Marc Morial, National Urban League Executive Director and former mayor of New Orleans, spoke passionately about the plight of Katrina survivors and accountability for the devastation of his native city during the State of the Black Union forum on February 27, 2006. At the one year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina touching down on the Gulf Coast, Mr. Morial’s remarks bring a balance of compassion and compelling perspective on who survived the tragedy and who participates in the unfinished restoration of a region and its citizens.

Here’s the point that is so important about Katrina and the people who have been victims, and that is, so many people have lost everything.

I don’t know if it’s easy for people to connect with losing everything. Not just your material possessions but your community connection.

It’s my mother and her friends saying, “I’m never going to see my friends at church again.”

It’s the retired letter carriers who went to the letter carriers’s hall because they play some cards, and tell some stories, and they’re disconnected.

It’s the high school juniors and seniors who will never see some of their classmates again because they’re in school in places.

It’s the young man I saw when I went down to the Lower Ninth Ward because I had to see with my own eyes who told me he walked 60 blocks to go back to his home in the Lower Ninth Ward because he was looking for one item, his family Bible, and he found it. But this is what I’m going to say. The government of this nation bears a responsibility to make people whole.

And the reason why I feel so fundamentally, if Katrina had come and left, there would have been very little devastation. What caused 90% of the damage in New Orleans were broken levies, made and funded by the United States Government. We can’t lose that point. We can’t lose the points.

So what it triggers is a special responsibility to make people whole.

We all have to be advocates because Katrina is not just about New Orleans and the Gulf Coast.

Katrina exposed poverty, and it also exposed neglect.

It exposed an idea that I certainly didn’t have when I was mayor of my hometown, and that is that people that couldn’t not evacuate, tough luck. It was wrong for the callousness and the neglect to take place. Fundamentally wrong, morally wrong.

If we’re spending $4 billion a month to rebuild Baghdad, even for the sake of argument, I won’t touch the argument about whether it ought to be done.

Then certainly we can spend half of that, or an equal amount, to rebuild an American city made up of United States citizens.

The reason why people have asked why should for example the organization I head, the National Urban League, or anyone nationally, be concerned about rebuilding New Orleans—New Orleans for the last 30 years was an embodiment of the success of the Voting Rights Act: African American mayors, majority city councils, school board members, state legislators.

And for some reason some people have sought to use the hurricane to foster a political agenda. Indeed one member of the state legislature even said, “Now Reconstruction is over.” Now I’m saying that because for some people to take advantage of a tragedy to push a political agenda should be a strong message that Katrina is more than a hurricane, it’s more than about Louisiana and Mississippi. It’s a symbolic issue of national and international importance.

…

I’m going to give three things [people can do.] First of all, there are Katrina evacuees in every state but Hawaii. Help somebody. Help somebody, through a church, through the Urban League affiliate.

Number two, insist that whenever any member of Congress, person running for the United States Senate, knocks on your door, asks for your vote, wants our community to vote, tell them we want the Gulf Coast to be treated like New York City was treated after 911. We want the rebuilding of the Gulf Coast to be given the same priority as the rebuilding of Baghdad. Say it to your elected officials.

The third thing is this has got to be an opportunity for us in this nation to begin a new conversation about poverty. A new conversation about economic disparity, and new conversation about the locked out and the left out. A new conversation about the deterioration about those who are at the bottom fifth of the economic ladder.

African Americans who have achieved success, most are one generation away from family members who struggled to get you out of poverty, who struggled to lift up the next generation.

And we are sell-outs if those who achieved some success think it is a license to turn their back on the rest.

Marc Morial is executive director of the National Urban League.

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