Part Two: The Common Ground Collective: The DIY Collective That Built Modern Mutual Aid - podcast episode cover

Part Two: The Common Ground Collective: The DIY Collective That Built Modern Mutual Aid

Feb 21, 202456 min
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Episode description

In part two, Margaret continues to talk with Andrew Ti about the anarchists and former Black Panthers that came together to set up mutual aid in post-Katrina New Orleans.

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Transcript

Speaker 1

Whole Zone Media.

Speaker 2

Hello and welcome to Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff, your weekly podcast about cool people who did cool stuff. And sometimes we talk about t shirts like the really good shirt that our guest Andrew is wearing that We're not going to tell you what it is because you have to go to the first episode.

Speaker 1

Listen to the first episode. Also, this is this is I've been having more tech issues than I should considering. This is not that hard, so we're at maximum efficiency. We've already rehearsed this like a time, I know, like the dress rehearsal went.

Speaker 3

Okay, we're doing this.

Speaker 2

Yeah, because we have a really hard job podcasting. I mean, it's actually kind of exhausting, but that's because I don't sleep.

Speaker 1

You put quite a lot into this. Yeah, there are ways to do this less fatiguingly.

Speaker 2

Yeah, okay, that's fair. But one of the reasons that this job is doable at all is because of my amazing producer, Sophie Hey. Sophie Hey, And another reason is the audio engineer Daniel Hi. Daniel good job, danel Hi, sweet sweet?

Speaker 1

Does he ever splice himself in responding to any of these highs? Well, think about it should out there just turn out there.

Speaker 2

Ian did that I think once. Yeah, Ian and Anmial switch switch shows, so they both still were Yeah, so so Vide and you said it the show and he did that once and it was funny. It was good. Daniel. You have to if you do it, you should do it as like the voice of God. You know, I had a lot of effects on your voice.

Speaker 4

Hello friends, it is I DJ Daniel. Your gratitude falls on my ears like a lullaby, soothing and sweet. May your episode be informative, researched and full of context. Goodbye now, but no I am with you always. Goodbye.

Speaker 2

Our theme music was written for us by unwoman. And this is part two and a two parter on the common Ground Collective in New Orleans, and we spent the whole We didn't even introduce the collective yet. The collective hasn't even started yet, although some people are doing collective types. A lot of mutual aid has already happened, and you should go listen to part one.

Speaker 3

By necessity.

Speaker 2

Yeah, yeah, Now we're going to talk about one of the other people that we've already mentioned who also chose to write out the storm, Robert King. Robert King, I decided to write out the storm. He'd written out the storms as a kid, and he figured it would be fine. He told his friends as much. Also, I have a feeling that once you spend twenty nine years in a box, shit doesn't phase you. That's just my assumption, right, yeah,

like literally, what could a storm do? Some storm? It's not worse, right, you know, there's very few things that are worse. An awful lot of people have declared solitary confinement to be torture, and those people.

Speaker 3

Are right, yeah, Jesus.

Speaker 2

But then the storm hit and the levees broke and the phones went dark, and his friends weren't so sure that he was safe. But he spent that time sitting on his front porch, hanging out with his dog, and basically, rescuers would come by on boats every now and then and be like, hey, you want to get out of here, and he'd say, can I bring my dog? And they'd say, oh, right, no,

and so he'd say then no, I'm good. And because he's a prepper, King, oh, his last name is King, he had filled his bathtub with water, which is what you should do if you don't have stored water, or even if you do have stored water, and you know that there's a good chance your water supply is going to be disrupted. He had already filled his bathtub up with water, and he had a little bit of food, and basically he made sure that his dog ate better than him and he just hung out and waited for

a week awn. His friends were worried about him. They couldn't reach him. There's no phones working. You know. He'd been a political prisoner for a long time, so he had friends all over who had helped him get out and then helped him after he got out. Right. He A big part of doing political prisoner or any prisoner support work is that you also take care of people as they transition out into the world. Three of his

friends were these white anarchists living in Austin, Texas. Anne Harkness, her partner, Scott Crow, and this other guy, Brandon Darby. Don't get too attached to Brandon Darby. He's going to turn out to be a real piece of shit. I don't say that lightly, but it's a cutt and dry here. Basically, Anne had made connections with Robert King, so she's an important part of it in that sense, but she's not

a big part of the rest of the story. Wrote an awful lot about common Ground and is one of the founders of common Ground, so we're gonna include him a lot in this story. And he is definitely cool. People did cool stuff like Malik and Robert and Sharon. Who will you know the other organizer who was there, Brandon Darby starts off the story a misogynist and then at the end of the story is an FBI and informant who put several people in prison.

Speaker 1

Right, it's probably that's the typical arc for those fuckers.

Speaker 2

It kind of is. Yeah, Scott, he's the only person in the story that I've met just from being in the movement together. And then also his record label put out a single of mine a few years back. Ironically, the single was called the Flood Came Over Me. I don't I don't know whether he picked the song because

of that or not. Anyway, we'll talk about Scott. Scott was raised poor by a single mother, living literally on the wrong side of the tracks in Dallas, and he was one of the white kids in a neighborhood that was mostly black and Chicano. But it was the seventies and so we got to go to a free preschool that was run by former members of the Black Panther Party, the Brown Berets, and the Young Patriots, which is to say, militant leftists representing black, brown, and poor white social movements.

