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Subject: CLNews: Curtis Muhammad on Tycoons, Trump and Gulf
Date: Tue, 4 Sep 2007 23:51:05 -0400
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From: "Prison Action Netwo" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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from Bother Jeb
Did you hear this today? I learned a lot, and it didn't really cheer me up
any, but this man has been where we are, and run miles around us, and he's
giving up. I won't. Not for a while at least. ]
Judith
The Privatization of New Orleans: Curtis Muhammad on Tycoons, Trump and
Gulf
Coast Oil
Tuesday, September 4th, 2007
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/09/04/145214
We speak with longtime activist, Curtis Muhammad, a member of the People's
Organizing Committee and a native of New Orleans. On the second anniversary
of Katrina, Muhammad wrote a farewell letter to the left and progressive
forces in the United States. He is leaving the country and heading south.
[includes rush transcript]
We turn to a conversation with Curtis Muhammad from the People's Organizing
Committee. Muhammad is a native of New Orleans and a longtime activist.
During the sixties, he was an organizer with the Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee, or SNCC, and co-founded Community Labor United.
After the Hurricane hit, he hit the road tracking the New Orleans refugees
into shelters from city to city. We first spoke to him in Jackson
Mississippi a few days after the flood.
On the second anniversary of Katrina, Curtis Muhammad wrote a farewell
letter to the left and progressive forces in the United States. He is
leaving the country and heading south. I visited him on his front porch in
New Orleans and asked him why.
Curtis Muhammad, a native of New Orleans and a longtime activist. He is a
member of People's Organizing Committee.
AMY GOODMAN: We turn now to a conversation with Curtis Muhammad from the
People's Organizing Committee. Curtis is a native of New Orleans and a
longtime activist. During the '60s, he was an organizer with SNCC, the
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and co-founder of Community
Labor
United.
On the second anniversary of Katrina, Curtis Muhammad wrote a farewell
letter to the left and progressive forces in the United States. He's
leaving
the country and heading south. I visited with him on his front porch in New
Orleans and asked him why.
CURTIS MUHAMMAD: Well, you know. You know, I come out of SNCC, Student
Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. I started organizing when I was eighteen
in Mississippi in 1961, and I lived a good ten years inside of movement
activity. And I realized some years ago that I was becoming a kind of a
dinosaur -- that is, people who are activists and organizers, who even have
knowledge of what a movement looked like. And most activists probably think
this is business as usual, that the kind of stuff we do, a demonstration
here, a conference, a workshop there, but have no real understanding of
what
a movement looked like, and how an enemy deals with a movement. So when
this
thing happened with Katrina, it was just so ugly, and it reminded me so
much
of the COINTELPRO era of the '60s, that we began to talk and try to show
young people what was going on.
But the trauma, the trauma of how the dollars are being spent, who gets the
dollars, who gets to talk to you, who gets to talk to the press, who
gets to
talk to the bosses in the power structures -- the people that I see
building
in the Ninth Ward, for an example, no government agencies, no
501(c)(3)s, no
NGOs, but just real basic grassroots people. So when they come together and
set up their little grassroots organizations, they say -- the foundations,
all of them say, "Who are your godfathers? We can't give you money
directly.
Poor people buy Cadillacs and dope. We can't give you money. Go get a
godfather. Go get a Jesse Jackson. Go get an Urban League. Go get an NAACP.
Go get an ACORN. Go get somebody that we know have handled dollars. But not
you." And so, we have hundreds of poor groups who are struggling with fists
and wrists, nothing, to build their communities, when nobody else want
to do
it, and everybody just living off of it. It's like free enterprise on poor
people, how you get a grant talking about how you and what you're going to
do for poor people, but yet nobody builds a house for poor people.
Nobody is
there teaching the folk how to get up off the ground and counseling and
working with the trauma and teaching them how to facilitate their meetings.
And so, it just hit me that we have this philosophical thing, our movement,
for years: let's organize the workers, let's organize the poor people,
let's
organize the grassroots. And here we, one time in our lives, have these
resources. 900 organizations on the ground in New Orleans, all of them got
grants. We knock doors every day. We have no competition talking to poor
people, none. And by that, they're talking to poor people. If you get them
in a meeting and they come long enough, they'll come to your meeting and
try
to take them if they look like they're good people that they can sit in a
circle when the press is present. But the idea of working with poor people
to empower, to teach them how to manage and control their own affairs,
it is
not happening. And everybody's present. All of us are present. It ain't
like
the left is overseas and just the liberals are here. Everybody's here. So
that's what's disturbing me. And I think that's more catastrophic than what
the government did.
