Saved by the People -- Not by FEMA

From her Atlanta home, former Gulf Coast resident Latosha Brown and a few friends watched the man-made catastrophe unfold in the wake Hurricane Katrina.

"We kept expecting to see the National Guard, the government, the Red Cross, somebody to do something. The idea that our leaders would allow people to fend for themselves two, three, five days with no food, water, medicine or help from outside -- we just couldn't get our minds around it.

"People were dying by the hundreds in New Orleans, and more folks we knew in Mississippi, in Alabama were hurt, missing and homeless or hungry. You've got two choices when you see something like that. Choice one is to feel defeated. Choice two is to be pro-active and do something about it. There were about six of us in my living room at that moment, all movement vets. We called around to see what we could make happen ourselves.

"The first folks to send a couple of vans of food and supplies was TOPS, The Ordinary Peoples Society, a prison ministry in Dothan, Ala., founded and staffed by ex-offenders. They organized food from a food bank, pooled their money to get additional goods and moved it to Mobile where they connected with a second organization of formerly incarcerated brothers down there to distribute it while they went back to Dothan for more. That's why we tell everybody now that it was felons who were the first to feed, the first to respond to need, the first to get up and do something. They didn't wait for permission or for a contract. That's real leadership."

The Real Leaders

Rev. Kenneth Glasgow of Dothan Alabama and Paul Jackson of Mobile each spent a decade in prison. Both are part of a network of black civic and religious organizations that have fought for years to restore the right to vote to over 200,000 former prisoners in Alabama, most of them African American men. Glasgow and his organization hustled food and got the first vans on the road southbound to the gulf. Jackson and his organization met the vans and guided them to where the need was greatest. "We started going into the projects," said Glasgow. "We went to Orange Grove and other places, somewhere the water had reached second floor windows, but nobody had seen FEMA or the Red Cross. We just started targeting areas where nobody else was coming."

The former prisoners found small and medium sized black churches in the affected area who also hadn't been contacted by the Red Cross or any government agency but who'd mobilized their own members to begin feeding their neighborhoods. The ex-offenders began sharing their supplies, their contacts and their information about unmet needs with these community partners. By the second food and water trip south, the former prisoners were bringing families out of flooded and devastated areas back to safety and temporary housing, and soon the ex-felons were driving in shifts with vans moving both ways around the clock.

Abandoned by the Government

Brown and her friends imagined that by their second or third trip south, local or federal officials, the National Guard or someone in authority would be on the scene to feed people, to evacuate the sick, homeless and injured, restore essential services, assess the damage and generally do what governments of modern and civilized societies are expected to do. But in Gulf Coast Alabama and Mississippi, just as in New Orleans, it didn't happen.

"When we realized this wouldn't be over in a couple days, we hit the phones again," Latosha Brown said. "We asked for help from community and civic organizations we'd worked with, from churches we knew, from businesses and individuals and doors just flew open. It was amazing. One friend was able to get $10,000 worth of food donated, but it sat there all morning because we had no way to move it. A brother in the community, a truck driver stepped up and volunteered to get it down to the Gulf Coast for gas money. Paul Jackson down in Mobile got us a warehouse to receive goods being sent, and somebody's supervisor on the job lent a forklift and driver. We found more vans in other places, and on the fourth day our group in Selma working with a local church opened up a shelter for a hundred people. Every truck and van that carried supplies down brought families out on the way back, including a number of Cambodian and Vietnamese families..."