The Rag Blog

Evidence Mounts of BP Spraying Toxic Dispersants

By Dahr Jamail / September 15, 2010

[The following dispatch from journalist Dahr Jamail, whose work has frequently appeared on The Rag Blog, was distributed by Truthout.]

Shirley and Don Tillman, residents of Pass Christian, Mississippi, have owned shrimp boats, an oyster boat and many pleasure boats. They spent much time on the Gulf of Mexico before working in BP’s Vessels Of Opportunity (VOO) program looking for and trying to clean up oil.

Don decided to work in the VOO program in order to assist his brother, who was unable to do so due to health problems. Thus, Don worked on the boat and Shirley decided to join him as a deckhand most of the days.

“We love the Gulf, our life is here and so when this oil disaster happened, we wanted to do what we could to help clean it up,” Shirley explained to Truthout.

However, not long after they began working in BP’s response effort in June, what they saw disturbed them. “It didn’t take long for us to understand that something was very, very wrong about this whole thing,” Shirley told Truthout. “So that’s when I started keeping a diary of what we experienced and began taking a lot of pictures. We had to speak up about what we know is being done to our Gulf.”

Shirley logged what they saw and took hundreds of photos. The Tillmans confirm, both with what they logged in writing as well as in photos, what Truthout has reported before: BP has hired out-of-state contractors to use unregistered boats, usually of the Carolina Skiff variety, to spray toxic Corexit dispersants on oil located by VOO workers.

Shirley provided Truthout with key excerpts from the diary she kept of her experiences out on the water with her husband while they worked in the VOO program before they, like most of the other VOO workers in Mississippi, were laid off because the state of Mississippi, along with the U.S. Coast Guard, has declared there is no more “recoverable oil” in their area.

“The first day I went, I noticed a lot of foam on the water,” reads her entry from June 26. “My husband said he had been seeing a lot of it. At that time, we were just looking for ‘Oil.’ We would go out in groups of normally, five boats. The Coast Guard was over the VOO operation. There was always a Coast Guard on at least one of the boats. They would tell us when to leave the harbor, where to go and how fast to go. They had flags on each of the VOO boats and also a transponder. Sometimes we would have one or more National Guardsmen in our group too, as well as an occasional safety man to monitor the air quality and procedures on the boat. If we found anything, the Coast Guard in our group would call it in to ‘Seahorse’ and they would determine what action would be taken.”

Along with giving a clear description of how the Coast Guard was thus always aware of the findings of the VOO workers, her diary provides, at times, heart-wrenching descriptions of what is happening to the marine life and wildlife of the Gulf of Mexico.

“Before we went to work, I went down by the beach,” reads her entry from July 4. “There were dead jellyfish everywhere. Some of them were surrounded by foam. A seagull was by the waters edge, as the foamy stuff continued to wash up. There was also a crane that appeared to be sick. It didn’t look like it had any oil on it, but it just stood there, no matter how close I got.”

On the morning of August 5, Shirley describes spotting a dead young dolphin floating in the water. “As we waited for the VOO Wildlife boat to come pick it up, we noticed a pod of dolphins close by,” she writes. “Even with all the boats around, they did not leave until the dead one was removed from the water. It was very emotional, for all of us.”

The next day, August 6, found her logging more death. “Last night on the news, they reported a fish kill. Before we went to work, I went to the beach by the harbor. The seagulls were everywhere. As for the dead fish, the only ones on the beach, were ones that the tide had left when it went back out. The rest of the ‘Fish Kill,’ was laying underwater, on the bottom. It was mainly flounder and crab. We only spotted two dead flounder floating that day. I can only imagine how many were on the bottom… I went back to the beach after work. The tide had gone out and the seagulls were eating all the dead fish that had been exposed. You could still see dead fish underwater, still on the bottom. Dead fish don’t float anymore?”

The Tillmans’ primary concern is the rampant use of toxic dispersants by what they described as private contractors working in unregistered boats, that regularly were going out into the Gulf as they and other VOO teams were coming in from their days’ work. There was, oftentimes, so much dispersant on top of the water, their boat left a trail.

“The first thing I noticed, was the ‘trail’ the boat was leaving in the water,” her log from July 10 reads. “You could see exactly where we had been, as far back as you could see. Around 11:00, we were in oil sheen and brownish clumps. We were North of Cat and Ship Island when the Coast Guard told us to drop the boom over. When you pick the boom up, you have to wear ‘protective gear.'”

Her log from August 1 describes, in detail, an incident of the Coast Guard not allowing them to collect oil and his proceeding to deny what they found was even oil:

Around 2:00 p.m., we started noticing a lot of oil sheen. We were North of the East end of Cat Island, but South of the Inter Coastal channel. There was, as usual, a Coast Guard on one of the boats in our team. He called in to report it, but we were told not to drop the boom, it was just “Fish Oil.” In the beginning of the clean-up operation, if something was floating on the water and it looked like oil, it was oil or oil sheen. Later they would sometimes say it was just “Fish Oil.” Also, if it was heavy foam with a brown or rust color, originally it was “Oil Mousse.” Later it was called “Algae.” We were then told to head Northwest. The further we went, the worse the “Fish Oil” got. Then, the foam was mixed in with the oil. It was at least the size of a football field, around our boat alone. My husband got on the radio and asked if they could put the boom over.

The Coast Guard, again, told them no.

We were then headed West, back towards Pass Christian. A pleasure boat flagged one of the boats in our group down and told him that there was oil all over. The Coast Guard said to tell him that they were aware of the situation… On the way back to the Pass Harbor, I asked my husband, “Just exactly what are we even doing out here?” He told me that he was beginning to think that it was all just for show. I can only imagine what the people on the pleasure boat had to say when they got back home that day. Probably, that they had seen a lot of oil on the water and the VOO boats were out there just riding around in it and not doing anything to clean it up. That is exactly what happened. We decided then to start documenting as much as we could. I believe it was the very next day, Thad Allen was on TV saying that they were scaling operations back due to the fact that, “No oil has been seen in the Gulf in almost two weeks.” Now, if we had pulled boom on Sunday and unloaded a bunch of dirty boom in the Pass harbor, it might have been a problem for him later.

On August 5, she describes a rare instance of their being allowed to drop boom in order to collect oil. “We had a Coast Guard and two Safety Men on our boat. We went to the West of the Pass Harbor. The water looked black in places. Lots of bubbles, not foam, just bubbles. Around 8:30, we were in oil sheen and mousse and were told to drop the boom. The more we pulled the boom, it appeared the more was coming up. The Pass [Christian] Harbor was closed because the oil was coming in so bad. We pulled boom back and forth the rest of the afternoon.”

By early August, the total number of VOO boats operating out of Pass Christian Harbor, where Shirley and Don worked, was down to 26.

