Many don't own a car, and some who did couldn't scrape together the money for a tank of gas.
Many of them had to work over the weekend, when thousands of better-off residents were crowding the I-10 evacuation route out of New Orleans.
Some were reportedly waiting for government checks due on Sept. 1, four days away.
"No funds," one 41-year-old woman surrounded by four young children told the New Orleans Times-Picayune when asked last Sunday why she was seeking shelter at the Superdome.
Some were old, some were infirm, and some were homeless. Most of them were also African-American, and the vast majority came from the poorest neighborhoods in a poverty-plagued city.
Today, they are the stranded and the desperate.
And as a nightmare of biblical proportions in the hurricane- and flood-ravaged city continues to grow more hellish by the hour, Americans are beginning to openly wonder what the New Orleans disaster is telling us about class, and to some extent race, in our society. [...]
| William Bunch's Philadelphia Daily News column "Poor blacks worse hit"
posted in articles on September 2, 2005 2:48 AM | t (0)
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The more I read about N.O., the more I keep thinking ... "and whitey's on the moon."
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