He didn't know that at the time because it wasn't like he didn't go and there weren't just like pictures of AK forty seven's and like now's little Red Book on the wall or whatever. It was the free preschool that activists ran. He had what you might call a troubled youth. He got arrested and did drugs and shit like that throughout the eighties, and then music turned in political. But I'm really excited about this part. It wasn't. I mean,

these other ways are great. Usually when someone gets political through music, it's hip hop or punk, right right, this was industrial and goth. Scott Crowe read an essay by al Jorgensen, the guy from Ministry, talking about the working class, and he was in. He was drawn originally towards socialism and communis, but he was wary of replicating problems with

the USSR. Soon as a teenager, he's marching in anti apartheid marches and he's like playing in industrial bands that tour with Skinny Puppy and nine inch nails and all that shit, and he's helping raise his partner's kid and starting a co op antiques business. Once from now into

the nineties, right, he's an adult at this point. Eventually he gets into anarchism in the nineties through just to check it off on your Free Space on cool Zone and sure an IWW organizer from the Industrial Workers of the World who had gotten out of prison, and an awful lot of this anarchist stuff clicks with Scott. Then in two thousand and one, Robert H. King gets out of prison Scott's partner and was soon friends with him, and they're all close as hell, and they refer to

each other as family. So they're like not going to fucking let bad things happen to each other, right, because the Texas Anarchists, we're doing support work for this released panther. It's four years later, it's Katrina, and no one has heard from Robert is the night of the twenty ninth, about twelve hours after the storm it hit, So Brandon Darby calls Scott Crow and it's like, hey, we should get a boat and go find our friend, and so they called the Red Cross, and the Red Cross is like, yes,

please come with a boat. We need people helping. And the two of them pack up supplies and a handgun and take off towards the unknown. As soon as they got into Baton Rouge, they realized the government operation was in shambles. It was arguing about who had jurisdiction. It was turning away hundreds of boat owners ready to do search and rescue, and so the pair were like, oh, okay, we're not allowed to do it. So they went home

just kidding. The pair were like, all right, well fuck you too, and they drove around to approach the city from another angle. What they saw was a fucking apocalypse. There is thirty foot tall mud drifts, there's cars smashed into buildings, there's trash everywhere. There's natural gas leaking everywhere right next to like down power lines that are sparking. So everyone's just waiting for everything to explode. You know, they're not even inside the city yet when they see

this stuff. They're not inside the flooded parts yet, right. They helped where they could, and eventually they found a father with his adult son who had their own boat who were about to like go around into the Gulf of Mexico and then up into the city in order to get to their warehouse because they weren't you know, there's the only way they could figure out to get in there. And so they were like, yeah, all right, you all have a boat, you can follow us. We'll

guide you through the city. And so they take off into a stormy nightmare and a flat bottomed motor boat designed for like lakes and shit. Oh god, yeah, that's so, that's like a video game.

Speaker 3

Honestly, it's like, I know, terrifying.

Speaker 2

I know, everywhere they went as they went into the city there was dead people and animals in the water.

Speaker 3

Yeah.

Speaker 2

Some of those people were dead with bullet holes in them. It's an apocalypse.

Speaker 3

Yeah.

Speaker 2

They passed rescue boat after rescue boat leaving the city and heard stories about gun battles. The media narrative around like, oh, everyone's just running around shooting each other is absolutely overblown, right,

and that is a dangerous thing that is overblown. But in this first person memoir, Scott talks about, for example, how one would be rescuer with a boat would show up and there'd be a bunch of people who need rescue, and the rescue boat would be like, oh, we're doing women and children first, and young men with guns would say, fuck you, I'm going to shoot you unless you let me into the boat. And so the rescuers were like

shooting the people that they're supposed to be rescuing. And eventually a lot of these rescuers were fleeing empty handed away from the violence that they were facing Jesus or empty boated. Maybe, Yeah, law enforcement isn't helping. They're shooting to kill anyone suspected of looting. Is this whole thing I read about a while ago when I was like first time I was researching all this stuff I was getting into like disaster studies that now I'm off script.

Sophie loves when they go off script. There's this thing thinking that the government talks about its priority is COG continuance of governance, and this is more important than law and order. It is more important that the cops are in charge.

Speaker 1

Right, whoever it was in charge, stays in charge, as opposed to like people be safe.

Speaker 2

Yeah, exactly, Oh, and I fundamentally disagree with that approach. Yeah, helicopters full of guns are whizzing overhead quite noticeably, there to shoot people and not rescue people. But they made their way through the city and eventually they made it to this warehouse, the Guide's warehouse. They spend the night there, like taking turns, keeping watch with the one gun that they have between the two of them, and the next day they realize that they can't do this. As two

white people with a gun and a boat. They are not going to make the situation any better. They are not going to rescue their friend. They are going to make some problems worse. Yeah, which has got to be an interesting decision to have to reach, you know.

Speaker 3

Yeah.

Speaker 1

Well it's also like a shadow of doubt is always there, and you're like, but maybe we're different, but maybe we're not different.

Speaker 2

Right, yeah totally, and will people perceive us as different? Right?

Speaker 3

Yeah?

Speaker 2

Oh, like, don't worry, I'm an anti racist white person in the middle of something that is starting to look like a race war caused by white people.

Speaker 3

Yeah.

Speaker 2

You know, yeah, I've had to deal with like really minor versions of that tension, but I've never had to deal with anything like this that they can't even really wrap my head around, you know. So they spent hours boating their way back out of the city, like clinging to their gun as they pass under bridges, waiting for people to like ambush them to take their boat. They make it back to their truck and they drive back to Austin in Texas, which I'm sure takes a long fucking time.

Speaker 3

Yeah, ok.

