Cool Zone Media, Hello, and welcome to Cool People. Did Cool Stuff your weekly reminder that sometimes good things happen, although, to be honest, usually it's in response to bad things and it doesn't always go well, but it's really cool along the way, I'm your Smargart Killsroy and with me today is Andrew T.
How are you? I E good? How's it going?
I'm good.
I tried to eat a piece of zucchini during the intro and then I lost faith, So I have a half chewed piece of zucchini on the table in front.
That's how you know a professional podcaster is the trying to time when you can take bites of I.
Bailed, though honestly enjoyed watching that. I just I had so much confidence and then it was much bigger than I thought it was.
Andrew is the host of Yo Is This Racist? Which is a podcast and as a TV writer, and says you can look it up if you want.
I didn't say with that attitude is all I will say.
That's true. No, there was flavor, there was spice to it. The spice wasn't at the listener.
That's true. Yeah, yeah, that's correct. That's correct.
In the industry, yeah, I was at the industry, not at the nice people who listened to our podcast, because that's right. I believe last time we had Andrew on there was a strike going on. Yeah, and I think the time before that, when we had Andrew on, there was a strike going on. Yeah, I think that's true.
Two strikes, two strikes, well two two thousands within this two strikes and yeah. But yeah, and the film and television industry is sort of limping back to life. So yeah, we'll see, we'll see how things go.
I believe in the writers more than I believe in the industry. But yeah, right, that's true. I can always turn this into something.
Yeah.
The rest of the introductions is that Sophie. The other voice you've heard is our producer, Sophie. Hi, how are you doing.
I'm good.
I was about to off my drink this water, but then I ruined it. This is my plan today is I'm looking to see when people on Zoom are reaching for water and food, and then I'm going to address questions to them. Our audio engineer is Daniel and our theme music was written. Oh everyone's to say hi to Danel. God we almost didn't do it. Hi Danel, Hi danel A. Our theme music was written for us by unwoman Andrew. Could you describe the shirt that you're wearing.
Oh, yeah, I believe it's I'm reading it backwards. I'm trying to remember it racist Saints Safe in the Dirty South, and.
There's a klansman being eaten by an alligator.
It's a pretty good illustration of a klansman being, yeah, eaten by an alligator. It is Oh shoot, It's a piece of fund raising merch from the I believe they go by the Screwston Anti Fascist Committee. It's literally written on the back of this thing. But I'm not going to turn around or got it fair enough? Yeah, it really spoke to me, but it's really like, it's really a wild illustration.
I love that shirt. I've seen it a couple other times from people who also supported that fundraiser, and it is an appropriate shirt for today. Is what I'm going to start off by telling you.
Oh wonderful.
Today, we're going to break out of cool people tradition and we're going to talk about the one century I never talk about this one, the twenty first century. I'm going to tell a story that happened less than twenty years ago.
Oh, perfet Wow. I'm still not going to know any of it, but this is great.
Have you ever heard of the common Ground collective?
I feel like I actually have, but then I can't think of a single fact so functional. I feel like I've heard those the phrase, but I was like, oh.
No, yeah, no, I mean it is a well Okay, So we've talked a ton on the show before about medical solidarity groups set up by the late sixties radicals. We have talked about the Young Lord's hijacking a mobile X ray unit in order to get people tested for
tuberculosis and later how they took over a hospital. We've talked about how the Black Panthers set up community health clinics as often as they set up free food programs, and we talked about how the Young Patriots sent it to members to meet with elderly folks in the community, to provide escort to doctors and patient advocacy and all of that, and we talked about how people would just go door to door to test for lead paint and
meet people's needs in the community. Basically before on this podcast, when we've talked about the late sixties early seventies, we've talked about how the New Left took medical care and mutual aids seriously. But what we haven't talked about is
anything that happens in the twenty first century. And today we're going to fix it, because today I want to talk about the child of those New Left programs, which went on to become parent to most of the mutual aid programs across the US today, because today we are going to talk about the Common Ground Collective that's set up in two thousand and five after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans and how they're the love child of the
Black Panthers and anarchists and they organized a solidarity not charity clinic and stepped in when government failed. I'm really excited to talk about this one.
Yeah, that's awesome, And yeah, this is a real swamp episode, so this is this is exciting.
