“Where There Is No Vision, The
People Perish”: A Comparative Perspective on Interfaith Responses to Hurricane
Katrina and Love Canal.
By Richard Newman
In
February 1979, several months after Love
Canal citizens mobilized for justice
and state and national officials declared a health emergency at the Niagara Falls
neighborhood infamously built around a leaching toxic waste dump, an ecumenical
official named Joann Brietsman challenged religious communities to enter the
struggle for environmental justice. “The
churches have to do something,” she declared after dealing with angry and
frightened citizens worried about their future in a hazardous landscape. Over a quarter century later and in a
completely different disaster context, Hurricane Katrina prompted a similar
declaration from a parishioner at St. Gabriel the Archangel
Church in New Orleans.
Local churches, Kermit Mogilles elegantly stated, must be “beacons of
hope to the revitalization of communities” throughout the Gulf Coast.[1]
As these
two quotes indicate, religion continues to frame citizens’ response to modern
American disasters. Yet while scholars have paid increasing attention to the
religious dimensions of environmental movements, few studies compare the
religious rhetoric and action associated with specific environmental disasters.[2]
This essay adopts a comparative framework to examine the interfaith responses
of New Orleans citizens following Hurricane
Katrina and Love Canal protesters in the 1970s and 1980s.
Although interfaith mobilization at these and other environmental disasters
revolves around common religious themes--for example, the need to remain
faithful and endure trying circumstances—I argue that the specific
circumstances of region, race, and class are also critical in determining the
type and meaning of religious rhetoric people of faith use to respond to
catastrophe. These factors in turn shape how a specific environmental disaster
becomes encoded in the religious landscape and memory of a particular
community.
Hurricane
Katrina and Love Canal offer an exceptional comparative
perspective on the broader theme of religious responses to disaster across both
time and space. Perhaps the signature
natural and “man-made” disasters, respectively, of the last fifty years, these
two events have become metaphors of environmental catastrophe. While various
media commentators have made Katrina the standard against which all other
hurricanes will be measured, reporters and cultural critics throughout North
America have long since used Love Canal as the face of hazardous waste and/or chemical
disaster--one reads constantly about the potential for “another Katrina” and
“another Love Canal.”[3]
And both disasters generated sustained media attention as well as political,
legal, and social scrutiny. There is also an increasing amount of literature
dedicated to religious outreach on both events.
More
importantly for the purposes of this essay, both of these disasters’ magnitude
challenged religious responders to re-examine the intersection of religious
reform, environmental awareness, and social justice. Katrina and Love Canal
have prompted a flurry of trenchant questions: How do people of faith respond
to a catastrophe that defies easy categorization? What roles do region, race, and class play in
framing the religious rhetoric people of faith utilize in the face of chaos and
uncertainty? How does faith inform and enable post-disaster social and
political mobilization? As the experiences of interfaith activists in both New Orleans and Niagara
Falls make clear, the answers to these questions vary
widely and require historical and cultural immersion in particular geographies
and histories of faith.
I.
Although
not a well-known part of the Love Canal story, interfaith response figured prominently in
local and national disaster relief efforts in this community of roughly one
thousand families situated in Niagara
Falls, N.Y. The story
began in the mid-1970s when a former hazardous waste dump in the center of what
was known as the “Love
Canal” neighborhood (so
named for an industrial developer’s abandoned nineteenth-century waterway)
began leaching toxic material into yards, sewer systems, and basements. The
size of ten contiguous football fields, the old Canal had been used by Hooker
Chemical Corporation to dispose of 100,000 barrels of chemical waste between
1942 and 1953. After that site had been filled and leased to the Niagara Falls
School Board, an elementary school was built on the dump. The school board then
leased property to developers and a neighborhood took shape: streets were
graded, sewers put in, playgrounds built. Once the neighborhood became
established, residents’ complaints about hazardous fumes, chemical leachate in
sump pumps, exposed and corroded barrels, and a maze of ailments from asthma to
miscarriages prompted investigation by state and federal officials. In August
1978, President Jimmy Carter issued an emergency declaration for Love Canal—the
first time any “man-made” disaster in American history acquired the
designation—and the New York State Health Department issued its first formal
evacuation notice to women and children living adjacent to the dump (impacting
residents on only two of the neighborhood's ten blocks). On May 21, 1980,
President Carter followed with a second emergency disaster declaration,
facilitating the removal of remaining citizens.
In
both the public mind, and in some scholarly accounts, the Love Canal
story begins and ends with efficient government action: citizens complained and
the government promptly responded.[4] The truth remains decidedly more complex. In
fact, without persistent grassroots organizing among Love Canal
families and activists, mass evacuation may never have occurred. It took two years of steady struggle, and
many confrontations with governing officials thereafter, to achieve any measure
of environmental justice.
Religious
activism and outreach formed a critical foundation for Love Canal
protesters. Although the most famous grassroots organization remains the Love
Canal Homeowners Association (formed in August of 1978 and headed by Lois
Gibbs), the Ecumenical Task Force of the Niagara Frontier (ETF) also became a
leading advocate of environmental justice. “The Ecumenical Task Force,” a
website dedicated to the group’s archives informs contemporary readers, “was
founded on March 13, 1979, by the interfaith community of Western New York in
response to the hazardous waste crisis of the Love Canal.
Its initial objectives were to provide direct aid to Love Canal
residents, to provide an advocacy voice for the religious community on behalf
of the residents, to inform religious communities of the issues, and to work
toward long-range solutions to the chemical waste problems locally and
throughout the country.”[5]
From its inception, the ETF worked with a variety of government officials,
legal allies, and environmentalists to obtain relief for Love Canal
residents. The group did not stop with local objectives. Using its multiyear
struggles at Love Canal as a guide, the ETF sought to raise awareness
about the dangers of hazardous waste disposal sites throughout North America and provide insight into the intersection
of faith and environmental politics.
At
the moment of its creation, the ETF assembled over two dozen religious leaders
from Niagara Falls and Western
New York—Baptists, Methodists, Catholics, Jews—to provide
theological guidance to reeling residents. A few ETF leaders had training in
community organization. The group's
Executive Director, Sister Margeen Hoffman, hailed from the Sisters of St.
Francis of Assisi
but had a master's degree in social planning and community organization.
(Sister Hoffman had already coordinated disaster relief efforts in other parts
of the country). Others had experience
in civil rights organizations, labor reform movements, and health and safety
initiatives.
What
differentiated ETF activism from other movements then taking shape at Love Canal?
