[reporter] The flooding in this city is leveling off.
But 80% of New Orleans is still underwater.
And while the mayor wants everyone to get out of the city,
people here are still trying to figure out how to leave.
The Superdome, which was the shelter of last resort,
has become the last place anyone wants to be.
[reporter] No one's allowed just to walk out of here?
-No.
-Come on man, no.
[reporter] If you say you want to just leave,
they've got, what do they say?
-They tell us there's alligators,
dead bodies, disease.
And, and you won't make it.
-My cousin, that's the one I picked up from home,
told me he didn't know how much he was gonna
be able to take.
He said, I don't think I'm gonna make it.
He was about to break down up in there.
I said, dawg, we gonna get out of here.
Right next to the Superdome,
they have a ramp.
The bottom of the ramp was flooded out.
And I seen, like, a group of National Guardsmen were,
like, they were sitting, like, on the back side by
the ramp just kicking it, relaxing, chilling.
I guess they ain't thinking nobody going
anywhere because of the water down there.
So, I was like, I'm gonna try to sneak up and get my truck.
We find my truck.
I'm all excited.
It just looked like this beautiful horse
sitting on a hill.
Right, I call her Pegasus.
As a matter of fact, it just was the most
beautiful sight I ever seen.
My heart was beating.
Got to the truck, put the keys in,
turned up, cranked it.
Thank God it started up again.
We're just driving through the water.
The waves just pushing, pushing, and pushing.
As we passed by the Convention Center,
I'm looking.
I'm seeing all these people just,
they don't know what's about to happen next.
They just want to survive.
They just want to get out of here.
And all them people just looking up at me like,
man, you about to get out of here in this truck.
I'm holding on to my crucifix and I'm praying,
I'm asking God to get us through it.
[♪ dramatic music playing]
[reporter] This is where they're picking up some of
the refugees out of the Superdome.
And as you can see, these people look like
they've been here for quite some time.
[reporter] There is one scrap of good news from New Orleans.
More than 100 buses evacuated thousands of
people from the hellhole that was once
the Louisiana Superdome.
And more will be brought out tonight.
-After a successful bus evacuation of
the Superdome, the National Guard organized
the people in front of the Convention Center,
got them on buses, and we sent them to the airport.
[soldier] Buses are loading up on Tchoupitoulas Street.
[soldier] Put it all in there.
Let's get the whole family.
-When they put us on the school buses,
under the Interstate Bridge,
they didn't tell us nothing.
They didn't tell you where you were going.
-I was still out there by the Convention Center.
I didn't feel like I could go no more.
Like, I didn't even feel myself.
You know? I was just done.
And so, when they said that the military
is taking people to the airport and
they going different places,
I said, man, I don't care where I go.
I was going anywhere that the plane was gonna fly me.
-The water had receded, so we took our mother,
who was in a wheelchair, and the rest of the family,
and we walked to a vacant lot
where a helicopter landed.
[Russel Honore] That Saturday, we had over 200 helicopters
from the 82nd Airborne landing in New Orleans.
The idea was to recover people and
get them evacuated and take care of them at the airport.
[Alice Craft-Kerney] At the airport,
we were met by National Guardsmens with
guns who said we must get on the plane.
We begged them to let us go to our
sister who lived
in Houma, Louisiana, which is about an hour's
drive away from New Orleans.
We had family that was ready to receive us.
But we were forced to get on the plane.
We had no choice.
They had guns.
[Russel Honore] The first airplanes are getting loaded.
Everything seemed to be going well.
But then, one of the senior pilots on
the ground flying the civilian airplane said,
well, we can't take off.
We don't have a manifest.
So, he told my major and my major called me up
and said, hey, boss.
We got a problem.
Well, they haven't taken off.
The people have been sitting here for hours
because we don't have a manifest.
I said, well, let me talk to him.
So I talked to him on the phone.
I said, look, a lot of these people here
don't even have identification.
There's no computers out here.
We can't create no manifest.
I said, we can get you a yellow piece of paper.
And when they walk on the airplane,
you take their names down and that's gonna
be your manifest.
Now, fly the fucking airplane.
And the planes took off.
[Alice Craft-Kerney] We asked, where were we going to go?
Where is this plane gonna land?
We don't know.
I said, you don't know.
I said, everybody has to know where they're gonna land.
Don't they have to have a flight plan and
this kind of thing?
They said, just get on the plane, ma'am.
-Nothing, we didn't know anything.