On August 8, Shirley wrote,

Talk at the harbor was that airplanes were spraying dispersants on the water at night, out by the islands. There was also talk of skiffs, from Louisiana, with white tanks on them, that were spraying [dispersants] too. We had seen the skiffs before. They would pass us up in the mornings and head towards the Bay St. Louis Bridge. We were told that they were working out of an area at Henderson Point. Henderson Point has a county-owned area with a boat launch & piers. It was closed to the public after the oil spill and a BP sub-contractor staging area was set up. It always appeared that these boats were finishing up their work day, just as we were going to start ours. Most of these skiffs were Carolina Skiffs.

Later that same morning, Shirley and her husband headed out of the harbor with a member of the National Guard on their boat, heading west, while a member of the Coast Guard and another member of the National Guard were on another boat in their VOO team. After boating for an hour, they turned back to the east, at which point Don spotted five of the Carolina Skiffs.

“I got my camera and started taking pictures of them,” Shirley writes.

As I was zooming in as close as I could, I saw one of them spraying something onto the water. I did not get a picture of it, I was too busy telling my husband to tell the Coast Guard on the other boat. The skiffs had turned North and were scattered out, zigzagging South of the train bridge. The Coast Guard called the incident in and sent one of our boats to follow the skiffs. The skiffs immediately left. When I saw the boat spraying, it was upwind from our boat. Within a few minutes, my nose started drying out. Later my throat and eyes did the same thing. A Coast Guard helicopter was dispatched along with a Coast Guard boat. We saw the helicopter about twenty minutes later, but I never saw the Coast Guard boat.

Back at Pass Christian Harbor, her team reported the Carolina Skiffs actively spraying dispersants. She was told by the contracting company, Parson’s, that managed their VOO team, to bring in her photographs.

Her entry from the next day, August 9, reads:

I took the pictures, 8×10’s to Parson’s. A short time later, my husband called and said the Coast Guard wanted me to make a disc of the pictures. I took the disc and turned it over to the Coast Guard. I was told, in the presence of others, that the incident had been investigated and the boats in question had been located at the Henderson Point site. He said that these boats were in the VOO program as skimmer boats, but it had not yet been verified. He said that he had questioned them about spraying something on the water. They told him that if I had seen them spraying anything, they were probably just rinsing out their tanks. He also asked me, “Don’t you think if they were spraying dispersants, they would be wearing respirators?” I told him, “You would think so, but nothing surprises me around here anymore.” We basically left after that. I knew all they had really wanted was to see exactly what I had gotten pictures of. There is of course the question, “Why would a skimmer boat need to rinse out his tanks?” If he had been skimming oil, why dump it back over? If he hadn’t been skimming oil, what was he rinsing out? I know what I saw and I know how I felt afterwards. I also know that in one of the pictures I took, you can see a helicopter over those boats. BP has spotters looking for oil. Could it be he was telling them where to “Touch Up” before they called it a day? One thing I did learn from Coast Guard guy that day, evidently these so-called skimmer boats, also have the ability to spray!

The Tillman’s curiosity drove them to investigate further, given the inconsistencies they were seeing in the Coast Guard’s actions regarding the dispersant being sprayed from contractors in the Carolina Skiffs.

“My husband came home and said that they had seen the ‘Skiffs’ again today,” reads Shirley’s entry from August 10.

He took pictures of them and a jack-up-rig. The rig moves around in the sound and is suppose to be a de-contamination station. However, some Captains have said when they went there, they were told it wasn’t in operation at the time. After thinking about the tank skiffs and the Coast Guard for two days, I could not make any sense of this whole situation. The Coast Guard is supposedly over the VOO Program, but it knows nothing about the skiffs at the site, so close to the Pass Harbor. They not only tell us every move to make, but they are always with us when we make the moves. Our boats are flagged and have transponders on them. Those boats have no flags, we have not seen a transponder, nor a Coast Guard member on one of them telling them what to do.

That afternoon, the Tillmans visited the Henderson Point staging area. Though it was guarded, what they found shocked them: “There were probably more boats there than in the entire Pass [Christian] VOO program at the time,” reads her entry.

There were only a couple of regular skimmer boats. All appeared to have Louisiana registrations. Almost all of the skiffs had the white tanks on them. A few of the tanks looked like they could have had something in them at one time, but nothing like the oily, sticky mess we had been dealing with. If we got something on our boat, it was almost impossible to get it off. I don’t see how they could have gotten it out of the tanks and still looked like they did. Also, there was a Harrison County Sheriffs Department car, right by the boats and some large, plastic, white containers with yellow bases.

On August 13, the VOO boat that Shirley and Don were running was deactivated. Still very concerned, the next day they visited the BP staging area in Hancock County.

“They had evacuated this site,” she writes. “Same setup though, a guard and a Sheriff’s car. We then went to a site in Gulfport. Evidently, this is a main BP storage site. There were all kinds of boats, including the tank skiffs. The Sheriffs Department was there also and so was those large, plastic tanks with the yellow bases.”

Other reports, of a very similar nature, have been reported about other BP staging areas along the Gulf of Mexico. The tanks are clearly used to store and transport Corexit dispersant. The Carolina Skiffs are clearly used to spray it atop oil.

Her August 16 entry details her discovery:

Over the next few days, I continued to go by the Henderson Point site and the Gulfport site. The Henderson Point site brought back a few boats, but none of the tank skiffs or the large plastic tanks. The Gulfport site stayed the same, full of everything. On August 25, I received an email with a link to an article about dispersants. It had a picture of the tanks that dispersants come in, with the label “Nalco Corexit EC9005A.” They were 330 gallon, large, plastic, white tanks with a yellow base. These were the same tanks that I had been seeing at the Henderson Point site and the Gulfport site. I was able to get the name of the manufacturer of the tanks, off a picture I took and compared it to the picture in the article. It was the same manufacturer. I researched this company on the internet and found the 330 gal tanks. They are marketed as: “The only manufacturer in the industry to offer portable tanks certified for hazardous goods transport by the United Nations and the U.S. Department of Transportation.”

Shirley and Don are, like tens of thousands of other VOO workers and Gulf residents, left with more questions than answers.

“While working on the boats, if you pull boom back onto the boat, you not only had to wear Tyvek suits, protective glasses and gloves, you also had to put tape around the gloves and suit sleeves, as well as around your boots and the suit.” Shirley asks, “Why would it be safe for people to get into the same water that all of this hazardous stuff was coming out of?”

For the Coast Guard, she asks:

How can you not know there are boats in the VOO program if you are in charge of the VOO program? The Coast Guard was supposedly over the VOO program, but they acted like they don’t know anything about the Carolina Skiffs. The boats were in either a task force or strike force. Every VOO boat has a flag. We all had transponders. This was VOO and Coast Guard regulations. But these skiffs didn’t have flags and we never saw transponders on them, nor did they have Coast Guard with them and supposedly every group had at least one Coast Guard in each group. Sometimes we would have two. But the Skiffs didn’t have any.