But I also don't think that that's just us, that that's something ingrown
with us. I think it has an external agenda. I think that that work that our
government did in the '60s to destroy the organizations of that era, I
don't
think that work ever stopped. And I think we've got to discover how they
control us, how they keep us acting like reformists and liberals, how they
keep us from taking risks. I mean, it's amazing, with all this devastation
and the thousands of people they killed intentionally -- and we knew they
did it -- ain't nobody really mad, ain't nobody went crazy and blew up
something, set something on fire. I'm not advocating it, but it's just
ironic that it ain't happened. How is this possible? How is it possible
that
people who lead radical organizations, their greatest solution is how to
lobby the state or the Congress or the senator or the.?
So the story that this young man was telling you earlier, I watched these
grassroots people organize their demonstration, and I watched the national
organizations that know, and then I watched the government close down their
plant. And then a few days later I see them all -- government, police,
press, all the players -- come together and do a demonstration, and walk
away. What -- to an old veteran struggler, that tells me something.
Maybe it
doesn't speak to someone else who have never seen a movement. But that's
the
way the enemy operate. So they did a show, a dog and pony show, for some
reason, about public housing, but our people are still strewn in trailer
parks throughout the South who belong in those houses that are ready to be
occupied with just minimal cleanup. You've seen those houses. So that's
devastating to my spirit, that we can be so manipulated that we can't even
stand for justice with our own people, with the least of ours, we can talk
about it as if it's some kind of romantic conversation piece. So that's
what
it is.
AMY GOODMAN: After Katrina, after you went and followed where survivors
were
going, how they were being treated, you held a gathering at Southern
University in Baton Rouge. Can you talk about what you were trying to do in
the series of gatherings you had in different places, and then what
happened?
CURTIS MUHAMMAD: Well, we was trying to see if the progressive community
understood the historical moment, and they convinced us that they did. And
we talked to everybody. And so, we were guilty of inviting everybody to
come, too, because we were like, "This is genocide" -- and people say,
"Yeah, this is genocide" -- "and this is our opportunity to really organize
on behalf of the poor. Let's do it. Let's put the people in charge of their
own destiny, and let's take our gifts, skills and talents and resources and
throw them at their feet and give them everything, every kind of support we
can give them." And people said, "Let's do it."
And we started, and folks heard it, and we talked it nationally, and you
helped us talk it, and people threw money at us to the tune of almost $1.3
million in a matter of four or five months. And all those organizations who
had signed on to empower the poor, to organize the poor, to give them the
reins to the struggle started looking back at those little programs and
ideas they had in their files that had never worked in the last forty years
and decided, well, maybe it's better we try this again. And so, the poor
people had to take second seat to those people, and they still are.
AMY GOODMAN: So what do you think needs to be done? I know that your letter
was a goodbye letter, but what do you feel needs to be done? This is two
years since Hurricane Katrina. People are utterly devastated here.
CURTIS MUHAMMAD: You know, I hate to say this, but I really think that time
is going to have to heal us. The greatest -- the greatest periods of
history
in America -- I don't know if this is true of the world, but it's
definitely
true here -- is when everybody was in trouble, and somebody saved us .
When the Civil War hit, the whole country was just in shambles, and the
slave rebels, those who had been part of the rebel movement before the
Civil
War, stepped up and won the war for them in exchange for a Reconstruction
program, one of the most beautiful periods in history, the Reconstruction
period, thirteen years before they threw us back in slavery almost.
The next beautiful period is the Depression. Everybody got scared. The
stock
market crashed, and everybody saw a little poverty for a minute, and we
came
out of that wanting everybody to have jobs, everybody to have an education
and medical care and housing. That's where public housing comes from,
that's
where Social Security comes from, that's where the eight-hour day comes
from, that's where the hospitals, the Charity hospitals come from -- all
the
stuff we are dismantling now, because we have forgotten what it's like to
suffer as a mass.