I know there's literally going to be people in storms and flat boats going around through the Gulf of Mexico and swamps in this episode. Awesome, And we're going to start this episode where we start, like half of all stories about the US with a Black Panther party for self defense, right, and in this case, we'll start with the Minister of Defense of its New Orleans chapter, a man named Malik Rahem. Malik Rahem was born in nineteen forty eight according to almost all the sources, in nineteen
forty seven according to other sources. And it's hey, Malik, if you're listening, Malik's still alive. I'm sorry that I don't know what anyway. One thing that's cool about doing these slightly more modern topics is that a lot of these people are still alive.
Yeah, and the community is not like that big, so like, yeah, there's a reasonable chance.
Yeah, I'm Alik. I think you're cool. That whole podcast about some of the stuff you did. Oh yeah, he's an environmental activist. Now we'll talk more about at the end. And he's not the only character we're going to talk about today, but he's we're starting with him.
Awesome.
He was raised in the neighborhood of New in New Orleans. We're going to center most of this story, which is Algiers, and Algiers is the in order to have like just the triple colonized thing, the neighborhood Algiers is in the West Bank of New Orleans, so.
God damn. Yeah. Yeah, it's like a like everywhere you go there's like a white guy with like a real weedy mustache ruining stuff.
Yeah, basically, which is kind of the story. Yeah, I mean that happened in New Orleans.
Happened.
Yeah, No, totally. Yeah, they all get pith helmets.
Yeah.
And unlike the rest of the city, Algiers is on the west bank of the Mississippi River, and the Misissippi River like curls around and stuff, so it's not like west of the rest of the city. It's New Orleans. Is really annoying geography. Algiers was originally a plantation and a landing spot for enslaved people. In eighteen seventy it it became officially part of New Orleans and it was a big center of jazz in the South. And it
is a very predominantly black neighborhood. There's one rich white neighborhood within it, Algiers Point, which is about ten blocks of wealth, but overall it is astoundingly poor and black, even by New Orleans standards. Before Katrina, sixty seven percent of the city as a whole was black. Algiers was eighty nine point four percent black.
Right.
It had been left out to dry by social services. It had you know, there was like not clinics for decades before Katrina so Malik, He's not born under that name. He later converts to Islam in nineteen sixty five, he joins the Navy, and he goes off to fight in Vietnam. He came back in nineteen seventy, fired up for civil rights and black power. And if you ever want to hear me talk about what I mean when the Panthers say black power, then just listened about half a dozen five done before.
Find a different episode. Also, I should tell the listeners I'm doing the single worst podcast guesting, which is nodding when you say stuff which is possibly marginally helpful to you and zero percent helpful to them. So I will be better.
Yeah, hmmmm, oh damn, Yeah, oh yeah, okay, yeah, No, if you take the pith helmet off, you don't have to go hmmm, you can install say damn.
We can just layer it in and then yeah, just drop in reactions as needed. I'll give you some clean ones at the end.
Yeah, thanks, I really appreciate it. And so he's out of the Navy in nineteen seventy and he helps found the Black Panther Party chapter in New Orleans, and I don't think we've talked about that particular chapter before.
On the show.
And they're doing all of the good Black Panther stuff. They are setting up a free breakfast program, they're setting up a free medical clinic, they're doing community patrols to protect people from the police. And they opened an office directly across the street from the Desire Housing project and it was opened seven days a week. This office. The government, of course, was like, this is great, You're totally doing what we wish we had time to do. But we're not.
No.
Wait, no, they did the opposite that. They they hated them and tried to murder them.
All. Yeah, kind of pretty standard standard government.
Behavior pretty much. There's a yeah, there's a track record.
Yeah, it's not great.
No, soon enough, the police decide to raid this Panther office. The Panthers they have seen way too many other Panther chapters gunned down. They don't want to go out easy, Malik in another vet. They've sand bagged the office, basically making it so that it's kind of bulletproof. So when the police starts shooting into the building, the Panthers start shooting back.
WHOA.
The whole thing lasts about twenty minutes. No one is killed in this shootout. Eventually the Panthers, including Malik, surrender. They're like, there's no way that is going to end. Well, yeah, so they walk out with their fists up, shouting all power to the people, to the growing out outside. And two things happened. First, even though all of the panthers present were facing felony charges, it didn't stop the panthers.
Other panthers came in, staffed the office and got right back to feeding breakfast to kids and patrolling the neighborhood, that thing that people have to risk their lives to do.
Right.