Local media in Pass Christian and Gulfport, Mississippi, are now reporting that BP hopes to have the VOO program in that area completed by September 19.

Shirley is incredulous. “Why would anyone bring their children here and put them in water that has had millions of gallons of toxic chemicals dumped into it, not counting the oil itself?” she asks. “Why would you want to eat seafood that has been living and dying in the water, with all those contaminates?”

Truthout has earlier reported on other fisherman in the area, James “Catfish” Miller and Mark Stewart, who have reported being eyewitnesses to the contractors in the Carolina Skiffs spraying dispersant as well.

Meanwhile, local, state and federal authorities continue to claim that dispersant was only used south of Mississippi’s barrier islands and that the Carolina Skiffs and the large tanks they carry are only used to “skim” oil.

“If dispersants were only being sprayed South of the islands, why would these 330 gallon hazardous goods tanks be located at two different work sites, right by the tank skiffs?” Shirley asks. “Why would the skiffs tanks be so clean if they were really skimming oil?”

The Tillmans and thousands of other fishermen and residents along the Gulf of Mexico are deeply concerned about local, state and federal government complicity in what they see as a massive cover-up of the oil disaster by using toxic dispersants to sink any and all oil that is located.

Dr. Riki Ott, a toxicologist and marine biologist, is a survivor of the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil disaster in Alaska. She recently submitted an open letter to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency expressing many of these same concerns.

Ongoing government denials of this problem neither fool nor dissuade Shirley. “I know what I have seen,” she told Truthout. “I know what I have been told. I know what I have experienced. I know what I have documented. I also know that I have taken hundreds of pictures to verify what I am saying.”

[Houston native Dahr Jamail, an independent journalist, is the author of The Will to Resist: Soldiers Who Refuse to Fight in Iraq and Afghanistan, (Haymarket Books, 2009), and Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches From an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq, (Haymarket Books, 2007). Jamail reported from occupied Iraq for nine months as well as from Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Turkey over the last five years.]

The Rag Blog

Battle of Algiers:
White vigilantes and the police in Katrina’s aftermath

By scott crow / The Rag Blog / September 8, 2010

“…within the war we are all waging with the forces of death, subtle and otherwise, conscious or not – I am not only a casualty, I am also a warrior.” –Audre Lorde

On the fifth anniversary of Katrina I want to share this narrative about anarchist organizing in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. This piece is made of stories about the early violence we came across in dealing with the white vigilantes and police in Algiers. It takes place upon my return to the area after a failed mission to find my friend Robert King of the Angola 3 right after the levees failed.

It also contains characters who had done something good only to reveal themselves as less than honorable, and somewhat harmful later. These stories take place just prior to organizing the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Ground_Collective Common Ground Collective. This is a rough draft excerpt from my forthcoming book: Black Flags and Windmills: Hope, Anarchy and the Common Ground Collective.

Five years later we have only scratched the surface of the atrocities of the vigilantes and the police. Many of us are still healing from those encounters. This story is just one of them.

On September 4th I was back home in Austin, resting uneasily from my draining trip. I received a call from my friend Malik Rahim who unknown to me had also remained in New Orleans. He on the other end of the crackling phone line saying we got racist white vigilantes driving around in pick up trucks terrorizing black people on the street. It’s very serious. We need some supplies and support…

He and his neighbors were being harassed and threatened by armed white men and the police. He had been interviewed for a piece that appeared in the San Francisco Bay View in California that explained the grim situation in detail. I had read it upon my brief return back to Austin. Now he was on the phone because he had heard I was just in NOLA looking for [former Black Panther and Angola 3 defendant] Robert King. I knew he was serious. He said he hoped I would come back to New Orleans to give them support and use it as another opportunity to search again for our friend King who was still missing.

Malik Rahim is a serious man with a broad smile and a big laugh. He was a former Black Panther, the Defense Minister for the New Orleans chapter. His days have been given to making the world a better place since that time. Throughout much of their lives, the histories of the men of the Angola 3 have been intertwined with that of Malik. He and King had not only been Panthers together, they had also been childhood friends in the Algiers neighborhood. I had visited him at his mom’s house a few times with King at the beginning of the century.

After living in Oakland, California for years, Malik had settled once again in Algiers, where through King he and I had become friends in 2001. It’s one of the oldest neighborhoods in New Orleans, situated across the Mississippi from the French Quarter.

Malik, too, had waited out the storm at his home with a woman named Sharon Johnson. While Katrina left massive damage in her wake it hadn’t flooded his neighborhood. Malik had no electricity and no water, but his phone still worked, and when he called I knew it was critical that we move quickly. No electricity, but a live phone. It reminded me of the days just earlier in the leaky vacant warehouse. What an odd coincidence I thought as we spoke.

With determination I decided I was going to go back there to deliver supplies and get to King. This was a chance to try again to find out what had really happened to my friend. The only thing I knew was that he had been trapped in his house, surrounded by dirty water for eight or nine days. I hoped he was still alive. Robert King had been in solitary confinement for 29 years in a 6’ x 9’ cell. I could not let him sit in the floodwaters any longer; I felt a duty to try and get to him.

On the way out of Austin again I stopped at a meeting called by local anarchists and activists who were organizing local aid for evacuees. I shared my stories, tears, fears, and the scary realities of what was happening on the ground. I then asked if anyone in the circled crowd of 50-60 people would come to New Orleans knowing what might transpire. Sadly, there weren’t any takers. Was I doing the right thing?

After my first trip to the Gulf I knew better what to bring on this mission: water, food, candles, matches, ammunition and guns; nothing more and nothing less. We were not prepared enough the first time — we were outgunned and under resourced — but not this time.

Fear of the unknown crawled under the surface of my skin, fear of what was about to happen as I headed back. I knew it was getting more desperate in the Gulf as time passed. Was a race war going to erupt? How many people had died needlessly already?

I had seen from the first trip the disregard and lack of empathy that some white rescuers had shown to desperate people. It had made me deeply angry but I had generally kept my mouth closed. I was torn between doing the work of simply helping people, and espousing my political ideals in the face of oppressive ignorance.

We hurried back to the scene of the floods, our truck speeding alone on the highway headed into an abyss. Few cars moved our way, apart from the occasional military vehicle. In the other direction the roadway was overflowing with evacuees — who began to look like refugees from another place.

People were piled into and on top of vehicles, carrying with them the remnants of their lives; others, stranded without cars, traveled on foot. Families, neighbors, and strangers trying to go somewhere — anywhere — that was away from the flooded areas. All the while the government repeated on the radio “order will be restored” when all anyone wanted to hear was that they would do what ever it took to get everyone to safety. It was a modern day exodus, caused by corruption and unresponsiveness that didn’t have to happen.