So what we do in New Orleans, we isolated the poor of us, the darkest of
us,
to kill, to literally -- we abandoned them. We were ready to let them
die at
the hands of a hurricane that we knew and hoped was coming. This country
did
that with knowledge. With knowledge. That's how folks --
So what has to happen? Something has to happen to remind human beings that
we can all suffer, every last one of us -- they've seen this -- because
those have been the periods when we most did the best as human beings in
this country. So something catastrophic has to happen inside of America
that
affects the entire mass to wake up our humanity, to pay attention to those
who are the most oppressed.
AMY GOODMAN: And you don't think the attacks on 9/11, followed by Hurricane
Katrina, did that?
CURTIS MUHAMMAD: Wasn't enough. Too many rich people, too many people
making
money. The CEOs' $346 million-a-year salary, can you imagine some poo-poo
like that?
AMY GOODMAN: The relief groups, the groups that are on the ground that are
working, do you find fault with them?
CURTIS MUHAMMAD: It's not so much fault. It's lack of understanding. I
mean,
yeah, I mean, people need food, so you feed people. People need medical
care, so you give them medical care. But if you don't have a process of
teaching people to give skills and talents and resources of
self-governance,
of self-sustenance, it's really just a throwaway. And it's not that they
don't -- they just don't know better. They're good liberal people.
AMY GOODMAN: Veteran organizer Curtis Muhammad, speaking to him in New
Orleans. We'll come back to the conversation in a minute.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN: We return to Curtis Muhammad, veteran organizer from New
Orleans. I was sitting with him on his front porch, as he had just released
a letter to the left and progressive forces, a farewell letter to the
United
States.
CURTIS MUHAMMAD: The students who are the children of the men who demanded,
who stopped their movement to demand to go defeat Germany, black men,
demanded to be soldiers -- they were they who were first to find the ovens
and free Jews in Germany. Little known history, by the way. That's what we
wanted to do when we went to Germany. We came home, we did not want to live
on the cotton plantations. We migrated to take the jobs of the steel mills
and the auto plants in the North. But the schools we knew that would accept
our children were down South, and we sent them there to go to school. And
those children wanted hamburgers at night, and we started the sit-in
movement because we couldn't get them. Do you remember the story?
So we got this massive sit-in movement, just swelled all over the South.
And
one smart woman named Ella Baker called us together and said, "Hey
children,
y'all are doing good work, but you need to know that there's been a
movement
around before you started this hamburger business." We're doing freedom
rides, we're integrating buses. We were just raising much hell. We're in
the
evening news and the morning news, and we were totally convinced we were
the
movement.
And Ms. Baker said, "Do me a favor. What do you think the worst state in
the
whole union is?" Oh, we were smart: "Mississippi!" She said, "Why don't you
go down there and talk to some of the elders about what they want?" And a
few of us decided to do that. And the people that she sent us to talk to
gave us a list of towns to go to with a car and some gas money and told us
to tell the people our story, who we were, and ask them what would they
have
us do if we were going to work for freedom for them. And we did it and came
back to the people. Amsie Moore was one of the great men who sent us. He
said "No, I don't want to hear it today. Go tomorrow." They made us do it
for five days: knock on doors and ask people these four or five questions
after we introduced who we were. And the tally of our conversation with
people was, "Oh, it's nice that y'all would like to integrate those places
-- it's good -- and that you've got the freedom rides and all those marches
you had, but we want the right to vote." Wow!
So we go back to the organizational meeting and say, "Well, here's our
findings. People want us to work on the right to vote. Ain't but 600 voters
in the whole state of Mississippi, but they're the majority population. But
you have to learn how to read and write before you can vote, because you
have to pass a literacy test to vote. 65% of the people can't read and
write. So the first thing we've got to do is do literacy." The students
said, "No, we already got a movement. Let's just keep going, because, you
know, we have to stop what we're doing. We have to go be teaching people
how
to read and write before they can even try to vote, and then they might not
pass. It will be years before we get the right to vote." We said, "No, but
that's what the people said they want to do."
So we're having this big fight in the SNCC meeting, about to tear the
organization up, and we just got started. Ms. Baker calms us down and said,
"Look, why don't you do two things? Why don't you have a direct action arm
that do demonstrations and have a voter registration arm that works on
voter
registration?" We said, "Great!" 300 people in the room. Nine people agreed
to go to Mississippi to work on this out of 300 -- 1961. By '63, we were
growing. By '64, it was the most popular demand in the movement: the right
to vote -- one man, one vote. By '65, we had won the Voting Rights Act.