The other thing that happened is that Malik and the others went to jail, whereupon they were beaten and mistreated by guards, and at one point they're okay, So they segregated away the panthers that they just arrested from general population. And there was another group on another level that was like also segregated away, that was like the real bad motherfuckers or whatever, right, And so the cops are like, you better act up, or we're gonna let those bad
motherfuckers in here with you. And I think they probably phrased it that way, right, And y'all are definitely gonna end up fighting because these are really bad people. You're in trouble now. And so they let all these hard and scary gangsters in with the panthers. It turns out that those hard and scary gangsters, we're all black and had either become recent converts to the Panther party or we're quite willing to become.
So yeah, so that's the wonder that is sort of not like heartening, but like it kind of got to give like cops something which is like they're not like kidding around when they appear to be like deathly afraid of like the magic evil of black men somehow, like they really think it's real. Yeah, it's pathetic, and it
lets them do all these kinds of things. But you know every time, like you know those cops that you know, the reason that that standard like of oh if a cop is afraid for their lives, they can use deadly force is a bullshit is because they genuinely do seem to believe that black men in particular are just mad death demons.
Yeah. Absolutely, that's why they all shoot fentanyl, not into those dets, but they open their guns up and shoot all drugs because they're afraid it's ventol. One of the scary, scary people that they had let in was another man we'll get to in a minute who's important to this story and to the development of mutual aid as a political practice in the United States. And his name is Robert H.
King.
We'll come back to him.
And he was.
Childhood friends with Malik. Anyhow, that's the other thing, right, And we're like, oh, or let these people in. We're like, right, these kids grew up together.
Yeah. The community is not that big. Yeah.
And so while the Panthers are sitting around in jail, the other panthers are running the office. But the cops are like, well, rating once works, so let's rate again, and this time we'll do it way bigger. And November nineteen seventy was a couple months later, and it was probably going to be a bloodbath, but three thousand residents from the nearby projects showed up and surrounded the Panther office and almost certainly saved the lives of the twelve panthers inside.
Or you know, I mean, I guess the thing that's dark is like, we're now rounding the quarner into the era of human shields don't work on us level.
Yeah, of fascism, you know, that's true. I don't like your thought that's true. You know, it's it's like a little fucked up that the like the thing.
That's like, oh, they're weaponizing our humanity against us. Well, we'll just have to not have humanity. I suppose.
Oh, there's this quote that I can't remember who said it is around this era that's like, you know, nonviolence depends on the like, yeah, the morality of your oppressor.
Yeah, I guess I just always assumed that was a Malcolm quote, but I don't know why, but.
I can't remember.
I'm not sure. I feel like you would know. So if that's.
Not right, No, I don't know. I mean it was it was Malcolm X or was someone else from roughly this time period doing singular work, you know.
And roughly yeah, roughly the same world as view. Yeah.
Yeah, And we are not going to look it up. Nope, that would be impossible. So instead, everyone, if we got it wrong, you can direct all complaints to our complaint department, which is on Twitter, which is that I write.
Okay, yeah, let him know.
Yeah. So the Panthers go to trial and they're acquitted by the jury. Later, Malik was asked why they'd shot back at the cops, and he said, quote, our position was that African Americans should no longer be lynched or beaten or attacked and have their rights taken away without any form of resistance. We believed you had a right to defend yourself, You had a right to defend your community, you had a right to defend your family, and you had a right to defend your honor as a human being.
Yeah, the sort of like standard ATRA stuff that somehow never shakes out in practice.
Totally whenever the cops shoot someone who for carrying a gun and then the NRA is like, I didn't see anything. Yeah, you have one.
Job, I mean, yeah, but it's not their stated job. No, they do have only one job, that is true.
Yeah. So after the stint in prison because you know, he's found not guilty, Malik, when he gets out, he goes to Oakland, California for a few decades, he moves away from New Orleans for a while. He sticks with the Party until the mid seventies. Then he tried his hand at being a crime guy instead. For a while. He did a five year stint for armed robbery. He gets back into activism when he's out, and he's fighting for affordable housing and for the rights of formally incarcerated people.
By the late nineties, he moved back to Algiers in New Orleans, and I'm inferring from what I've read that he moves back into his family's house, his mother's house specifically. I'm not sure if she's still alive or not at this point. I'm a little bit frustrated that I didn't immediately find that information because half of the things refer to it as Malik's house and half of it referred to Malik's mother's house.