I asked myself “what the hell am I getting into?”

We changed course to go along the lower southwestern coastal route this time, traveling into what looked more and more like occupied war territory with military vehicles and personnel at every turn. I wondered if the doctored passes that we made would get us past the bureaucracy we knew was already rearing its head.

The military and the state only understood badges and uniforms. They wouldn’t let civilians help even though it was the right thing to do. Many of the young soldiers looked war-stressed and distant as we came up. They grilled us about why and where we were going. Half truths got us through; it was the only way.

After the last checkpoint we drove headlong onto the empty bridgeway; I knew we were “safe.” I let out a sigh of relief and continued to Malik’s. Ours was the only truck on the road, so we ignored the dead useless stop lights.

So much water so close to home

Algiers is situated in New Orleans, on the south and west sides of the Mississippi river in an area called, ironically, enough the “West Bank.” Like the West Bank halfway around the world in the Middle East, it too had an apartheid system — with two unequal populations. Before the storm, the West Bank was home to 70,000 people. It had a largely poor black population, and a small, wealthy white minority. Governments rendered the larger populace invisible in daily life; why would a storm make it any different?

Huge housing projects and surrounding neighborhoods were burned out or empty, first from neglect, and now the storm. There had been no social services or safety nets to speak of for decades. When the last clinic closed 10 years earlier it stayed that way, and it was the same with many shuttered schools.

It was surrounded by massive graying concrete levees on the Mississippi sides — almost like prison walls — which didn’t give way, despite nearly being crushed by a huge barge ship that Katrina had run aground within a few feet of the levee walls. This was why it hadn’t flooded, even though the river had swollen to the top of the levees.

After the storm, most residents were gone, with only about 3-4,000 remaining behind. Many were people who couldn’t leave. They had no money, transportation, or family support, or were elderly and in ill health. The storm had made an already terrible situation much worse for them.

The police command structures in the fourth district of Algiers were in shambles. There was scant military help on the ground on this side of the river. The city center — the money-making sections — were the most important to those in power. They had to get NOLA open for business and they neglected everything else.

There were dead bodies on the ground, and buildings smoldered in flames from unknown fires. Algiers, like the rest of New Orleans, was only a remnant of its former self. It was isolated geographically and psychologically from the other side of the river and the outside world.

What was called law enforcement at this stage was erratic, disorganized, and reactionary. It was made up of city, county, state, and some federal officers, but mostly it was Louisiana-based. If they had a plan — besides acting like thugs with badges — it hadn’t been revealed.

As in life before Katrina, laws were subjectively enforced. There were different standards for whites and everyone else, and threats from officers were all over the map in severity. They were accountable to no one but themselves. There were heavily fortified military zones and check points around the area but nothing inside. The residents were left to fend for themselves against the police.

Trapped in this situation, cut off from the rest of New Orleans and the world, Malik Rahim, Sharon Johnson, and a few nearby neighbors struggled to provide basic aid to each other with rudimentary food delivery of military MRE’s (Meals Ready to Eat) and water provided by a distant government military.

They had few resources: one busted-ass car with limited gas, including what they could find from abandoned cars. There was no Red Cross, no FEMA — nothing. To get anything you had to have a vehicle, and access to gas and money to buy it. Someone had to drive 20-30 miles to a remote military outpost, wait in a long line under armed security — and hope they would be let back into their community before curfew without running out of gas or being shot. The ordeal would take the whole day. That was all they had — there were no other options.

Tapestries of violence

This community had asked for support, so I returned to do what I could. It was what many of us on the outside with conscience would be doing in the weeks to come. But today that was an eternity from where I stood.

I arrived in New Orleans for the second time seven days after the levee failure on September 5th. Everyone pitched in to unload the supplies we had brought. Then the conversation turned to discussing the best way to search for King.

Before we did anything else, Malik took Brandon and me down the street to cover up the dead bullet-riddled body that lay near his house with a piece of sheet metal tin. The bloated and putrid body had been left there for days. We could smell it as we approached. Malik hoped someone would come and get it soon. But who was looking for this man, unknown to any of us, including the kids who found him?

His image haunts me among the string of deaths I experienced during my time there. He met an ignoble death without a chance. Left to decay on the sun-baked street, where others I had seen had been in the waters. I imagined they all deserved better. His death was a product of his skin color, economics, and chance.

We started establishing safety and security for ourselves and our immediate neighbors. Something else had happened in the short interim since our first arrival in New Orleans. While the state was in crisis, white vigilante militias had formed in Algiers Point and in the French Quarter district. These white vigilantes were little more than an organized mob. Signs on the backs of their trucks announced that it was their job to secure law and order in the absence of the police. The militia in Algiers seemed to be made up of drunken racist fools.

Algiers Point is a small, very wealthy, very white neighborhood that is about 10 blocks long in each direction. It is very separated from the Algiers neighborhood. Both sections are part of the broader Westbank, which is predominantly black working class, and poor.

Algiers Point was the only neighborhood on the West Bank where when traveling down the mostly abandoned and littered streets we saw hateful signs like “You loot, we’ll shoot” or “Your life ain’t worth what’s inside.” Signs proudly displayed on the houses that were still occupied, as well as the ones that were vacant and boarded up.

These kinds of signs were put up by the vigilante types who stayed. They believed it was their right to protect their private property and secure law and order. It was as if the dam of civil society that kept them from acting out their most racist tendencies had broken enough to allow their ugly hatred to emerge. They had another shot at the good old Klan days and they were going to take it.

This armed white militia rode around through largely low-income black communities and meted out their version of justice — intimidation — around Algiers and the West Bank. Their “defense,” as they called it, amounted to harassment of any unarmed black person on the street alone. With pride they acted and talked tough, never offering to help anyone who wasn’t white.

Their incendiary vigilante actions, thinly veiled under the guise of protecting themselves and their private property, was gasoline on the fire of the undeclared war on all who were desperate. I found myself asking what kind of people are more interested in their private property and security than in the well-being of another human?

I could understand the concept, given the right situation, of an armed group of people gathering to defend themselves in the absence of the state, and this disaster could be seen as such a situation. But ultimately in their racist actions and words they acted no better than Klansmen straight out of the old Deep South, as they paraded around in their trucks. Our conflicting ideas of what community self defense meant were on a collision course.

In those early days, the Algiers Point Militia openly threatened — and may have killed — desperate unarmed civilians. They foolishly bragged about it to a Danish media crew and to anyone else who would listen. Local representatives of the state, or what little remained of it, with their ingrained racist attitudes towards these marginalized communities they were supposed to protect, stood by and let these vigilantes do their thing.

