1.
The government did not want to claim the dead. I believe that they did not want the death count after Katrina to exceed the number of people who died on 9/11. That would mean someone would have to get bombed, I guess. Or at least blamed.
I know that doesn’t sound right. Nothing that happened sounded right during those five days after and every day after.
Death is not the only measure of horror, turns out.
2.
The night Katrina made landfall I was sitting in a tattoo parlor in Little Five Points in Atlanta. The tattoo is on the inside of my left arm, three black crows and a red ribbon that says family. At some point, the pain required a break, and we got whiskey shots in the bar next door. The news was on, and the streets were sheets of rain. I know it’s hard to believe, but I knew this storm was different.
I grew up with hurricanes in Houston. The safety plan was getting in the bathtub and waiting it out. Hope that there’d be no school the next day.
On August 29, 2005, I was twenty-eight years old. I was a serious person. I was trying to be useful. I had decided to face the realities of the world and do something about it. I had been trained to organize people, to work hard, to assess a situation, to act.
3.
On August 29, 2005, I felt helpless. But a moment is not the only measure of history.
Part of an organizer’s job is to remember the patterns. Learn the terrain. Anticipate the enemy. And build a better plan. Katrina was not the enemy. Katrina was the teacher who showed us how the enemy moves. It is up to us to learn the lessons. To prepare, not just to survive the storms, but to win.
4.
Six years before the hurricanes, in 1999, tens of thousands of people shut down the World Trade Organization in Seattle. We were organizers, students, teachers, artists, engineers, community leaders, strategists, union workers, journalists, parents, lawyers, bartenders, and friends. We decided to face the realities and repercussions of this corporate financial institution wreaking disaster and debt across the globe, and we decided to tell everyone. We decided to stop it with our bodies.
To organize people to get into the streets, we had to expose the thing. We had to show what the WTO does and reveal how all these systems work together—capitalism requires poverty, it doesn’t just create it.
One story reminds me of Katrina and feels like a lesson for today. The mayor and the riot cops tear-gassed the Seattle neighborhoods the night we interrupted the first day of the ministerial meetings. The decision was upon us: react to their violence in the moment or plan the next day of action. We decided to plan. Hundreds of people gathered in the old nightclub on Denny Way. People outside the club kept screaming from the streets about the police and armored tanks. We could have rushed into the fray. I stood in front of hundreds of people who were waiting to know what to do. We called on courage. We did not react. We got organized and kept going for four more days. We shut down the ministerial. The WTO did not make any decisions. We won.
We won because we planned, and we did not react to the chaos. We surprised the police in the streets and succeeded. But surprise only works once.
5.
New Orleans is a long way from Seattle. A distance not measured in miles.
6.
Newsweek published an issue on September 19, 2005, three weeks after the storm. The cover was a close-up of a Black child’s face with tears and the words “POVERTY, RACE & KATRINA” in bold letters.
Louisiana and Mississippi were the poorest states in the nation in 2005.
Louisiana and Mississippi were the states with the highest percentage of Black people.
For the next few months, I carried that Newsweek with me everywhere. When I spoke at conferences or workshops as part of my role as organizer with a Black-led movement organization, I would pull it out and show it to the crowd. The cover was a kind of signal that proved a wall had fallen, like the levees—blasted and broken. There was no denying it. The truth flooded out all over the front cover so thick and so hot that we could not ignore it. It was time to act.
7.
Those months after Katrina shaped a generation of southern organizers.
8.
State officials had been warned of the failing systems. Lessons from hurricanes just the year before laid out the potential devastation. The president, the director of FEMA, and the director of Homeland Security were briefed the day before Katrina hit. The only thing they prepared for was the taking.
Looters. (Remember the newspaper pictures of people in chest-high water with loaves of bread above their heads and how they said the white people were “survivors” and the Black people were “looters”?)
But it was the state agencies we thought were in place to protect us. They shuttered the hospital. They sold off the schools. They stole the land. It was a heist job. Like when they looted the treasury in 2008 and poured public money into the banks. Like burning down the Bronx in the 1970s, like crowning presidents in Katanga to control the copper mines of Congo. Like 1948 in Palestine. Different terrains. Same playbook: Burn, flood, contain. Displace, murder, and control.
In New Orleans in 2005, the US Army occupied the streets with the largest military operation on US soil since the Civil War. They contained twenty-five thousand people in the Superdome. They drove a million people from their homes. Put them on planes, buses, and trains to Houston, to Knoxville, to Alaska. It was the largest displacement since the 1930s Dust Bowl.
9.
The French Quarter opened back up four weeks after Katrina. The Imperial Palace Casino in Biloxi opened in less than four months, taking advantage of the storm to expand operations.
Twenty years later, more than six hundred thousand people have not returned to Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama.
10.