So got it.
He's doing all kinds of activism now. He's fighting against the death penalty. He found the Algiers Development Center and invest in transitional housing, which helped house more than one thousand former inmates and you know, help people get back on their feet. He runs for office with the Green Party time and time again, though he doesn't win. In nineteen ninety seven, he notices something not all the Movement
prisoners from the seventies are out. In fact, locally three of them are still in including his childhood friend Robert H.
King.
One of the guys who would come up right, right, And Robert H. King is one of the once famous, now forgotten and goal of three. So he starts the work to go about making these people unforgotten and more importantly free, much like all of the products that we advertise are free if you apply yourself and are not afraid of breaking the law.
Yeah, if you just got to do do it the old fashioned way.
Yeah. And that's how you can take advantage of these sweet sweet deals is by applying crime, Sophie. That's a way that will help us keep our advertisers if we phrase it that way, right, And we're back. So now we're going to talk about Robert Hillary King. Robert H. King, he was born in nineteen forty two and he grew up in New Orleans. He grew up into petty crime and boxing. Those were like his interests as a teenager as far as I can.
Tell, Yeah, that's that awesome.
With that same he went semi pro under the name Speedy King. As a boxer, he did a few years for armed robbery before getting out on parole at twenty two. And then as far as I can tell, I'm not certain about this. As far as I can tell he became like the usual suspect where they're like, oh, we think like a black guy did an armed robbery. Let's just go arrest this.
Guy, black guy.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, Later he gets arrested for armed robbery again. Eventually they dropped the charges because he's innocent. Okay, But then listen to this cop logic. The guy he got arrested alongside of took a plea bargain right and became a felon. So Robert had been hanging out with a felon and therefore had violated his previous parole. He had to go spend fifteen months in prison for literally.
Not breaking God. That is so cram.
He is not going to have an easy life, this man. Yeah, the a goal of three. Well, we'll talk about that in a second. Later, he gets arrested for armed robbery again. He probably didn't do it this time either. His co defendant that time had been tortured into giving a false statement. Is what everyone seems to think, and you know there's some reasonable eve that.
Yeah.
At one point early on into that stint, he decides that he wants to preemptively help the listener fill out a bingos square on cool people who did cool stuff, bingo. And so he breaks out of prison. But he then does what pretty much everyone who breaks out of prison does, which is get caught.
Right. Is that is that a standard part of the story that's rad.
It's like there's a couple like.
I haven't I haven't been on prison breaking episodes.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, Well there's a couple that are like getting or getting outdated, Like there's been a long time since anyone's dug a tunnel, right, But that used to be a real big part of early cool people did cool stuff. Oh man, I think it's because I moved away from the nineteenth century. I feel like the nineteenth century was all about tunnels.
Yeah, yeah, right, But.
Yeah, so he's caught. Now that he's back in prison, this is when he meets Malik Raheem and all this other stuff happens, right, the panther stuff that we talked about earlier, And he's like, oh shit, this panther thing, that's that fucking rules I'm in. And then he's transferred to Angola Prison and he's thrown into solitary because he quote wanted to play lawyer for another inmate.
Oh god.
Famously not a crime, yeah, Jesus Christ. Along the way, somewhere in all of this, he gets convicted for murdering another prisoner, which he almost certainly again either didn't do or it wasn't murder, right, because this conviction is going to end up overturned in two thousand and one decade later, he then spends the rest of his prison career in solitary confinement. Somewhere along this way, probably before the solitary stint, he tried to stop the sex slave trade of young
inmates and has the knife scars to prove it. And so I think that that might be I'm inferring here from the different stories that I've read, I think that might be where the killing someone in prison comes from. But oh sure, sure, and that maybe it wasn't considered murder because it was I don't know, right, right, right the self defense are defending someone or Yeah, but I'm not entirely certain, yep, But I know his conviction was overturned, Okay, Right.
Two other black inmates who are in at the same time as him, Herman Wallace and Albert Woodfox, they're in solitary too, and they just all keep being in solitary decades go by and they are in solitary. They are the Angola Three, not because they were co defendants on the same case, but because they're all in solitary for just unconscious able lengths of time.
Yeah.