There were bullet-riddled bodies of black men in the street, including one that we tried to get picked up for 15 days while it decomposed. Was it the vigilantes or was it the police or both? Those men’s bodies were on different streets — found separately — near nothing of value. Who killed these men? I know now — as I believed then — that the vigilantes or the police had killed them and gotten away with it.

In this country, on city streets, they killed people and were accountable to no one.

They regularly both drew their guns on, and shot at, numerous innocent people who happened to be unarmed, poor, black, and on foot, to scare and intimidate them. They threatened Malik—who they mockingly called the “Mayor of Algiers” — from the beginning, pointing guns as they would drive by, threatening to “get ’em.”

The police did nothing but close their eyes and continue their own harassment and shooting campaigns. The lines between law and thugs blurred, leaving people with nowhere to turn.

Undercurrents

From the moment I had set foot into the Algiers neighborhood and spoken with Malik and Sharon Johnson in more detail, I realized that this was going to be bigger, more difficult, and more dangerous than anyone thought. They were both exhausted from having to struggle for survival and remain vigilant about the militia and the police. There had been no help. People were left on their own.

Although Algiers had not flooded, it had been ravaged by the storm, and the long term neglect before that. The water was still high along the levees down the block rising at the edge of the dead end streets to the north and east sides of the banks; spirits were low in the streets below, but some desperate hope remained among those residents who had stayed. This had always been their home and they didn’t want to leave.

I had been here a few years before with Malik and King, who showed me their old stomping grounds as kids and young hustlers, before they became Black Panthers. Now, like the rest of city, trash and abandoned cars littered the empty streets and vacant lots. I asked myself — as I came in and passed the armed, sandbagged turrets at the intersections — what damage was new and what had been that way for a long time?

This place had been occupied by a police force before, but now the outskirts were occupied by an army that watched from bunkers without helping the people within. Military vehicles patrolled many of the city streets. It looked like low intensity warfare against a civilian population, not aid, eerily reminding me of what I had seen in Belfast and in East Berlin.

Immediately after delivering water and food, we met and talked with residents from the neighborhood who were scared and fed up with the white militia and the police. People, mostly men with little or no resources, both young and old, told us the stories of their live, and why they had stayed.

Some were forgotten vets from U.S. government wars, others had seen prison time for essentially being Black in Louisiana, while some were quiet and deeply religious men. But they all stayed because they had to. All of them had long family histories within these city blocks; many houses were multi-generational.

They cared about where they stayed and what happened to their neighbors. They worked together to make the most of a bad situation with no resources. They were men and women who had been reduced to statistics by the media, the government, and civil society; they were virtually invisible, characterized only as poor, black, unemployed — branded as hoodlums, drug addicts, or any other number of de-humanizing words — and now they were being called looters for managing to survive.

The small group talked about what we might do to defend ourselves should it become necessary. There were conflicting opinions on how the police might react, but we felt we had no other choice today. We inventoried what we had among us. Who was in, and who could have nothing to do with carrying arms.

Eventually — with Brandon Darby, Reggie B. and “Clarence” (not his real name) carrying civilian AK-47’s and a .45 caliber pistol, and me with a 9mm carbine rifle — we began our first rudimentary watches, standing or sitting on Malik’s porch and waiting, armed.

I wasn’t a white man taking it on himself to protect helpless locals. There was no machismo. I was anxious and honored to be amongst these people. To me this was solidarity with people whose lives were being threatened simply because of the color of their skin.

Being there was an expression of my anti-racist principles, my personal relationships, and my revolutionary beliefs that already existed before the storm. I had been asked for support and came, not blindly but as a matter of principle. I had come back ready to defend friends and strangers in the neighborhood, because they asked me to. They wouldn’t have, had it not been necessary. Civil society had given them no choices. It looked as if they were left to die. We had to at least give ourselves a fighting chance for survival.

I was a community organizer from another city who believed that the right to self-determination and self-defense are fundamental if we are going to have just communities. I accept the fact that dismantling coercive systems that hold people down will require various tools, and sometimes it might involve defending ourselves and our communities. Even if a violent world in the future is what we want to avoid. It is one of the hard and dirty realities that we must sometimes face while moving towards liberation.

Comrades in the Crescent City by the river asked — and I said yes. I was terrified but resolved in what I was doing. I had little previous experience in community self-defense. I had been tested on a much smaller scale — resisting neo-nazis and small time fascists, confronting police brutality in the streets, facing threats from private security for my environmental or animal rights work. But this was on a scale unlike anything I knew.

I had had a few years of firearms practice, but now I needed to transform a conceptual framework of armed self-defense into a reality with many unknowns. It was all to happen so quickly too, without much or time for processing or reflection. It was now time for action.

Friends of Durruti

The midday humidity hung heavy and the helicopters continued their constant noise in the overhead sky. A few neighbors remained gathered at Malik’s, a long narrow “shotgun” style house built in the thirties that sits high off the ground with a tall concrete porch behind a rusting chain link fence.

The white vigilantes came around the corner in their truck — and as before — slowed in front of the house on Atlantic Avenue, talking their racist trash and making threats. But this time it was different — when they came we were there, and nervously holding our ground — armed. There were four or five of us — most from the neighborhood — and we held the high ground.

We had more firepower, a better firing position and we were sober. Finally someone said for them to move on down the road. They would not be able to intimidate or threaten any more residents around here. In a flash this could turn bad in a hail of bullets. Time was standing still, each moment passing slowly, with my finger on the trigger of my rifle.

Earlier, we had all informally agreed that some of us would hold the space no matter what, although it wasn’t clear exactly what that meant. The previous days had been harrowing, but this was one of the most unnerving situations of my life.

After a few words were exchanged, the truck drove on without further incident. My heart and my head pounded with sickness and relief. I was shaking inside from fear and adrenaline. The incident seemed to have lasted forever, but in reality it probably happened over a few scant minutes. In opposing them we had made our presence known.

My head swirled with a tidal wave, with more questions than answers. How was the state going to react? How were we going to react? Was this the right thing to do? What if the situation continued to escalate? Would other movement groups support us? What if I had shot someone — or worse killed them? Would it have been worth it?

Some of these men in the truck were known to Malik and his neighbors. Had the veil of society stopped them from this kind of aggression in the past, and now they felt free to kill as they pleased? Even if they were ignorant they had no real power once they were challenged; this was immediately apparent. As they left there we felt guarded joy and relief — they were gone but would they stop their attacks on the neighborhoods?

More volunteers would sit on Malik’s porch over the days to come and begin rudimentary neighborhood patrols, to keep the militia threat, and to a lesser degree the police, at bay. These acts and our refusal to leave in the face of repression made us enemies in the eyes of law enforcement, and race traitors to the racist militias.