We knew that we were leaving New Orleans.
My mind was blank.
I, I didn't know what was gonna be next.
We didn't, we didn't really have control over our destiny.
-They tell you you're gonna go to Houston.
They tell you you're gonna go to Atlanta,
to Chicago, San Francisco.
God knows where you'll end up.
[reporter] The New Orleans International Airport
is part of the largest airlift ever on U.S. soil.
More than 10,000 hurricane survivors.
-Help's on the way.
Help's on the way.
-We've witnessed all day airlifting evacuees to
the Louis Armstrong International Airport.
Buses also arriving to take people out of
the once great city.
[Geraldo Rivera] I tell you.
What a difference a day makes.
24 hours ago, this building behind me,
crowded with thousands and thousands of the most
desperate refugees you could imagine,
has been emptied.
God bless the United States Army.
God bless the United States military.
They pulled this thing together from
chaos, confusion, anarchy.
Well, God bless you.
-Oh, I tell you what, it's great.
That all Americans are here to help Americans.
[Geraldo Rivera] That's it.
-Is this America?
Do I have freedom of movement?
I, I, I thought I was still living in America.
So you know, it was, like, okay.
I'm gonna do what they tell me to do.
I'm gonna cooperate.
I'm not gonna cause a ruckus.
But I will get back to New Orleans.
[reporter] The first wave of hurricane refugees
from Louisiana is arriving in Texas this morning.
They're being bused from the New Orleans Superdome.
[Keith Craft] As we were moving around the country,
the news media were calling people from
New Orleans refugees.
[reporter] Dallas schools are opening their doors
to storm refugee kids.
And Dallas is delivering truckloads of
donations to refugees.
[Keith Craft] How can you be a refugee in your own country?
It offended not only me but a lot of people.
[storm victim] We are not refugees.
We are American citizen that got caught up in a bad way.
And we resent that word refugees.
And they shouldn't use that anymore.
[storm victim] We been traveling and traveling.
We been going from one shelter to the next shelter.
But that's okay because we living.
The thing that's not all right is we got
family members scattered all around.
Where they're scattered at, we don't know.
[reporter] With approximately a million refugees,
30 states in all are accepting evacuees
in this country's largest migration in 70 years.
-These were internally displaced people.
This was the forced migration of people
because of Katrina.
And I think within modern history that was
the first time for a lot of Americans that that happened.
[Kevin Goodman] I had never even heard of
Austin, Texas in my life.
But Austin, they showed us love up there.
But I didn't know where my life was headed from there.
[storm victim] I currently live in Memphis, Tennessee.
However, I'm from New Orleans, Louisiana,
I have...
[storm victim] I'm here in Georgia.
I have lost everything in my home.
[storm victim] I live in Norman, Oklahoma now.
[storm victim] I came here to Carson City.
[storm victim] Houston, Texas.
[storm victim] But I want to go back home.
But now, I got...
[storm victim] I used to be a New Orleanian.
I was born and raised there.
-About a month after leaving the Superdome,
once the water receded, I was able to come back
to check on the house in St. Bernard Parish.
You can see the devastation.
[Thanh Truong] Coming back after the city was emptied out,
it was strange, for sure.
A city that is known for celebrating,
known for its food, known for being loud.
It was dead quiet.
[Lucrece Phillips] When I came back to New Orleans,
everything looked dead.
Everything smelled dead.
It was just desolate, just oh, my God.
I could not believe.
I was like, this is never gonna be put back right.
[Shelton Alexander] The graveyard.
This the worst thing I ever seen in my life.
We have above-ground tombs.
But the water saturated the earth,
and it made a lot of the graves come up.
We got caskets coming out, man.
One of my cousins, we had just buried,
like, not too long ago, her casket was actually
sitting out in the open, exposed.
Now my people's graves, and it's right on top of
my people's graves.
Just look all around.
This, this, this not cool, man.
I don't think anybody, after they bury their people,
they want to see graves like this, man.
Damn, I wasn't ready for this.
-It's one thing to think about the loss.
It's another thing to see it.
When you see it, it's real.
When I saw my home for the first time,
I was devastated.
The tears just kind of rolled down my face.
Mud was still inside the home.
It was just a muddy mess.
All of my belongings were ruined.
All of my pictures.
Everything.
[Lynette Boutte] I had mold that was, like,
going up to the ceiling almost.
[Lucrece Phillips] Birth certificates. Pictures.
Everything was gone.