In two thousand and one, thanks to the work of Malik and other activists, Robert gets his conviction overturned and he's released. He spent twenty nine years out of thirty two years in prison in solitary confinement. Jesus Christ and then Herman Wallace spends about forty two years in solitary confinement before he is released under compassionate release in twenty thirteen, which is when they let you out of prison because
you're dying, right, you know. He died three days after he was set free, and even then the people were like, how dare you have set him free? You know, right, you let this murderer? Whatever the fuck mean, he's dying? Fuck off?
Yeah, who cares.
Albert Woodfox is released from prison in twenty sixteen after forty two years of solitary confinement. He died in twenty twenty two of COVID. He was quite likely the longest serving solitary confinement in US history. Yeah, fuck the United Nations Standard minimum rules for the treatment of prisoners. You know how long they say that you're allowed to put someone in solitary for. Isn't it like on the order of like weeks fifteen days? Yeah, yeah, yeah, we all
know international law as a joke. But here's the other example. Yeah, on any given day in the US right now, while you're listening, one hundred and twenty two thousand people are being kept in cages alone for twenty two to twenty four hours a day. Jesus, forty one to forty eight thousand people are held longer than fifteen days in a given year, and more than six thousand of those will have been in solitary for more than a year at any given point.
That's like yeah, and that's also like so far past the bounds of like what that could do to somebody. I mean, I know, yeah.
I did on my other podcast Live Like the World Has Died, I did an interview that actually is worth people checking out. I did an interview with a long term anarchist prisoner named Eric King, who spent years in solitary for defending himself from guards and all this stuff. Like literally like at one point he won a self defense case while he was in prison for defending himself from a guard, which is has to be a pretty clear cut case to win.
Yeah right, They're not trying to give that one to you.
No, and they absolutely would. He ended up serving in every level of incarceration. He started off in minimum and ended up in maximum like super max because of how much the guards hated him. I did an interview with him about what's involved in like surviving prison. I came out probably in January of twenty twenty four for anyone who wants to hear it, and it is a It was an intense conversation.
Yeah, fuck, it is a k.
Have you ever been in solitary?
Nope.
I spent one night alone in a jail cell and it was foreign detention in the Netherlands, and that was one of the most impactful moments of my life. Was one night alone in a jail cell with no one to talk to and no idea what's happening?
You know? Yeah? I fuck.
Anyway, twenty nine years this man who went on to become incredibly important to the development of so many things. So Robert King gets out of prison two thousand and one, He gets right back into activism. He also just as a fun side note, because why not. He's a football fan. This actually I threw this in for Sophie. Sophie likes spelts. I like basketball. This guy likes the real like soccer football you know. Oh, okay, oh europe football or rest of the world, the one you play with your feet.
The ball, the.
One with less concussions. Yeah. He supports the Scottish club, the Celtics. Oh, probably the Celtics. They probably pronounced it right over there.
I think it's just Celtic. I will say, oh, the football club from Scotland. Yeah, I think it's just called it's just Celtic FC. Okay, or maybe Celtic, but it's no, there's no the yeah or plural. Yeah.
My sports knowledge is bleeding through. The most I ever learned about sports was I ghost write all these romance I ghost wrote two romance novels back in the day, and they had to be about like Midwest sportsman protagonists. Sure, like one one guy was a baseball player and one guy was an American football player, so I had to learn a lot about them back then. Anyway, that's kind of all you need. Yeah, that's funny. So he said about this, I don't know how to pronounce football club
in twenty twenty. They represent oppressed people like me and my brothers in the African American community. They represent the poor Irish immigrants in the UK and the people in the poorest areas of Glasgow, the people with nothing and who face adversity.
Yeah.
So he likes the politicized sports and I understand.
Yeah, yeah, that one I think is very It's it's like, I can't remember all the details, but there's basically a Catholic team and a Protestant team in Glasgow and it's as about as like, you know, passionate and violent as it sounds.
Yeah.
Yeah.
The thing I'm coming off of is doing a whole lot of I just did a four part about the Easter Rising in Ireland.
So oh yeah, yeah.
So anyway, you've got these two former Panthers living in New Orleans. There's more of them, I'm sure, but they're living in New Orleans, and then Hurricane Katrina hits. Hurricane Katrina is one of the deadliest natural disasters in US history. But as we'll talk about, it wasn't the storm itself that killed people. Well, the storm itself also killed people, right, but it was systemic poverty and racism that did an
awful lot of them. Ordering the right world murder, Well, actually, in this case it is murder because it's caused by these whatever anyway, Right, it is not the deadliest storm in US history. That honor goes to the Great Galveston hurricane that hit coastal Texas in nineteen hundred, which killed eight thousand people. Most of the deadliest storms were one hundred plus years ago. We theoretically have the infrastructure now
to prevent massive loss of life from natural disasters. Yet Katrina killed eighteen hundred people, and Hurricane Maria, which hit Puerto Rico in twenty seventeen, killed about three thousand people.
