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• Article by Mr. Horne
• Q & A with Mr. Horne
• Excerpt from Breach of Faith
• About Breach of Faith

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Tavis: Jed, I wanna start our conversation with you, and I wanna start with you because in this book, 'Breach of Faith: Hurricane Katrina and the Near Death of a Great American City,' you write these words. Both in its destructiveness, most of it tied to flooding, and throughout the early phases of the recovery that are part of the story chronicled in this book, Katrina has been essentially a manmade disaster. Katrina has been essentially a manmade disaster. Bold statement.

Jed Horne: True statement.

Tavis: Bold statement. You say true statement.

Horne: Think of it as an unnatural disaster, if you will. There are a lot of people out there who would like to think of what happened to us as an act of God, and there was a meteorological component, to be sure. The federal government would like to think of it as an act of God, as would the insurance industry, as a way to slough off some of the liability politically and also financially for what happened.

But at the end of the day, this was an engineering failure. The, the levees broke. They were badly constructed, as finally was confessed by the Army Corps. And the result is the result is the worst engineering disaster in the history of this nation.

Tavis: What does it mean for you a year later that there are still folk who for whatever reason or reasons don't want to accept and-or acknowledge that, as you see it, it is a manmade disaster? What does that mean, a year later?

Horne: Well, it means that, that people are still in a state of denial, and perhaps that's a permanent condition. There's denial of various different stripes, but ultimately, I think we have to acknowledge the truth here, to acknowledge what went wrong in order to remedy those kinds of problems, and keep them from recurring.

Tavis: I wonder what the - I wanna phrase this the right way. I wonder what the downside is. What's the danger? There it is. The danger. What's the danger in our not acknowledging, in our not recognizing, and in our not applying a strategy to this belief that it was, in fact, manmade? What's the danger in our not acknowledging that, and not addressing that, as you see it?

Horne: The danger, which unfortunately is all too present, is that we will not adequately fortify our flood defenses, believing that they were sufficient to all but this freakishly unnatural, or freakishly natural event, when in truth, they failed at a category three hurricane strength. We need category five protections. I think most everyone in this state is unanimous in that view. The federal government asked for unanimity among us.

We spoke loudly and clearly of the need for a state of the art flood defense, which is not a category three defense. We know what that's good for. Nothing. And as a consequence, we're now fighting a very grudging federal government for permission to do what the Dutch did 50 years ago. Fifty-three years ago, to be precise. Begin to build a state of the art flood defense to prevent this from ever happening again.

Tavis: I didn't come here a year later to rehash these arguments, but since you've raised this, I think it is worth of our going back to try to address it for just a moment. There are a lot of folk, I suspect, certainly some folk watching this program right now, who are of the mindset that while we could debate whether it's manmade or a natural disaster, and I'm sure most Americans - I haven't surveyed this, but I'm sure most Americans would argue that it's a little bit of both.

That said, there are a lot of folk, I suspect, watching who think that it is the fault of politicos. Or the fault of legislators, who did not, before this disaster, raise enough hell, pardon the phrase, to make sure that you had what you needed. That money was not properly spent. That it wasn't properly managed. That's before the fact. After the fact, I keep reading articles every day that talk about how Mississippi has really moved ahead of New Orleans with its rebuilding efforts.

They've got their plan laid out; they know how they want the structures rebuilt; they know how they want the cities redesigned. And New Orleans is still lagging in terms of laying out a strategy for how to bring this city back. You can't lay that at God. That's gotta be laid at the feet of local elected officials, of state officials. I'm not casting aspersion on you, but I'm only raising this 'cause I wanna get your thought on how much of this is the responsibility, at this moment, of legislators.

Charmaine Marchand: Well, a lot of our problems have been a lot of bureaucracy from the time that Hurricane Katrina occurred all the way to now. Even with the Road Home program, and everything about giving people money in order to rebuild their homes. We still have not issued out one dollar as of yet, and it's due to bureaucracy. It's due to the fact that even recently, the Governor has quote, unquote, done a second amendment to the Road Home program that she has to now have approved by HUD.

And those dollars cannot be issued out until HUD approves that program. So we still have people, a year later, waiting for dollars to be given to them, so that they can rebuild and start their lives over again. So yes, bureaucracy definitely plays a part, and I blame myself as well as anybody else. Because I feel like I'm fighting, and I'm one voice, but I still have a voice, and I fight every day.

But I need a lot of help out there. I can't do this by myself. But bureaucracy definitely plays a big part in why we have not moved forward. But also, let me say this. This is not Mississippi's first time in having a disaster. They did not have to create the wheel for the first time. This is our first time dealing with a disaster at this magnitude. And it's not an excuse as to why we're going so slow, but it's definitely a reason. A reason why we have not gotten our thing together as of yet. They've already gone through this process.