-When you come back to something that has been
your dream and you realize that it has been destroyed,
it was, like, what do I do?
[Shelton Alexander] Oh, man. Man, look at my crib.
It's smashed down to the ground.
My mama trailer.
And look at my other crib that we just built,
leaning to the side.
Look at my crib.
Man, this don't even feel like home, man.
Hey, girl.
Hey, Cinnamon.
Hey. Hey, girl. Hey.
She miss you. She miss you.
[Shelton Alexander] My other dog...
she was in this...
she was in this fucking house.
Look at it now.
Look at my shit, man.
My big screen.
This is devastation.
Martin Luther King.
I got some of my old letters from the military.
My military books are fine, man.
You have to step over stuff and walk through
stuff to get to stuff.
I can't really get in there.
There's so much mud and thick stuff up in there, man.
It's gonna be enough.
But this house is damn gutted out.
Look how thick the mud is.
I can't get to nothing.
I really can't find what I'm looking for.
But I'll say I guess whatever I got out the deal,
guess it'll be all right.
But.
[Shelton Alexander] I hate to leave like this, man...
[Shelton Alexander] Shit is so fucked up.
Everything you ever worked for, man,
or gain on your own.
And you, even if you had too fucking much, man,
this was, it was, like, this was yours.
You know?
(crying)
It just leave you confused.
What are we gonna do?
How are we gonna fix this?
An, and it just seemed like it was unfixable at the time.
[reporter] Louisiana, today, officially ended the search
for bodies of people killed by Hurricane Katrina.
The death toll in the state now stands at 964.
[Russel Honore] Because of the heat and the lack
of communication and the absence of medicine,
a lot of the people we found in homes dead
were elderly, poor, and disabled.
And they were alone.
[Kevin Goodman] My brother, the one that when we went
walking in the water,
kicked a stop sign and put a big hole in his leg.
He died from a infection.
And my niece that was walking with us, she had, uh,
she had Lupus already.
But then, she couldn't take her medicine,
so she developed meningitis,
and it moved up to her brains.
So she couldn't talk.
All she could do is lay there with her eyes open.
And so, you know, that was one of the reasons why
I didn't want to come back to New Orleans.
Because I didn't want to have to, like,
relive that again.
[reporter] From the air today,
we saw miles of once flooded houses.
As many as 250,000 homes may be uninhabitable.
[reporter] In New Orleans, there was anger and
frustration today when a sweeping new blueprint
to rebuild the city was unveiled.
[reporter] Anyone who lives in a neighborhood
highlighted here in yellow, most of the city,
could be forced to move.
The plan calls for new parks in green that
would help control flooding.
Residents would be resettled in areas
circled in red.
-This was a plan that somebody had come up with
to turn different areas into,
into green spaces for people
that would also be able to capture water during storms.
Great, great idea.
Except that people actually lived there.
[Eddie Compass] When he came up with the plan
about the new New Orleans,
it angered me.
Because many of the areas where the people at
the bottom of socioeconomic scale and
people who did not have a voice were being discounted.
[spokesperson] Immediately, we need to identify and be,
begin assembling properties that can
become part of this system.
-The Lower 9th Ward, it was supposed to be a g, green space.
How you gonna make a g, green space out of my property?
-When the map came out, the first thing that came
to my mind was hell no.
It was hell no because it goes back to the legacy
that that house that I live in provided.
I'm not giving up this man's property and even,
and I'm referring to my grandfather.
[reporter] Some worry that the Black wards of
the city are being intentionally neglected
and may even be bulldozed, leaving residents
displaced and disenfranchised.
-It did not go over well with me.
It didn't go well with most of the citizens
who wanted to come back and rebuild their homes
and their life.
And that's when, I think, folks started to think
about how can we organize and fight back.
-Any area of the city of New Orleans that is
sparsely populated, they are going to want to
use the eminent domain to take over the properties.
-We have a resident on the phone.
Whoever didn't hear, we have a resident on
the phone right now.
She's watching them at Galvez and Reynes
bulldozing a home.
-Get me the city attorney's number.
-We will move the people.
Just get your dozer stopped.
Ain't no danger as long as they stop.
-These are people's homes.
-They're leaving.
-All right.
-Yes.
(cheering, applause)
-Now, you got a whole bunch of mad citizen that's in the city
and gonna get a whole lot madder.
-So that's a problem.
[reporter] So mad they were screaming today at
the commission that came up with the rebuilding plan.
-Please.
-Don't tell me about what this fucking town deserves.
