Spring Break on the Gulf Coast

By Celina R. De Leon, WireTap. Posted February 25, 2006.

This spring break, undergrad and graduate students across the country are going to be heading down to Biloxi, Miss., Mobile Ala., and New Orleans, La. Not to party hearty, or to get their groove on at clubs catering to them and their dollars, but to help make a difference in the lives affected most by the biggest natural disaster to hit the United States in recent history, thanks to the organizing efforts of the Katrina on the Ground initiative.

"A lot of people are going to want to go to New Orleans because of how the media has displayed New Orleans. But my choice is to go to Alabama and Mississippi, first, because, I have a personal connection," said Chazeman Jackson.

Jackson, 26, is a microbiology Ph.D. student at Howard University who will be spending her spring break in the Gulf region, hopefully in Mississippi, where she's originally from, and where she got her undergraduate degree.

"I'm really, really excited about this … A lot of times, people judge this generation of students as apathetic. But this is a call, and I think a lot of our age group is going to answer that call," said Jackson. "We're not a lost generation. We do care. And we don't just care, we organize ourselves and mobilize ourselves."

We caught up with one of the lead organizers of Katrina on the Ground, long-time activist, Kevin Powell, during one of his speaking engagements in Ohio. According to Powell, if Katrina on the Ground is a success this spring, the initiative will be back this summer for another round of students to take part in. Powell and fellow organizers are hoping for at least a thousand students to attend this March.

Celina R. De Leon: How did you become involved with Katrina on the Ground?

Kevin Powell: I was one of the folks who came up with the idea for it, so I've been involved since the very beginning. I organized two Katrina benefits in New York, one in September and one in December. And I went down to New Orleans, Baton Rouge and Houston, about a week after everything went down. It's been something very near and dear to my heart since the very, very beginning.

When [a group of us] were talking about what we can do, I thought about my years in college in the late '80s and my involvement in the anti-apartheid movement. And I knew we needed to go down there.

CDL: Can you explain further the four main goals of the initiative -- physical and emotional reconstruction, legal education and assistance, and financial literacy?

KP: Having been down there, I knew for a fact, that there is an obvious need for human help. There are a lot of great organizations on the ground and coalitions of all kinds, but there is still a shortage of human help … For example, help cleaning up the area. They need people to help build new houses. And certain places should actually be deemed unlivable because of how bad they were hit by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

Another need is the fact that this is an incredibly traumatic experience. And so for us, it's about making sure students know that there's a need for sensitivity with these folks in the community -- that [students] are not just talking to them, or with them, but actually listening. I know from being in New York -- we've been doing a lot of work with the Katrina survivors who are living in hotels there, which FEMA is trying to kick folks out of now -- one of the basic things people just need to do is unload their stories. This means listening, and also collecting oral stories, because it's now a part of America's tragic history. So, in our recruitment, we also have a lot of psychology majors, etc. … This is just very important when talking about how trauma affects people and how it carries out through several years, especially when it's not handled properly.

In terms of financial literacy, a lot of the working class people -- we saw poor Blacks, but there are also poor white folks, poor Latino brothers and sisters, and Haitians who lived in the surrounding areas who were affected by [Hurricane Katrina]. Class was not orchestrated by Hurricane Katrina, but it was definitely exasperated by it. And so trying to get people to understand that we might not be dependent on the government to move forward, so what are some of the things that we need to do financially to move forward. For example, while we were at the Astrodome we noticed some people got their hands on the government checks for $2,000, and these folks were going out buying Xboxes and sneakers, and stuff like that. In this country, we're conditioned to think that once we get money, we need to spend it. So what we mean by financial literacy is we have to educate people that just because you have money doesn't mean you need to spend it.

We also need to bring back jobs to the community.

[In terms of civil rights and legal education and assistance], there's supposed to be a mayoral election in April. And you know, folks are scattered all across the country. So, who's going to vote? You're not there, but you're not there because of a natural disaster. And so what we have is people not participating in the election of the mayor and of the city council, who will be representing their state for the next four years. So here we go again, back to people paying taxes in this country and not being part of the democratic process. These are the things we're talking about …

Celina R. De Leon is a contributing writer to WireTap based in Brooklyn, N.Y.

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