USA Reality - Katrina - Vigilantes Shooting Black Men

Reality, in everyday usage, means "the state of things as they actually exist".
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December 19, 2008

Katrinas Hidden Race War: In Aftermath of Storm, White Vigilante Groups Shot 11 African Americans in New Orleans

In a shocking new report, The Nation magazine exposes how white vigilante groups patrolled the streets of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, shooting at least eleven African American men. Local police have never conducted investigations into the shootings. We speak to reporter A.C. Thompson and New Orleans resident Donnell Herrington, who nearly died after being shot by a white vigilante.


A.C. Thompson, investigative reporter whose latest article Katrinas Hidden Race War appears in The Nation magazine. A.C. Thompsons reporting on New Orleans was directed and underwritten by the Investigative Fund at the Nation Institute. ProPublica provided additional support, as did the Center for Investigative Reporting and New American Media.

Donnell Herrington, New Orleans resident who nearly died on Sept. 1, 2005, after he was shot by a white vigilante in Algiers Point.

When Hurricane Katrina ripped into New Orleans, most people tried to flee. In one neighborhood, however, a band of fifteen to thirty people refused to evacuate. With the police department crippled, these people amassed weapons and began patrolling the streets. Before long, bullets began to fly.

Fearing an influx of outsiders, the gunmen of Algiers Point barricaded their streets. Malik Rahim is one of a handful of blacks living in Algiers Point. In the days after Katrina, he says he was threatened at gunpoint by several white neighbors.

what we did over the span of eighteen months is we would try to recreate the history. We tried to go back and figure out exactly what happened in basically the two weeks after the storm hit. And so, what I did is I tracked down people like Donnell Herrington. I tracked down people who admitted to being involved in the gunfire, the vigilantes themselves. I tracked down eyewitnesses, people like Malik Rahim. And I asked everyone, What did you see? Dont tell me about what you heard about. Dont tell me about what people told you about. Tell me about what you saw, what you were involved in, what you experienced.

And what I came to believe from my interviews was that at least eleven people, all of them African American males, were shot in the Algiers Point neighborhood during about the week after the storm hit. That information was bolstered, one, by a trauma surgeon, the doctor who operated on Donnell, who said, Hey, we had a whole stream of people in our emergency room who had been shot, some of them fatally. He said at least five or six non-fatal gunshot wounds, three fatal gunshot wounds. And he said, Look, I dont think any of these cases have been investigated. I think they went unreported.