[community member] This is a big, audacious plan.
It was put together by,
obviously, very brilliant people.
But guess what?
You missed the boat.
[Thanh Truong] In fairness to them, there were some areas
that you knew, because of the elevation and because
of the amount of flooding that it may have taken on
during the storm, it may have not made sense to,
to rebuild there.
But everything is personal in New Orleans.
For people that grew up here,
their neighborhood is everything.
The high school where they went to is everything.
So if the mayor says, if the city says this part
isn't gonna come back, we're gonna make this
green space, like, it, it's going to cut you deep.
-I hate you.
Because you been in the background trying to
scheme and get our land.
It's been happening.
That's not happening.
-We know that they have wildfires in California.
They have tornadoes in the middle of America.
They have flooding in Florida.
But they've never told them you can't rebuild.
-I don't think it's right that you try to
take our property.
Because like I said, over my dead body.
I didn't die with Katrina.
Bye.
(applause).
[Mark Schleifstein] The blowback of it was so bad
that the mayor basically said not only we're not
doing that, we're not gonna do anything except
what the localities want us to do.
[Mayor Nagin] We, as the community,
will have the ultimate say in how we move forward.
[Alice Craft-Kerney] If you don't have the resources,
how can you put your life back together?
The people who lived in these more affluent
neighborhoods, they're up here.
So who's gonna need the most resources?
The people who are here or the people who are down here?
It shouldn't be about equal.
It should be about equity.
[Russel Honore] How you survive a disaster is directly
proportion to how well-prepared and
how well you off before the disaster.
The bottom line in that, the poor got poorer,
and the rich got richer.
[Mitch Landrieu] When the federal levees broke
10 years ago, we and the world gasped at the
possibility that in the blink of an eye New Orleans
as we know it would be gone.
But 10 years after Katrina,
we're no longer recovering.
We're not rebuilding.
Now, we're creating.
(crowd cheering)
We're in the midst of a retail and
restaurant building boom.
Can you think of any other place in the world
where you can lose 100,000 people and gain
600 more restaurants than we had before Katrina?
I mean, come on.
-You want tomatoes on that?
-Ladies and gentlemen, your city is changing
before your eyes.
-What did he order?
-I'm gonna try this alligator sausage.
[Malik Rahim] It was a tale of two cities.
The rest of the city was pulling back together.
But go ask those in the 9th Ward.
Ask them who was left behind.
[♪ somber music playing]
-In some instances, the city was back.
But it just wasn't back equitably for everyone.
[reporter] Louisiana got ten billion dollars in
federal money to create and oversee the Road Home Program.
It's the largest housing recovery effort
in American history.
-My plan offers a fair and practical solution
to return people to their homes
and their communities.
This is a great victory for Louisiana.
(applause)
-The Road Home turned out to be the road
to nowhere for a lot of people.
[reporter] The Road Home was supposed to cover the
costs that insurance and other federal aid didn't.
[reporter] People have waited for months for
clearance of the money and everything else.
Strangled by all this red tape.
[Angela Chalk] Every time you went in there applying
to the government for Road Home assistance,
it seemed like the rules changed from week to week.
So now, you have to expend more time and
energy and you're still dealing with the mental
effects of Hurricane Katrina.
It's overwhelming.
[reporter] The Road Home had a fatal flaw.
It awarded grants based on repair costs or
pre-storm value, whichever was less.
In the poorest neighborhoods,
a home's pre-storm value tended to be less
than the cost of repairing or rebuilding it.
Those neighborhoods were majority Black.
[Alice Craft-Kerney] So, folks who lived in Lakeview,
a predominantly White,
upper middle class to upper class area that
already had the resources to rebuild,
they got more money than folks that lived in,
let's just say, the Lower 9th Ward.
Even though the building materials cost was the same.
A 2-by-4 for my house costs the same
as a 2-by-4 for another person's house.
So why are you gonna give me a different amount of money?
It was like they were sabotaging the recovery
in areas where Black folk lived.
-Everybody wants to come home.
It's just that we can't come home because
the government is trying to keep us away from home.
[Lynette Boutte] It was gonna cost at least $250,000 to
repair my property.
I was fully insured but
I had just borrowed on the building.
And when I borrowed on the building,
it was put for collateral.
And when the storm hit and I went back,
the bank took the money.
They told me that they weren't giving me anything.
I got zero from Road Home.
-Homeowners can choose repair, rebuild,
accept a buyout and relocate within Louisiana,
or sell and leave the state.