Speaker 2

And they're fucking dejected, you know. They're like, oh, we went to go do this noble thing and we can't didn't work, you know. And meanwhile, during all this, King is hanging out on his front porch and you know, feeding his dog. But his friends didn't know how he was doing. He's doing okay, He's not I'm sure he's not great, right, He's doing okay. And then on September fifth, less than a week after the storm, the Texas Anarchists

get a call from New Orleans from Malik. This time his phone line still works kind of it's kind of staticky, right, and he's like, hey, I heard you tried to reach King. We could really use outside support. We need supplies and we need volunteers over in Algiers, you know. Yeah, And so Scott goes and he's in Austin. He gives a talk to like you know, sixty anarchists or radicals or whatever, and he's like, hey, everyone, we gotta go do this

dangerous shit in New Orleans. Who's with us? And the answer is a resounding nobody.

Speaker 3

Yeah.

Speaker 1

I mean I think at the time too, it's like heading into New Orleans would have sounded like the most like crazy thing you could do, basically.

Speaker 2

Yeah, totally.

Speaker 3

Yeah.

Speaker 2

I mean Scott Crow actually compares go up into the city and the boat to feeling like reliving The Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, you know, which is like, oh, that's complicated, Yeah, because that is a lot. I don't have really positive race feelings about Joseph Conrad in the book Heart of Darkness, you know.

Speaker 3

I yeah, I think it's just become a different thing.

Speaker 1

But yeah, yeah, like when you say it like that, there's so many things that you can need.

Speaker 2

Yeah, no, absolutely.

Speaker 1

I think for a lot of people it's just like that book just means took a boat to a violent place.

Speaker 2

Yeah, totally. I used to feel very strongly that Joseph Conrad is piece of shit racist because he like has this quote from when he's younger about seeing a black person for the first time and being like terrified, and like that image stayed in his mind as like an object of terror for years or whatever. I've like since I don't even remember the details. I've since complicated that view of just corn red, but not in a way where I'm like, what a good guy, but that is

not yeah, yeah, but is a really scary place. And I understand why a bunch of people didn't want to go show up with guns, you know. Yeah, Scott and Brandon load up with supplies, including some rifles. This time they forge a bunch of documents they forged. I think it must be like press passes or something that they're like,

you know, in order to get through checkpoints. And they drive to Algiers and along the way they stopped to take advantage of sweet deals, just amazing products and services interwoven.

Speaker 1

Rat It's all unpleasant every time. It just not unpleasant. But it gets me every time. I'm like, oh, never, never once have I not been like, God, damn it, you got me again.

Speaker 2

This is my one joy in life is cynically introducing the interjections of capitalism into my anti capitalist podcast. Gotcha, here they are and we're back. And so they've made their way through the gauntlet of government checkpoints and advertisers

and which weren't there, but the government checkpoints were. And they made it to Malik's house, which was the center of local organizing, right, And this is a shotgun house built in the nineteen thirties in the New Orleans style, And there's food and supplies being distributed and plans were

being made. But the most pressing concern as soon as they get there, after you know, handing out the supplies they brought, is above food water first aid is the fact that a white militia threatening to kill Malik, right, right, that is.

Speaker 1

A problem pretty serious.

Speaker 3

Yeah.

Speaker 2

Yeah, So Brandon Scott and three locals set armed on Malik's front porch Jesus and the militia came by in a pickup truck, you know, like a couple guys in the back with rifles or whatever.

Speaker 3

Fuck. This is like so real.

Speaker 1

I also just like, I don't know why my YouTube algorithm has been suggesting clips from gameplay of the Last of Us, So.

Speaker 3

It's very cool.

Speaker 2

Yeah, basically, yeah, that's that shit. Yeah, well, and that's like this is how we counterpoint that, you know, like I do a whole podcast with preparedness and this is how we counter it is we present organizing models that, instead of rely on get guns and shoot everyone who's different, say, distribute things and probably get guns to defend yourself from the people trying to shoot everyone who's different, you know.

Speaker 3

Yeah.

Speaker 2

So the militia showed up and they were like, oh shit, I thought I was playing the video game one easy. Now I'm not anymore because the other side is suddenly armed. They realized they were outnumbered, they realized they were out gunned, and they realized that the people facing them down were both white and black. And the folks on the porch said, basically,

you won't be harassing people in this neighborhood anymore. Yeah, And this last part, the fact that they're white and black winds up mattering quite a lot in what happens in New Orleans and Algiers in particular, in the near future, there was a lot of racial tension in the city. Scott writes about it very explicitly that it it felt like it could have fallen into race war, right, or I mean, in some ways it is race war, right, the whole American project is race war.

Speaker 1

But however you want to describe, yeah, escalating that yeah, I guess it's like like race cold war into race hot.

Speaker 2

War totally, or like race war war the other side shooting too. Yeah, well right, yeah, so whatever that is. The usual goal is to not have it turn into race war.

Speaker 1

That's the yeah for now.

Speaker 2

Yeah is that Tony Hawk meme? Anyway, So it mattered a lot that some white folks from Texas had shown up with guns to protect black residents, and that helped defuse certain tensions that were happening. So they started patrols to keep militias out of the neighborhood. Armed patrols, And this is one of the first instances of community defense from the left in the twenty first century in the

US that I'm I'm aware of because community defense. Armed community defense had largely gone out of style for decades, with moments of there's exceptions, right, but it had largely gone out of style for decades because we had a lot of like non violence and stuff in the eighties and nineties in terms of activism in the United States, was not in style when this happened in two thousand and five, I barely knew anyone who owned a gun. It's twenty twenty four and for very similar reasons. White

militias directly and personally threatening my life. I'm armed, and many people I know are Yeah, but yeah, not the style. They're doing it anyway, because it needs doing so the most pressing issue was being addressed, right. They had started to stand up to the militias. And so then three of them, Scott, Sharon, and Malik, sat around Malik's kitchen table and hashed out how they would build a revolutionary

aid organization. They prioritize security, first aid, and food distribution, and they built what would soon become the common Ground collective all around them. The state was failing, the Red Cross was raising billions of dollars but not helping. So they were going to do something different. To quote Scott Crow, we would begin relief work without reliance on or interference from the state or professional aid agencies. We would prefigure the civil society we would like to see in the future.