Religious rhetoric for one thing, which ETF members consistently utilized to
demonstrate their commitment to the twin principles of faith and political
mobilization. No sooner had it been
formed than the ETF addressed the theological meaning of inadequate government
response to the Love
Canal crisis. “The earth
lies polluted under its inhabitants” (Isaiah 24:5) became the ETF’s mantra,
serving as an epigram for essays, position papers, and annual reports. With
this one phrase, the group used biblical language to underscore its belief that
those in power had not only violated their mandate to protect the environment
but failed to envision distressed citizens as members of the commonweal. “Where
There Is No Vision, The People Perish,” from Proverbs 29:18, similarly framed
the group’s first annual “Progress Report” in 1980. Pointing out that
government inaction had left hundreds of families stranded in Love Canal
homes nearly two years after the President's initial emergency declaration, it
presented a “theological rationale” for continued interfaith action. According
to this statement, the ETF would dedicate itself to three main goals, each
steeped in a biblical understanding of environmental “stewardship”: calling out
“inadequate government response to human needs” in disaster settings; seeking
guarantees of “the rights of each citizen” without regard to race, class or
creed; and, looking beyond Love Canal itself, providing “caring stewardship of
the earth” so that hazardous waste catastrophes would not occur again.[6]
To
realize its ambitious agenda, the ETF created several committees in the years
following its inception, including those dedicated to “direct aid,” “funding,”
“public policy” and “educational response.” To help ETF officers and Love Canal
citizens better understand the lab and medical science behind public health
testing, the group assembled a “Technical/Scientific advisory board” of over
twenty doctors, chemists and lab scientists. “But maybe our biggest
accomplishment,” Terri Mudd, a member of St. Peter's Roman Catholic Church in
nearby Lewiston, N.Y.,
and part of ETF's Executive Board, explained in a second “progress report,” “is
that the Love Canal situation is called a disaster by the world now.”[7]
Working sometimes alongside, sometimes in opposition to, the Love Canal
Homeowners Association, the ETF helped spread the word that local, state, and
federal governments were dragging their feet and that many Love Canal
residents lived in a disaster zone that made them susceptible to increased risk
of certain diseases and illnesses ranging from asthma to a variety of cancers.
The
emerging Love Canal
protest agenda flowed from the experiences of Love Canal
citizens themselves, some of whom joined the ETF. As they recounted in
interviews and testimony, they felt abandoned by the political system and
threatened by the very landscape they inhabited. Patricia Brown lived in Love Canal
for over a decade before being evacuated.
She returned to become a “volunteer advocate” before joining the ETF’s
executive board in 1981; she also served as “resource manager” thereafter,
distributing literature on Love Canal mobilization and speaking before
churches, schools and universities. Joann Hale had also lived in Love Canal
before becoming a member of the ETF executive board. Both Brown and Hale used membership in local
churches as a springboard into the Ecumenical Task Force. Others residents
worked closely with members of ETF, providing chilling descriptions of life in
a hazardous community. Anne Hillis, a stay-at-home mother who became one of the
most expressive Love
Canal writers, left
testimony, poetry, and a brief autobiography in ETF archives, hoping that these
documents would conjure images of a toxic life.
Hillis’
words made a palpable impression in Washington, where her testimony (like that
of several other Love Canal residents) before a Joint Senate Subcommittee on
environmental pollution and hazardous waste in March 1979 galvanized
congressional support for what became the federal Superfund law. After
describing a terrifying life in Love
Canal—with sickness and
poison pervading their every move and where she had already lost one son—Hillis
conveyed a heart-rending scene with her young son. Finding him awake and
crouched under a chair late one night, she asked him what was wrong. “I want to die, I don't want to live here
anymore—I know you will be sick again and I will be sick again!” How could
people be asked to live in such an environment, she asked?[8]
Senator Edmund Muskie of Maine
eventually cited Hillis’s testimony as evidence that American industry and
government must respond more swiftly to the challenges of hazardous waste
disposal.[9]
While
state and federal health data consistently indicated elevated risks for
residents living beyond the Canal proper—particularly expectant mothers,
children under two and those with certain illnesses—government officials would
not issue a final evacuation order. Thus, no matter how strenuously state
officials issued assurances that the leaking dump had been contained, Love Canal
protesters refused to leave the public stage. They held press conferences,
traveled to the state capital of Albany and the
federal capital of Washington,
and planned angry public marches. In a
celebrated incident, Love Canal citizens traveled to the Democratic national
convention in New York City
in 1980 to pressure Jimmy Carter into helping broker a buyout agreement for
local residents. “President Carter, hear
our plea. Set the Love Canal
people free!,” they shouted. “2-4-6-8-Help us now before it's too late!”[10]
The ETF indirectly testified to this heated environment by explicitly stating
that members must remain dedicated to nonviolent protest.
Residents’
ire was often directed at officials who minimized health threats, spoke in
arcane scientific language, or offered mixed messages about the hazardous
environment they lived in. “You tell us
the air tests clean,” Lois Gibbs remembered, “but you also tell us we can't eat
the vegetables [in our own gardens.]” If children get chemical burns from
playing on the grass, she continued, health officials replied, “have the
children walk on the sidewalk.” Rumors that state officials would not sanction
a buyout of contaminated homes for fear of setting a bad precedent produced
deeper anxieties among residents.[11]
ETF
officials provided spiritual outlets for frazzled residents as well as a sense
of higher direction and purpose. To some politicians and business leaders, Love Canal
protesters were viewed as self-interested.[12]
With home values plummeting around the former dump, critics sneered, greedy
citizens pushed for a government buyout. By joining the ETF, activists became linked
in a sacred chain of meaning sanctified by God.
As “creature[s] made in the image of God and charged with responsibility
for the protection of the earth,” the group reported in 1980, ETF activists
pledged “not to pollute its water,” “not to defile the land,” and on witnessing
“others corrupting our common environment,” to “challenge the injustice of such
cruel, irresponsible and arrogant behavior.”[13]
Using
theological insight to legitimize citizen protest helped satisfy another
concern facing Love
Canal residents: that the
lack of physical destruction neutralized their claim of living in a disaster
area. One of the key differences between Katrina and Love Canal
was the latter's lack of a visual narrative of catastrophe to contextualize
citizen mobilization. For all intents and appearances, the Love Canal
neighborhood seemed to be the epitome of American suburbia: neat homes built outside the urban core
filled tree-lined streets, with schools and park space close by. And with Niagara Falls just down the road, Love Canal
residents seemed to have the American dream. How could this be Ground Zero of a
leaking hazardous-waste dump? Indeed,
for over two decades a counter-narrative haunting Love Canal
residents has been the claim that there was no disaster at all; rather, this
line of thinking goes, hysterical residents created a media circus that
compelled wary government officials to act.[14]
For
obvious reasons, then, the ETF’s religious rhetoric sacralized residents’
protest. ETF literature pointed out that hazardous-waste dumps were a growing
part of the American landscape. Love
Canal was the proverbial canary in the coal mine—the first community to really
mobilize against the toxic threat hidden beneath them. This was the dark
underside of American industrial growth, they continued: a toxic tomb of nearly
22,000 tons of chemical waste, including 200 different compounds, from benzene
to Dioxin. This is what leached into residents’ sewer systems and basements and
caused all sorts of worry about the physical and psychological impact of living
near a previously unknown chemical dump.
