The white gunmen of Katrina

In the days after hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005 we heard stories of lawless black people running loose in the city. What we did not hear was that some of the lawless people running loose in the city were white men with guns who shot on blacks at will and even murdered some. They have never been brought to justice. The mainstream press and particularly the police are strikingly incurious.

Most people who died in the days after Katrina died in the waters. But in the Algiers Point part of New Orleans, which was above the water, most died from being shot.

At least 11 were shot and four killed in Algiers Point in the days after Katrina. A nearby doctor says he handled about nine shooting cases, three ending up dead. In all known cases those shot were black and those shooting, as far as we can tell, were white.

The coroner says more than ten were shot dead, but his records from that period are so incomplete that it is hard even to say which ones took place in Algiers Point.

People remember the body of one black man lying on Opelousas Avenue. On one side of Opelousas is Algiers Point: nice houses where mostly white people live. On the other side is the black ghetto of Algiers.

About 15 to 30 white men of Algiers Point banded together shooting on any black person they found in their neighbourhood who they did not know. They were afraid that blacks would come and break into their houses and take everything.

One black man was shot dead trying to break into Daigle’s Grocery. Another, who lived in Algiers Point itself, was told at gunpoint in front of his house to leave the neighbourhood. Three others were shot when they tried to cross Algiers Point to get to the buses going to Texas.

One of those three, Donnell Herrington, was shot in the neck. Blood coming down from his neck, he saw two white men drive by in a black pickup truck and said, “Help me, help me – I’m shot.” They said: “Get away from this truck, nigger. We’re not gonna help you. We’re liable to kill you ourselves.”

The police were no where to be seen in the week after Katrina hit. They told one guman: “If they’re breaking in your property do what you gotta do and leave them [the bodies] on the side of the road.”

The gunmen were seen as holding the neighbourhood together until the army arrived.

Not long afterwards one gunman said, “It was great! It was like pheasant season in South Dakota. If it moved, you shot it.” One woman said they learned what the n-word meant.

Another woman, whose uncle and two cousins were gunmen, said:

My uncle was very excited that it was a free-for-all – white against black – that he could participate in. For him, the opportunity to hunt black people was a joy.

The police have not looked into any of the murders.

See also:

• “Katrina’s Hidden Race War” – from the Nation magazine.
• Sign the petition at Color of Change
• Katrina
• black ghetto
• Tim Wise: The creation of whiteness – where he makes the excellent point that whites and blacks turned on each other right after Katrina when they should have been turning on the government which did not make sure the levees would be strong enough for a Category 4 hurricane.
• Other cases where the police and the press are strangely incurious when it is black people who are dead or missing:
  • Missing White Woman Syndrome
  • Henry Louis Wallace