[Lynette Boutte] I started looking at what
they were trying to do.
I'm like, you're not getting my property.
Because I am not selling.
[Angela Chalk] But some folks just did give up
and say I don't want this headache.
I'll take the buyout.
[Lynette Boutte] And so, what they accomplished
with a lot of people was to get them out and
away from the city.
[Kevin Goodman] After, like, nine and a half years being
in Austin, I went back to New Orleans.
But when I came back, there wasn't no more
affordable housing.
No more houses in the hood, you know,
where you can get a one-bedroom for $300 and
a two-bedroom for $500.
Back in the day, most of the houses was doubles.
You know, family on this side and a family on that side.
But after Katrina, they started making single
houses out of double houses,
like you see here.
That's two families that's out of a house.
The cost of living became so high,
I made a decision to leave New Orleans.
[♪ somber music playing]
[Shelton Alexander] After Katrina, I knew I couldn't
come back home immediately,
since I had to go and work and make money.
My dad been a master carpenter for many years.
So, I just drove all the way to California
to work with him.
Now, I just got to see the scenery and travel
where God want me to travel.
Then go back home eventually.
I just was thinking about a new beginning because
I knew what I had left behind.
It was a lot of devastation, lot of pain.
So, I just had my moments when I'm like, you know,
kind of, like, singing a old spiritual hymn,
you know, from, like, my grandmother,
and going through the mountains.
♪ Lord, I'm climbing high in mountains. ♪
♪ Trying to get home. ♪
So that was kind of, like, my, my whole thing.
Like, I was just was, like, I'm,
I'm just trying to get home.
And I don't even know where home is just yet.
Trying to get home.
♪ You know I'm climbing high mountains. ♪
♪ I want the Lord to know I am. ♪
♪ Trying to get home. ♪
♪ Said, I'm... ♪
[Shelton Alexander] Well, the driving force behind
me coming back to New Orleans was my moms.
[Shelton Alexander] My mama's birthday was...
November 30th.
[Shelton Alexander] November 30th.
-I made 50 years old.
Ain't that's a blessing?
[Shelton Alexander] After the storm,
we had FEMA trailers all over the land.
And that's another trailer in front of my house.
And from that Road Home Program,
she did receive some money.
And my mom bought this trailer.
And so, with that money, my moms finally bought, like,
a big mobile trailer to make sure we had
a place to stay.
But then, maybe about 20 days later,
my moms passed away.
♪ Get home. ♪
[Shelton Alexander] And all I have left is these pictures.
I kept remodeling.
I kept working on that house.
Almost complete.
I still have some work to go.
But as the years start going on,
the grants start going away.
Eventually, I had to move to another location,
make more money to be able to come back and
put in resources.
So every now and again, I'll just come back,
try to touch up on some things.
Ohh, lot of work still left to go up in here.
But uh, something in me was saying,
for my mom's sake and everything that she did,
I need to finish the house.
Even though it was impossible to
finish the house.
Every time I come back here,
I got memories of my life,
my moms, my stepdad, all my people right there.
My neighbor next door,
she's gone.
Everybody is gone.
It's depressing to come here and look around and
know that none of these people who know me,
that know my story, they are no longer here.
It's like pictures flashing,
videos flashing of what it used to be.
But it's no longer.
So when I finally felt like I did all I could do, now,
maybe, it felt like my mom's spirit was all
around me saying, it's time to go, man.
You can go.
It's okay.
Don't worry about it.
And I left.
[♪ somber music playing]
[reporter] Hurricane Katrina laid bare the massive failures
of the Corps of Engineers hurricane protection system
of levees and flood walls.
Congress gave the Corps $14.6 billion to make it right.
-All of this was done after Katrina.
If you look at this,
you can see the construction of it is different.
It's more stable.
It goes down deeper.
And it's fortified much better to take stress from
rising water or wind.
-Since Katrina,
the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers
repaired the levees.
Many of the repairs are quite robust.
However, the Corps of Engineers
themselves recently admitted that
when they determined the heights,
they didn't take into account global warming.
[reporter] No sooner did the Corps of Engineers
finish the last piece of that upgrade project than
it posted a notice in the Federal Register saying
subsidence and sea level rise will cause levees
to require future lifts.
[Ivor Van Heerden] Within 70-odd years,
the water level around New Orleans is gonna be
four feet higher than at present.
In addition, many of the wetlands are gone.
There's no friction.
That water can move much further and get much higher.