The most recent research has borne out Love Canal
activists’ initial claims. In the Great Lakes region alone, there are nearly 500 hazardous
waste disposal sites, many of which are situated in economically struggling and
racially marginalized communities.[15]
The
Love Canal Jeremiad thus came to focus on a much broader problem in American
culture than the buyout of damaged homes in a single neighborhood. It became part and parcel of a growing
environmental justice movement that focused on the disproportionate
hazardous-waste burden facing marginalized communities in America. While
hoping to build on the consciousness-raising efforts of American
environmentalism writ large, environmental justice advocates also sought to
transcend some of the limitations of the broader movement. Love Canal
protesters discovered that the national headquarters of some major
environmental groups, composed of scientists, philosophers and academicians,
were initially unhelpful to local residents. Love Canal,
they argued, was not as marketable as saving the whales! Environmental justice reformers spoke of a
more gritty movement based in former mining towns, urban-industrial centers,
and among communities of color. In all these places, environmental justice
advocates claimed, people had--or should have--the same environmental rights as
every other American: the right to clean air, clean water, and clean living
space, as well as the right to know what chemical companies and other
industries incinerated and land filled in their neighborhoods.
The
ETF’s creation and theological grounding speak to the relevance of other
historical factors too, particularly religious reform traditions in Western New York. A seedbed of religious upheaval since
the Second Great Awakening in the early nineteenth century, western New York had been known
as the “burned-over-district” for its pervasive revivals. Charles Grandison
Finney, Theodore Dwight Weld, Lyman Beecher and other famous northern
evangelicals became familiar names to generations of believers.[16]
(By the twentieth century, waves of Catholic immigrants had made Buffalo and Niagara
Falls a center of Catholic reform too.) Melding
religiosity with concepts of civic virtue, nineteenth-century evangelical
reformers wanted to restore order and justice—to prevent the “cosmos from
crumbling,” in historian Robert Abzug's marvelous phrase. According to Abzug,
the reform waves emanating from northeastern revival culture were “at odds with
the world in its ‘natural’ state and [reformers remained] bent upon sacralizing
all the world in accordance with their vision of God's plan.” This mentalité
flowed from a belief that “the most personal and most cosmic issues [were]
interconnected.”[17]
The
reform culture that flowered during the nineteenth-century was a bold attempt
at sacralizing the social and political world—not creating a theocracy, but
rather imbuing American reform with a sacred purpose. As the forces of market
culture and democratic politics collided, religious reformers extended their
critique of politics and social relations, hoping to perfect the human
condition as never before. The Lord had
given his message to the faithful, Northern revivalists believed, and it was
their job to reinvigorate the gospel of freedom and justice for all.
Abolitionism, temperance, peace initiatives—all would stem from this same
post-millennialist philosophy.
The
concept of kairos is critical both
understanding this historical backdrop and the ETF's revelatory frame of
mind. Initially defined by theologian
Paul Tillich as a historical period when the Kingdom of God
intervenes in human affairs, a kairos
also marks a moment in time when religious reformers make “an eschatological
leap . . . [over] the limits of previous political, racial, and economic
history,” according to both David Brion Davis and Robert Abzug. The constantly
changing conditions of modernity often impel religious activists to look at
their world anew—to become seekers, reformers, and healers who bring the Kingdom of God closer to the secular realm. In the nineteenth century, a succession of
events prompted religious insight and mobilization: the advent of the Erie Canal, early industrialization, religious pluralism
and immigration.[18]
For
Love Canal's faithful, the 1970s and 1980s
represent a potential break from history and therefore a moment of revelation—a
kairos. De-industrialization had already stripped
Western New York of thousands of blue-collar jobs; Cold War politics and domestic
gender roles remained unstable in the post-Vietnam era (suicide took the lives
of several men in Love Canal who believed that they did not adequately provide
for their family); and environmental pollution emerged as a global concern in
the wake of Love Canal, Three Mile Island, and the Union Carbide chemical
disaster in Bopal, India. Anne Hillis spoke to the relevance of this last point
in her March 1979 congressional speech, noting that “the day we testified was
the same day the 3 mile Island [sic] nuclear
disaster occurred.”As their own story made headlines, residents like Hillis
began corresponding with citizens in other parts of the country who faced toxic
threats. In no small sense, they felt as
Hillis did, that they were living in an apocryphal time. Rachel Carson's Silent Spring offered the keynote to
this new era. “In the future,” Hillis
wrote in an unpublished autobiography she began keeping to deal with her
anxieties, “will we the people of the Love Canal
. . . know what a silent spring sounds like?
God help us.”[19]
Like
other Love Canal protesters, the ETF hoped that
citizen mobilization would spur a national environmental movement centered on
the hazards of chemical waste disposal. “Let us go forward on the road which
has brought us where we are today,” the group reported only a year after
forming, using language from Acts 4:20.
In fact, the enduring lesson of grassroots mobilization by religious
itinerants at Love
Canal was that local
people could reclaim a political voice through protest. “We cannot possibly
give up speaking of the things we have seen and heard,” it declared in 1981,
after the state and federal governments agreed to purchase all contaminated
homes. “The government did take action”—but only because of the “combined force
from all of us.”
In
this sense, one enduring narrative of Love Canal
protest would not be siege but positivism: a belief that grassroots campaigning
could challenge government and reclaim citizens’ rights. This, a
post-millennial philosophy, asserted that the faithful must spread the gospel
of righteousness left by the Lord. Like previous generations of northern
reformers, western New York’s
faithful believed not only that a new day was coming but that they would create
it. Indeed, this was the only way the faithful could avert condemnation on
final judgment day.
Turning
plowshares into political swords became a metaphor of ETF activity well after
the majority of Love
Canal citizens were
finally evacuated during the early 1980s. The ETF remained operational into the
following decade precisely because it offered a voice still lacking in public
discourse. “We believe that the religious community has a unique role to play
and hazardous waste problem, its causes and resolutions,” the group declared in
a 1987 booklet entitled “Earthcare:
Lessons From Love Canal, A
Resource Guide and Response.” “Biblical wisdom, born of centuries of experience
in a clarification of values, is the gift of the church which will speak
truth.” And now the ETF would respond to what it termed “other ‘Love Canals’”
around the country. Some group officers
referred to this mission as part of a “maturity” among evangelical
environmentalists. No longer concerned
simply with protest but with spreading the gospel of environmental stewardship
to citizens, politicians and business leaders, ETF officials became
environmental correspondents with activists around the country and around the
world; they spoke in high school classrooms and universities; and they
maintained a watchful eye over Love Canal.[20]
This
last point is critical. ETF officials registered concern about what would
happen to Love Canal far into the future, both as a
potential living space and a monument to hazardous waste disposal gone wrong.
