by Glynn Wilson

Photo by Glynn Wilson

Malik Rahim of New Orleans, co-founder of Common Ground Relief for Hurricane Katrina victims, came to downtown Birmingham Saturday night in the lead up to the Martin Luther King holiday.

Malik Rahim of New Orleans, co-founder of Common Ground Relief for Hurricane Katrina victims, speaks slowly as he tells a story of chaos and fear to about 100 peace advocates Saturday night in downtown Birmingham.

He refused to evacuate and leave behind his Algiers neighborhood August 29, 2005, when Hurricane Katrina swirled up the Mississippi River and veered East of Lake Pontchartrain, sparing the city a direct hit from the Category 4 furry.

Across the Mississippi River from the French Quarter, Algiers was saved from the massive flooding that overtook much of the city the next morning, even though an ocean liner ran aground against the levees there - while reportedly, a barge crashed into the levees along the Lower Ninth Ward and contributed to the breach that turned much of the city back into a swamp.

For five and a half days, the scene in New Orleans was "complete madness and fear," which took hold not at first, he says, but "after people realized the city had no plan to help them, no plan to provide food or water or unpolluted clothes."

African-Americans who tried to escape across the bridge to Jefferson Parish, he pointed out, "were turned back at gunpoint."

In the depths of the horror that no one would be coming to save them, he and a group of friends and neighbors started rescuing people and providing basic health care. It was in a largely flooded city with no lights or phone service that they formed a new group called Common Ground Relief, in part because they realized the differences in race, class and party affiliation had played pivitol roles in dividing people and laying the disastrous groundwork for the problems they faced.

He says even the governor of Louisiana - a woman, a Cajun and a Democrat - issued a secret "shoot-to-kill" order in the dawn-to-dusk curfew. In a city patrolled by six law enforcement agencies and the National Guard, he says, it was an order that "applied only to blacks."

In that five and a half days, 19 people in Algeirs were killed, he insists, either by the police or vigilantes. "They laid where they died, some for 14 days. And our neighborhood was not flooded."

He urges people to get involved "in the cause of peace and justice" whether they are Jews or Muslims, black or white, or belong to the Green Party or the Republican Party.

If everyone doesn't come together on common ground as human beings, he says, "what happened in New Orleans will happen again. There are Katrinas waiting to happen all over this land."

The event was sponsored by the Birmingham Peace Project. Anne Braden was unable to make the event due to the flu. Malika Sanders of Selma was also a guest speaker at the event, dedicated to the memory of Joe Farmer, a homeless Vietnam veteran - of the Green Beret Special Forces - who was recently found dead outside the Church of the Reconciler, a multicultural, multiracial United Methodist congregation with a unique ministry for downtown Birmingham.