New Orleans is a city of murderous policing and corruption of the powerful

Recently, a reader of this column buttonholed me, saying she was puzzled about my references to black America as a force for change in the confusion of a world moving rapidly to chaos.

She admitted she had little knowledge, except for a vague acquaintance with Martin Luther King's exploits. How could she fill this hole? I suggested she read Black Reconstruction in America by W E B Du Bois, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, and the novels The Color Purple by Alice Walker and Sula by Toni Morrison. Had she taken my advice, she would have been able to grasp the events unleashed by Hurricane Katrina.

If she did, she would be irritated by the accounts of tourists/journalists making their pilgrimages to the French Quarter in New Orleans. That is not the New Orleans I know. These accounts never tell us that 70 per cent of the city is black, dirt poor and dissatisfied. You would not have known before the catastrophe that it had long been one of the most miserable places in the US: a city of murderous behaviour by police against blacks, of corruption of the powerful, and of exclusion of those who carry the tourism industry on their broad black backs.

Du Bois, in his careful investigation of US social life, would explode all the myths of black lethargy in one paragraph: "The black man will enter modern civilisation on the basis of perfect equality with any white man, or he will not enter at all . . . This is the last great battle of the west." My reader would then question the non-verified accounts of rape and murder. She would not repeat the nonsense that black America has been reduced to the powerlessness that paralyses African peasantry. African Americans are modern people with an unimpeachable historical record. Their intervention in the American civil war hastened the defeat of the South. Their rebellion against the war in Vietnam led to the defeat of US imperialism in south-east Asia.

And she would keep her eye on the ball to see into whose pockets the billions of dollars that will be spent in the next few years will flow.

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