As remediation of the former dump proceeded during the 1980s, state officials
discussed the possibility of re-habiting portions of the evacuated
neighborhood. Local and state leaders’ hopes of returning at least some portion
of the area to the tax rolls and proving that Love Canal was only a temporary
blip in industrial recovery framed governmental discussions of the area’s
future. Former residents joined with allies in the environmental community to
challenge once again this framing narrative. ETF officers vigorously opposed Love Canal
rehabitation. In their eyes, Love Canal
should stand in public consciousness as a lesson. “I pray that we will carry [the ETF's]
message to many more states and governors and legislators and to the people . .
. who suffer the most from hazardous-waste in our communities.” Like the Sermon
on the Mount, “Love
Canal” must symbolize
something transcendent to anyone who heard the very words.
II.
While
Hurricane Katrina activists share many of these theological concerns, they come
to them through a different hermeneutic lens. Linking Katrina experiences to
black struggles for justice throughout American history, they speak of
communalism, surviving in the face of long-standing governmental neglect, and
protesting against racial injustice at both the local and national levels.
“Theology,” James Cone famously argued in his 1982 memoir My Soul Looks Back, “cannot be separated from the community which
it represents. It assumes that truth has
been given to the community at the moment of its birth. Its task is to analyze the implications of
that truth in order to make sure that the community remains committed to that
which defines its existence.”[21]
The
truth defining the lives of post-Katrina residents still revolves around
massive physical destruction, economic displacement, and physical separation of
families, churches and entire sectors of the local population. Ironically, even as Katrina's visual
narrative of catastrophe remains more striking than that of Love Canal
(more deaths, more property loss), the hurricane’s comprehensive
destructiveness may have dulled the impact of the disaster on marginalized
communities. The New Orleans
death toll from Katrina—now figured at roughly 1800 persons, down from an
initial estimate of several thousand—includes a disproportionate number of
African-Americans in the urban core, among them people who were “forgotten”
long before the storm: the ill, the elderly, those without personal
transportation or the money to leave for extended periods of time. In addition, the staggering number of
displaced citizens remains hard to comprehend beyond the Gulf Coast.
The 1.2 million evacuees from Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama
constitute the equivalent of a mid-sized metropolitan area, a reality that many
Americans simply find impossible to fathom in the world's largest democracy and
economy. Add to these inducements to collective amnesia the apathy and outright
neglect of government (something Love Canal citizens knew all too well) and the point
becomes clear: Katrina protesters shared with Love Canal’s
activist community a sense that they had to organize both to protect their
interests and publicize their ongoing struggle for justice.
A
multitude of churches, community groups and activist associations have
contributed to post-Katrina recovery efforts and citizen mobilization. Even
more so than at Love
Canal, the lines between
these groups are porous; faithful and secular activists co-mingle in various
organizations. For example, the Holy Cross Neighborhood Association (HCNA),
originally formed in 1981 in the Lower Ninth Ward, but reinvigorated by the
storm, is based at the Greater Little Zion Missionary Baptist Church (GLMC). It
produces a monthly newsletter in both print and electronic formats and
organizes communitywide restoration efforts. One of the group's signal
initiatives, called “Rebuilding Together,” funds home maintenance and repair
projects for low income and elderly residents who might otherwise have to leave
the already depleted area. “Together,”
the HCNA’s August 2007 newsletter declares, “we can save the Nine.”[22]
Whatever the specific affiliations of its
members—whether secular or sacred—the HCNA’s “Rebuilding Together” program
offers a glimpse of a much broader phenomenon among post-Katrina activists: the
theologically inspired struggle to keep the black community intact. As the
group's literature phrases it, “Rebuilding Together” is the grassroots response
to “The Flood.” While this word refers specifically to the massive wall of
water accompanying the Katrina storm surge, it also signifies a near-mythic
event that places the black community in the realm of sacred history. No
illusory refuge from troubles in the secular realm, this sacred history
connects marginalized people to one another through time and space. It also emphasizes the unique role that black
people are called to play in their own liberation—a prophetic role assigned to
them by a just God. As long as they remain faithful to the Lord and connected
to one another in the face the oppression, African-Americans would redeem
themselves and the world around them.
According
to literary scholar John Ernest, eighteenth-century black leaders originally
conceived of sacred history—the realm of absolute justice and divine
prophecy—as “a dynamic and complex presence in the [secular] world.” Black protesters and theologians “spoke
powerfully . . . of moral violations and of the abandonment of the principles
that dominated white public discourse.”[23]
The realm of sacred history, in other words, focused the black community's
attention on its historical self-consciousness and historic struggle for
justice. When the HCNA, like other organizations, declares that it is “time to
honor our dead” killed in the storm and “time to fight for the return of all,”
it draws on these elements of sacred history to mobilize the black community.[24]
Indeed,
as the language of the Holy Cross Neighborhood Association indicates, sacred
and secular histories operate together in post-Katrina reform efforts. One of
the icons of Katrina protest further emphasizes the relevance of sacred history
among the faithful: the “all-knowing, all seeing third eye of God.” The image—a
piercing eye gazing out of a sacred triangle—first appeared on a stained-glass
window at St. Augustine's
Catholic Church, a black parish in New Orleans Treme district. It has since
been used by one of the most important black-led ecumenical groups in the
country, the Samuel DeWitt Proctor Conference (or SDPC, which, while based in Chicago, has been
galvanized by Katrina). According to the SDPC, which has organized
commemorations of Katrina victims and mobilized clergy in New Orleans to press
local, state and national leaders for better aid programs, the eye symbolizes
humans’ “capacity to look beyond our earthly boundaries and ‘see’ the realities
of the world.”[25] With similar thoughts in mind, many Katrina
activists view themselves as keepers of a moral vision of the universe. “You
Shall Know the Truth, and the Truth Shall Make You Free,” St. Augustine Church informs visitors, referring to John
8:32. Those powerful Gulf coast hurricanes of August 2005 revivified
black sacred history, with threatened residents deploying it to inspire new
social justice initiatives for marginalized communities.