Georgia’s own congressional representative Cynthia McKinney rang the bell. She submitted the Supplemental Report to the Findings of the Select Bipartisan Committee to Investigate the Preparation for and Response to Hurricane Katrina.
Cynthia asked: Who benefits?
She went on:
In its eagerness to bulldoze the Lower Ninth Ward even as bodies are still being discovered in the debris, the Government of the City of New Orleans has been in a running legal battle with lawyers representing the displaced. It appears as if the City can scarcely wait to wipe the slate clean, deprive long-standing residents of their property rights, declare eminent domain and hand the survivors’ property over to developers. It also seems clear that African-American communities are primarily the ones being targeted.1
Just as the 9/11 Commission called for a new czar to fight terrorism and got it, the call has already gone out in response to the failure of Hurricane Katrina for the selection of a righthand man or woman to be the President’s point person in coordinating natural disasters. Yet it becomes clear as we proceed that the Secretary of Homeland Security had this authority and failed to exercise it in this disaster.2
11.
New Orleans police opened fire on Black people on Danziger Bridge.
And all of us watched.
12.
We wanted Katrina to spark a global uprising. This time we will win, an elder said during a national meeting a few weeks after. I knew it was not true. I wanted it to be, but we were not prepared to win.
After we shut down the WTO in 1999, the timeline ripped open again on September 11, 2001. We attempted to organize so that 9/11 could be a reckoning with United States imperialism rather than a justification for more brutality and loss. We did not succeed. And then Katrina happened. The flood filled our homes. Right here. Exposing the reality. These systems were designed to break. They said it on the cover of Newsweek, for god’s sake. Poverty and Race.
We organized one million meetings. Southern leaders were called in to facilitate tense circles of angry people. A friend from Mississippi, the brother of a trumpet player, told me at the hotel bar during a meeting a few months after Katrina: If we don’t come together on this and do something, our spirits will drown. I believed him, and we started planning.
We could not throw our bodies at this one. We could not make change happen by marching and mobilizing. Walls had been blasted open, and we could no longer choose one issue at a time. We had to build what we needed.
And many people rose up and saved each other.
13.
No one is coming for us.
The Secretary of State went shoe shopping with a tennis star five days after Katrina hit and the horrors had begun. (Remember when Bush told us to go shopping after thousands of people were killed in 2001?)
The government did not send funds to the community relief efforts. But the FBI managed to send undercover agents to infiltrate the most successful mutual aid network in Algiers. (Remember when police rampaged that same Black neighborhood of Algiers in 1980, murdering four people and torturing others?)
The governor of Louisiana issued a shoot-to-kill order to the national guard flooding the state. And everyone else. (Remember Blackwater?)
According to the supplemental report:
All of this office’s requests for more information about who hired Blackwater, and for what reason, have gone unanswered. However, one official of the City of New Orleans told Congresswoman McKinney that the Department of Homeland Security sent them to the city.3
Organizers look for patterns.
14.
Dear movements rising to face this moment in 2025:
We must remember Katrina.
Our spirits are drowning in the overwhelm of witnessing genocide in 2023, 2024, 2025. Fascist states rise like the waters. We name this moment as a turning point in history, as we proclaim that the future is contested.
After a meeting of social justice organizations in a church in Jackson, Mississippi, a few weeks after Katrina, my work partner and I drank a whole bottle of Bushmills in the hotel room. We soaked in the hurt of traumatized people facilitating traumatized people in a time of trauma. We knew we would have to survive this trauma and build something to prepare for the next trauma and continue to resist the ongoing systemic trauma. We still are.
Ten years after Michael Brown was shot by police, and Ferguson rose up for one hundred nights. Five years after police murders of Floyd, Taylor, Brooks, and so, so many, when millions rose up in hundreds of places. We are still organizing. We have to prepare to win. But first we have to remember.
History is tricky: How do we remember if we were not there? If you did not see a dead body floating in the water, does it mean you do not remember that they left us?
Please don’t make us prove (over and over again) that Black lives only ever mattered to the state and the capitalists for labor or for roundabout justifications of social control. Don’t make us prove (over and over again) that the South is a fulcrum of this colonial nation.
They left all of us.
They left us in the hospitals. They left us in the prisons.
If it was not your house or your block, does it mean we cannot learn the truth dammed up at the edges of the city? Whose memory will chart us through the wreckage?
We need all of us.
15.
They did not want to count the dead.
During Congresswoman McKinney’s committee delegation’s meeting with first responders, the officer in charge of special forces at the convention center was asked how many people died. He could not say, he told us.4
Calls to the suicide prevention hotline more than doubled in September 2005.
They put the death toll somewhere around thirteen hundred.
But the official agencies did not count the missing. The tallies did not include the drawn-out sicknesses, the grieved ones, the uncounted, and the discounted.
16.
There is not a softer way to tell the story.
