This is a somber time for the people who lived through Hurricane Katrina or had people they love experience it.

As the world approaches the 20th anniversary of when the Category 3 storm made landfall in New Orleans on Aug. 29, 2005, people with ties to the Crescent City remember the fear and panic of watching water pour into buildings, streets turn into lakes, the horrors of staying at the Superdome, the racism from some responders, the destroyed homes — but also the resilience of men, women, and children. 

The survivors are people like National Urban League President Marc Morial, actor and activist Wendell Pierce, writers Shelton Alexander and Cierra Chenier, and former probation officer and author Paul Harris. All have a strong connection to this city of gumbo, pralines, and unforgettable people. All have been busy since that tragic time making sense of what they saw, or helping with recovery.

Former Mayor Marc Morial: There is still ‘disappointment and devastation’

Morial was the mayor of New Orleans from 1994 to 2002 and is the son of the late Ernest “Dutch” Morial, the city’s first Black mayor. The younger Morial spearheaded a New Orleans renaissance. 

Morial said that it is tough for him to process that 20 years have passed since Katrina struck. He shared what he experienced when he recently visited the Lower Ninth Ward, the predominantly Black, impoverished neighborhood permanently changed by catastrophic flooding.

“I went to the site of the major levee breach, where a group of young people working with the artist Brandan “BMIKE” Odums has placed a mural, which is a great piece of art, at that site,” Morial told Black News & Views. “What’s clear is that the Lower Ninth Ward has not been completely restored. While many have moved back, it’s still an area of great disappointment and devastation.”

Morial said he also remembers the betrayal of the government (local, state, and federal) in its initial response to the storm, but that disappointment leads to uplifting memories too.

“I also think about the power, the resilience, the resurgence of the people of New Orleans, who fought to rebuild this city, who fought to restore their homes, their businesses, and their neighborhoods, who fought day and night, even when there was governmental (and) insurance company red tape and distrust,” Morial said. 

“What I celebrate is the power of people, the power and resilience of neighborhood organizations, community activists, small business owners, and some very enlightened community leaders,” he added. 

The civil rights leader pointed out that the city has lost about 100,000 people in population since 2005, but added this has not kept the Big Easy down. It’s also meant that there are pieces of New Orleans spread around the United States.

“We now have this incredible New Orleans diaspora living in places like Houston and Dallas, in Atlanta, along the East Coast and the West Coast — literally all over the country,” he said. “New Orleanians who are still rooted here, they’re still grounded here, but they live and they’ve made their lives in other places.”

Morial said that he hopes that the country will not repeat the sins from the Katrina recovery — marred by what some criticized as slow, disorganized, and ineffective response by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). The Trump administration’s moves to defund the agency will have grave consequences for the future, especially with hurricanes increasing in intensity due to climate change, according to published reports.

“We have a right to expect and demand that the federal government that we pay taxes to will be an ally in helping people both prepare and respond to natural disasters such as hurricanes,” Morial said. 

Actor Wendell Pierce: Feels a responsibility to rebuild

Award-winning actor and businessman Wendell Pierce, a native of metro New Orleans, wants to be sure he did the right thing when he looks back on how he responded to Katrina.

“There’s going to be a little boy who asks 20 years from now: ‘Mr. Pierce, in New Orleans’ darkest hour, what did you do?’ And I wanted to have an answer,” Pierce said in a telephone interview with Black News & Views.  

“My response to it was to put out a clarion call to my neighborhood that I grew up in (to) the generation that grew up with me to make sure to restore the neighborhood of that generation that passed it on to us,” he said. 

Pierce, known for his roles in “Elsbeth,” “The Wire,” and “Treme,” grew up in the Pontchartrain Park neighborhood, which he said came out of civil rights advocacy post World War II. It was a time when Black people were prohibited from buying into the new suburbia, when segregation was at its height and violence happened with it. 

“The covenants in neighborhoods saying that Blacks couldn’t move in, couldn’t buy land, couldn’t buy houses, ‘Thou shalt not that,’ ‘Thou shalt not this,’ these prohibitions of segregation we fought against,” Pierce said. “As a result, my neighborhood, Pontchartrain Park, came into being as an appeasement, separate but equal — adjacent to a white neighborhood [with] the same developer.” 

Pierce said residents called Pontchartrain Park a Black Mayberry after the idyllic community featured on “The Andy Griffith Show” on TV. It was a place where Black people could get a good education, experience a well-rounded childhood, and obtain home ownership to build their wealth. 

As Hurricane Katrina hit land, Pierce’s neighborhood experienced catastrophic flooding and he set out to honor his parents’ generation by bringing it back — leading a movement of redevelopment with the Pontchartrain Park Community Development Corporation. 