The
saliency of sacred history brings us back to James Cone’s understanding of the
dialectic between community self-consciousness and the development of a broader
theology—in this case, the existence of a “black theology” that could be called
in to being during disaster situations such as Katrina. Whether operating
within the framework of local churches and ecumenical organizations, or
speaking more broadly on behalf of the thousands of African-Americans displaced
by Katrina, New Orleans’ grassroots activists have consistently invoked
elements of a black theology that can be traced all the way back to the
beginnings of Afro-Christianity in the Atlantic world. Even handwritten signs
in the Lower Ninth Ward declaring that “we're keeping our neighborhood” (in the
face of urban developers who have marginalized the voices of local citizens)
reconnect the black community to its sacred struggles for justice. For generations of black leaders, families,
and extended kinship networks, the first step on the road to carrying out
African-Americans’ divinely inspired mission has been to cohere in the face of
oppressive forces. “From the beginning of African slavery in mainland North America,” scholars Ira Berlin and Leslie Rowland
assert at the outset of Families and
Freedom, their invaluable documentary history of black kinship rituals and
networks in the Civil War era, “Black people understood their society in the
idiom of kinship.” For communalism offered the most reliable protection against
racial violence and injustice. Right up until the twentieth century, Berlin and Rowland
conclude in words that could be cut and pasted into the age of Katrina,
“familial and communal relations were one.”[26]
In
the Deep South, African-Americans’ emphasis on
solidarity and communalism remains particularly resonant. Perhaps more than any
single institution, the black church has symbolized black solidarity. According
to historian Donald Devore, post-Katrina parishioners “understand the
importance of religiously informed group solidarity in preventing the kind of
psychological fragmentation that leads to defeat and despair.” Rebuilding
churches was not simply a way to fill the void left by governmental apathy but
a sacred endeavor to restore the soul of black community life. “Few
individuals,” Devore has insightfully concluded, want “to imagine a
post-Katrina ‘new’ New Orleans
without the churches.”[27]
Even in
northern communities with traditionally small black population bases,
communalism has historically been a vital part of black freedom movements. Free
black church founders Richard Allen and Absalom Jones offered one of the
earliest and most powerful articulations of communalism’s sacred nature in
their 1794 pamphlet, “A Narrative of the Black People during the Late Awful
Calamity in Philadelphia.”
The first copyrighted document by African-Americans in the new nation, the
pamphlet challenged racial injustice flowing from Philadelphia's terrible yellow fever epidemic
during the previous year. The calamity claimed the lives of nearly 5000
Philadelphians, including as many as 400 people of color—roughly 10% of the
population bases of white and black citizens, respectively. Because Philadelphia
was the temporary home of the federal government at the time, the yellow fever
crisis also became a national cause célèbre. Would the national capital
crumble?[28]
African-Americans
were mistakenly thought to be immune from the fever (which merely took longer
to reach the scattered black population). Abolitionist physician Dr. Benjamin
Rush believed that God had visited fever upon whites so that blacks could
render aid and display their readiness for national emancipation. For free
blacks like Allen and Jones, the yellow fever epidemic offered a more practical
opportunity to illustrate their understanding of public virtue, deemed an
essential quality of American citizenship in the late eighteenth century.
Through the efforts of dozens of Afro-Philadelphians, black citizens mobilized
and helped save the city.
Glad
tidings did not last long, however, as a racial backlash soon pierced the black
community. African-Americans were
accused of theft, graft, and usury, and generally labeled as plunderers who
took advantage of civic illness to “pilfer” white homes and businesses. Allen
and Jones, former slaves who had already exited a segregationist white church to
create independent black churches, were outraged, even though their actions as
black elites had been celebrated. When they issued their pamphlet decrying
racial stereotyping, Allen and Jones defended the black community as a whole,
not individual leaders or families. “In consequence of a partial representation
of the conduct of the people who were employed to nurse the sick in the
calamitous state of the city of Philadelphia,” they wrote in the baroque style
of the times, “we were solicited by a number of those [black citizens] who felt
themselves injured thereby, and by the advice of several respectable citizens,
to step forward and declare facts as they really were.” These “facts” included
black civic virtue, black economic sacrifice, and a rising black death toll
that still did not rate much mention in public papers. Allen extended his
critique of white injustice by affixing an antislavery appeal to the pamphlet,
for he believed that bondage was the root cause of racial stereotyping. In
doing this, the black preacher likened African-Americans’ position to that of
the ancient Israelites trapped under Egyptian masters. Allen reminded white citizens that a just God
ultimately liberated the enslaved. That same God would render divine judgment
on recalcitrant American Masters who did not embrace black freedom. “If you
love your country, if you love the God of love,” he proclaimed, “clear your
hands of slaves burden not your country with them.”[29]
By
responding to white injustice via the power of communalism and biblical
prophecy, Allen, Jones and a host of other black commentators helped redefine
African-Americans’ place in national culture.
Far from marginal actors, they had been charged by God to speak truth to
power. This vision allowed black people to see themselves as redeeming
agents—the moral conscience of the nation. It also called into being standards
of eternal justice that allowed black thinkers and activists to transcend the
limits of secular racism. Without early black reformers’ sacredly inspired activism,
the better known radical abolitionism of William Lloyd Garrison may not have
come into being in the years preceding the Civil War.
With black protest foundations steeped in
sacred history, it is no wonder that the biblical story of Exodus has figured
so prominently in African-American struggles for justice from Allen's time
right up to Katrina (a recent African-American history text is subtitled, “From
Timbuktu to Katrina”).[30]
Following the Civil War, African-Americans used Exodus phraseology to signify
the meaning of liberation and the ongoing struggle to reconnect with family
members scattered by slavery. Martin Luther King saw Exodus typology at work
again in the modern civil rights movement. For King, Exodus “explained . . .
nothing less than God's repeating liberatory act, an archetypal event spiraling
through history.”[31]
The key for black activists was to recognize moments in time when sacred and
secular history—God's eternal vision and real-time events—converged, allowing
reformers to push the struggle for justice forward. Put another way, the sacred story of Exodus
has served for African-descended people as a kairos: a pathway to salvation.
Looking at the rhetoric
of many post-Katrina reformers, it is clear that Exodus typology has once again
ascended in public discourse. Survivors have seen families, neighborhoods, and
regions fragment into waves of homeless citizens, displaced persons, and
disconnected souls. Given the etymology
of Exodus in the Greek for “going
out,” it is little wonder that survivors who have had to travel to Texas, Colorado, Georgia and
beyond to find temporary housing and work have envisioned themselves as part of
a “Katrina Exodus” and “Katrina diaspora.” As one might suspect, religious
leaders have alluded to the appropriateness of the analogy. The Rev. Lance Eden, Pastor at the First Street
United Methodist
Church in New Orleans, has stated that post-Katrina
reformers must create a communication “network” among “persons in the
diaspora.” In New Orleans
alone, he continues, there are roughly “17,000 homeless [persons]” who need
shelter, food and information about their future in the Crescent city.[32]
Only by keeping the diasporic community together could Katrina reformers build
and maintain a social movement capable of reaching the promised land.
But
the story of Exodus registers in the minds of Katrina's faithful community
because it also conjures a powerful sense of political and social
estrangement—the discovery, in a legendary phrase from Exodus itself, that one
was “a stranger in a strange land” (Exodus 2: 21-22). Katrina survivors and
their allies were outraged when media commentators described those evacuated
from flooded neighborhoods as “refugees” and not citizens. “’Refugee’ implies
that the displaced storm victims, many of whom have been black, are
second-class citizens—or not even Americans,” MSNBC reported in September 2005.[33]
Was this not like ancient Israelites’ discovery that they had been banished by
the Egyptian pharaoh?