Right, It's like that thing where like famine is not actually about the distribution of the actual food.
Right totally. It's not about whether or not the food grows out of the ground correctly.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, or sorry, It is about the distribution. It's the existence of the.
Food, yeah, totally. So Katrina is real fucking bad. For a little while. It was a Category five storm, which the highest category we have so far of hurricanes. I believe in US, I believe we'll have to come up with a higher category.
You know what. And I just actually got off a family text thread with like some Republican aunts that are like, it's so crazy. There's all these storms in California, and it's just like, yeah, I wish there was some explanation for why this could be happening. It's just I guess there is a just a coo incidents. I suppose did you give.
Did you give them the oh geez? I'm like, you don't.
Say it's really like, oh, well, I guess. I guess the consequences will just land and we'll be like, oh, this is so weird because we're all flowing away.
I don't remember fucking around. Why am I finding out for no reason? So Katrina calmed down to a category three before hitting Louisiana and Mississippi before making landfall in August twenty ninth, two thousand and five, which it did early in the morning, and yet it devastated the area. It did at least one hundred billion dollars in damages, which is just when you're talking about damage and you use money, and then you also talk about numbers and
you get into the billions. It doesn't. It's more in miss I could have said, right, I could have said one hundred trillion, and you'd be like wow.
You know, like, yeah, it's equal. Yeah, it just means everything.
Yeah, fucking a lot more money than I currently have. Yeah, by a little bit. But if that's right, I would have been a great place for an ad transition. But I don't think that's where we're at. So most of New Orleans had evacuated. Eighty to ninety percent of New Orleans evacuated. That's still left tens of thousands of people
in harms way. Mostly it was people who had nowhere to go and or no where to get anywhere, plus a lot of stubborn motherfuckers who just weren't leaving, Plus a lot of people who like a lot of the emmergen agency services that people set up that the city set up. Wouldn't let you take your animals, And right, I wouldn't leave my dog, Yeah I right, just wouldn't you know. Yeah, we made a deal. I'm in charge of every moment of his life, and in exchange, I can't fucking abandon him.
Yeah, you know, I don't even like this dog that much, but she's coming with me.
Yeah, and New Orleans is not the best designed city in the world. An awful lot of it forty nine percent is below sea level. The whole thing is surrounded by levees to keep out the Gulf of Mexico. But construction on those levees was of mixed quality and not always done. And there's like, like, ten years later, a
lot of stuff came out. We're not going to get into the like the nitty gritty of why the levels collapsed, but the Army Corps of engineers fucking at the very least dropped the ball right, whether they did so like criminally whatever, you know, anyway, engineers and shit knew it
was a disaster waiting to happen. There was like regular articles being like, so when you think a hurricane's gonna come and kill everyone, and everyone's like, I don't know, well I'm too poor to fix it, and the city's like we kind of don't care, you know.
Yeah, I guess that's the thing with most infrastructure. It's like, yeah, oh well they'll just say sorry. It's a real like you know, beg for forgiveness culture there.
Yeah, absolutely, especially in places where poor people live. Yeah, you will be shocked to know that the below sea level parts are more often the poorer parts.
That's interesting. I would not have considered that possibility.
Yeah. Two days before landfall, the National Weather Service was like, Hey, we're in fucking trouble. This is going to break the levees. So the mayor, rayinn Egan, whose name we remembered how to pronounce because it sounds like rain again.
Called.
When I say we, I mean everyone but me, called for a voluntary evacuation. First on Saturday night, and then on Sunday they called for the city's first mandatory evacuation in history. Basically, he was like, this is going to topple our levee system. Anyone who stayed behind was offered to be shuttled to the Louisiana super Dome. Throughout Sunday and Monday morning, the storm hit, the waters broke the levee in fifty places. People started dining and bridges collapsed.
Jesus, Yeah, you.
Want to know who else wasn't evacuated? These goods and service? Is this a good place for an ad transition? These goods and services stayed right where they were, through thick and thin, by their own choice. Here they are and we're back.