“We built 40 houses and spurred this redevelopment of our neighborhood and rebuilding of our neighborhood,” Pierce said. “We did it brick by brick, house by house, block by block, and we rebuilt our neighborhood.” 

The actor added, “I’m very proud of the fact that I joined my neighbors, and this is one of the few resident-initiated redevelopments.”

As Pierce looks back on these 20 years since Katrina, he said he feels fulfilled that he accomplished a mission of getting his parents, now deceased, back into the home they worked so hard to buy in the first place.

“[It] was destroyed and I didn’t think that they would ever make it back. But they did,” Pierce said. “So as I reflect on these 20 years, I reflect on them.” 

He also said that while the restoration of the city should be celebrated, the ineffectiveness, incompetence, and lack of vision in the response should be remembered too. People around the world will remember how people who were unable to evacuate lived in the Superdome for days under increasingly inhumane conditions, and how many more than 1,800 died in the disaster.

“For all of those people that lost their lives, we still have a lot of work to do to make sure that the loss of their [lives] is not in vain,” he said. “Nothing is greater than the people of New Orleans, and until they are properly restored and resourced, we still have a lot of work to do.” 

Some of those lost lives Pierce remembers include three unarmed Black men. Henry Glover, 31, was fatally shot on Sept. 2, 2005, by a New Orleans police officer and his charred body found in a car. An officer was acquitted in the death. James Brissette, 17, and Ronald Madison, 40, were shot and killed on Sept. 4, 2005, by members of the New Orleans Police Department, who claimed they were responding to a call in the Katrina aftermath. Five officers pleaded guilty to charges related to the deaths. 

“I say their names because even before the world watched George Floyd, they were there as an example of how easily a Black life could be ended at the hands of a police officer at the height of our need,” Pierce told BNV. “I remember the police officers shooting at black folks trying to get out of the city as they walked across the Mississippi River Bridge. They were shot at, called refugees, as if they were from another country looking for asylum, when we were American citizens looking for respite.”

Pierce added, “I want to remember that too in this 20th anniversary, because while things have gotten better, we have to be vigilant.”

Shelton “Shakespear” Alexander: ‘Strange feeling’ that something bad was coming

Shelton “Shakespear” Alexander, a poet and creative writing teacher, is a native of New Orleans, but in later years, moved to Violet, Louisiana, in St. Bernard Parish 15 miles southeast. He is one of the survivors of Hurricane Katrina and lost loved ones in the catastrophe.

When the storm hit, Alexander described having this weird feeling that something was going to happen and began to film his experience with his camera.

“I had this strange feeling about this — finally convinced my mom to leave. She got out of there, and so my cousin came through,” said Alexander, 50, who now lives in Houston.

They were headed to Baton Rouge, but traffic was heavy and they ran out of gas, so they turned around and headed to the Superdome, which was being set up as a shelter for people who could not evacuate.

“[When] we get in there finally, they’ve got us all stacked up on top of each other. I always refer to the Middle Passage in a sense as to the slave trade, like we were packed in like sardines,” he said. 

While they were promised fresh food and the opportunity to watch the storm progress on monitors, none of these things happened. Instead, they were given military style ready-to-eat meals. 

One morning, he and others at the Superdome woke to thunder and rumbling and a little girl said she was getting wet and could see water streaming in.

“I zoomed into the spot, got on top of it, and then next thing you know, I’m starting to see it come in,” he said. “People [are] starting to get wet. They’re starting to panic.” 

The heat, humidity, and odor in the overworked bathrooms were a lot to deal with, he said. 

“People (were) just walking around … no shirts, T-shirts, underwear, whatever. The bathrooms started getting really bad, right away, really bad, like the smell,” he said. “The people that were smoking in the bathrooms helped fill the room with that smoke … like, you would prefer to smell cigarette smoke … versus, just straight raw sewage. … Trash was starting to get out of hand.” 

When Alexander was finally able to leave the Superdome and find his truck, he saw the damage the storm caused.  

“You’ve got kids floating in rafts, old people on all kinds of stuff they’re using … for floating devices,” he recalled, saying some streets might have five feet of water and others had no water.

He reconnected with his cousin and they went back to the Superdome to pick up some people and their belongings, and he felt bad looking at the faces of those he had to leave behind.

“I’m just feeling it like, ‘Man, I wish I could take everybody with me,’ “ Alexander remembered. “That hurt a lot.”

Paul Harris: Wondered, as a white man, about preferential treatment by the National Guard

Paul Harris came to New Orleans as a tourist from California for the Southern Decadence Parade, the largest LGBTQ+ event in the city, during the time of the storm. 