Exodus
has thus shaped the very style of post-Katrina political appeals. When the SDPC
declared that “we are demanding an audience with President George Bush and
White House officials because they hold the lives of children, women and men in
[their] hands,” they recalled God’s injunction to Moses: “Then the LORD said
unto Moses, Go in unto Pharaoh, and tell him, ‘Thus saith the LORD God of the
Hebrews, Let my people go, that they may serve me.” (Exodus 9:1). Versions of
this confrontational scene—of going to people in power to demand restitution—frequently
recur in descriptions of post-Katrina activism.
“We are very concerned about how long it is taking our governmental
leaders to respond to the needs of the people,” the Rev. Tom Watson, a member
of both the SDPC and the Greater New Orleans Clergy for Restorative Justice
(GNOCRJ), stated. “That is why we went
to Washington[,] to tell members of the U.S.
Congress we need their help . . . to ensure the restoration of all communities
in New Orleans.”[34]
Of
course, Exodus typology merely points the faithful towards the promised land;
it does not set a timetable for achieving justice. That makes communal
cohesiveness and collective struggle a constant concern. Katrina activists
recognize the fact that they live not in the fulfillment of divine prophecy but
somewhere in the middle of that sacred journey between slavery and ultimate
freedom. “Two years later and still fighting,” the Holy Cross Neighborhood
Association announced in August 2007, using language that characterized a whole
range of ongoing protest movement at the grassroots level.[35]
As
with Love Canal activists, ecumenical
organizations have become conduits of political activism. Both the SDPC and the
GNOCRJ have galvanized religious activists, locally as well as nationally. In
fact, because the SDPC helped facilitate the advent of the Greater New Orleans
Clergy in 2006, members of the two groups often operate in tandem. In February
2007, for example, these two organizations “mobilized [clergy] and traveled to Washington . . . to fight for the financial resources to
support . . . churches and communities” on the Gulf Coast.[36]
The GNOCRJ and the SDPC combined forces again to sponsor a second anniversary
commemoration of “the lost children of Katrina.” “We've lost countless children
and they've never been officially acknowledged,” said Reverend Leona Fisher of
Morris Brown African Methodist Episcopal Church in New Orleans and a member of the GNOCRJ. By
honoring these victims of Katrina, both the GNOCRJ and the SDPC hoped to shed
light on the plight of “the many children of New Orleans and along the Gulf
Coast region who survived hurricanes Katrina and Rita” and still don't have
“adequate health care” or educational facilities. [37]
The
SDPC also created the National Katrina Justice Commission and Hearings in Washington, D.C., New Orleans, and Houston—the
only national commission to examine governmental response and citizens’ ongoing
concerns about revitalization efforts. Its findings were published as
“The Breach: Bearing Witness,” a book documenting the testimonies of people
affected by the disaster, including victims, government agencies, local
churches, and community organizers. The stories have become the basis of
renewed calls for governmental support of building initiatives in the hardest
hit areas of New Orleans.
As one SDPC news release announced at the beginning of 2007, “we are calling on
the United States
government to create a trust that would ensure the complete restoration of the
Lower Ninth Ward and the rest of New Orleans East.”[38]
If
ecumenical organization and protest offered one route to political
mobilization, spontaneous direct action has offered another, less formal road.
The potential closing of St. Augustine
Church, located in New Orleans’s Treme neighborhood, offers a
powerful example of the way that local churches have served as rallying points
for Katrina activists. Known as “the oldest African-American parish in United States,” St. Augustine was founded in 1841 with
support of both free and enslaved people. Congregants learned of this
community’s sacred nature at the earliest possible moment when free people of
color purchased pews for enslaved people. Over the next century, the church
became a bulwark of local black freedom struggles. Homer Plessy, the famed
plaintiff in the 1896 desegregation Supreme Court case bearing his name,
belonged to the congregation. Although the church suffered minimal physical
damage, Hurricane Katrina still threatened to do what slavery and racial
segregation could not: shut its doors. In March 2006, the archdiocese announced
that budgetary constraints had forced its hands; St. Augustine Church
would be no more.[39]
Though
struggling with their own issues at work and home, black congregants galvanized
community support, holding protest rallies that culminated in a 19-day rectory
sit-in. “Save our parish, we will not be
moved,” parishioners shouted in a self-conscious nod to the civil rights
struggle. As Suncere Ali Shakur, leader of the Common Ground Collective,
explained, “[Martin Luther] King says when negotiations fail, direct action is
automatically the next step.” By April,
congregants’ had compelled the archdiocese to relent.[40]
Far
from an isolated battle, the struggle to save St. Augustine was part of a larger effort to
achieve justice for marginalized people. With a sense of political
powerlessness about so many other issues hovering over them, post-Katrina
community leaders attempted to take control of this one critical part of their
lives. Perhaps as important, the struggle put parishioners in touch with the
sacred history of enslaved people. Only the year before Katrina hit New Orleans, St.
Augustine had established “The Tomb of the Unknown
Slave.” Centered on a 1500-pound anchor that had formerly been attached to a
buoy in the Mississippi River, “The Tomb of the Unknown Slave” is “analogous to
the tomb of the unknown soldier in Arlington, Virginia . . . [though] the big
difference is that it’s slaves [being honored],” according to Pastor Jerome
Ledoux. “[A]ll over this country, there are many slaves buried, and nobody
knows who they are or where they are, and especially in this part of the
country, here in Treme, where there was a really high concentration of slaves.”[41]
The memorial,
the church informs visitors, has been “consecrated by many slaves' inglorious
deaths bereft of any acknowledgement, dignity or respect, but ultimately
glorious by their blood, sweat, tears, faith, prayers and deep worship of our
Creator.”
For many members of St. Augustine, the
attempt to shut church doors was part of a long history of neglect. Indeed,
although church officials subsequently apologized, they displayed a lack of
sensitivity when dealing with black congregants. When the archbishop arrived to
announce the final closing of the church in March 2006, he did so in the
presence of armed guards. Moreover, the
beloved pastor Jerome Ledoux was excused from services, outraging some
congregants. Pastor Ledoux spoke for many of his parishioners when he referred
to the armed men as evidence of “racial profiling” among white church leaders.
Although St. Augustine's
protesters publicly dedicated themselves to nonviolent activity, church elders
feared marauding bands of blacks, in Pastor Ledoux’s words. “These folks
are not dangerous. They’re just upset. But if you’re not acculturated, you
don’t understand that, so you come in with armed guards.”[42]
The re-consecration of St. Augustine Church
as a holy space was nothing less than a metaphor of resurrection. “Well, I
always have said that this has been a very heavy cross for the members of St.
Augustine’s to carry,” Sandra Gordon, the president of St. Augustine’s parish
council, told national reporters after the event. “[This] was like the cross
that Jesus carried on Good Friday, but what happened on Easter Sunday? Resurrection.
