There are probably sections of the Ninth Ward,” one 1885 guidebook claimed, “which have never been visited by man. The Ninth Ward can broadly be divided into three sections, from where the ward is divided from north to south by the Industrial Canal, and where the area east of the Industrial Canal is divided east to west by the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway/Mississippi River Gulf Outlet. The smallest of these pieces is the area south and east of these canals. The portion of the Ninth Ward along the river down-river from the Industrial Canal stretching to the St. Bernard line is called the Lower 9th Ward or Lower Ninth. It includes the Holy Cross neighborhood, the twin Doullut Steamboat Houses and the Jackson Barracks. Until Hurricane Katrina, the Lower Ninth Ward had the highest percentage of black home ownership in the city. The designation of this area as the 9th Ward dates from 1852, when the boundaries of the Wards of New Orleans were redrawn as part of the reorganization of the city from three municipalities into one centralized city government. Along the lakefront were various fishing camps built on piers, the most famous collection being Little Woods. Such camps were common along the lakefront in the 19th and early 20th century, but the collection at Little Woods was the longest lasting concentration, many surviving until Hurricane Georges in 1998. The area of the 9th Ward on the back side of St. Claude Avenue experienced the citys most significant and longest standing flooding from the New Orleans Hurricane of 1915 due to a break in the protection levee at Florida Avenue. The Industrial Canal was dredged through the neighborhood at the start of the 1920s. Most of the area between Gentilly Ridge and Lake Pontchartrain was swamp, not drained and developed until the mid and late 20th century. Lincoln Beach was an amusement park along the lakefront for African-Americans during the era of racial segregation. The nearby Pontchartrain Beach was the corresponding amusement area for whites. In the late 1800s, the Ninth Ward’s isolation encouraged the growth of a self-sufficient communal culture among its residents. By 1890 over 17,000 people lived in the Ninth Ward. Settlers arrived in search of work, and the rural, neighborly environment often kept them there. With wood harvested from surrounding cypress trees, they built one-story shotgun houses, whose layout encouraged breezes to flow through the buildings as residents entertained neighbors on their front porches. Residents organized benevolent societies and mutual-aid associations and constructed churches. African Americans and whites alike recall considerable racial harmony in their early 1900s Ninth Ward upbringings. “Everybody helped everybody else,” one white man remembered decades later. “Every Saturday night, the blacks across the street would have a fish fry, and they would always bring a batch over to my mother. There was never any hatred between us; we all lived together and that’s the way things were. Construction of the Industrial Canal during 1918–1923 disrupted the area’s bucolic feel. In the early 1900s, officials of the Port of New Orleans aspired to “coordinate river, rail and maritime facilities most economically” and to spur urban industrial growth by constructing a deepwater canal between the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain. Looking downriver, the middle of the Ninth Ward appeared to offer the ideal site for the canal because, officials claimed, it was uninhabited. In fact, by 1910, 25,599 people lived in the Ninth Ward, over 7 percent of the city’s population. Running five-and-one-half miles through the Ninth Ward, the massive canal reinforced the Lower Ninth Ward’s detachment from the rest of New Orleans. Still, the area continued to grow as employment opportunities drew newcomers to surrounding neighborhoods.] As the century wore on, the Lower Ninth Ward’s literal and figurative isolation from central and uptown New Orleans bred a fierce loyalty among residents to their neighborhoods. It also encouraged civic activism focused on strengthening municipal services such as drainage and public education. In the 1940s and 1950s, for instance, the indigenous neighborhood advocacy of Lower Ninth Ward African Americans provided the impetus for New Orleans public school desegregation. Plaintiffs in two major legal suits supported by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (naacp) (Aubert v. Orleans Parish School Board, 1948, challenging the inequality of white and black New Orleans public schools, and Bush v. Orleans Parish School Board, 1952, challenging the constitutionality of segregated schools) hailed from the Lower Ninth Ward. Local naacp attorneys later recalled that few black New Orleanians dared to risk their families’ well-being and livelihoods in such a public way. Fueled by the hope of civil rights and better neighborhoods, however, some