Horne: Can I chime in with an observation?

Tavis: Sure.

Horne: I'm not gonna rush to Charmaine's defense, because I don't think she needs a defense, but I would repeat something that Joe Alba, who preceded Mike Brown as the head of FEMA, mentioned to us some few years prior to Katrina, which was that by definition, a catastrophe, which is the kind of event that FEMA was created to respond to, is an event that overwhelms the local infrastructure, politically and in every other sense.

And you look to the federal government for that. That's what it was set up to be there for. And the bottlenecks, the indifference, the grudging response, as I've called it, is occurring at the federal level, and trickles back down locally. And just a footnote as regards Mississippi, their challenge is miniscule compared to our own. Our problem is, as I think most people in this room would understand, is our being below sea level by a few feet.

And the need for that huge flood defense in order to sustain a city here. They got a terrible surge, and it went all the way back a couple miles inland and tore up a lot of houses, and the water went away within a day or two.

Tavis: Chief, I love you, but I feel for you. (Laugh) You are a brother in a tough, tough, tough spot.

Warren Riley: Truly.

Tavis: I know, and I know this 'cause I actually have overheard a couple of people talking about this on my way here, and it got my attention so much that I actually turned around and looked to see who was saying it. I don't know if you know this or not, but there are some people who now say that the crime rate that has started to escalate in this city again is exactly why ya'll don't need no more help than you already got.

That the minute that you start to come back in here, the crime rate goes up again. People being - you know we see this on, you mentioned CNN, we see it every day - who've been shot dead in the middle of the street. I know it's a challenge for you. I'm curious as to how you wrestle with trying to do your part to encourage folk to come back to the city - it's the tourism that makes this city what it is, economically.

How do you encourage folk to come back? How do you tell folk it's okay? How do you tell folk we're trying to turn this thing around, and those images are what we're seeing every day, about this crime rate going back through the roof, and that's only with a quarter of ya'll back here.

Riley: Well, first of all, you have to hope that the majority of our citizens are sophisticated enough to realize what the national media puts out there is not necessarily the truth. Because New Orleans, although not the progress that it should, is making some progress. When you talk about our crime rate, we're doing statistics right now, and we have this company, GCR, who's looking and doing the research, right now, our population, we have about 235,000 people that are here overnight.

Based on GCR. What's overlooked is the 40,000 migrant workers that are here doing work, and the contractors that are coming in here. That escalates the population. That's not being discussed. But what really happens in the city as relates to criminal justice right now is our criminal justice infrastructure is broken. And it's broken as a result of Katrina.

For instance, we have more mental patients involved in violent crime and killing people, because they have no healthcare facilities here. Here's no place to admit a person with mental disabilities who are having mental problems. Our youth study center for juvenile offenders has only been up and running since July twenty-first. Our criminal court system has only had six courtrooms out of the 12 working over the last six weeks.

Prior to that, for 10 months, we only had two criminal court sections. Our prison right now, and the sheriff, he only has 1,600 beds to house prisoners. And before the storm, he had 6,200. So our infrastructure is broken, so no matter what we do, until the federal government - and the city of New Orleans can't do it alone. It's impossible to rebuild the prisons, to rebuild our juvenile facilities, to rebuild the criminal justice infrastructure, when the city doesn't have the revenue stream coming in that it had pre-Katrina.

So if the federal government does not come in and help rebuild the criminal justice system, we're gonna have some problems. Now, the other side of it, they portray New Orleans as the murder capital of the world, which is no true. Right now, we have had 84 murders this year. Eighty-four too many. Last year at this time, we had 196. One hundred and ninety six.

Now, with about 52 percent of our population, we're down as it relates to murders, and our per-capita rate will come out in the next couple of weeks, hopefully. But how things are portrayed to the nation, I can assure you if this was Kennebunkport, Maine, or the Hamptons, these images would not be out there, this city would not be torn down, and we would not be dealing with what we're dealing with, and we'd have a lot more help from the federal government.

Tavis: Let me ask you, to your point, and I wanna get Angela to comment on this at a different level, and I certainly understand the value of money. It takes money to do what needs to be done here. Is the answer just money? Is that the only thing that you need, is money? In other words, if we got serious - and don't hold your breath on this. But if we got serious about this and gave New Orleans and the state of Louisiana right now all the money that it needed, would that address the problems that you're talking about?

Riley: Well, I think it's more than that. We need the money; we need the federal government to come in, to bring contractors in. The money needs to be overseen by someone. Everybody knows the reputation of Louisiana, not that it's all true. Somebody needs to come in and make sure the money's being spent the way that it's supposed to be spent.