As he was preparing to leave the city via taxi cab, the driver told him that both the bus and train stations were closed because Mayor Ray Nagin had earlier called for a mandatory evacuation. 

“They had closed that transportation avenue out … way too early. People couldn’t get out. So I knew my options were either to hitchhike with a hurricane coming or to head to the Superdome,” said Harris, a 69-year-old library clerk who lives in Cathedral City, California. 

Harris, who is white and the author of “Diary From the Dome: Reflections on Fear and Privilege During Katrina,” said that when he arrived at the Superdome, the National Guard was there, armed, and asked people to turn over any drugs or alcohol. 

“I thought, ‘Wow, this is overkill,’ “ Harris said, adding that they also were frisking people.

This was at about 2 p.m., he said. By late that night, the Superdome had filled to about 15,000 people. There was electricity, running water, and working bathrooms, he said. But by about 3 a.m. the next morning, the water started to come in.

“Around 6:30 a.m., the portion of the roof blew off. It was probably a 30-foot-by-40-foot portion. That was when people really got scared because you didn’t know if the whole roof was going to go off. And there’s a lot of…people praying,” he said.

“As soon as the electricity went out, more people [were] pouring into the Superdome, especially after the Army Corps of Engineers levees failed, and the town started to get flooded,” he said.

By then, there were about 30,000 people crowded into the Superdome, Harris said.

“There were fights that broke out, but the vast majority of people were families, and interracial couples, gay and straight, and people were just scared,” he said.

There was no good communication or leadership, and rumors began to circulate about sexual assaults and corpses, he remembered.

“The National Guardsmen were in there — I remember one of them saying he was more scared in there than being in Iraq,” Harris said.. 

Harris also remembers he rumors that buses were coming to the Superdome. He never saw them.

“It was like living in a porta potty — I mean, it was that smelly,” he said. “You just had to find overflowing toilets … use the Handi Wipes from your meal. It was beyond [developing] country. People [were] being suspicious of each other,” he said. 

Harris was able to connect with a group of tourists and smuggled out with them to a hotel.

“It was one National Guardsman who arranged with one of the Australian tourists to get us all out of there prematurely, and they said, ‘Do not say a word to anybody, because you potentially could start a riot,’ “ he recalled, adding that he wondered, “Why are we getting this favored treatment?”

Cierra Chenier: Black New Orleanians deserve something for their suffering

Cierra Chenier is a writer, historian, and storyteller born and raised in New Orleans. She is best known for creating NOIR ‘N NOLA, a digital platform “preserving the history, culture, and soul of Black New Orleans.” She is also a survivor of Hurricane Katrina.  

To help her cope with the memories of that time, she likes to escape mentally and remember her beloved New Orleans East pre-Katrina. The neighborhood sits on the eastern edge of the city. 

“I had so many family members that also lived in the East so we were close to each other,” said Chenier, 29, of New Orleans. “The East was where you went to shop, to eat at certain restaurants. There was Jazzland Theme Park, which later became Six Flags. I saw that every day driving to my house. I always described my childhood as something that was unique.”

She added, “I felt like there was a cohesiveness to pre-Katrina New Orleans that was a bit disrupted post-Katrina.” 

As the 20th anniversary has approached, Chenier said she has become anxious over expectations of herself and confronting the memories.

“For me, the biggest priorities are to talk about gentrification and displacement, the state of young people of New Orleans going into the next 20 years, and revitalizing New Orleans,” Chenier told Black News & Views. “I’ve tried to write through it and be an advocate for those things.” 

Chenier said that she also feels a lot of anger approaching the anniversary, as she is proud of how her city was able to come back, but also feels sadness for both the lives and landmarks lost. 

“There’s grief that we hold over the lives that have been lost — just the negligence that led to so many lives being lost. Then, the physical loss of certain things, whether it is the school you went to or the places you used to go to,” she said. 

She also said that she holds anger around wondering what New Orleans residents will get from sharing their stories of loss and suffering. 

“What do we get from this?” she asked. “So many people, especially now with so many stories being told, so many documentaries … are starting to realize … the gravity of what took place in New Orleans, which is amazing, but I’m … wondering at what point do we get reparation for that?”

Twenty years later, Chenier said, she is hoping for a more equitable New Orleans where the injustices that happened in the aftermath of Katrina would not happen again.

“I hope that we have a New Orleans that prioritizes those who were most disproportionately and directly impacted and we know that that’s Black New Orleans,” she said. “Now, we should be at a place where we can no longer tell Black New Orleans to wait its turn.”