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After Katrina, Baton Rouge Weathers a Storm of Its Own
In the aftermath of the hurricane, baton Rouge opened its doors to evacuees. William Dickerson, owner of Plank Road Cleaners in Baton Rouge, chats with employee Diane Johnson, a New Orleans evacuee.
(Michael Williamson -- The Washington Post)
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In 2005 Baton Rouge's population was 43 percent black, a figure that has surely risen after Katrina, city officials say.
Blacks here especially have viewed themselves and their city as different from New Orleans, which they see as a rough-and-tumble poorer relation. Baton Rouge's blacks are proud of their middle-class roots, their jobs at the state Capitol, and the reality that many were former New Orleanians who made good and were able to move here.
Sharon Hebert, 50, works as an administrative clerk at Shiloh Missionary Baptist Church. A black woman, she has listened over the months to the black-on-black chatter regarding the fallout from the hurricane. "You wanted to speak up," she says. "There were things, being black, you dared not say. We all knew it, but we're afraid to openly admit there is a class problem. There is an element we had to say to: 'We're not going to allow you to cause anything to happen to us just because you're black.' "
There also were sharp concerns about what additional challenges the new arrivals might place on the Baton Rouge school system, where the increase in students could fill three new elementary schools. Hebert says she and many other blacks quietly fretted that the influx of students could overwhelm teachers and dampen learning.
And there were times she felt that her candor might be taken as denigrating other blacks, especially Katrina arrivals.
When she would broach the subject of high standards in the schools with other blacks, Hebert says, some felt she was "selling out," a criticism that stung her. "No, you're not selling out. You are so connected that you want your community to keep improving."
Many blacks across wide swaths of the South point to education as paramount to their advances in society. Baton Rouge is home to Southern University, a historically black college, as well as Louisiana State University.
Shortly after the hurricane, Southern had upwards of 1,000 student evacuees from New Orleans on its campus.
"We opened our doors," says Lynn Dickerson, Southern University's assistant vice chancellor for student affairs. "We fed them, we housed them." And, she adds: "It put a complete hole in our budget. Historic black schools don't ever get enough money anyway."
It wasn't long before Southern administrators noticed that students from New Orleans had company in their dormitory rooms. Many had told their homeless New Orleans families to join them.
"We just looked the other way," says Chancellor Edward R. Jackson. "They bought Mama, Daddy, some grandparents."
Jackson noticed the changes loosed across the landscape when blacks and whites discussed the hurricane and the government's responsibility to help the afflicted. He said few denied that the government needed to play a stronger role in hurricane relief.
