What came from the state after Hurricane Katrina was not aid. It was armor. On August 29, 2005, the storm breached New Orleans's levee system in more than fifty places, killing more than eighteen hundred people across the Gulf Coast, while National Guard troops arrived under orders to shoot and kill and food and water took days longer to reach anyone.
Malik Rahim, a former Black Panther, and three fellow organisers founded the Common Ground Collective six days after landfall, with no funding and no authorization from anyone above them. This episode doesn't look away from what the state's own agents did that same week either: the Danziger Bridge shootings, the Gretna bridge blockade, and white vigilante patrols in Algiers Point who shot at least eleven Black men. Common Ground's actual record, a free clinic that has logged sixty thousand patient visits, twenty-two thousand volunteers over six years, sits against Naomi Klein's account of the "disaster capitalism" that fired 7,500 teachers and demolished public housing HUD's own inspectors had called structurally sound.
It closes with an honest complication: one of Common Ground's own founders became an FBI informant, and the pattern this show traced through COINTELPRO two episodes earlier reached even here, at the founding table.
Further reading: Scott Crow, Black Flags and Windmills: Hope, Anarchy, and the Common Ground Collective (PM Press, 2011) Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (Metropolitan Books, 2007) A.C. Thompson, "Katrina's Hidden Race War," ProPublica/The Nation, 2008–2009 Democracy Now!, "Prominent Austin Activist Admits He Infiltrated RNC Protest Groups as FBI Informant" (January 6, 2009) Elena Poniatowska, Nothing, Nobody: The Voices of the Mexico City Earthquake (Temple University Press, 1995)
Tags: Hurricane Katrina, Common Ground Collective, Malik Rahim, mutual aid, disaster capitalism, Naomi Klein, Danziger Bridge, Algiers Point, New Orleans, Mexico City earthquake, brigadistas, state failure, anarchism
Show notes: Black Flags in the Flood: Katrina, Common Ground, and What the State Left to Drown. A Thousand Small Fires, Season 2, Episode 6
Hurricane Katrina wasn't a natural disaster so much as a test the state failed on camera, in real time — the anarchists and one longtime Black Panther who built the rescue the government didn't, and what happened to New Orleans once the water receded.
In this episode:
- Malik Rahim, Scott Crow, and the founding of Common Ground Collective
- The Algiers Point vigilante shootings and Donnell Herrington
- The Danziger Bridge shootings and the Gretna bridge blockade
- Common Ground's free clinic, 22,000 volunteers, six years of work
- Naomi Klein, disaster capitalism, and the firing of 7,500 teachers
- The demolition of New Orleans's "Big Four" public housing
- The 1985 Mexico City earthquake and the topos who dug survivors out by hand
- Brandon Darby's FBI informant betrayal, and what survived it anyway
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