You gotta find the places.
I know. The other thing that wasn't evacuated. So there was about seven thousand prisoners total in New Orleans at that time, including one hundred children, six hundred and fifty prisoners, and entire wing of one of these prisons was just abandoned by its staff, with the prisoners locked inside their cells. This is one of the worst things that's I've ever
America's bad. America has always been bad. I'm gonna go on out on a crazy limb here, but this is one of the worst things I've ever read about my life. Six hundred and fifty prisoners were abandoned by their staff, with the prisoners locked in their cells. On the first floor, the water came up to people's waists. Obviously, this flooded all of the sewage and all of these things. People didn't know if I was going to stop rising. People
are like hanging out on their top bunks. People on the upper floors are like calling down to the people down below, being like, hey, a you okay, and people are just like crying and they're like, no, yeah, I'm not Yeah. There was no food or water. People were drinking sewage there was no lights, there was no air circulation. The people who were evacuated, the prisoners who were evacuated on time were left for days in buses in the sun on the highway, often going entire days without food
or water. Five hundred and seventeen prisoners from across the city in the end were never accounted for by the prison system. I hope they all escaped. I think they probably only did so if you believe in heaven.
Yeah, it seems unlikely, Jesus Christ.
Most of the prisoners were just in were like serving a couple of weeks, you know whatever, like facing trial from misdemeanors and shit. After Katrina, they suspended habeas corpus, and people did like six months or a year waiting on trial for like something that would have only gotten them in, you know, a one week sentence or whatever. But the hurricane wasn't the worst of it. I want to quote one of the founders of Common Ground, Scott Crow from his memoir Black Flags and Windmills. It was
not the hurricane that caused this disaster. It was the levee failures and the ongoing ecological destruction in the Gulf. This was the latest in a long history of largely invisible disasters of neglect in these communities. To me, the levees became a symbol of the way that the corruption and arrogance of government disregards the most vulnerable people. And the flooding lasted for days in most of the city and weeks in plenty of places, some places like a
couple months before the flood waters receded. Yeah, most of the people who died because of Katrina were elderly folks living near levee breaches, in the poorest neighborhoods like the Lower ninth ward right. The news, of course, you remember the news during Katrina.
I'm not uh kind of yeah, I mean it was just like yeah, like obviously, I mean I think at the time it was this like Jesus Christ, like George W. Bush is going to fuck this up. Not exclusively a Republican thing, but not I guess, of the choices, not the not the preferred one, not that either is that great?
Yeah, who knows how fucking gore who ran in Gore. But the news was full of these wild stories about and when I say anarchy, I don't mean anarchy like I like anarchy. I mean the opposite anarchy. The news was full of all these wild stories of like everyone in the super Dome is currently being raped and murdered.
Oh right, yes, yes.
The gangs run it. Snipers are just killing people in there. And you know what, six people died at the super Dome, that's true. Four of them died of natural causes, one person odeed, and one person killed themselves. And there were no snipers. Right, But there was violence in post Katrina New Orleans, most famously after the fact, police violence. Right, But we're going to talk about how there was I mean, there was more. You know, it was a bad situation.
And let's get back to our panthers who are living in New Orleans, especially to Malik Rameil. Malik Ramil and his friend Sharon Johnson in the Algiers neighborhood. They decided to stick it out together. They stayed in the house to make it Sharon Johnson was not yet a community organizer, but she's about to become one, and Malik Ramil has been one for decades. Right, this neighborhood, Algiers, it was spared the worst of the natural disaster. It gets as
much as anyone else of the unnatural disaster. It's levees were separate from the rest of the city, right because it's in a separate physical geographical location, and they held despite a ship crashing into one, which is pretty they built one levee, right, yeah, god it is.
I guess what an improbability that that's the one that was like that held.
In this case. Yeah, yeah, I mean these ones were like solid concrete, yeah, and twelve feet highs compared to a lot of them that were like just dirt. And you know, I wonder whether they finished these early. I don't know enough about the levee system of New Orleans. I've walked on some of the levees. They're a very nice place to walk your dog.
I don't think i've ever been. Oh it's nice in New Orleans.
But yeah, if you walk down one of the levees, you can get to this place called the End of the World. That's just a little sticks out into the water and there's some burned out, rusty things and people go and hang out and do drugs or walk their dogs and it's like kind of like a nice vibe of like those two things like happily coinciding, you know.
