The Creator has jokes.
I spent the week leading up to the 21st anniversary of Hurricane Katrina just outside Washington, D.C., with a large contingent of fellow New Orleanians at the PolicyLink Summit.
The gathering was called We Are the Founders: Writing the Unfinished Story of Our Democracy.
Thousands of artists, organizers, policymakers, philanthropists, researchers, builders, doers, makers, and movers came together to imagine a country that finally governs for all of us.
The whole New Orleans was there, right down to one of our most beloved musicians.
Not everybody in that New Orleans still lives here. The summit was also a reunion with people who used to — people whose lives carried them elsewhere but whose work, relationships, and sense of belonging remain tied to the city.
We were not there representing one organization, one sector, or one version of the city. We were there as people working on housing, education, economic development, arts and culture, philanthropy, public policy, and the thousand other things it takes to keep a place alive.
Committed to New Orleans.
Committed to a future that is more just and includes all of us. And I do mean all — including the people whose so-called “lifestyle” some folks keep debating as if identity were a recreational choice.
There we were, being asked to think of ourselves as founders while the city that formed us was preparing to mark the day the water came.
The connection was almost too neat.
PolicyLink’s chief strategy officer, Judith Dangerfield, chaired the Ujamaa Economic Development Corporation before I did. Mama Carol Bebelle was there too — the woman who co-founded Ashé Cultural Arts Center and, a few years ago, handed that mantle to Asali Ecclesiastes. Ujamaa’s president emeritus was Jerome “Big Duck” Smith, the Freedom Rider, organizer, culture bearer, and lifelong champion of Black children who died only days before the summit began. New Orleans was back in the street for him just last week, second-lining from Tuba Fats Square to Hunter’s Field.
See what I mean?
The Creator has jokes.
The City That Care Forgot
The phrase was originally meant to sell the fantasy of a carefree place—a city where visitors could put down their burdens, have a drink, hear some music, and forget whatever was waiting for them at home.
Katrina gave those words another meaning.
Care forgot New Orleans.
The federal government did. Public institutions did. Some of our neighbors did too. Folks still say a certain parish that starts with a “J” had something to do with that.
The flooding was not simply a natural disaster. The federally designed and built flood-protection system failed. People waited on rooftops and interstate overpasses. Elders died in the heat. Families were scattered across the country. Black residents were described as looters while other people carrying the same necessities were described as survivors.
The country watched.
Some helped. Some took notes. Some looked away.
But New Orleans did not forget how to care.
Neighbors pulled neighbors from houses. People shared food, medicine, boats, generators, phone chargers, spare rooms, and whatever information they had. Families stretched across cities and states to find one another. Churches, social-aid and pleasure clubs, culture bearers, community organizations, and regular people became the infrastructure when the formal infrastructure failed.
Katrina did not create that care.
It revealed it.
It also revealed how much of New Orleans had always depended on people doing for one another when the systems around them had never reliably done so.
Tell It Like We Need to Hear It
Jerome “Big Duck” Smith understood that care was not always soft.
Sometimes care tells you the truth exactly the way you need to hear it so you will finally open your eyes and ears.
In 1963, Big Duck was invited to a private meeting with Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy. James Baldwin was there. So were Lorraine Hansberry, Harry Belafonte, Lena Horne, and other accomplished Black artists and leaders.
But Hansberry reportedly told Kennedy that Duck was the person in the room he needed to hear.
Duck had been beaten and jailed for challenging segregation. He had watched representatives of the federal government stand nearby taking notes while civil-rights workers were attacked. Then he was invited into a room to listen to the attorney general explain what the government was doing to help.
Duck told him that being in the room made him want to puke.
Kennedy was offended.
Good.
As Jarvis DeBerry wrote in his tribute to Duck, his willingness to cause offense in pursuit of justice was part of his uncommon courage. Accounts of that meeting suggest Duck’s words also forced Kennedy to reconsider what he thought he understood. Within days, Kennedy acknowledged that he might feel the same way in Duck’s position.
That is a very New Orleans form of care.
We will tell you the thing plainly. We might raise our voice. We may make you uncomfortable. But if we are still talking to you, then there is a chance we believe you can do better.
Duck did not leave his struggle in that room.
In 1968, he founded Tamborine & Fan to teach Black children their history, culture, and civic responsibility. He brought children to City Hall to demand buses for field trips. He had them block a Tremé street until the city cleaned up the trash. He bought them birthday cakes. He taught them to stand up, speak out and never bow.
He spent his life demonstrating that care for children means more than keeping them safe. It means teaching them that they have the right — and the responsibility — to change the conditions around them.
