New Orleans

Just read this great piece in Facing South by James Perry of the Greater New Orleans Fair Housing Action Center about the amazing work that is going on to rebuild the city, both socially and physically. He clearly sees direct implications of King's legacy in New Orleans.

King noted that a key to successful advocacy is making the situation ripe for negotiation. He advised that this can be done by using non-violent advocacy to make a situation "so crisis packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation." One can only imagine the discomfort of members of Congress as they looked into the eyes of Women of the Storm and members of the Louisiana Housing Alliance who lamented story after story of the government's failure to provide for the needs of Americans in the wake of the 2005 storms. The result: billions of dollars were allocated for Gulf Coast recovery.

[Ed. Note: The following article will appear in the Spring 2008 issue of Fellowship magazine, and is offered here online in the context of this week's observance of the fortieth anniversary of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. on April 4, 1968. Click here to subscribe to Fellowship.]

Sitting in our favorite coffeehouse, Tyler Jared, my eldest son, and I are having our “man time.” I am sipping a cappuccino and he is drinking some orange concoction. We stare into one another’s eyes, with an occasional “What?” breaking our silence. We are excited to see each other and saddened by the time we have spent apart. I hold a deep sense of calling that has taken me around the world, but away from him and his siblings. He has grown so much. He is now taller than me, his 13-year-old face starting to break out with pimples, voice cracking, but he is still my baby. I hold his hand and run my fingers through his golden locks. It embarrasses him, but he does not stop me, because I am Dad.

He interrupts the silence. “Dad, everyone knows you want to be like Martin Luther King.”

Last week, I was in New Orleans for the annual Nonprofit Technology Conference. While there I had the immense pleasure of being given a post-Katrina tour by my friend Quintus Jett, a professor at Dartmouth. He is the Director of the Gentilly Project, an effort to use open source principles to map the state of storm-damaged New Orleans neighborhoods. At their web site you can use dynamic GIS maps to zoom in on the condition of each lot (ie: vacant, being renovated, occupied, etc.), and zoom out to see the block-by-clock process of rebuilding.

I was so grateful for a chance to see the community personally. As you may know, there are still spray-painted symbols on many homes left by the rescue efforts. The biggest shock was that much of the Lower 9th Ward, which used to be hundreds of homes, is now a grassy field with just a few cement blocks and slabs marking former foundations.

You can browse my pictures at Flickr or watch the slideshow below.

Two years ago, a pair of young interns at the Fellowship of Reconciliation, Danae Davis and Virginia Wilber, led a delegation of nine young people to post-Katrina New Orleans.