00:00I always believed I was as good as anybody else that was in the world.
00:04Never, never less than. I just never bought that theory.
00:09My era, my generation of the 60s, you know, we aspired to the world.
00:13And that's what I tried to do. I tried to conquer it, the whole of the world.
00:18I'm a native New Orleanian, but I was born in Opelousas, Louisiana, on December 4th, 1942.
00:24That means I'm a good young 72 years old now.
00:27Growing up in New Orleans, urban and poor in the Lower Ninth Ward, that's part of the life that I led.
00:35But I also saw the other side of life.
00:38And I also saw what racism does to you and vowed all of my life to fight and change that.
00:44When you get on the bus, there were signs that said for colored patrons only.
00:49You had to sit behind that sign.
00:51So we used to take the signs when we were in high school and throw them out the window.
00:55And the white bus driver would get all bent out of shape.
00:59I always thought it to be kind of on the fast side in New Orleans, which was okay, but I wasn't a fast lane kid.
01:07Whenever some rumbling get to going down on the block, I was always able to talk my way out of the mess.
01:13In one of my biology classes, I did an experiment with a little drop of water from a little pond down in the Ninth Ward where we used to crawfish.
01:24Brought that little drop of water in and put it under a microscope.
01:27And I had never seen anything like that in my whole life.
01:33An entirely new and different world of one-cell animals.
01:39Amoebas and paramecia and euglenia.
01:43I said, what?
01:44In this one drop of water, all this is happening?
01:48And then I saw a cell divide.
01:50Mitosis.
01:51It was like the cell divided right in front of my eyes and I just knew I had seen the face of God.
01:56I said, oh, my Lord.
02:00My interest was to be multidisciplinary.
02:04Where I could be a social scientist and a political scientist.
02:08I could be a philosopher and I could be an activist.
02:12You know, I could be a biologist and I could be an artist.
02:16I wasn't taught to be limited or to be restricted.
02:18I did my master's degree on the effect of endotoxin on plagued metabolism.
02:24At the same time, I'm talking with Stokely Carmichael about black power.
02:29I'm Louisiana by birth.
02:31Louisiana by rearing.
02:33But I've also lived in other places.
02:36Now, I'm living in Houston, Texas.
02:39I've had the good fortune of teaching at 10 major universities.
02:42Including Harvard and MIT and Cal Berkeley, Open University of Tanzania.
02:48And, of course, my beloved Dillard University in New Orleans.
02:56We've known each other over 24 years now.
03:00And have been in active relationship 20 of those years.
03:05She was doing a program at a church in San Francisco.
03:10I came to be supportive.
03:11And afterwards, we were walking back to my car.
03:15And I was listening to Christmas Spiritus.
03:18And, Oh, Holy Night, one of them songs came in.
03:21And I just turned around and grabbed her in my arms and just wouldn't let her go.
03:25So, I mean, the Holy Spirit just said, that's the way to do it.
03:30That's what you should do.
03:31And the world changed.
03:33Right there, the world changed.
03:36You know, I like to tell her that I saw her in the days of the Nile.
03:40When culture was young and civilization was born.
03:45And sashayed up to her, you know.
03:47And like everybody used to say, boy, you sure would talk a whole bunch of stuff.
03:51I said, yeah, well, you know, you use the gifts that you got.
03:59I looked at the calendar and said, you know, time is passing by.
04:03And pretty soon, you're going to be reaching something they call retirement.
04:08I said, I got to make some other choices about what's going to happen to my future.
04:13Because I don't have any money.
04:16I don't have any economic security.
04:18I don't have any assets.
04:19I've spent my life as a servant leader.
04:23The people in New Orleans have said to me, look, you've been doing this work all over the country.
04:27It's time you look at coming back to New Orleans.
04:30Reverend Nina Bryant, the wonderful wife that I have, we talked about it.
04:33And we got our affairs in order and together.
04:36In 2004, we made the move.
04:39It was like bringing it all home.
04:41All of what I've been doing all over the world.
04:43Just trying to finally crystallize it in New Orleans.
04:46I hadn't been in a hurricane season in New Orleans for years.
04:55I was not here for the 1965 big one.
04:58I was away in graduate school.
04:59So I hadn't practiced the drill or routinized the drill.
05:03So I began to ask other people what they were doing.
05:05And most people started telling me, hey, they were making plans to leave.
05:09So I just said, well, what are y'all going to do?
05:10They said, we're going to pack up, board up, and get out.
05:14I said, you're going to leave all your stuff?
05:15They said, yeah.
05:16I'm going to leave my stuff in here.
05:18They said, well, what's going to happen to your stuff?
05:20They said, well, whatever happens to it is whatever's going to happen to it.
05:23The traditional routine was three days and you come back.
05:29You move from the lower parts of the city to the higher parts of town.
05:33Or you go stay with a relative somewhere.
05:36Or you might go to a hotel for a couple of days, but that's your coming back.