That is founding too.
Here
Twenty-one years after Katrina, some people are still here because they never left.
Some left only long enough for the city to reopen.
Some were gone for years before something in them said, “Let’s go home.”
Others came from elsewhere. Maybe Jazz Fest got you. Maybe a job brought you here, left you, and you stayed. Maybe you fell in love with the city, or a person, or a version of yourself that only seemed to exist here.
Here.
I see care every day.
I see it in people deep inside the legislative process, working through language most of us will never read so that one sentence does less harm.
I see it in the young educator entering a seventh year in the classroom, still trying to make school feel like possibility.
I see it in artists protecting culture from becoming another product sold back to the people who made it.
I see it in organizers, public servants, neighborhood elders, small-business owners, community developers, researchers, culture bearers and philanthropists trying to move resources closer to the people who already know what needs to be done.
The New Orleanians at PolicyLink were part of that same continuum. Different sectors. Different methods. Probably different opinions about almost everything.
Still committed to the city.
Still working toward a future that governs for all.
In the words of Queen Diva Big Freedia:
You. Already. Know.
My landlord is one of my closest friends. This summer he went on a cruise to Alaska and watched the glaciers melting. We were talking about it in a global frame — what a warming planet actually looks like when you see it with your own eyes — when I mentioned I had just gotten back from PolicyLink, where scores of us from New Orleans had shown up in one place during a week when, 21 years ago, 80% of the city was flooded.
He got quiet.
“I remember the Hyatt,” he said. “I remember the Superdome.”
That day.
Then he paused. “Today feels so solemn,” he said. “It is a solemn day.”
He wasn’t at the summit. He doesn’t work in policy or philanthropy or arts administration. He just remembers the way people who lived it remember.
And sometimes it is good to remember what people made possible in the aftermath, too.
Still Does Not Mean Fine
Being here does not mean everything is fine.
The New Orleans metro area lost more than 36,000 residents between 2020 and 2025, according to The Data Center. New Orleans is still staring down boil-water advisories, an education system whose approach to delivering quality education to all our babies remains beyond questionable and taxes and insurance costs that can make the price on a house feel like a whole lie.
We know more about how to live with water than almost any city in this country. We have demonstrated that we can do it. Then we put a few dollars here, another pilot there and return to the futile premise that we can keep pumping all the water out forever.
Now we are staring down what is happening at the federal level while navigating a near-perfect storm at the city and state levels.
So no, this is not another essay about New Orleans being resilient.
I hate that word.
Why should we be admired for our ability to take a beating?
Resilience too easily becomes the compliment people give us instead of changing the conditions that keep requiring us to survive. It turns abandonment into a personality trait. It asks communities to be proud of enduring what should never have been allowed to happen.
I am not interested in praising New Orleans for how much it can survive.
I am interested in the people working to make sure survival is not the best we can offer one another.
What We Have
PolicyLink asked us to see ourselves as founders — not because this country has ever fully lived up to its promises, but because generations of people excluded from its original definition of “We the People” have kept expanding the meaning anyway.
Indigenous people were here before anyone called this place New Orleans. Their land was taken, renamed, parceled and leased back as if they had never belonged to it.
Black people survived the Middle Passage, slavery, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, displacement and every new system built to make an old hierarchy look respectable.
Immigrants came from Haiti, Honduras, Vietnam, Russia, the Congo and everywhere in between to make themselves part of this place.
They founded families, neighborhoods, churches, businesses, traditions, mutual-aid networks and ways of caring that official histories rarely recognize as governance.
Now it is our turn.
That does not mean we have every dollar, policy or institution we need. It does not mean the government gets to abandon us because we are creative enough to improvise around its failures.
It means we already possess the wisdom, relationships, imagination and lived experience required to recognize what is broken and build something better.
The work still requires care.
Care for the community, yes. But also care for ourselves.
Care without self-awareness can become control. Care without humility can turn us into the very institutions we are trying to change. Care without rest becomes martyrdom; and martyrdom is not a sustainable operating model.
We have to keep finding our role, perfecting our approach, asking better questions and remaining curious enough to know when our way is not the only way.
We have to love people enough to tell the truth.
Duck did.
Twenty-one years after Katrina, we are still here.
Still telling power exactly what it needs to hear.
Still choosing one another.
Still finding what comes next.
We are indeed special.
They know it.
So do we.
Disclosure: The author currently chairs the Ujamaa Economic Development Corporation — a role she is stepping down from at the organization’s October meeting — co-founded Brothers Empowered to Teach, and attended the PolicyLink Summit described in this piece.
