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on august 29, 2005, hurricane katrina made landfall near New Orleans, leaving death and destruction across the Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama Gulf coast counties.* Katrina was the most destructive hurricane in US history, costing over $70 billion in insured damage. Katrina was also one of the deadliest storms in decades, with a death toll of 1,836, and still counting. Katrina's death toll is surpassed only by the 1928 hurricane in Florida (estimates vary from 2,500 to 3,000 deaths) and the 8,000 who perished in the 1900 Galveston hurricane (Kleinberg, 2003; Pastor et al., 2006).
After some two and a half years, reconstruction continues to move at a slow pace in New Orleans and the Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama Gulf coast region. The lethargic recovery is now beginning to overshadow the deadly storm itself (Kromm and Sturgis, 2007). Questions linger: What went wrong? Can it happen again? Is government equipped to plan for, mitigate, respond to, and recover from natural and man-made disasters? Can the public trust government response to be fair? Does race matter when it comes to disaster relief ?
WHY FOCUS ON THE SOUTH?
This paper uses the events that unfolded in New Orleans, the Gulf coast region, and the southern United States as the sociohistorical backdrop for examining social vulnerability and government response to unnatural disasters. The case studies of disparate treatment date back more than eight decades. The South is unique because of the legacy of slavery, Jim Crow segregation, and entrenched white supremacy. The region has a history of black business ownership, black home ownership, and black land ownership. Most black farmers are located in the South. It is no accident that the South gave birth to the modern civil rights movement and the environmental justice movement. And the vast majority (over 95 percent) of the 105 historically black colleges and universities are located in the South.
The 2000 census showed that African Americans ended the century by returning "home" to the South-the same region they spent most of the century escaping. Since the mid-seventies, reverse migration patterns indicate that more blacks are entering the South than leaving for other regions. Today, over 54 percent of the nation's blacks live in the South (McKinnon, 2000). In the 620 counties that...