Deliberate and systematic destruction of blacks in the United States

Gretna Police Chief Arthur S. Lawson, Jr.

He is directly responsible for the deaths of multiple people by refusing to offer aid to the victims of hurricane Katrina.

During the aftermath of hurricane Katrina people were told to evacuate New Orleans by crossing the bridge that lead from New Orleans to Gretna. The bridge spans the Mississippi river linking New Orleans to the west bank city of Gretna. If you were black or in the company of blacks you were blocked from evacuating New Orleans by the Gretna police.

Gretna Police Chief Arthur S. Lawson, Jr. ordered his officers to kill any black people that tried to cross the bridge that lead into Gretna. His officers shot at blacks or people in the company of blacks that tried to cross the bridge.

A group of around 20, mostly blacks who were fired at when they tried to cross the bridge, camped out at the top of the bridge. Their camp was raided at dusk by Gretna police who held them at gun point, shouted racial slurs and robbed them of their food and water. They hate black people so much that they wanted to add to their suffering pilled on them by hurricane Katrina by taking away their life sustaining food and water. Many died as a result.

The Gretna police blocked the evacuation route for days. Shooting in the air and above the heads of blacks who were trying to get out of New Orleans during the aftermath of hurricane Katrina. These gun shots from the white police officers of Gretna were mistaken by rescue workers in New Orleans as sniper attacks. This lead to the grounding of ambulance helicopters that thought they were being fired at when in reality it was the Gretna police shooting in the air and over the head of black people trying to cross the bridge. Much, if not all, of the reported shooting in New Orleans was actually coming from the Gretna police shooting off their guns and assault riffles at the black victims of hurricane Katrina just trying to get out of the city of New Orleans.

 

i'm never sure anymore how much to believe about katrina, after all the freaky hysterics of the media and the people reporting crimes on the ground that never happened. so i kept looking. i found this on the story, perhaps a bit less accusatory and impartial.
http://www.tms.tribune.com/htmlmail/commentators/articles/0922page.htm

CLARENCE PAGE

For release 09/22/2005



A BRIDGE TOO FAR

By Clarence Page

Tribune Media Services



WASHINGTON—Among other unanswered questions in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, we have this one: Why didn’t stranded residents of flooded New Orleans simply walk to dry land? For many, the answer was simple and disturbing: The suburbs wouldn’t let them.

Three long days after the hurricane hit, thousands of mostly black evacuees tried to march across one of the last escape routes out of the flooded city, the Greater New Orleans Bridge. But they were turned back by gun-wielding police officers from suburban Gretna.

Authorities in St. Bernard Parish, to the east, also stacked cars to block off roads from the city, according to news accounts. But Gretna’s decision gained the most notoriety after two eyewitnesses, San Francisco paramedics caught in the bridge confrontation, reported it on a Socialist Worker Web site.

Internet chatter, angered by the ugly implications of a mostly white town blocking the path of mostly black evacuees, quickly spread the story as an outrageous allegory about race, bureaucratic bungling and the eternal tensions between cities and suburbs.

But, here, as with many stories about race these days, truth gets in the way of a good allegory. Mainstream media revisiting the story found another side to it. Questionable as their tactics might have been, the suburbanites were not as racially evil as they initially seemed.

Gretna’s population of 17,500 is about one third black. The town has a racially integrated police force and a black City Council member. He joined the rest in passing a unanimous resolution on Sept. 15, supporting the police chief’s move to block the bridge.

When the town had lost power and water service like New Orleans after Katrina struck Aug. 29, officials turned without success to the state and the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Yet, when thousands of evacuees fled into the tiny town from New Orleans, the smaller town bused more than 5,000 of them on Aug. 31 to a hastily constructed food distribution center in another suburb.

After growing crowds crossed the bridge after being stuck for days in the New Orleans convention center without food, water and working toilets, New Orleans officials began telling others to cross, too. Gretna officials, upset at this apparently unfunded mandate imposed on them by the big city, began to feel overwhelmed, they say.

Someone set a local mall on fire on Aug. 31 and, as more crowds crossed the bridge, Gretna Police Chief Arthur S. Lawson Jr. proposed the blockade. Mayor Ronnie C. Harris backed him up. The result was the confrontation at the bridge, fraught with racial implications, but, at bottom, an ugly consequence of desperate people on two sides of a river, doing their best to survive under awful circumstances.

Who’s to blame? There’s plenty to go around at the federal, state or local level. The burden for their failures falls on the victims of the flood and those who were trying to help the victims, often heroically—until many of them became overwhelmed.