Lower Ninth Ward residents believed it was a risk worth taking. The Ninth Ward provided not only the impetus but also the setting for public school desegregation. After a federal judge ordered desegregation in New Orleans to begin in 1960, a reluctant all-white Orleans Parish School Board chose five black girls from the Ninth Ward to desegregate two white elementary schools, one in the Lower Ninth Ward and one in the Upper Ninth Ward. The city remained silent about the chosen schools until four of the girls first appeared for class on November 14, 1960. Outraged Ninth Ward whites, primarily women, began to gather daily outside the schools to threaten and taunt the girls as they entered and exited the buildings. Fascinated by the spectacle of housewives screaming obscenities at first graders, scores of reporters arrived to broadcast the women’s fury to a national audience. Some observers concluded that class and race tensions caused the crisis. Indeed, Ninth Ward whites did resent privileged uptowners: “They send their children away, and then they support integration,” one grumbled. “Their children will go to college anyway, integration or not. It’s our schools that will be changed.”[11] The protesters’ vitriol was a product of the neighborhoods around them. To whites the decision to initiate school desegregation in the Ninth Ward represented another example of the city’s disregard for their community. Ironically, it was the city’s chronic neglect that motivated Lower Ninth Ward African Americans to spearhead the grassroots effort for school desegregation. The 1960 school crisis revealed that while black and white residents shared a desire for a better Ninth Ward, they envisioned that improvement in vastly different ways. Meanwhile, Ninth Ward whites continued the steady migration to St. Bernard Parish begun decades earlier. The movement contributed to a post–World War II local suburban explosion (aided by the draining of former back swamps and the construction of the interstate highway system) and reflected urban residential patterns nationwide. Supported by government incentives, whites across the United States moved by the millions into racially exclusive suburban developments. In the New Orleans metropolitan area from the 1930s through the 1980s, twice as many federally backed homeowner loans went to suburban residents as to Orleans Parish residents. African Americans, noting that retail services such as restaurants and corner groceries drained out of their neighborhoods alongside the departing whites, asserted that racism was the primary motivation for white flight. The historian Matthew D. Lassiter argued that this demographic shift in New Orleans and other U.S. cities resulted in the ascendance of a politically potent white suburban population whose color-blind, individualist rhetoric defending suburbanization masked post–Jim Crow “spatial apartheid” based on class and race. In the years before Hurricane Katrina, crossing the border from the black, poor-and-working-class Lower Ninth Ward to the primarily white, middle-and-working-class St. Bernard Parish bore out his argument. A force peculiar to New Orleans, Hurricane Betsy, also exacerbated white flight from the Ninth Ward. In September 1965, that category 3 storm roiled out of the Gulf of Mexico and up the Mississippi River toward New Orleans. On the evening of Thursday September 9, 150 mph winds slammed into the city, driving a storm surge through the Intracoastal Waterway and the Industrial Canal into low-lying eastern areas of the city. Floodwater overtopped the levees and crashed through levee breaches to drown the Lower Ninth Ward and St. Bernard Parish beneath six to twelve feet of water; the rest of the city remained relatively unscathed. Images from Hurricane Betsy are virtually identical to ones from its 2005 successor: an ocean of rooftops; bloated, floating bodies; a barge resting incongruously on the Industrial Canal levee. Three days after the storm hit, police officers found “an elderly Negro woman” standing on a chair perched on her stove, neck-high in floodwater. Dozens drowned, hundreds of houses were destroyed, and thousands were left homeless. In the Lower Ninth Ward’s collective memory, Hurricane Betsy was the catalyst that drove remaining whites, already inflamed by school integration, to St. Bernard Parish. The storm also came to symbolize long-standing municipal indifference to the Ninth Ward. The hurricane’s devastation of the Lower Ninth Ward contrasted sharply with minimal damage to the rest of the city, and residents, accustomed to decades of neglect, were certain that officials purposefully blew up the Industrial Canal to spare the “richer upriver areas. Distant memories of another disaster informed that conviction: in 1927, acting at the behest of powerful New Orleans businessmen who feared that the engorged Mississippi River might break over the Crescent City, local officials ordered the public dynamiting of the Poydras levee south of New Orleans, destroying the homes and livelihood of thousands of residents of St. Bernard and Plaquemines parishes. While analyses of Hurricane Betsy uncover no evidence of intentional levee destruction, a 1965 New Orleans Sewerage and Water Board report did concede that much of the area’s drainage system could not handle above-average rainfall. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, “Betsy” was recalled time and again by residents convinced that the 2005 storm damage and recovery effort somehow involved elite malfeasance. In the decades between Hurricanes Betsy and Katrina, New Orleans evolved into an African American city. As whites moved to the suburbs, the city’s population fell 22 percent, even as the number of African Americans rose. As the city grew blacker, it got poorer. Consumer services followed whites out of urban neighborhoods in search of suburban relocation. The port’s containerization wiped out well-paying jobs for thousands of blue-collar New Orleanians. Manufacturing jobs declined citywide. The race and class dynamics reshaping New Orleans were particularly salient in the Lower Ninth Ward. From 1940 to 1970, the nonwhite population of the area rose from 31 percent to 73 percent, and by 1970, Lower Ninth Ward civic activism continued into the twenty-first century. Residents joined existing or newly formed organizations to lobby for playgrounds, public school facilities, health clinics, and protection against environmental hazards. Such local allegiance was not unique to the Lower Ninth Ward; areas such as Broadmoor, Mid-City, and New Orleans East also bred intense neighborhood loyalty among their residents. The Lower Ninth Ward did stand out, however, in its residents’ long-standing conviction that the area was “forgotten.” In one 2001 community forum, over one hundred citizens applauded when the Lower Ninth Ward resident Betty Stewart claimed, “Our fears are what bring us out tonight. The forgotten people of the Lower 9th refuse to be forgotten any longer.”[21] In August 2005, a force outside human control threw the city into chaos: Hurricane Katrina. After hitting Florida on Thursday August 25 and subsiding to a tropical storm, Hurricane Katrina regrouped and headed toward the Mississippi/Louisiana coast. On Friday, Louisiana governor Kathleen Blanco declared a state of emergency; the following day, New Orleans mayor C. Ray Nagin followed suit. By Sunday, a direct Crescent City hit appeared probable, and Nagin announced the city’s first mandatory evacuation in history. Before the hurricane made landfall on Monday, 80 percent of metropolitan-area citizens had fled; the 20 percent remaining included elderly New Orleanians, New Orleanians without resources, and warning-weary New Orleanians who had lived through unfulfilled predictions of doom in the past. As with Hurricane Betsy forty years earlier, Hurricane Katrina arrived in the Lower Ninth Ward as an eruption of sound and water. And as during its predecessor, levee breaches caused both eruptions. Around 6:50 a.m., the eye of the hurricane proceeded northward over Lake Borgne east of the city. Hurricane winds pushed a sixteen- to nineteen-foot-high storm surge westward through the Intracoastal Waterway and into the Industrial Canal. Levees cracked and leaked from the pressure and water poured over their walls into St. Bernard Parish and the Lower Ninth Ward. Then, between 7:30 and 7:45 a.m., nine hundred feet of floodwall collapsed near Claiborne Avenue on the Industrial Canal’s east side. As an engineering report later described it, “the inrushing waters entered the adjacent community with great force. Homes for several blocks were ripped from their foundations and scattered, usually in splinters, eastward across the inboard neighborhood. And thus, once again, floodwaters engulfed the Lower Ninth Ward and St. Bernard Parish. the Lower Ninth Ward—historically neglected, stigmatized, and peripheral to the city’s power structure—is now a household name across the nation, symbolizing the storm’s human disaster. Alfred Lawless High School was the only public high school that operated in the Lower 9th ward. The campus received severe damage in Katrina. The 43-year old facility was among those that received the most damage. The flood waters moved some buildings off of their foundations. By December 2007 the RSD received a demolition permit for Lawless High. St. David Elementary School Serviced the Youth Of The Catholic Church K-8 grade. Among the famous natives and residents of the 9th Ward are music legend Fats Domino, rappers Brian Baby Williams and Magic, NBA basketball player Eldridge Recasner, NFL Player Marshall Faulk, authors Kalamu ya Salaam and Poppy Z. Brite, actor John Larroquette, trumpeter Kermit Ruffins, and the prominent Batiste musical family.
Posted on: Sun, 02 Nov 2014 05:38:33 +0000
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