I came to help, not end up on a porch with guns facing down a truck full of armed men. I, like the others, was ready to die defending the community from attacks. It meant something to them — especially at that time — that white people would come to their aid and put their lives on the line with them — as more would do as the days progressed. It had a profound effect on me, that by circumstances and choices we

had taken the step to not lie down, but to rebel against giving up hope.

There was no Red Cross, there was no FEMA, there was no protection except what we all were willing to organize ourselves. Under siege we stayed and soon myths were born from words that would take on lives of their own, as many currents swirled and converged taking us in new directions.

Sometime later the presence of whites and blacks working together in solidarity defense of these communities against the racist militia would be cited by local residents as one of the acts that helped ease the tensions in a racially and economically divided area devastated before the levees ever broke.

From self defense we created the Common Ground Collective based on anarchist principles and practice. An organization always at odds with the state, that took direct action to meet the needs of communities left to die.

[scott crow is an anarchist community organizer and writer based in Austin, Texas. He was one of the founders of Common Ground Collective, an organization formed in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 to aid in the rebuilding of New Orleans.]

The Rag Blog

Battle of Algiers: white vigilantes and the police in Katrina’s aftermath

By scott crow / The Rag Blog / September 8, 2010

“…within the war we are all waging with the forces of death, subtle and otherwise, conscious or not – I am not only a casualty, I am also a warrior.” –Audre Lorde

On the fifth anniversary of Katrina I want to share this narrative about anarchist organizing in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. This piece is made of stories about the early violence we came across in dealing with the white vigilantes and police in Algiers. It takes place upon my return to the area after a failed mission to find my friend Robert King of the Angola 3 (see “It takes a spark” from INFOSHOP archives) right after the levees failed.

It also contains characters who had done something good only to reveal themselves as less than honorable, and somewhat harmful later. These stories take place just prior to organizing the Common Ground Collective. This is a rough draft excerpt from my forthcoming book: Black Flags and Windmills: Hope, Anarchy and the Common Ground Collective.

Five years later we have only scratched the surface of the atrocities of the vigilantes and the police. Many of us are still healing from those encounters. This story is just one of them

On September 4th I was back home in Austin, resting uneasily from my draining trip. I received a call from my friend Malik Rahim who unknown to me had also remained in New Orleans. He on the other end of the crackling phone line saying we got racist white vigilantes driving around in pick up trucks terrorizing black people on the street. It’s very serious. We need some supplies and support…

He and his neighbors were being harassed and threatened by armed white men and the police. He had been interviewed for a piece that appeared in the San Francisco Bay View in California that explained the grim situation in detail. I had read it upon my brief return back to Austin. Now he was on the phone because he had heard I was just in NOLA looking for Robert King. I knew he was serious. He said he hoped I would come back to New Orleans to give them support and use it as another opportunity to search again for our friend King who was still missing. cite?

Malik Rahim is a serious man with a broad smile and a big laugh. He was a former Black Panther, the Defense Minister for the New Orleans chapter. His days have been given to making the world a better place since that time. Throughout much of their lives, the histories of the men of the Angola 3 have been intertwined with that of Malik. He and King had not only been Panthers together, they had also been childhood friends in the Algiers neighborhood. I had visited him at his mom’s house a few times with King at the beginning of the century.

After living in Oakland, California for years, Malik had settled once again in Algiers, where through King he and I had become friends in 2001. It’s one of the oldest neighborhoods in New Orleans, situated across the Mississippi from the French Quarter.

Malik, too, had waited out the storm at his home with a woman named Sharon Johnson. While Katrina left massive damage in her wake it hadn’t flooded his neighborhood. Malik had no electricity and no water, but his phone still worked, and when he called I knew it was critical that we move quickly. No electricity, but a live phone. It reminded me of the days just earlier in the leaky vacant warehouse. What an odd coincidence I thought as we spoke.

With determination I decided I was going to go back there to deliver supplies and get to King. This was a chance to try again to find out what had really happened to my friend. The only thing I knew was that he had been trapped in his house, surrounded by dirty water for eight or nine days. I hoped he was still alive. Robert King had been in solitary confinement for 29 years in a 6’ x 9’ cell. I could not let him sit in the floodwaters any longer; I felt a duty to try and get to him.

On the way out of Austin again I stopped at a meeting called by local anarchists and activists who were organizing local aid for evacuees. I shared my stories, tears, fears, and the scary realities of what was happening on the ground. I then asked if anyone in the circled crowd of 50-60 people would come to New Orleans knowing what might transpire. Sadly, there weren’t any takers. Was I doing the right thing?

After my first trip to the Gulf I knew better what to bring on this mission: water, food, candles, matches, ammunition and guns; nothing more and nothing less. We were not prepared enough the first time — we were outgunned and under resourced — but not this time.

Fear of the unknown crawled under the surface of my skin, fear of what was about to happen as I headed back. I knew it was getting more desperate in the Gulf as time passed. Was a race war going to erupt? How many people had died needlessly already? I had seen from the first trip the disregard and lack of empathy that some white rescuers had shown to desperate people. It had made me deeply angry but I had often kept my mouth closed. I was torn between doing the work of simply helping people, and espousing my political ideals in the face of oppressive ignorance.

We hurried back to the scene of the floods, our truck speeding alone on the highway headed into an abyss. Few cars moved our way, apart from the occasional military vehicle. In the other direction the roadway was overflowing with evacuees — who began to look like refugees from another place. People were piled into and on top of vehicles, carrying with them the remnants of their lives; others, stranded without cars, traveled on foot.

Families, neighbors, and strangers trying to go somewhere — anywhere — that was away from the flooded areas. All the while the government repeated on the radio “order will be restored” when all anyone wanted to hear was that they would do what ever it took to get everyone to safety. It was a modern day exodus, caused by corruption and unresponsiveness that didn’t have to happen.

I asked myself “what the hell am I getting into?”

We changed course to go along the lower southwestern coastal route this time, traveling into what looked more and more like occupied war territory with military vehicles and personnel at every turn. I wondered if the doctored passes that we made would get us past the bureaucracy we knew was already rearing its head.

The military and the state only understood badges and uniforms. They wouldn’t let civilians help even though it was the right thing to do. Many of the young soldiers looked war-stressed and distant as we came up. They grilled us about why and where we were going. Half truths got us through; it was the only way.

After the last checkpoint we drove headlong onto the empty bridgeway; I knew we were “safe.” I let out a sigh of relief and continued to Malik’s. Ours was the only truck on the road, so we ignored the dead useless stop lights.

So much water so close to home

Algiers is situated in New Orleans, on the south and west sides of the Mississippi river in an area called, ironically, enough the “West Bank.” Like the West Bank halfway around the world in the Middle East,

it shared many similar apartheid systems between two unequal populations. Before the storm, the West Bank was home to 70,000 people. It had a largely poor black population that and a small, wealthy white minority. Governments rendered the larger populace invisible in daily life; why would a storm make it any different?