And they decided to build this organization. They would build on what everyone knew. Malik, of course, had done direct community aid and organizing with the Panthers and beyond, and Scott was a veteran of the alter globalization movement. The turn of the Millennium Right, which was the big protest movement in the late nineties and early odds, Right, which had taught how to build grassroots infrastructure everywhere. It went

a very like dynamic and responsive thing. At all these street medics, you had all of these you know, direct action participants, you had all these organizers who were good

at going places. Brandon Darby wasn't part of this initial thing because and he's still i mean, he's doing good things during this stage of it, right, But yeah, yeah, he had gone off into the floodwaters to find Robert King because they still hadn't found him, right, right, And so he like drives as far as he can, and then he parks his truck and he gets out and he's just like fuck it, and he starts wading into

the dark flood waters. FEMA surrounds him while he's wading waists deep through storm water, and eventually he persuades them. He's like, look, let me go check on the following person, the following address, and it was nearby, and so they found King and his dog Kenya on the front porch and basically, through sheer force of will or whatever, they were like, King is coming and the dog is coming.

Speaker 1

Right, that's fucking good at least Jesus and that one silver well, no, it's it is silver linings. I get that.

Speaker 2

But yea, it's funny. It's like this whole this episode is about the silver lining to this storm cloud. You know, yeah, we have to get through the cloud. And King said simply, I knew y'all would come, which is fucking cool.

Speaker 1

That's fair.

Speaker 3

Yeah, gotta have a line ready.

Speaker 1

When they came here.

Speaker 2

Yeah, day four he's like, fuck, he's a going back and forth between took y'all long enough?

Speaker 1

Yeah, yeah, it's like okay, okay, all right, all right, just trying it out on the dog totally.

Speaker 2

And it was King who named the organization, or it was someone paraphrasing King. I've sort of read both. The whole point of this organization was to come together to help each other. So King said, the only thing we need to find is common ground, and you know right, they were like, yeah.

Speaker 3

That's good, nafe good knife yeah.

Speaker 2

No notes. And then I think it was Malik who added a collective because wanted to indicate what that meant. And it was interesting because it was actually a class, not a clash, emerging of two ideological positions, where Malik is coming more out of a hierarchical organizing model and Scott Crow's coming out of a much more decentralized and horizontal organizing model. But they started the way that all

smart organizations like this do. They don't decide what needs doing and go around and like just do it for people. They go around and they fucking canvas. They ask. They're like, right, hey, but what yeah, what do you need? One woman was like, the trash on the street, that is the problem. And this is exactly how the Young Lords started. We did a four parter about them. They were amazing Puerto Rican

radicals in New York City and Chicago. The Young Lord started with a trash pickup, So they started doing trash pickup and they're soon joined by a deacon named Reverend Powell. Not the Young Lords the common Ground. Pretty soon thereafter they evacuate King from the city because the state is just like, the state does not like this man, you know, right right right, and he's like this, this is not the place for me. And Brandon Darby, the later informant,

he also leaves at this point. He's not around for the setting up of the organization. Besides, this initial moment basically says I don't like organizing anyhow.

Speaker 3

Which I guess is true.

Speaker 2

Yeah, fair enough, Yeah, yeah, it's much more destroying these organizations. And so then they just organized their asses off. They relied on decades of experience in networking. Someone from Greenpeace sent the first two way radios, not green Peace, the organization. Someone from Greenpeace sent their first two way radios, and then a whole ass food not Bombs chapter made its way down from Hartford, Connecticut, just like they're like, all right, oh,

well more than Hartford does, right now. You know, I actually almost went down during this, but then I got into an argument with the person I was going to go with, and so they went and then I didn't.

Speaker 1

Pretty classic.

Speaker 2

Also, I know, exactly, like God, the.

Speaker 3

Thing that happens, it's understandable.

Speaker 2

Yeah, and the powers that be were trying hard to keep AID out of the city.

Speaker 1

Yeah, if it wasn't, I mean, good, it's such like a common tale. But I was just like, I just I'm sort of curious, not I guess that curious, like what these people actually tell themselves at night, Like the fuck is wrong with you?

Speaker 2

I know, I think that they're like, well, what's interesting later in this story, a lot of the powers that be who work for all these organizations are just going to start giving stuff to common Ground against their own like guidelines.

Speaker 3

Yeah.

Speaker 2

That was actually the story that like I kind of heard first about Common Ground was like, oh, the National Guard is like, hey, y'all are better distributing this stuff than us. Here you go, yeah, you know, yeah, but yeah, at the start of it, they're like, oh, we got to keep everyone safe by making sure these people don't go into the city, and so people had to smuggle supplies in with like media and then also official aid personnel would help them smuggle through the official aid boundary.

Speaker 1

Right, you can at least like write, even if your fucking organization is to whatever, we can at least like slap a badge on something.

Speaker 2

Totally. But the first doctor they tried to get through was black and he got denied at every checkpoint, and white volunteers were just like slipping through, no problem. Yeah, which is probably a coincidence. Right, Racism has been gone for decades at this point, you.

Speaker 1

Know, Oh man, it really yeah, it's so fucking it's so like depressing, how like frequently it just that, you know, there's no situation where that shit doesn't just crop up. Yeah, totally fuck.