But that is a big part of it. We need contractors to come in; we need the military to come in with their engineering groups and things like that to help rebuild the prisons. To help get the courts up and running, to get our juvenile facilities up and running, until we have that infrastructure. And even if they sent the money, the city right now probably could not get the contractors in to do all that work quick enough.

Tavis: Angela, you know as well as I do, speaking of money and the resources it takes to turn this city around, there are a lot of folk in our community, talking specifically now about the African-American community, who continue to engage in a great deal of conversation about what the plans are for this city. You've been in here a lot, working with a number of organizations at the ground, grassroots level, doing the work that needs to be done.

What is your sense? What do you say to those persons watching, listening right now, who have reason or reasons to believe, whatever they might be, that there is a plan here to turn this city around, but it's not a plan that involves, includes, or considers Black folk in the way that it should? You seen any evidence of that?

Angela Blackwell: That is the fundamental question. That's the question...

Tavis: Why'd it take me 20 minutes to ask it, then?

Blackwell: Yeah, that is the question that's on everybody's mind. Whether - when New Orleans is rebuilt, because nobody doubts that it's going to be rebuilt. It is a fabulous place. When it is rebuilt, is it gonna be rebuilt for the people who were here before? Is it going to have the character and the flavor that it had before? Or is it going to become a French Quarter Disneyland?

That's what people are worried about. Or is it going to become a beautiful city, and it's only White, upper-income. Or Black upper-income people who are living here? It is unknown what's going to happen, but we must, as people who care about what happens here, make sure that those who are making decisions about when to send the money and how to send the money and what strings to attach to the money, that we need to rebuild New Orleans in a way that everybody can return.

And that will only happen if we have housing for people who are low income, as well as housing for people who are higher income. We need to take advantage of the fact that this disaster has happened, and rebuild a better New Orleans. A new New Orleans. A New Orleans in which we are (applause) actually capturing the economic development opportunities, and making sure that people who have been wanting jobs get jobs.

And they get the training so that they can get living wage jobs, and really do right by their families. And the good news is that this is all possible. You ask, if you sent money, would that solve all the problems? Eventually. But you've gotta send money for the right things. One of the stories that the media has not told is that the people who are responsible for running the government in New Orleans have not had the resources to have the staff, to have the plans, to take the actions that they need to take.

Three thousand employees were let go, and they have not been hired back at that same level. There's not been money coming into New Orleans to build a staff to be able to do the kind of programming that it will take to rebuild. So we need to have money coming in the right directions. Billions of dollars are about to come into this city. Most of it is going to come from the federal government to the state government to individuals, to rebuild their houses.

But who's going to pay to make sure that we have a sewage system that actually serves the community? (Applause) Who's going to make sure that the parts actually work? Who's going to make sure that we actually invest in infrastructure that is driven by equity? This word, infrastructure, has not been on the tongue of people who've been social justice advocates. But infrastructure is gonna determine whether we have social justice here or not. It takes money. It takes planning.

Tavis: Royce, you're an artist. You engage in the world of cultural empowerment. I wonder - Angela references now the American people. And I love her phraseology, the aspirations of the American people that President Bush was picking up on at the time. That American people term is so amorphous; it's hard to kind of address it, on a certain level.

But I wonder what your sense is of what - this is a big question, but I know you can handle it. (Laugh) I wonder what your sense is of what the American people were supposed to learn, supposed to learn, from this tragedy that we all went through and endured together, that we have not learned over the last year? What was being said to us, as the American people, that we didn't get, that we still haven't gotten a year later?

Royce Osborn: Well, I hope one thing that they have learned is that this can happen to you, too. This can happen to anybody in the United States. A natural disaster happens, or an unnatural disaster happens, and you can't really expect much from the federal government, from anybody. You're on your own. It's what it's shown a lot of people here, and I think a lot of Americans have come to that same conclusion. Not to expect much help from the government.

Tavis: Since you went there, let me follow up. Do you honestly believe that most Americans have figured that out, watching New Orleans? Or do you believe, to the contrary, that most Americans look at this, and whether they want to acknowledge it or not, they know that that was them, that was down south, that was those impoverished Negroes in a city that is under sea level.

That would never happen to me where I live, and I know that I'm a good, tax-paying citizen, and if I got in trouble, the government wouldn't do me the way they did the folk in New Orleans? One could even look at what happened with Rita, after Katrina hit here. Folk were subjected to that. Certainly there were tragedies there, but the government had gotten its act together a little bit better by the time that came.

So do you really believe, a year later, that most Americans get that government really ain't all that, and don't count on them when you get in trouble? Or do you believe to the contrary that most Americans still believe that was an anomaly; that would never happen to me.