Huge housing projects and surrounding neighborhoods were burned out or empty, first from neglect, and now the storm. There had been no social services or safety nets to speak of for decades. When the last clinic closed 10 years earlier it stayed that way, and it was the same with many shuttered schools.

It was surrounded by massive graying concrete levees on the Mississippi sides — almost like prison walls — which didn’t give way, despite nearly being crushed by a huge barge ship that Katrina had run aground within a few feet of the levee walls. This was why it hadn’t flooded, even though the river had swollen to the top of the levees.

After the storm, most residents were gone, with only about 3-4,000 remaining behind. Many were people who couldn’t leave. They had no money, transportation or family support, or were elderly and in ill health. The storm had made an already terrible situation much worse for them.

The police command structures in the fourth district of Algiers were in shambles. There was scant military help on the ground on this side of the river. The city center — the money-making sections — were the most important to those in power. They had to get NOLA open for business and they neglected everything else.

There were dead bodies on the ground, and buildings smoldered in flames from unknown fires. Algiers, like the rest of New Orleans, was only a remnant of its former self. It was isolated geographically and psychologically from the other side of the river and the outside world.

What was called law enforcement at this stage was erratic, disorganized, and reactionary. It was made up of city, county, state, and some federal officers, but mostly it was-Louisiana based. If they had a plan — besides acting like thugs with badges — it hadn’t been revealed yet. As in everyday life, laws were subjectively enforced. There were different standards for whites and everyone else, and levels of threats from officers were all over the map in severity.

They were accountable to no one but themselves, providing law and order above support or help. There were heavily fortified military zones and check points around the area but nothing inside. The residents were left to fend for themselves against the police.

Trapped in this situation, cut off from the rest of New Orleans and the world, Malik Rahim, Sharon Johnson and a few nearby neighbors struggled to provide basic aid to each other with rudimentary food delivery of military MRE’s (Meals Ready to Eat) and water provided by a distant government military.

They had few resources: one busted-ass car with limited gas, including what they could find from abandoned cars. There was no Red Cross, no FEMA — nothing. To get anything you had to have a vehicle, and access to gas and money to buy it. Someone had to drive 20-30 miles to a remote military outpost, wait in a long line under armed security — and hope they would be let back into their community before curfew without running out of gas or being shot. The ordeal would take the whole day. That was all they had — there were no other options.

Tapestries of violence

This community had asked for support, so I returned to do what I could. It was what many of us on the outside with conscience would be doing in the weeks to come. But today that was an eternity from where I stood.

I arrived in New Orleans for the second time seven days after the levee failure on September 5th. Everyone pitched in to unload the supplies we had brought. Then the conversation turned to discussing the best way to search for King.

Before we did anything else, Malik took Brandon and me down the street to cover up the dead bullet-riddled body that lay near his house with a piece of sheet metal tin lying nearby. The bloated and putrid body had been left there for days. We could smell it as we approached. Malik hoped someone would come and get it soon. But who was looking for this man, unknown to any of us, including the kids who found him?

His image haunts me among the string of deaths I experienced during my time there. He met an ignoble death without a chance. Left to decay on the sun-baked street, where others I had seen had been in the waters. I imagined they all deserved more. His death was a product of his skin color, economics, and chance.

We started establishing safety and security for ourselves and our immediate neighbors. Something else had happened in the short interim since our first arrival in New Orleans. While the state was in crisis, white vigilante militias had formed in Algiers Point and in the French Quarter district. These white vigilantes were little more than an organized mob. Signs on the backs of their trucks announced that it was their job to secure law and order in the absence of the police. The militia in Algiers seemed to be made up of drunken racist fools.

Algiers Point is a small, very wealthy, very white neighborhood that is about 10 blocks long in each direction. It is very separated from the Algiers neighborhood. Both sections are part of the broader Westbank, which is predominantly black working class, and poor.

Algiers Point was the only neighborhood on the West Bank where when traveling down the mostly abandoned and littered streets we saw hateful signs like “You loot, we’ll shoot” or “Your life ain’t worth what’s inside.” Signs proudly displayed on the houses that were still occupied as well as the ones that were vacant and boarded up.

These kinds of signs, a rarity in most other places, were put up by the vigilante types who stayed. They believed it was their right to protect their private property and secure law and order. It was as if the dam of civil society that kept them from acting out their most racist tendencies had broken enough to allow their ugly hatred to emerge. They had another shot at the good old Klan days and they were going to take it.

This armed white militia rode around armed through largely low-income black communities and meted out their version of justice — intimidation — around Algiers and the West Bank. Their “defense,” as they called it, amounted to harassment of any unarmed black person on the street alone. With pride they acted and talked tough, never offering to help anyone who wasn’t white.

Their incendiary vigilante actions, thinly veiled under the guise of protecting themselves and their private property, was gasoline on the fire of the undeclared war on all who were desperate. I found myself asking what kind of people are more interested in their private property and security than in the well-being of another human?

I could understand the concept of an armed group of people gathering to defend themselves in the absence of the state given the right situation, and this disaster could be seen as such a situation. But ultimately in their racist actions and words they acted no better than Klansmen straight out of the old Deep South, as they paraded around in their trucks. Our conflicting ideas of what community self defense meant were on a collision course.

In those early days, the Algiers Point Militia openly threatened and — may have killed — desperate unarmed civilians. They foolishly bragged about it to a Danish media crew and to anyone who would listen. Local representatives of the state, or what little remained of it, with their ingrained racist attitudes towards these marginalized communities they were supposed to protect, stood by and let these vigilantes do their thing.

There were bullet-riddled bodies of black men in the street, including one that we tried to get picked up for 15 days while it decomposed. Was it the vigilantes or was it the police or both? Those men’s bodies were on different streets — found separately — near nothing of value. Who killed these men? I know now — as I believed then — that the vigilantes or the police had killed them and gotten away with it.

Every bullet that passed from their guns was a shot that faded any veneer of righteousness or justice leaving blood on the hands of the state’s failures. In this country, on city streets they killed people and were accountable to no one.

They regularly both drew their guns on, and shot at, numerous innocent people who happened to be unarmed, poor, black and on foot, to scare and intimidate them. They threatened Malik—who they mockingly called ‘the mayor of Algiers’– from the beginning, pointing guns as they would drive by, threatening to ‘get em’.

The white supremacist attitude and actions of this militia, and of many white rescuers and the state, added nothing but desperation, mistrust, and resentment from local residents, who were deciding to defend themselves. The police did nothing but close their eyes and continue their own harassment and shooting campaigns. The lines between law and thugs blurred within the vigilante and police camps, leaving people with nowhere to turn. The Klan would have been proud.

