ED GORDON, host:
Across the nation people are commemorating the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. Starting Monday NEWS & NOTES will take you on a journey through the Big Easy. We'll check in with some residents we've spoken to before, as well as bring you new stories of rebuilding in one of the most devastated areas of the city.
Here are some of the voices of survivors you'll hear on next week's show.
Unidentified Woman #1: And if you was here when Katrina hit and to be in the Superdome and the Convention Center, at the airport, it was not race. Because money didn't matter. You could've had millions. You could've been black, you could've been white. It didn't make a difference. It didn't buy you out of New Orleans.
Unidentified Woman #2: After Katrina I feel like there's not as much racial division as it was before. It's just that people are speaking of it more now, you know, but it's actually less than it was before Katrina. Because, as we said, when the hurricane hit, it just didn't hit the black people in the lower Ninth Ward, it hit the rich people in the Ninth Ward. They hit the rich people all over the city. And people right now seem to be helping each other everywhere I turn.
Unidentified Man #1: Every other race on the face of this planet can come to the United States of America and they can acquire the American Dream. We were here before all of them. We helped build this country. What more is it that we have to do in order to be looked at as a human being and treated as a human being. We can't disappear. You can point us out in any crowd. Are we victims of our own color? Don't blame that on us, blame that on your creator.
Unidentified Man #2: Gangs of young men racing through the streets, not true. Corpses stacked like cordwood in the Convention Center freezer, not true. The negative imagery was extremely destructive to the city's image, a city that's dependent on public goodwill and Congress and also on the tourism trade to keep its coffers full.
Unidentified Woman #3: Our (unintelligible) Rosa Parks. I feel that if auntie Rosa had been well, the last stage of her life she would have lent her name, her energy to helping Katrina victims. She just would've. I'm so convinced.
Unidentified Man #3: If the people cannot come back that cripples everything. Businesses can't operate. You need people to drive the cabs, the busses. How you're going to - you're talking about tourists, you know. You have a football team, you have a basketball team. What good is that if there are no people here and you don't pay them a decent wage.
Unidentified Man #4: You know, if you take comfort in it being New Orleans' problem and New Orleans being a little low in the land, low in the, you know, against the coast, what's it going to be like when the dirty bomb is found in the New York City subway system? Or what's it going to be like when San Francisco gets the big one? Or what's it going to be like when the nuke melts down outside of St. Louis. I mean we are not ready for those kinds of events and New Orleans was the test run and the federal government failed that test to an astonishing degree.
GORDON: Tune it Monday for a conversation with Jed Horn, a New Orleans resident and editor of the Pulitzer-Prize-winning newspaper, The Times Picayune. He talks to NPR's Farai Chideya bout the city's continuing struggle to survive.
Thanks for joining us.
To listen to the show, visit NPR.org.
I'm Ed Gordon. This is NEWS & NOTES.
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