The Audacity of Hope - Barack Obama [108]
In many ways, seeing a man who was both the former leader of the free world and a son of the South acknowledge the debt he owed a black seamstress was a fitting tribute to the legacy of Rosa Parks. Indeed, the magnificent church, the multitude of black elected officials, the evident prosperity of so many of those in attendance, and my own presence onstage as a United States senator—all of it could be traced to that December day in 1955 when, with quiet determination and unruffled dignity, Mrs. Parks had refused to surrender her seat on a bus. In honoring Rosa Parks, we honored others as well, the thousands of women and men and children across the South whose names were absent from the history books, whose stories had been lost in the slow eddies of time, but whose courage and grace had helped liberate a people.
And yet, as I sat and listened to the former President and the procession of speakers that followed, my mind kept wandering back to the scenes of devastation that had dominated the news just two months earlier, when Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast and New Orleans was submerged. I recalled images of teenage mothers weeping or cursing in front of the New Orleans Superdome, their listless infants hoisted to their hips, and old women in wheelchairs, heads lolled back from the heat, their withered legs exposed under soiled dresses. I thought about the news footage of a solitary body someone had laid beside a wall, motionless beneath the flimsy dignity of a blanket; and the scenes of shirtless young men in sagging pants, their legs churning through the dark waters, their arms draped with whatever goods they had managed to grab from nearby stores, the spark of chaos in their eyes.
I had been out of the country when the hurricane first hit the Gulf, on my way back from a trip to Russia. One week after the initial tragedy, though, I traveled to Houston, joining Bill and Hillary Clinton, as well as George H. W. Bush and his wife, Barbara, as they announced fund-raising efforts on behalf of the hurricane’s victims and visited with some of the twenty-five thousand evacuees who were now sheltered in the Houston Astrodome and adjoining Reliant Center.
The city of Houston had done an impressive job setting up emergency facilities to accommodate so many people, working with the Red Cross and FEMA to provide them with food, clothing, shelter, and medical care. But as we walked along the rows of cots that now lined the Reliant Center, shaking hands, playing with children, listening to people’s stories, it was obvious that many of Katrina’s survivors had been abandoned long before the hurricane struck. They were the faces of any inner-city neighborhood in any American city, the faces of black poverty—the jobless and almost jobless, the sick and soon to be sick, the frail and the elderly. A young mother talked about handing off her children to a bus full of strangers. Old men quietly described the houses they had lost and the absence of any insurance or family to fall back on. A group of young men insisted that the levees had been blown up by those who wished to rid New Orleans of black people. One tall, gaunt woman, looking haggard in an Astros T-shirt two sizes too big, clutched my arm and pulled me toward her.
“We didn’t have nothin’ before the storm,” she whispered. “Now we got less than nothin’.”
In the days that followed, I returned to Washington and worked the phones, trying to secure relief supplies and contributions. In Senate Democratic Caucus meetings, my colleagues and I discussed possible legislation. I appeared on the Sunday morning news shows, rejecting the notion that the Administration had acted slowly because Katrina’s victims were black—“the incompetence was color-blind,” I said—but insisting that the Administration’s inadequate planning showed a degree