Speaker 2

An anarchist collective of street medics from DC called may Day d C showed up in an old van and then they worked to set up the first first aid station, which was at Malik's mosque, and it was first staff by these street medics, and soon doctors coming from as far away as California. A bike shop in Austin donated two hundred bicycles, and once the bikes get in, medics go door to door by bike to check in on everyone. Right, they're just like, oh, damn, yeah, how's everyone in the

neighborhood doing? You know which I mean considering the number of like dead bodies that they're finding, right that, yeah, must have been an interesting job. Yeah, Jesus Malik's house is soon a distro center and a tent city of people sleeping in the yards sets up. I think this is mostly the volunteers. It takes neighbors a minute to trust all the white folks are suddenly in their neighborhood. Most of the volunteers who are now pouring in from

outside or white but not all right. But once they realize that they've been invited and that a lot of the core organizing is coming from black people who live in the neighborhood and grew up there, you know. And they're also like, okay, and you're not the Red Cross and you're not vigilantes. Yeah, and so they start building trust. Veterans for Peace started coordinating supply drops. And there's this French organization Secur Popular Francis that starts helping out too.

Because the Red Cross and FEMA told them to kick rocks. They're like, right, oh, you don't pronounce enough of the letters in your words, you can't help, or like we remember the yeah French Indians, but no, yeah, I know, right, And so they had fiftyvolunteers like pretty soon then goes up to like seventy and a couple hundred and stuff, you know, And they have fifty volunteers of patrolling to

keep out militias. They're running a medical clinic and a distro, and they're heading out in a rescue boat and they're heading out just to check on everyone and pass out what needs passing out. They get generators and extension cords that are snaking through the neighborhood. This is the only power in this neighborhood for months, or gas power generators that they're bringing in, right, tech and media collectives. This is like the same era that like there's this whole

weird one day, I'll probably cover this. Do you know that there's like a weird anarchist connection to social media and Twitter and all that shit.

Speaker 1

I mean, just I mean, I guess I think of it more of just the general Internet, like the you know, the kind of like hippies, no no tech hippies, like no no borders, no boundaries kind of hacker people.

Speaker 2

Yeah, and you have a lot of it, a lot of the infrastructure that they learned how to build during these anti globalization ault globalization protests. Oh sure, we're like, and they would set up these like indie media nodes where like it's like everyone's a journalist, which prefigures both the good things and the bad things about the monitoring that.

And so it's like all of those people start coming to right, these tech and media collectives show up and they do weird tech stuff involving vans and radios to get phone and internet service going through all the Sure. Yeah, and they set up a pirate radio station just fucking cool. Like pirate radio is like always cool, but especially in this situation.

Speaker 3

Yeah.

Speaker 1

Well it's also like more useful than usual.

Speaker 2

Too, Yeah exactly, Like usually, yeah it's cool because it's pirate radio. In this case, it's like, yeah, we need this.

Speaker 1

Yeah, we need to like yeah, coordinate and inform people.

Speaker 2

Yeah, And Malik starts leaving for you weeks at a time to go across the country to raise awareness and funds and bring in volunteers to bring people to help rebuild New Orleans from the bottom up. Common Ground starts crossing the river in order to help it out in the flooded seventh and ninth wards. They start with hot food served by food not bombs. There's other groups doing this, right.

They hook up with a group called Soul Patrol, which is a mutual aid group started by a woman named Mama Dee who is fighting Homeland security that was trying to force everyone out of their homes because the whole time, it's like no one's really supposed to be in New Orleans, but you like kind of can't round everyone up and kick them out, but you can kind of.

Speaker 3

Try, right, or you just harassed people who are there.

Speaker 2

Yeah, Yeah, exactly. And so the Soul Patrol is fighting against Homeland Security all the while trying to you know, get generators going and stuff like that. Common ground gets them to generators and other supplies. Eventually, the National Guard shows up in Algiers, and they kind of didn't do much. They around in hum v's and they were like, Hey, we're gonna like and they would like announce from loud speakers, be like two days from now we're going to tarp houses.

Everyone tell us if we need your house tarped, like they'd go put tarps over roofs in order to you know, keep the rain water from In the end, they spent after like announcing this for days, they spent a couple hours putting tarps on about five houses out of one hundred plus people who requested it.

Speaker 3

That feels about right.

Speaker 2

But so the organization itself, the National Guard, noth looking great, right, But individuals kind of shine even, you know, people do what needs doing a lot of times, so units that were like leaving, they were like, oh, we're cycling out or whatever. We'd be like, whoops, we're totally just going to leave these supplies here right with you. And so with the people are supposed to get them, you know.

Speaker 3

To the extent that there is much help on any of this stuff.

Speaker 1

It is like, ultimately it's still human beings, you know, running these organized you know, like National Guard units and whatever, and like we'll see, but hopefully some of them sometimes can do good.

Speaker 2

Yeah exactly. Pastors for Peace soon starts donating, and soon there's also a common Ground clinic at a church as well as the one at the mosque. It's a church called Saint Mary's. Rather, what happened was that the National Guard was running one there for two hours a day, two days a week, and then basically was like y'all want to do this, you'll do it better and common

Grounds yeah we do and we will, you know. And so at this point that means you have Marxist anarchists, Muslims, and Christians all working together with the help from sympathetic National guardsmen who are sneaking them supplies. At one point you have a truck from Islamic Relief showing up with supplies from Mormon and Catholic charities. Like fuck yeah, common Ground, you know, like literally the name fine common guy.

Speaker 3

Yeah.

Speaker 2

It was all organized horizontally, and it was organized on anarchist principles. It wasn't an anarchist organization, but anarchist principles work really well for different groups of different ideologies working together because the principles say that everyone is equal, so one position can't dominate the group. You know, it can't become a Christian organization or a Muslim organization or even an anarchist organization. They had a big meeting every morning

at seven am. They they just worked their asses off and burned themselves out. But we'll get to that. Yeah, every morning seven am they did check ins and help people figure out what needed doing on that day. And they use a spokes council model, so like someone would speak up for like one of the clinics, and someone would be like, oh, trash Duty says this, and you know, food nott bums, and then seventh Ward says they need

this and stuff like that. Then they would work all fucking day and then they would meet again in the evening and then they would sleep for like three hours or whatever.