Whether and how race played a role at the bridge to Gretna will be argued forever, it is safe to say that a potentially violent standoff occurred there between the desperately needy and those who felt they had no more to give. As with the news images transmitted around the world from the convention center and the Superdome, the faces of New Orleans’ neediest were mostly black.

Imposing racial explanations too quickly impairs our ability to focus on other explanations that may be closer to the truth. To answer satisfactorily the burning questions of what went wrong in Gretna and elsewhere in the hurricane zone, I think we need what the Republican Congress and President Bush have been reluctant to provide: an independent, bipartisan, multiracial commission similar to the 911 Commission.

A new report by the 911 Commission chastises the government’s failure to follow its recommendations for improving communications between police, firefighters and other first-responders. Thomas H. Kean and Lee H. Hamilton, the commission’s former chair and vice chair, respectively, called it “scandalous” that, for example, the New Orleans breakdown in communications led to breakdowns in law and order. The city and three neighboring parishes could not talk to each other because they were using different equipment and different frequencies. Helicopter crews couldn’t talk to rescuers in boats. New Orleans police and National Guard commanders in Mississippi had to use human couriers to carry messages.

An independent post-Katrina commission won’t satisfy everyone. Nothing will. But it can help authorities at all levels of government avoid making the same mistakes again. No one can anticipate every disaster, but we should at least be able to respond quickly after disaster happens. Cities and suburbs have enough disputes to work out without waiting for a disaster to make things worse.

(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage(at)tribune.com, or write to him c/o Tribune Media Services, 2225 Kenmore Ave., Suite 114, Buffalo, NY 14207.)

© 2005 BY THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE
DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.

 

i was wondering if this awful situation may be partially to blame on the erroneous reports of the stranded victims of the hurricane turning into looters and murderers handed out so hystrionically by the media. the media just looking to show the absolute worst of everyone, and here through their own biased reporting we got more insult added to injury.

 

A deep South town made of mostly white people using armed might to prevent blacks from entering their haven of whiteness. We are shocked by this?

 

The media didn't help any in that respect. I would say, however, that the uncertainty of the situation had a major effect. I saw a doctor on MSNBC who was at the Convention Center. He said for him it was fairly safe in there. I also saw another clip on one of the major U.S. news TV networks of a TV group who ducked for cover as gunshots went off near them at night. Apparently their camera lights attacted the attention of some snipers. About 4 snipers were shot while taking pot shots at contractors walking across a bridge.

You can't be sure what's going to happen, even if those kinds of incidents are relatively sparse. The Red Cross kept its people out initially on the recommendation of an official (can't remember who right now) who said the city was unsafe. If the police, national guard, and federal troops had assembled there sooner, aid groups would have had more confidence about moving into the area.

The governor of S. Carolina pre-emptively sent a few hundred guard troops to the coast after the Katrina incident when a hurricane was skirting the east coast. People will have to start planning ahead like this for future disasters. We have pre-emptive invasions of other countries for supposed terror links that cost us hundreds of billions of dollars. We can surely have pre-emptive planning for hurricanes in our own country.

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...because we all know how truthful and accurate everything is that's posted on the internet, especially at obvoiusly biased sites. That's like somone posting that "all negroes are dirty and bad and tried to rape my mother!!!" on a white power site and the AP picking it up as fact. Wow. Our media is so credible.

 

Incidents like Katrina show that there still are racial tensions in the U.S., although today people in general aren't as vocal about it (until a situation such as Katrina or the LA riots occurs). I think we've all heard some very ugly racial remarks made after Katrina. It shows you how fragile order and fairness in society really are and how easily things can get out of hand

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absolutely. but at the same time things that may or may not be racially motivated are made so out of oversimplification and a desire to lash out at SOMEONE, ANYONE. it's a lot easier to exorcise one demon than to address a multitude of them. but that doesn't really fix anything.

 

Bill Maher did a bit on this on his new show on HBO.
He said hypothetically, say Oakland was destroyed and the survivors tried to walk across the golden gate to the mostly white, and ultra-liberal, city of San Francisco. He said that even though they were open minded and such wouldn't help when thousands of angry, hungry, armed black men started to invade the city En Masse, the only difference would be that Liberals don't have guns. The former Mayor of San Francisco was on and he said that everyone would run like the devil himself was on his trail.

 

masses of desperate people marching your direction is terrifying no matter what color they are, ESPECIALLY if you've got nothing left to give them.

 

bout time