In 1999, organizers exposed the WTO, fought the police, and won. By 2001, as a kind of punishment for victory, the state and private forces prepared. They readied their playbooks and threw a net of surveillance, repression, and fear to justify all imperial responses to 9/11. They reminded us that the state is a predator, not a protector. In 2005, in the streets of New Orleans, the bayous of Louisiana, the coasts of Mississippi and Alabama, they showed us for real.
No one is coming to help. They are only coming to take.
In 2025, Katrina is happening to all of us, across every state, across every frontline, across every community, and they are coming to take all that they can. All that we let them take.
17.
If we don’t come together on this and do something, our spirits will drown. People saved each other. Families found families. We organized. We trained up new leaders. We fought legal battles. We studied the moves. We brought people together. We decided to build something that could withstand the next storm.
They use the weapons sharpened after 9/11, after Katrina, after COVID, after uprisings and oil disasters and firestorms—to take. We are using the tools we forged in Katrina to build the new world now.
18.
Dear movement organizers, artists, teachers, scientists, nurses, barbers, growers, firefighters, oceanographers, therapists, journalists, lawyers, engineers, future builders, world makers: Remember Katrina.
Today, organizers still stand in rooms in front of hundreds of people who want to know what to do. Wanting to believe that we can make something, build something, prepare for and survive the next surge.
The chaos invites. It is seductive. Just like 1999, in that club in Seattle when the police rolled through Capitol Hill in tanks and riot gear. Just like 2025, when ICE rolls through our clinics, our schools, our workplaces. We have to fight. And we have to decide (over and over again) to plan our path beyond the moment.
The lessons from Katrina can be the magnets of a compass to set our paths forward.
19.
Katrina, twenty years later, continues to teach us. How do we fight a broken levee system and weaponized abandonment? How do we take on the state when it aligns with finance and funds mercenaries against its own people? How do we know we can save our own selves? Remember Katrina.
Tattoos are permanent. Families save families.
Marks of a flood can be seen like salt lines on a wall. What is the map that the flood leaves behind?
I have been shaped by these rooms, these floods, these fights. Southern organizers are marked by these patterns of history. These moments are stenciled on our flesh, and tattoos are just pretty scars.
And we are veterans now. With all the others from all the other places. Veterans of battles, of storms, of failed infrastructure. Veterans navigating poverty and violent racism in these United States in this, the twenty-first century. Louisiana and Mississippi are still the poorest states in the nation in 2025.
We are family beyond place and rooted in purpose. We are people trained to organize, to work, to assess a situation, and to act. We call on courage. We are more prepared than we were twenty years ago.
20.
The surge is rising again.
Today: Shock troops kidnap and disappear. They surveil, track, displace, and kill.
They applaud violence and embolden the binary. They vote austerity into an already impoverished terrain.
The storm is stronger.
Katrina helped us name climate crisis, fueled by industry and exploited to dump and extract as the situation speeds up and turns into wildfires, tornadoes, droughts, rising seas, and deadly heat. Katrina helped us see that the government will not protect. That they wield the law for the interest of control and containment, not access and connection.
We need all of us.
Today: We face the surge of stronger enemies. But we gather. We plan. We prepare. We look up and into our own eyes, we nest broken hearts, we pour whiskeys, we stand up in front of rooms, we grieve. We remind ourselves and each other:
We need all of us.
To remember. To be ready. To win.
This essay is informed by Representative Cynthia McKinney’s Supplemental Report to the Findings of the Select Bipartisan Committee to Investigate the Preparation for and Response to Hurricane Katrina; Dan Leahy’s notes for a class at The Evergreen State College on Reconstructing New Orleans; and Binyavanga Wainaina’s “It’s Only a Matter of Acceleration Now,” Chimurenga, July 1, 2014, https://chimurengachronic.co.za/binyavanga-youssou/.
Stephanie Guilloud is an organizer and writer from Houston, Texas. She was a cofounder of the Direct Action Network and has worked at Project South, based in Atlanta, Georgia, since 2003. As the movement organizing senior strategist, she works with frontline organizers across the US South to build regional power and infrastructure.
Header image: A sign is seen on a window at Memorial Medical Center in New Orleans, September 12, 2005. More than 40 bodies were recovered from the 317-bed hospital. AP Photo/Rick Bowmer.
NOTES
- Representative Cynthia McKinney’s Supplementary Report to the Findings of the Select Bipartisan Committee to Investigate the Preparation for and Response to Hurricane Katrina, Appendix 8 of “A Failure of Initiative,” presented by the Select Committee on behalf of Representative Cynthia A. McKinney, February 6, 2006, 451. The Supplementary Report is part of H. Rpt. 109–377, A Failure of Initiative: Final Report of the Select Bipartisan Committee to Investigate the Preparation for and Response to Hurricane Katrina.
- Supplementary Report, 441.
- Supplementary Report, 480.
- Supplementary Report, 448.