Speaker 1

You know, God.

Speaker 2

Totally sustainable, but Jesus, sometimes sometimes people should try not to burn themselves out and find ways to be sustainable. But like you know what, sometimes there's a crisis.

Speaker 1

Yeah, and sometimes the energy or the necessity and the energy just have to find themselves.

Speaker 2

Like yeah. At one point, the ISO, the International Socialist Organization, they tried their usual tactic called entryism, which is where they join a group that is not ideologically committed to their Marxist whatever and then take it over. Right, it's enough of a tactic that they have a name for it. Right, this didn't work. People were like, you know, you can stay and participate in the democratic process, or you can go. And they were like where we don't want to go.

And then they're like, we have these guns, you gotta lead, and you know, fuck yeah. The cops we're not excited about common Ground. You know, the National Guard and all these places are so treating them like kind of neutral. You know, we'll talk about that in a second. But the cops they treat it like there's an insurgency in

their neighborhood called common Ground. Cops are pulling guns on volunteers. Soon, no one is traveling alone or at night, because cops kept saying shit like well, we could drop you right now, or I'm gonna throw your body in the river, right and you'll be absolutely shocked. Andrew to know that this happened more often and more intensely to black volunteers than white ones.

Speaker 1

Yeah, that's obviously, like the tricky bit of this whole thing is like it's just like sometimes the white folks like have a real purpose in those situations.

Speaker 2

Totally, totally, you know. And so white organizers still end up with guns in their faces often enough, but it's like not as often. Eventually the cops raid the place with hum v's and rifles and they show up, and the volunteers form a human chain and like tell them that they have no right to be there, and like the cops kind of pushed through, and there's all this stuff, and slowly the police end up retreating. It easily could

have turned into a gunfight both sides. Like common Ground was armed and ready in case if the cops started shooting it. I'm glad they didn't. Yeah, But the military once they arrived, was more neutral and generally had kind of a sort of a truce with Common Ground and actually prevented the police from doing the worst of their racism because there was like dads around, you know.

Speaker 1

Yeah, God, And so once again it's also like, yeah, sometimes like the fucking National Guard. I guess it's like the lesser of several evils.

Speaker 2

Yeah, absolutely, which is not a natural transition into advertising. But yet here we are, there's still a transition to ads. That's happening. It's happening, right, No, and we're back. Yes, we survived, We did, Sophie, did you survive? Mm hmm, excellent.

Speaker 3

Fair.

Speaker 2

So a second fucking hurricane hit the Gulf Coast, Hurricane Rita. Oh yeah, that asshole the like Yeah.

Speaker 1

Also, yeah, completely forgot the double tap.

Speaker 2

It didn't hit New Orleans as directly as Katrina had, but it was bad and the place is a hit. It's bad for those places too, you know. Yeah, most of Common Ground evacuated. A skeleton crew stayed on and kept the clinics open and shit. One of the first rules of disaster relief, and this is okay, you asked how earlier, how like the people could sleep at night?

Speaker 1

Right?

Speaker 3

Right?

Speaker 2

One of the primary rules of disaster relief is that you can't make yourself another person who needs help. Yes, so you should not go into a disaster zone if you yourself are going to need rescuing, right, that makes everything worse, and so one it made sense for common Ground to evacuate. And two that's probably how those people, the gatekeepers in this case, sleep at night. Now, the ones who only let in white doctors not black doctors, should walk into the pick up a really large rock

and walk into the Gulf of Mexico. Hold on, prove your tenacity, right.

Speaker 3

You can do it?

Speaker 2

Yeah, believe this. Yeah yeah. Anyone who doesn't, As cooked Biden tells you not to pick up a big rock and walk into the ocean, you're wrong, yeah, yeah, buster.

Speaker 1

Yeah.

Speaker 2

The trans agenda is that I want all the conservatives to stay on the land and not pick up large rocks and walk into the Yeah.

Speaker 1

Yeah, keep the rocks. No, no rock walking. That's what we think.

Speaker 2

Yeah, it's right. Yeah, you're not strong enough too.

Speaker 3

We don't want you to hurt yourself. Yeah yeah, we're.

Speaker 2

Just worried about you anyway. So they come back, and then common Ground stretches itself even further because they started working with the areas that were hit by RITA, and in particular, they start working with indigenous groups and churches in the areas outside the city that were affected. But since they weren't there to like save the day or take charge they were there to coordinate with people on the ground and figure out what help should be offered.

Speaker 1

Right.

Speaker 2

So soon the Four Directions Network split off from common Ground to make sure that the regional autonomy like stayed real regional autonomy. Yes autonomys yeah yeah that big Yeah. Common Ground keeps going in Algiers. When the Red Cross finally shows up in Algiers like a month after Katrina, because they were like, oh, whatever, I don't care about those starving people because they're currently underwater or whatever.

Speaker 1

You know.

Speaker 2

Yeah, the Red Cross shows up with three huge box trucks full of supplies and they're like, everyone's like, yeah, finally, like some get some fucking good food and shit. And they gather around, you know, and the volunteers open up one box truck. It is entirely full of plastic utensils. So they open up the next box truck, all napkins, third box truck handy wipes.

Speaker 1

Oh my god, I guess that's at least they're not. I mean they are, but they're not actively doing anything I do. Like.

Speaker 2

It's funny. Is then there's all this whole I didn't end up concluding it, but there's this whole thing where the handy wipes. They're like, fine, we'll take the fucking handy wipes and will distribute them. But then the cops later are like, you stole those from the Red Cross. You stole the handy wipes and you're selling them. And they're like and they're like holding people at gunpoint accusing them of selling handy wipes from the Red Cross.