Osborn: Well, that's part of the problem with the media coverage of this event. When all you see are poor Black folks in the convention center or on roofs in the Ninth Ward and in places, then it's easy to brush it off as something that happens to poor people. But when they're not showing folks in St. Bernard Parish and Lakeview going through the same problems, and those people now are going through exactly the same problems that a lot of Black folks have gone through in Hurricane Betsy and other disasters that have happened, they're in the same boat.

And they're realizing for the first time that this affects them, too. And I'm sorry that anybody gets hit by this hurricane and is affected this way, but at the same time, I'm glad there are other people who are going through the process, and not just poor Black people again.

Tavis: Before I go to the chief here, let me just ask you and Representative Marchand the same question. I'll start with you, Royce. I asked the two of you this question, because the two of you both, she lost her house, you had your house damaged. You were out in L.A. living with family for a while before you got back here. Since you mentioned the media, and I'm sure I'm setting myself up for this one, but let me (laugh) just ask you honestly what your sense is, a year later, of how the media covered this story. You were a victim of it. How do you think the media, gut level, covered the story? What's your assessment? What grade do you give them?

Osborn: Well, let me tell you, you've been great. (Laugh) (Applause) You've been the exception, after the flood, after the - and I hesitate to use the word Katrina myself, just because I agree with Mr. Horne. I don't think of it as the natural disaster that people portray it. It was manmade, and I don't think Katrina did us wrong, but poor levees, poor engineering, a poor response, poor planning.

That's what really did us in. You were here at the beginning, and you had people on constantly, week after week after week. A lot of people just, if it weren't wet, there was no point in showing them. After things dried out and a few months later, it was as if okay, well, they've sent all the money down there, everybody must be fine. And I've traveled around a little bit since then, and people are just dumbstruck, they're surprised to hear that things are still the way they are down here.

They just have the sense that well, "We don't see it anymore on television, so things must be all right." I moved back early November to Gentilly, and there was one family back on the block in November. And today, there's still one other family back on the block. It's been a very, very slow process there.

Tavis: Representative Marchand, I mentioned earlier that you lost your house in that now-infamous Lower Ninth that we've seen time and time and time again. When you wanna talk about the devastation in New Orleans, everybody goes to the Lower Ninth, to the Ninth Ward to get those photos. You lost a house there. What's your sense of how the media has covered this over the last year?

Marchand: Well originally, my biggest concern was not having people to forget. And there was a lot of portrayal of the African-American, the impoverished areas. We even saw some of the depictions of how it was different in some of the newspapers, where they show - I think everybody knows the one guy who's walking around with a basket, the Black guy walking around with a basket in the water of televisions and other things, and then they show the White couple with food in their arms.

But they didn't show the other White couple that was also holding baskets of Heinekens, and everything else. But it's just a matter of what message are you really trying to send out? And at one point in time, there was very negative messages that were being sent out. And it was mainly focused on African-Americans. There was no conversation about what other areas were affected by Katrina.

There was very little conversation about St. Bernard Parish, which was hit just as hard as the Lower Ninth Ward. And now, even today, and as I go out to different areas, I tell people, do you realize I live in the Lower Ninth Ward; I still am under look and leave. I'm still not allowed to go back to my home and live, because we don't have the proper infrastructure down in the Lower Ninth Ward yet for the entire area, with regard to water and the electric. So there's still people who cannot go, even start the process of rebuilding their homes in the Lower Ninth Ward, still.

Tavis: Let me close this conversation, though, Chief, by asking you why it is, with all that we've discussed here, and so much that we didn't get to in this half hour, but tell me why it is that you remain hopeful.

Riley: Well, first of all, what keeps me here is just my love for the city, being here. My love for this city, to see the people of New Orleans become a revitalized community. This city can change. I don't know what it will actually take, but it's really just a love for the city, to see so many struggling people. And when you see our elderly, our elderly don't wanna go anywhere else.

They wanna come home. And any of them that are away, they wanna come home. So, we have to find a way. And the other side of it is that New Orleans has had its problems, but we have an opportunity to change so many deficiencies. To change our education system. To change our criminal justice system. To make New Orleans a better place. New Orleans could be a thriving city.

We simply need some help, and this is an opportunity. We have to make it an opportunity, because it was a tragedy. But we have to make it an opportunity. And hopefully 10 or 15 years from now, New Orleans will be a city that everybody wants to be a part of, because we do have an opportunity to make a big change right now.

Tavis: Tomorrow night, a look at issues of race and class in New Orleans one year after Hurricane Katrina. Our panel will be joined by legendary New Orleans singer-songwriter, Irma Thomas.

That's our show for tonight. You can catch me on the weekends on PRI, Public Radio International. Check your local listing. See you back here next time on PBS. Until then, good night from Los Angeles, thanks for watching, and keep the faith.