And that’s what happened with our parish. Our parish has been
resurrected.” That has been good news
for the surrounding community. “The church is
currently playing a pivotal role in Hurricane Katrina relief,” St. Augustine's web site
proudly notes, “joining with Second Harvest and other organizations to offer
food, clothing and shelter to the dispossesd. [We are] also matching those in
need with available legal, medical, and FEMA assistance and with volunteer
workman and cleanup crews.”[43]
Like so much else in post-Katrina New Orleans, the picture remains cloudy even for St. Augustine. The
archdiocese has only agreed to keep it open temporarily. And yet, it is also
clear that congregants will continue to draw on traditions of sacred history,
scripture and community struggle to keep a beloved institution open.
III.
If
the experiences of Love
Canal and Katrina’s
faithful tell us anything, it is that religion has been and remains a capacious
vehicle for those dealing with modern environmental disasters. In both
instances, the chaos of disaster—not just physical death but the loss of home
and savings, the separation of family and loved ones, the likelihood of long
and uncertain struggles for restitution—compelled congregants, churches, and entire
religious networks to rededicate themselves to the basic principles of faith: a
belief in a just God who enters history at critical moments to inspire social
justice. For this reason, it is little wonder that many Love Canal
citizens turned to an ecumenical group to voice their concerns about toxic
waste locally and nationally—their marginalized political and economic status
compelled them to find transcendent models that sacralized grassroots
mobilization for environmental justice.
Similarly, Katrina survivors have sought both to strengthen existing
networks of religious reformers and to retain sacred church space precisely
because this puts them in touch with the spiritual traditions that strengthen
oppressed communities and shine a light on a future world where equality and
justice for all is a reality. In
disaster situations, according to Professor Vanessa Ochs, Director of Jewish
Studies at the University
of Virginia, “we're
looking for miracles. We're desperately looking for miracles, not just acts of
kindness, but objects that we find that suggest to us that we will go on.” That
is why a church, a family Bible, a piece of scripture signifies so much. These
sacred items “serve as spiritual agents that give us our sense of religious
identity, that move us to act in holy and ethical ways, that tell us who we are
as people of faith communities. When you see a sacred object that's been
destroyed, it could potentially give you the experience of God's absence. It
might lead you to think, where is God now?[44]
For
the ETF, traditions of post-millennialist protest in Western
New York pointed toward the environment itself as a sacred space
that might be destroyed. The lesson of history was that the citizens
themselves—and not governing officials or business leaders—must mobilize for
environmental justice. Becoming religious “virtuosos”[45]—activists
who can move skillfully between the sacred realm and secular reform
movements—they used scripture to inform and ennoble environmental activism,
bringing a theological focus to the disaster looming not only at Love Canal
proper but at the thousands of toxic waste sites throughout North America.
Utilizing
the lessons of a different sacred tradition, many Katrina activists have
similarly come to understand themselves as playing a vital role in the modern
social justice movement—including the attainment of environmental justice for
communities of color. Indeed, though
clearly linked to liberation struggles among African-descended people going
back centuries, post-Katrina reform has also updated its communalist struggles
to include environmental concerns. As part of its broader effort to help people
recover from the hurricane, the Holy Cross Neighborhood Association has
announced the creation of sustainability initiatives for area residents. All
Congregations Together (ACT), yet another ecumenical group that predated
Hurricane Katrina but has been emboldened by it, has used Katrina's notoriety
to mobilize support for several environmental justice initiatives. For example,
the group has called for a “collaborative decision-making” process in the
redevelopment of several New Orleans-area “brownfields,” abandoned or underused
industrial sites whose future is compromised by environmental contamination.
(With nearly 300 brownfields in or near their city, many New Orleans’ residents are particularly
fearful about the toxic stew that a hurricane can create). “ACT’s
[environmental] issues come from the people,” a brochure informs readers. Like
other ecumenical organizations, it has folded environmental justice concerns
into a broader movement for social justice among traditionally marginalized
people of color.
There
is a final lesson that may link Love
Canal and Katrina
activists. For history suggests that Katrina victims, like their Love Canal
counterparts, will be struggling to keep alive their own specific memories of
disaster decades into the future. “Love
Canal is not over, it
will never be over,” Lois Gibbs proclaimed nearly 20 years after she departed
her toxic neighborhood.[46] The
resettlement of nearly 250 homes across the street from a massive chain-link
fence without signage prompts her continued outrage. Though not a part of the
ETF, Gibbs gives voice to the countless Love Canal
residents who still speak to school children and political officials about the
hazards of toxic dumping. Likewise,
Katrina activists have wasted little time in merging their memories of struggle
with long-standing movements for social justice. In February 2006, the SDPC
held its Fourth Annual Meeting in New Orleans under the banner, “In the Wake of
Katrina: Lest We Forget . . . Call To Renewal.” As a press release noted, the
hundreds of ministers from around the country were meeting “to examine public
policies, emergency preparedness, healthcare and other issues affecting the
African-American church and community” that may be fresh in people's minds
after Katrina.[47] Now a part of sacred history, Katrina
activism will itself become an emblem of black theology and environmental
justice for generations to come.
I would like to thank the co-editors of this special
issue for their wonderful comments and constant encouragement. Thank you as
well to Luella Kenny for many insightful discussions of living in Love Canal,
and to the American Society for Environmental History, Baton
Rouge organizing committee, for sponsoring a trip to New Orleans' Lower Ninth
Ward in March 2007.
[1] Joann Brietsman, February 1979, quoted in “Progress
Report of the Ecumenical Task Force of the Niagara Frontier, March 20, 1979 -
August 1, 1980” (Niagara Falls, 1980), 4; Kermit Mogilles quoted in Donald E.
DeVore, “Water in Sacred Places: Rebuilding New Orleans Black Churches as Sites
of Community Empowerment,” Journal of American History, 94 (Dec. 2007), 762–69, quote
at 768-9.
[2] See, for example, Rodrick
Nash’s seminal treatment, “The Greening of Religion,” in Nash, The Rights of Nature: A History of
Environmental Ethics (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989) and
Thomas R. Dunlap, Faith in Nature:
Environmentalism as Religious Quest (Seattle: University of Washington
Press, 2004).
[3] See The New York Times, March 18, 2004, for parallels between Love Canal
and the toxic threat posed by the World
Trade Center
cleanup. Interestingly, the Global Community Monitor, a nonprofit environmental
justice group, reported on one New Orleans resident’s fears that a leaking oil
refinery in the wake of Hurricane Katrina could become like “a Love Canal down
here” (September 5, 2005).
[4] On citizen protest at Love Canal
generally, see Michael Brown’s seminal book, Laying Waste: The Poisoning of American by Toxic Chemicals (New
York: Random House, 1981), and Adeline Godron Levine, Love Canal: Science, Politics and People
(Lexington, Mass: Lexington Books, 1982).