Speaker 3

Oh my god.

Speaker 2

So and FEMA shows up. They basically just end up a referral service for common Ground because the people show up and are like, what do we do and they're like, I don't know. I go to common Ground. They know what they're doing, right, And the regional head of FEMA, at some point she needs medical attention and she doesn't go to like the official government clinics. She goes to

one of the common Ground clinics. She shows up and there's a sign on the door that says basically like no firearms allowed, no exceptions, and her guards have to stay outside, and like are really confused by the whole thing, but yeah, So common Ground just does amazing and hard work for months. As the floodwaters received In the weeks and months after the storm, New Orleans was transformed by

gentrification right, and we don't. We're not going to go into all of the many ills that face New Orleans still presently because of this, all the displacement that happened. But Landlord check to b Rens speculation ruled the day landlard Search just illegally evicting people. Will talk more in a second, and then one of the things that we have to address is that Common Ground did some of that gentrification, right because Common Ground brought a fucking lot

of white people to New Orleans, right, right, right. I want to quote Scott Crow again. Our missives were bringing masses of volunteers into New Orleans with words spreading like wildfire across white radical subcultures. From train hopping hoboes, street and circus performers, DIY punks to squatters, burners and forest hippies. Most joined the efforts to relieve and rebuild the city, offering music and other creative endeavors as well as labor.

But disconcertingly, some within these subcultures came to live out a fantasy of living in a burned out, post apocalyptic city. They gave little credence to the tragedies of the people who lived there or to the ongoing relief work. Some of them were self described anarchists, but they acted like assholes, giving an anarchism and radical subculture a bad name. They were narcissists whose personal liberty meant more to them than being respectful or alleviating the suffering around them.

Speaker 3

Right, it's sort of a common byproduct.

Speaker 2

I feel like, yeah, totally, uh one day. Yeah, one of the hardest conversations that it would have. We would have a lot, right, Like I remember like squatting a building in the South Bronx, like being like, yeah, is this gentrification and like not not.

Speaker 3

I mean it's something I.

Speaker 2

Think landlords raising the rents or the you know, it's not uncomplicated. Yeah, Soon there was a broader network that common Ground became part of, which is cool, like a citywide network called the People's Hurricane Relief Fund, and they started working on these long term issues like the right

to return. The government was keeping residents out of the city, which is like, of course helps all the real estate speculators and all the like, right fuckers, The most gentrifying thing was to red things out and fuck over whatever it evict everyone and shit, you know, right, and the immediate crisis is waning. At this point, the white militias were no longer out in force, a few stores are reopening, water has begun to recede, but the larger problems remain.

Common Ground did a lot of behind the scenes work for PHRF rather than taking any kind of directing role. But overall PHRF and Common Ground kept on. They started work remediating houses and doing like mold clean up as

well as soil remediation. So they would like come up with all of these kind of new and interesting ideas that were starting to come up in disaster relief around this time, of like using weird microbes to fight mold and houses, and like growing certain plants in order to pull the toxins from the floodwater out of the soil and all this stuff, you know, right, oh cool, Yeah, this is cool stuff.

Speaker 3

Yeah.

Speaker 2

They also, alongside PHRF started fighting the legal evictions that are happening throughout the city, and sometimes they would unevict people, like people would get evicted illegally, and so then like PHRF and Common Ground would just like show up and put everyone's furniture back into their houses. And then like and the landlords don't live in the fucking city, so they don't like notice for a long ass time, so people get like months extra. You know, they did what

needed to be done. Slowly, they became less necessary, or rather it was less about direct intervention and crisis that became lessness. That is what became less necessary, right common ground. It continued for years. It morphed into and split off into a lot of different groups who did an awful lot of good. By two thousand and eight it was a traditional nonprofit which with all of the upsides and

downsides that that has to offer. And I want to quote Scott Crow one more time about what they accomplished. We had established the largest functioning organization based on anarchist ideals in the United States since the IWT. We were participating in direct democracy at every turn with local residents,

community leaders, and volunteers. Everyone was in the streets. Community organized revolution was in the air, not a seizure of state power, but a revolution of a different kind, the revolution of exercising grassroots power to make changes we all wanted to see. Our revolution challenged the standard pessimism about people's limited agency in their own lives. He also said

we had created a crack in history. We had revealed the lies, corruption and failures of the state, and without hesitating, we had done something about it.

Speaker 3

Yeah.

Speaker 1

It's as someone who approaches the small amount of things that I do from almost like a fear defensive standpoint, I do appreciate being able to call on the show and just be like, right, yeah, you can also do this optimistically, yeah, totally, yeah, okay, okay.

Speaker 2

Yeah, And it's like, I mean, do they win, like no, Like, New Orleans is not run by the people of New Orleans in a direct democratic way, right, Mutual aid is not the primary economic method by which people meet their needs. They showed the failure of the state, and they showed that people can have agency and they did amazing fucking work. And then also just like literally directly saved lots of people's lives, you know, and like. And so Scott goes

back to Austin. He starts a co op thrift historical treasure city thrift where a few years later, my boyfriend pressured me into buying some leather pants for five dollars. I did look good in them, Okay, hell yeah. Brandon Darby went on to go do some stuff while he was in New Orleans. He became friends with the cops who introduced him to the FBI, and by two thousand

and six he was a paid informant. He was kicked out of common Ground around that time for his misogyny and overall flakiness he had, Like he left during the origin of it, but then he came back later at the end of the year, once everything was all set up, you know, and then he just used it to be a sexual predator and a piece of shit. So he was kicked out. He came back a year later and

he became interim director. He basically was able to like leverage the social capital of having been there at the beginning and all that shit, you know, right, and then he fucked the thing up. He like fucked up common Ground. He probably on purpose that is not provable, but it sure meet was provable. He was working for the FBI at this point, and it sure meets what they do. He like, let funds get on accounted for. He started

introducing a lot more authoritarians into the organization. He started firing everyone, like kicking everyone out who disagreed with him and shit, you know. And then eventually he lasts like three months before finally like the common Ground like shakes him off right, kicks him.