Undercurrents

From the moment I had set foot into the Algiers neighborhood and spoke with Malik and Sharon Johnson in more detail, I realized that this was going to be bigger, more difficult and more dangerous than anyone thought. They were both exhausted from having to struggle for survival and be vigilant about the militia and the police. There had been no help. People were left on their own. Although Algiers had not flooded, it had been ravaged by the storm, and the long term neglect before that. The water was still high along the levees down the block rising at the edge of the dead end streets to the north and eat sides of the banks almost like prison walls not to keep people in but to keep the waters of the Mississippi; spirits were low in the streets below, but some desperate hope was there with those residents who had stayed. This had always been their home and they didn’t want to leave.

I had been here a few years before with Malik and King who showed me their old stomping grounds as kids and young hustlers, before they became Black Panthers. Now, like the rest of city, trash and abandoned cars littered the empty streets and vacant lots. I ask myself as I came in and passed the armed, sandbagged turrets at the intersections. What damage was new and what had been that way for a long time? This place had been occupied by a police force before, but now the outskirts were occupied by an army who watched from bunkers without helping the people within. Military vehicles patrolled many of the city streets. It looked like low intensity warfare against a civilian population, not aid, eerily reminding me of the apartheid I had seen in Belfast and in East Berlin.

Immediately after delivering water and food, we met and talked with residents from the neighborhood who were scared and fed up with the white militia and the police. People, mostly men with little or no resources, both young and old, told us the many varied stories of their lives and why they had stayed. Some were forgotten vets from U.S. government wars, others had seen prison time for essentially being Black in Louisiana, while some were quiet and deeply religious men, but they all stayed because they had to. All of them had long family histories within their city blocks, many houses were intergenerational. They cared about where they stayed and what happened to their neighbors. They worked together to make the most of a bad situation with no resources. They were men and women who had been reduced to statistics by the media, the government, and civil society; characterized only as invisible, poor, black, unemployed, branded as hoodlums, drug addicts, or any other number of de-humanizing words and now they were being called looters for surviving.

The small group talked about what we might do to defend ourselves if it became necessary. There were conflicting opinions on how the police might react, but we felt we had no other choice today. We inventoried what we had between us. Who was in, and who could have nothing to do with carrying arms. Eventually Brandon Darby, Reggie B. and ‘Clarence’ (not his real name), carrying civilian AK-47’s, a .45 caliber pistol, and I carrying a 9mm carbine rifle began our first rudimentary watches, standing or sitting on Malik’s porch and waited–armed . I wasn’t a white man taking it on himself to protect helpless locals. There was no machismo, I was anxious and honored to be amongst some of these people. To me this was solidarity with people affected by the very real threats to their lives simply for the color of their skin.

Being there was an expression of my anti-racist principles, my personal relationships and my revolutionary beliefs before the storm. I had been asked for support and came, not blindly but in principle. I had come back ready to defend friends and strangers in the neighborhood who had asked. They wouldn’t have had it not been necessary. Civil society had given them no choices. It looked as if they were left to die. We had to at least give ourselves a fighting chance for survival. I was a community organizer from another city whose belief in the right to self determination and self defense as fundamentals in having just communities. I accept that dismantling any coercive systems that hold people down, takes various tools and sometimes it might involve defending ourselves and our communities. Even if a violent world in the future is what we want to avoid. It is one of the hard and dirty realities that we as movements must sometimes face while moving towards liberation.

Comrades in the Crescent City by the river asked–and I said yes. I was terrified and resolved in what I was doing. Before I arrived, my actions of defense had been mostly tested on much smaller scales resisting neo-nazis, small time fascists, confronting police brutality in the streets, or in facing threats from private security for my environmental or animal rights work, but this scale was unlike any reality I knew. I had a few years of firearms practice, but this was taking a conceptual framework of armed self defense into a reality with many unknowns. It was all to happen so quickly too, without much processing or time for reflection. It was time for action.

Friends of Durruti

The midday humidity hung heavy and the helicopters continued their constant noise in the overhead sky. A few neighbors remained gathered at Malik’s, a long narrow ‘shotgun’ style house built in the thirties that sits high off the ground with a tall concrete porch behind a rusting chain link fence. The white vigilantes came around the corner in their truck–and as before–slowed in front of the house on Atlantic Ave. talking their racist trash and making threats. But this time it was different–when they came we were there, and nervously held our ground–armed. There were four or five of us–most from the neighborhood– and we held the high ground. We had more firepower, a better firing position and we were sober. Finally someone said for them to move on down the road. They would not be able to intimidate or threaten any more residents ‘round here. In a flash this could turn bad in a hail of bullets. Time was standing still, each moment passing slowly, with my finger on the trigger of my rifle.

Earlier, we had all informally agreed that some of us would hold the space no matter what, although it wasn’t clear exactly what that meant. Many of the previous days had been harrowing, but this was one of the most unnerving situations of my life. After a few words were exchanged, the truck drove on without further incident. My heart and my head pounded with sickness and relief. I was shaking inside from fear and adrenaline. All those moments seemed to have lasted forever, but in reality it probably happened over a few scant minutes. In opposing them we had made our presence known. My head swirled with a tidal wave of more questions than answers. How was the state going to react? How were we going to react? Was this the right thing to do? What if the situation continued to escalate? Would other movements support us? What if I had shot someone–or worse killed them? Would it have been worth it? Some of these men in the truck were known to Malik and his neighbors. Had the veil of society stopped them from this in the past and now they were free to kill as they pleased? Even if they were ignorant they had no real power once they were challenged, which became apparent. As they left there was guarded joy and relief amongst us–they were gone but would they stop their attacks on the neighborhoods? More volunteers would sit on Malik’s porch over the days to come and begin rudimentary neighborhood patrols, to keep the militia threat, and to a lesser degree the police, at bay. These acts and our refusal to leave in the face of repression made us enemies in the eyes of law enforcement, and race traitors to the racist militias.

I came to help, not end up on a porch with guns facing down a truck full of armed men. I like the others were ready to die defending the communities from attacks. It meant something to them–especially at that time–that white people would come to their aid and put their lives on the line with them as more would do as the days progressed. It had a profound effect on me, that by circumstances and choices we had taken the step to not lie down, but to rebel against giving up hope.

There was no Red Cross, there was no FEMA, there was no protection except what we all were willing to organize ourselves. Under siege we stayed and soon myths were born from words that would take on lives of their own, as many currents swirled and converged taking us in new directions. Sometime later the presence of whites and blacks working together in solidarity defense of these communities against the racist militia would later be cited by local residents as one of the acts that helped ease the tensions in a racially and economically divided area devastated before the levees ever broke.

From self defense we created the Common Ground Collective based on anarchist principles and practice. An organization always at odds with the state, that took direct action to meet the needs of communities left to die.

Type rest of the post here

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