On the other hand, major texts can skip over citizen protest at Love Canal,
including, for instance, Carolyn Merchant’s otherwise excellent text, Major Problems in Environmental History (New
York: Houghton Mifflin, 1993, 2006).
[5] This description heads the Love Canal
collection description in the SUNY Buffalo archives. It essentially repeats
information in many ETF publications. It is available online at the following
web address: http://ublib.buffalo.edu/libraries/projects/Lovecanal/guide.html
[7] Ibid,
3, (emphasis in original quotation).
[8]See “Testimony of Anne
Hillis and Jim Clark [before the] Joint Senate Subcommittee on environmental
pollution and hazardous waste in March 28-29, 1979,” in SUNY- Buffalo’s “Love
Canal Collection – Online Documents.”
[9] Muskie cited Hillis’ words
in a speech before the American society of civil engineers in Boston, April 2, 1979. See “Testimony of Anne Hillis before the
Senate standing committee on conservation and recreation . . . May 1979,” in
ibid.
[10] See Lois Gibbs, Love Canal, My Story (Albany, NY, 1982), 164.
[12] Allan Mazur’s A Hazardous Inquiry: The Rashomon Effect at
Love Canal (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998) offers a critical
scholarly perspective on citizen activism, going so far as to claim that health
officials and not local activists were the real heroes of the crisis.
[13] Progress
Report of the Ecumenical Task Force of the Niagara
Frontier, March 20, 197- August 1, 1980.”
[14] See Mazur, A Hazardous Inquiry, Introduction.
[15] See especially Thomas H.
Fletcher, From Love
Canal to Environmental Justice: The
Politics of Hazardous Waste on the Canadian-U.S. Border (Toronto: Broadview Press, 2003).
[16] On religious revivalism
generally, see Daniel Walker Howe’s What Hath God Wrought (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).
For a masterful treatment of northern evangelical culture and religious reform
in early America,
see particularly Robert Abzug, Cosmos
Crumbling: American Reform and the Religious Imagination (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1994). The classic treatment of Protestant revivalism in
western New York remains Whitney Cross, The Burned-Over District - The Social and
Intellectual History of Enthusiastic Religion in Western New York, 1800-1850
(New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1965), although Paul Johnson's A
Shopkeeper's Millennium: Society and Revivals in Rochester, New York, 1815-1837
(revised paperback edition, New York: Hill and Wang, 2004) is the best
microhistory of revivalism in New York.
[17] Abzug, Cosmos Crumbling, vii, 4-5.
[18] Paul Tillich, Protestant Era (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1948); Abzug, Cosmos
Crumbling, 5.
[19] Anne Hillis, “Love Canal's
Contamination: The Poisoning of an American Family,” unpublished ms. in the
Love Canal Collection, SUNY Buffalo archives.
[20] Sister Margeen Hoffman,
ed., Earthcare: Lessons From Love Canal, A Resource Guide and Response (Niagara
Falls, 1987).
[21] Cone, My Soul Looks Back (Nashvill: Orbis Books, 1982, 1985), 1-11. On
Katrina and race, see of course Michael Eric Dyson’s Come Hell or High Water (New York: Basic Books, 2006). On prophetic
traditions and black theology generally, see Cain Hope Felder, ed., Stony the Road We Trod: African American
Biblical Interpretation (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress Publishers, 1991).
See also David L. Chappell, A Stone of
Hope: Prophetic Religion and the Death of Jim Crow (Chapel Hill: The
University of North Carolina Press, 2004); Allen Dwight Callahan, The Talking Book: African Americans and the
Bible (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 2006).
[22] See Holy Cross Neighborhood
Association Newsletter, August, 2007; see also the New Orleans Times-Picayune, July 7, 2007, and letter to the editor July 14,
2007.
[23] John Ernest, Liberation Historiography: African-American
Writers and the Challenge of History, 1794-1861 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 11.
[24] Holy Cross Neighborhood
Association Newsletter, August, 2007
[25] For public use of the
“third eye” icon, see for example the SDPC’s announcement of its “Pastors and
Lay Leadership Conference,” scheduled for February 11-14 in New Orleans at http://www.sdpconference.info.
[26] Berlin and Rowland, Families and Freedom: A Documentary History Of African American Kinship
in the Civil War Era (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 3.
[27] See DeVore, “Water in
Sacred Places: Rebuilding New Orleans Black Churches as Sites of Community
Empowerment,” Journal
of American History, 762–69.
[28] On Allen, prophetic justice
and the yellow fever, see Richard S. Newman, Freedom’s Prophet: Bishop Richard Allen, the AME
Church, and the Black Founding Fathers
(New York:
NYU Press, 2008).
[29] See Richard Allen, “An
Address to Those Who Keep Slaves and Approve the Practice,” reprinted in Newman
et al, Pamphlets of Protest:
African-American Protest Writing, 1790-1860 (New York: Routledge, 2001), 39-41.
[30] Quintard
Taylor, Jr, ed., From Timbuktu
to Katrina: Readings
in African American History, Vol II. (Boston:
Wadsworth,
2008). On Exodus, see Eddie S. Glaude, Exodus:
Religion, Race and Nation in Early Nineteenth Century America (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press,
2000).
[31] On King’s theological understanding
of Exodus, see Keith D. Miller, Voice of
Deliverance: The Language of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Its Sources (New
York: Free Press, 1992), 158.
[32] New York Solidarity
Coalition with Katrina/Rita Survivors Video interview with Rev. Lance Eden, Dec
26, 2007, posted on YouTube. See also Eden’s
comments on Religion and Ethics News Weekly, April 14, 2006.
[33] See MSNBC archives for
September 7, 2005; see also the Christian Science Monitor, September 12, 2005.
[34] Rev. Tom Watson quoted in a
June 29, 2007 press release issued by the SDPC with the headline: “The Greater
New Orleans clergy for restorative justice are mobilizing: rebuilding
communities and advocating for change in public policy in Washington, D.C.,
[35] See the Holy Cross
Neighborhood Association Newsletter, August, 2007.
[36] See SDPC news release from
June 29, 2007 on GNOCRJ protest initiatives entitled, “the greater New Orleans clergy for
restorative justice are mobilizing for change.”
[37] SDPC news release from
August 16, 2007 entitled “Honoring the Lost Children of Katrina.”
[38] Dr. Ida
Carruthers quoted in SDPC news release from February 7, 2007 entitled “Time is
Running Out for Katrina Victims.”
[39] Washington Post, March 19, 2006.
[40] Democracy Now, April 10,
2006.
[44] Religion and Ethics Newsweekly, September 23, 2005.
[45] The term comes from Max
Weber, though Abzug updates its utility nicely in Cosmos Crumbling, 4.
[46] Lois Gibbs quoted on Chris
Matthew Hardball, December 7, 2000.
[47] SDPC news release, Feb 5,
2006 (mislabeled 2005 on the original), entitled, “African American
Ministers Focus on Katrina while Bush Aids War in Iraq.”