems to be lacking her sword and scales while remaining as blind as ever. The unseen and unwritten history of New Orleans is, as noted at both conventions, a tool for development. The cultural and economic enrichment generated by this unique opportunity should be extended, first and foremost, to the vibrant, living keepers of that culture.
Sincerely,
Rita J. King
PS. It so happens that a third convention took place at another hotel in New Orleans during the same time--on the subject of in-vitro fertilization. In the shuttle on the way back to the airport, an embryologist told me that roughly 100,000 fertilized eggs (that won't ever be implanted in wombs) are currently sitting in labs across the nation. Simply put: if these cells aren't used for scientific research, he said, they will eventually be destroyed. In light of your recent reaction to Michael J. Fox's support for stem cell research, I respectfully submit the notion that these already-existing fertilized eggs, if discarded, will never achieve any meaningful purpose, but if they are used instead for scientific research, these cells might achieve the most purposeful goal of all--saving hundreds of thousands or more lives. Even among the born, few can claim such a remarkable achievement.