That
was a movement, but it was a consensus.
What was key was we discovered -- this is what Ms. Baker taught us. She
said
when -- an organizer do not design a program and sell it to the people. An
organizer talks to the people until they discover what the people already
agree to. She said the people have a consensus. They're just not aware of
it. The organizer's job is to find out what it is and then organize around
that consensus. And our consensus was the demand for the right to vote.
AMY GOODMAN: And what do you think the equivalent is here now in New
Orleans?
CURTIS MUHAMMAD: I think public school education is one. We proved that in
New Orleans before Katrina. I think public school education is a mass
consensus in America. And I think you can organize around it, and parents
and students would take risk on that question. I really do.
I also think that genocide is growing to be one, and I think that the
enslaved men and black male children between fourteen and twenty-five --
every mother have lost a child to the slave trade of the prison-industrial
complex, and I think that the movement ignores it, because they never saw
that black males were at the bottom of oppression, because our oppression
has been defined by other than our own community. But if you ask the
average
black mother, "My children don't get educated, and my boys are going to
jail."
AMY GOODMAN: What do you think of the charter schools and the firing of all
the teachers after the hurricane?
CURTIS MUHAMMAD: I think it's another form of slavery. It's another way to
isolate the very poor and the very dire, so that genocide is possible. I
think we are involved in a genocidal mode in this country for particularly
young black males right now, and I think very poor black folks are very
vulnerable to it. So I think this hurricane was an opportunity to do it.
They just missed it.
I think we need a whole re-education in this country. We didn't -- we
missed
it when we watched the automation of the cotton picker thirty or forty
years
ago. We missed the fact that three, four, five million people were still on
cotton plantations and tobacco plantations and sugarcane plantations who
had
been there since slavery, never reading, never writing, knowing nothing
about society, was dumped all at once, within one-and-a-half decades, into
the major cities of the country. Something like one-fifth of our population
had just come off the plantations in 1965, '70. And those are they who are
the super poor, who are uneducated, that this country do not want to invest
in educating. I mean, there's some stuff going on among us that we just
have
not taken the time to look at.
AMY GOODMAN: Housing, who do you believe in New Orleans is designing this
experiment on privatization? There's a T-shirt at the tribunal that says
something like "Don't believe the hype. It's not redevelopment" -- let's
see
if I can get it exactly. "It's not redevelopment that is slow, so-called,
here" -- let me get it exactly. "Don't believe the hype. Gulf Coast
recovery
is not 'slow.' It's a privatization scheme that takes away our homes,
schools, hospitals and human rights." Do you agree with that?
CURTIS MUHAMMAD: You know, this thing is so big, Amy, that I'm really
nervous about grabbing a little piece of something to agree or disagree
with, because it's such a massive, broad scheme. Since you do a lot of
investigative stuff, you need to look at the shipbuilding contracts and
where they are right now and look at the number of them that's coming to
shipyards along this coast of New Orleans and look at the new shipyards
being constructed. You need to look at the oil find in the Gulf, that was
equivalent to some of the biggest oil finds in the Middle East, and the
development that has happened since that find, the number of new rigs that
have been built right out on the Gulf Coast. And then we need to think
about
what is the plan for the mouth of the Mississippi moving up in this city
that is host to the --
You've got one TV. Why are you going to take two? Go, man. Tell her to stop
taking -- OK. Go ahead, man. Go ahead.
So we're wondering -- we're wondering what's planned, that -- I mean, we
watched them bring 30,000 H2 visas in to work in the shipping yard and in
the oil rigs, where they can pay people less than $20 an hour easily. They
can get down to $9, $8, and $10, and they used to have to pay big money for
that. We don't quite know what they're after, the casino population. People
have seen Trump down here trying to buy real estate, you know, the big
tycoons, you know? The gated community is growing faster and faster. We
don't know what they're up to. Somebody needs to look at this.
It's bigger than just -- I mean, you saw -- you looked at the public
housing. If we got a housing problem, they could have knocked that out in a
week if they wanted to, clean it up and wash a few things, put a few
windows
in, turn on the electricity and the water, get the people back in. They
could have done that for almost 8,000 families. That's a lot of people.