Amazing.
Yeah, So there's a lot of like rituals for the dead. And this is a neat, neat place anyway. Yeah, Algiers wasn't spared completely. People were trapped, right, They couldn't leave the city, right, All the bridges had collapsed, like all this crazy shit's happening. There's like check points everywhere. Getting in and out as a nightmare. And of course there's like all these armed people with guns that work for the government yelling at you and yeah, and so they're
fucking hungry. Malik and Sharon they started talking with their neighbors and soon enough they had a food distribution system going. They used their one fucked up car and whatever gas they could siphon from abandoned vehicles to pass out the mrs the meals ready to eat and water that was filtering in from the National Guard. Algiers primarily a black neighborhood. It has one white area, Algiers Point, which is full of those like U loot, we shoot signs.
Right.
Have you seen that that meme where there's like the white assholes with guns standing in front of a Texas flag and it says lotters will be shoot on site. Oh it's good. And then there's like lotters are not afraid. The mean with the.
Yeah, I haven't. I don't know if I've seen that. I Mean, it's like I feel like it's an endless well on the internet of yeah, totally, but yeah, it is like the mentality of like, I will murder someone for you know, at worst categorizing it as burglary. Ye. Like, it's like, yeah, like fucking crazy, which.
Is funny because they all watch movies where white people break into grocery stores after the end of the world, and you know, it's good and noble because they're starving or whatever. Right, that's the vibe is lotters will be shoot on site, and soon enough there is a white racist militia patrolling not just their own blocks but the
rest of Algiers. And another similar militia was active in the French quarter on the other side of the river, and they weren't just sticking to their blocks, right, An awful lot of young black men were dead in the streets full of bullets. The police let them do it because the police were there to shoot looters too. Yeah,
quote looters whoever they fucking wanted. And one highly publicized example on September fourth, cops on the Danziger Bridge killed James Brissett, who was seventeen, and Ronald Madison, who was forty and had mental disabilities. Ronald was shot in the back. The police tried to cover it up. It took until twenty sixteen for the cops involved to get convicted. And of course that was only after like, yeah, more than a decade of work, right, Yeah, I.
Kind of remember that one, yeah, because that was caught on like news camera or something, right.
I think, so, I actually a little bit ago. It said a whole long thing about it. There's like good and really emotional reporting that people have done about that.
You know.
It's like they were a family out to try and like find something to eat and figure out what's going on and stuff, you know, and like, yeah, Malik himself saw nineteen people shot to death by these militias, according to what I read. And this was not yeah, it was someone else quoting Malik. This is not a direct quote from him. But the militias piled men with rifles into the beds of pickups and drove around to harrass people. Yeah,
and they particularly had it out for Malik. They called him the mayor of Algiers and said they were going to quote get him, which, to put it mildly, is a bad situation.
Yeah, concerning, But what was.
Going to happen? In order to find out, You're going to have to wait until Wednesday.
Part two.
That was so cool. Thank you, thank you. Proud of a I'm proud of my segues seguys, cliffhangers.
Yeah.
But what people don't have to wait for is to hear from you Andrew about what you do.
Oh that's true. Yeah, just fine. I don't know the Yosis Racist podcast, I guess is the thing that is happening every week when this comes out. I don't know what's happening. I do know I just recorded a very hurried solo premium episode because I was stuck at San Francisco Airport for fourteen hours. So I did a little recap of that, and I was very tired of when I did it. Anyway, Yoss Racist.
Awesome, Sophie, what do you got to plug?
Well? And I at cool Zone Media have a new weekly podcast that I think at the time of this at least the trailer, if not episode one will be out.
It's called Better Offline. It's a weekly show exploring the tech industry's fuckery. So check that out. Yeah, check me out on substack Margaret Kiljoy dot substack dot com, where I alright google it like the rest of us. You sick. You don't just type in your yeah.
No man.
Although, with the way Google's going, who knows where we're starting.
Ask chat GPT yo, go Duck duck.
The world's gonna split into three directions. There's going to be Google the centrists, and there's going to be Duck dutgo, the privacy paranoid. And then there's going to be the chat GPT, Yeah, the dumb fox, the people who are the least correct according to my whatever. Go listen to that podcast and it'll probably have better ideas than I do. Yeah, and we will talk to you all on Wednesday.
Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts and cool Zone Media, visit our website cool Zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.