Speaker 3

Out for good.

Speaker 1

Yeah.

Speaker 2

He then spent years trying to talk people into arson and violence, finally succeeding at setting two young anarchists to go to prison for Molotov cocktails in two thousand and eight. There's an essay worth reading about him. You actually you hinted at the title of this earlier. The essay is called why Misogynists make Great Informants.

Speaker 3

Yeah, and.

Speaker 2

After putting some people in prison, his cover was blown and he kind of just became a right wing grifter. He was like very like, we all miss Bush. This is you know, it's a while ago now, right, Yeah, there's not a lot of information available about him currently. I hope it's because he's dead.

Speaker 3

Yeah.

Speaker 1

It's a depressing I will say, it's not the culture, but it is the like, I don't know what it is about these like white dudes, mostly in this area where it's just I guess it's just like punk can really go either way totally, and I guess that is basically the heart of the vibe. It's just like absolutely your anti authority and what you view as authority is very very malleable. Totally.

Speaker 2

All my friends telling me what to do, like, don't work with the FBI. Yeah, bluck Man, Yeah, no, absolutely, like.

Speaker 3

Yeah, Paul Ryan tells himself he's a punk.

Speaker 2

Yeah. Oh god yeah. Watching the Republican Party rebrand itself as anti anti establishment has just been it's.

Speaker 1

Yeah, it's pathetic, but it is probably more effective than we want to want to think about.

Speaker 3

Yep.

Speaker 2

Yeah, And so of the other founders. Sharon worked with Common Ground until twenty ten. Malik does environmental work now around coastal land cleanup. Robert King moved to Austin and does organizing work around political prisoners. Common Ground Collective has direct successors like common Ground Relief, which works to restore the coastal wetlands as well as provide free food to

about two hundred families in New Orleans. And Common Ground also led to the proliferation of mutual aid organizations around the mid twenty tens, culminating in the truly amazing number of groups as the government failed to addequately respond to the COVID crisis in twenty twenty. That is the legacy of Common Ground, not just these organizations with specific names that are in New Orleans that but the like if

there's a problem we can come together. I mean, obviously it's a natural human instinct, but like the way in which people do it and talk about it is is there.

Speaker 1

Like a framework and you just got to like and that's so it's like, fuck, all right, well someone's got.

Speaker 3

To do it. Just do it.

Speaker 2

Yeah totally.

Speaker 1

It's also like, at the end of the day, you know, there are obviously significant logistics and you know, cooperation and teamwork and all that, but it also the other way to think about it is it's just getting stuff that people have or the stuff that exists, to the people who need it. And like there's like complicated ways to do that and simple ways to do that, and like.

Speaker 3

Do it.

Speaker 2

Yeah, no, totally, yeah, I really like that. At the end of the day, that's what it is. You find the people who have the stuff and the people who need the stuff, and you're like, all right, yeah, let's move the stuff from one person or another.

Speaker 1

Sometimes it's hard, sometimes it's easy, but it's not like a difficult concept totally.

Speaker 3

Yeah.

Speaker 2

And so if there's a spiritual successor to common Ground, I would guess it's a group called Mutual Aid Disaster relief who work to coordinate is going to shock you disaster relief in in a mutual aid format. Yeah, they're pretty literal namers. And I just like that. The modern mutual aid movement in the US got its start because panthers and anarchists, Muslims and Christians, black and white people

just got together to just fucking make it happen. Yeah, because all here's my catchy ending, because all we need to do is find our common ground.

Speaker 3

Yes, yes, you got there? Hell yeah?

Speaker 2

Hell yeah thanks now that Yeah, that's that's the story. You got anything that you want to plug here at the end, I don't know.

Speaker 3

Just yoss racist. That's my podcast.

Speaker 2

Who's your co host? And would we recognize her from Margaret's current favorite show, Lower Decks.

Speaker 1

Yeah, my co host is Toddy Dows. She's the She plays Mariner on Lower X and a wonderful show. I guess watch Lower X two now that we're past strike times. Watch watch TV that you'd like, and I guess don't watch TV that you don't like. But whatever.

Speaker 2

Also whatever, Well I want to plug. I want to plug mutual a disaster relief. They're great people, yeah, and they do really amazing work and you can probably support them somehow. I didn't ask or look how people can support them, but if you look it up, usually pretty straightforward.

Speaker 1

Yeah.

Speaker 2

I feel like they've been around long enough that they probably know how to have on the website somewhere says how to help them, and I I want to plug the don't become misogynist and then an FBI agent.

Speaker 3

Yeah. And if you're one of those things, you can you can stop.

Speaker 2

Yeah, you have two choices. Stop or take the Margaret rock challenge, in which you pick up a really heavy rock and you walk into the nearest large body of water and don't just see Yeah, just see how long you can make If you can't hold the rock underwater long enough, Yeah, you're weak.

Speaker 3

You're weak. That's right.

Speaker 2

Sophie guiding Plug at cool Zone Media.

Speaker 1

On the social medes, look out for our newest show, Better Offline.

Speaker 3

Whoo ya all right?

Speaker 2

Speaking of offline, That's where I'm going to be now.

Speaker 3

That's cool.

Speaker 2

People who did Cool Stop is a production of cool Zone Media.

Speaker 1

For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website coolzonmedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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