05:41I felt that there was nothing else I could do and the time had come to get out of here.
05:46So for us, that meant looking to Houston for several reasons.
05:52One of which, perhaps, and the most important, is that we had family.
05:56We had additional family on my father's side and my mother's side.
06:01So you didn't quite know what to make out of everything.
06:04You still worried, when am I going to get back?
06:07And what's going to be the state of where I live when I get back?
06:10The TV was telling us how ferocious the storm had been,
06:19how much damage there was along the way.
06:23The most important thing the TV was telling us is that a levee had broken.
06:29There was water just pouring into different sections of the city.
06:36You saw people trapped in houses.
06:38You saw people trapped on expressways.
06:40You saw people trapped everywhere you turned.
06:43There were people who were trapped in the city who did not get out and who could not get out.
06:50All these are things that you began to see that left you with a highly uneasy feeling
06:56about what had happened, who had happened to, how bad it was, and how will it ever be addressed,
07:03and what did it all mean for you?
07:06And you didn't have an answer.
07:09So at that point, all you could do, man, is hope and pray for the best,
07:13for the people you love, for the things that were valuable to you in your life,
07:17and wonder, how could all of this be as bad as it is?
07:22How could this happen like this?
07:24I haven't felt that helpless in my life, where something's being done to me, and I don't have the ability to influence the outcome.
07:36We stayed at my stepmother's home from the time we landed in August to the month of December.
07:50Our first responsibility was to immediately figure out how to get FEMA registered, and that meant going to the Astrodome.
07:59It was like a disorganized human jungle.
08:06Massive numbers of people, all hurting, all aching, confused, angry, protesting.
08:18I just started becoming more assertive, raise a little hell, raise a little cane, and so we finally did get our infamous FEMA numbers.
08:26That's like that number across your chest, you know, when you get booked in, so we finally got booked in.
08:32Late October is when we got back to New Orleans.
08:40It was barren.
08:43There were no people around.
08:45There were no children.
08:46There were no birds.
08:48You could see the water levels.
08:52Four feet some places, five feet others.
08:55And you could see the mold just penetrating into the fabric of the wall.
09:02There's that odor, there's that stench, there's that uninviting, dead look to your belongings.
09:09And it's like you feel, I've lost something.
09:13And I can't just wipe this off and make it come back to life.
09:18The place we used to live was indeed the place we used to live.
09:32In the rebuilding of New Orleans, I think there's been fundamental injustice that has taken place.
09:37Because on the one side, you have people who have gotten better opportunities, made more money.
09:45A whole other set of people have gotten bypassed.
09:47There's so much disparity and suffering among lower-income people, especially black people.
09:55New Orleans was a social disaster before the storm.
09:58Katrina just revealed and unmasked the level of the injustices that were here.
10:04We should try to rebuild a better city.
10:07Make it more just than it was before.
10:09I regard myself as a dual citizen.
10:15I'm comfortable residing in Houston and comfortable residing in New Orleans.
10:19So I call myself a Houston-Linian.
10:22I commuted for five years to teach at Dillard.
10:25And then after that, I became an adjunct professor at TSU.
10:29We lost the house in New Orleans.
10:33We built a brand new house in Houston.
10:34My wife didn't have the employment opportunity that she wanted.
10:40She got it in Houston.
10:41There is no perfect city.
10:43There's no perfect place to live where there are no social problems and no contradictions.
10:48And black folks are not in marginal positions.
10:50We're in marginal positions every place we go.
10:54To me, it's just a part of the life cycle at this stage.
10:59Living in both cities.
11:04Leaving Houston, first track of the journey is getting to Beaumont.
11:10And when I get out of Beaumont into Louisiana, it's like, I can exhale now.
11:16I know I'm getting closer to home.
11:20Closer to the womb.
11:22Closer to a sense of peace.
11:25And just going through those green fields along the road just soothes my soul.
11:32Then the next step is on to Lafayette.
11:34And now I'm in my birth zone.
11:36I'm down the street from Opelousas.
11:38And I really am feeling secure.
11:40When I hit the Lafayette, Opelousas area, I know if I want to get some good crawfish and some boudin.
11:44All of that and some authentic zydeco.
11:47I might even run over to Opelousas, my home city, and say hello, you know, and get refreshed real quick.
11:53Now I'm leaving southwest Louisiana and I'm going to the next nation, southeast Louisiana.
11:58From the Cajun Nation to the Creole Nation.
12:00I'm really sailing now.
12:02And I get across that bridge, that Mississippi River Bridge.
12:05Yeah, I see the lake.
12:06So I know I got it made.
12:08I'm sailing.
12:09I'm sailing.
12:09We done made it.
12:10It's rolling on in.
12:12Back home at last.
12:14Back home at last.
12:15Thank God I'm out of here.
12:16I'm back home at last.
12:17Phew.
12:45Thank God I'm out of here.
12:49You
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