In Katrina's Wake, Inaccurate Rumors Sullied Victims

But Amoss added this:

"If the dome and Convention Center had harbored large numbers of middle-class white people, it would not have been a fertile ground for this kind of rumormongering."

No kidding. It's always easier to recount -- and believe -- the alleged inhumanity of those who are poor, less educated or of different ethnicities than of those reporting their supposed actions. Rumor becomes part of the official record more often than journalists, historians and other "authoritative" chroniclers care to acknowledge.

Post-hurricane confusion between rumor and fact reminds Howard University history Professor Elizabeth Clark-Lewis of historian George Rudé's classic 1959 study, "The Crowd in the French Revolution," about the masses of Parisians -- many of them poor -- who violently overthrew the monarchy. According to Rudé, "Rumors did impact on the behavior of the crowd," sometimes resulting in more violence, Clark-Lewis says.

But Rudé also found that "when you're talking about classes of people, it's easy to expect [poor] people to act a certain way, and to accept rumors of their criminality when in fact, much of [what was reported] was greatly exaggerated," the Howard professor says.

Today, as in the late 1700s, such exaggerations reflect the presumption that "individuals who are outside the mainstream . . . are going to create disorder wherever they are." Like exaggerated reports of post-Katrina criminality, "rumors made their way into the written histories of the French Revolution, even police records," Clark-Lewis says.

"Rumors became part of what historians [accepted]."

So why do people -- and in the case of post-Katrina rumors, black people -- accept the worst suppositions about themselves? I asked someone whose experience might have resembled that of a frightened, traumatized hurricane victim:

A war veteran.

In 1944, Silver Spring resident Wilson Hull was stationed in Italy with the U.S. Army's black "Buffalo division." Fighting the German army was tough; almost as demoralizing were letters his comrades received from home filled with rumors:

Of black soldiers' below-par equipment and training. Of white soldiers' hatred of "colored" soldiers. Of his comrades' alleged cowardice.

"There were rumors that the black troops were running away from the enemy," Hull, 83, recalls. "But my unit was assigned to the front lines -- people weren't turning their backs." Moreover, the white soldiers whom Hull met were friendly, and his unit's equipment and training matched theirs.

But war is the ultimate isolated, fear-fraught situation. "You had the same type situation in the Superdome," Hull says. "A lot of the worst rumors are spread by your own people. The more isolated you are, the more detrimental the effects."

Inevitably, terrible things did happen in Katrina's wake. That some terrible things never happened -- but were reported as true -- was perhaps just as inevitable.

"Pure fact doesn't exist," Clark-Lewis states. "If four people observe an accident, you're going to have four ways of understanding it. . . . We see fact as the written record of what happened.

"But just because something's written doesn't make it true."