Times four, what's that? Twenty-four, five --
AMY GOODMAN: 32,000.
CURTIS MUHAMMAD: 32,000 people. That's a lot of people that they could have
just brought home. No, why not? You can't explain that by the side. That's
too big. That needs some research. You don't just say "screw you" to 32,000
people and just explain it all away, some kind of little old cute way.
AMY GOODMAN: What do you think of the candidates coming in on the
anniversary of Katrina? I think Barack Obama came, and Hillary Clinton. I
think John Edwards was here. Well, of course, President Bush. Alberto
Gonzales said it was one of the high points of his career, was New Orleans
and the Katrina time, because of the level of cooperation.
CURTIS MUHAMMAD: You know, I mean, poor people have all -- this is -- poor
people have always been the -- what's the word? -- the --
AMY GOODMAN: "Backdrop"?
CURTIS MUHAMMAD: Yeah, for political poo-poo. You know, they show up at our
picnics in an election year and talk about how they're going to do this for
us and put chickens in our pot and cars in our garages, and jobs, and they
always promise this poo-poo. But then, what's so ugly about this, what's so
ugly about New Orleans, I mean, we have recorded close to 6,000 people that
died. We think that was a real intentional attempt to wipe out 100,000
black
folks right here with Hurricane Katrina. And here's all these thousands of
people using these poor people to pick their stuff up and stand tall and
look like somebody, and nothing changes. You walked around this town. The
Ninth Ward ain't changed. Public housing ain't changed. Ain't nobody doing
nothing for no poor people.
The housing going on, so they took care to elect -- they're doing something
down there for, what, the musicians. You saw that. They're doing something
for the homeowners. You see that down there by the levee, what the town
community is called, back there behind the Ninth Ward, and they call it
Ninth Ward, what --
AMY GOODMAN: Holy Cross.
CURTIS MUHAMMAD: Holy Cross community, you see this kind of construction
going on. You see the Garden District downtown, the casinos, the hotels,
you
see it. It's not a secret. And so, people come here and say, "Oh, we're
going to do this, we're going to do" -- and then we still poor, we still
got
nothing, still got no help.
And you know what? When I travel around the country people think that folks
are doing stuff for poor people in New Orleans. That's what's so weird. I
was just in Europe. People in England said they were surprised that poor
people ain't got no houses. They thought -- I was down in Latin America.
People thought we weren't catching hell. In some kind of way they are able
to project this feeling that everything is OK in New Orleans. You know,
people like me get accused of being a conspiracy theorist or something, but
this is stuff people can see. They literally have no intentions, by
evidence, of bringing poor black folks back to this city.
AMY GOODMAN: What about Ray Nagin, the Mayor?
CURTIS MUHAMMAD: That's another long story. You've got to deal with the
fact
that we were the slaves of masters from England, from France, and from
Spanish, to understand that. You'd have to understand the apartheid of the
white light-skinned Creole, dark-skinned Creole and the black folk. The
reality of New Orleans is a cast that was institutionalized by the Spanish
that other people honored, and we still in it. Ray's heritage is the
islands, so his heritage is part of the Creole heritage. This town has
never
been politically run by anybody else other than Creoles. We don't like to
talk about it. We like to be cool.
But part of the problem here is we have a serious apartheid. I mean, local,
state and national governments were in an agreement to allow those 100,000
people to die, and Ray Nagin was the mayor. I don't back off of that.
And we
had 278 buses upstairs on the sixth floor of the damn city parking lot that
could have driven people out of this town. I'm sorry. Ray can't do that to
me. He was in agreement. And nowhere else in history has every arm of the
government agreed to let something like that happen. Even slavery,
everybody
wasn't in agreement. But on this one, the local, state and national
governments had agreement to just let them people sit here.
AMY GOODMAN: Do you think the whole thing can happen again?
CURTIS MUHAMMAD: Yes, I do. I really do. But they will be much better at
painting the picture. There won't be nobody like me looking at it, I bet
you. It can happen again.
AMY GOODMAN: Veteran organizer Curtis Muhammad in New Orleans. He is
leaving
the United States this week and heading south. He wrote a goodbye letter to
the people of the United States.
www.democracynow.org <http://www.democracynow.org>
_______________________________________________
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