-As it relates to climate change,
communities of color are the ones who are impacted
the first and the worst.
-Many folks that live in and among these
communities do not have the resources that others
have, and so, they are at a higher risk
for what's gonna happen in the future.
[reporter] Tonight, Maria's direct hit
devastating Puerto Rico.
-Unfortunately, it's not gonna get any better.
[reporter] Sweeping devastation in Lahaina.
[Marty Bahamonde] It's just gonna get worse.
[reporter] The deadliest and most devastating storm
that North Carolina history.
(crying)
[Keith Craft] This is home.
I've been here all my life.
But what really gets me, the Lower 9th Ward,
really, the hardest hit area.
It's forgotten.
[reporter] An entire ward of this city,
the 9th Ward, appears to be up to its rooftops
in water.
I told you earlier today I didn't think this
had turned out to be Armageddon.
I was wrong.
[Malik Rahim] The environmental injustice that is
happening in our community is manmade.
But that mean, also, it could be man solved.
Yeah?
-I can remember, as a little boy,
we used to go back there into the swamp.
It was our wonderland, our playground.
The park started out small and it grew.
It's a little bit like it was before.
They're planting cypress trees.
There's a outdoor classroom.
You can fish.
I'm an ambassador to the park.
I welcome people.
I tell them as much as I can about when I
was growing up in that same area, you know,
and what we're trying to do.
Because as I said, it's something that
we are doing for ourselves, to start over.
You know, new beginning.
[Alice Craft-Kerney] When Katrina hit,
and it took so many of our elders,
it was like losing so much of our history.
They celebrated together.
They praised the Lord together.
It was a true community.
[Lynette Boutte] A lot of people couldn't come back.
A lot of people didn't come back.
It's heartbreaking, because New Orleans lost
a whole maybe two generations of people.
And that took away a lot of the culture that
sits in this area.
And so, I wanted to come back into the community
and do what I had to do.
And I was not gonna stop until I got back to
where I intended to be back in 2005.
Every penny I have made since Katrina has gone
into me getting back into my salon and my property.
It's mine.
And like I told the people at Road Home,
you will have to pry them out of my wrinkled up,
little brown hands to get it.
[Eric Wright] There's been a lot of changes in
New Orleans since Katrina.
You would enter by steps here.
And you would come into the living room.
The living room ran the width of the lot.
The kitchen would have been right up in here.
This is where Mom did all of her famous cooking.
You know, I'm a New Orleans boy.
There's a certain energy that comes out of that land.
That house was an extension of me.
And the most difficult thing was to demolish the house.
I felt like I was taking a piece of me away.
[Lucrece Phillips] I, I really came back here
because I, I couldn't stay away.
I wanted to be home.
But now, it's the new New Orleans.
It's totally different.
You know, it's like the roots are here,
but the tree has been stubbed.
We still have our culture and that's a good thing.
[Kevin Goodman] A lot of my friends,
they kept the masking and Mardi Gras going after Katrina.
Say I talked to my daddy.
He said, son, don't you worry.
That was their life.
You know, and it was my life too.
♪ So on Mardi Gras morning, gonna tell you a story. ♪
I'm in a tribe that my father started.
The Flaming Arrows.
♪ We are the Flaming Arrows. ♪
[Kevin Goodman] My dad, he was a Indian chief.
My mom was a seamstress.
We really not Mardi Gras Indians.
The correct name is the Black Masking Indians.
On Carnival morning, we wear these suits and pay
homage to the real native Indians who helped our people.
♪ Mardi Gras here we come. ♪
♪ We are the Flaming Arrows. ♪
♪ Gonna be a morning... ♪
So it's a family thing passed down through generations.
It's my last time putting on a suit,
but I have grandchildren and I'm gonna keep the
tradition going.
We got to pass the torch down.
One of my cousins who I'm turning my tribe over to,
he was, like, well, you know,
we need you to come back home because we can't
let you go out like that.
♪ Here, not just any ol' sound. ♪
-Mardi Gras day.
♪ Gonna get on down. ♪
♪ In the Mardi Gras sound. ♪
♪ Everybody sing! ♪
♪ Here, not just any ol' sound. ♪
♪ Get on down, in the Mardi Gras sound. ♪
[Kevin Goodman] I still take New Orleans with
me wherever I go.
But before Katrina I would have never thought
that I would ever left New Orleans.
You know, I just thought that I was gonna be
a New Orleanian, like, all my life.
Say Mardi Gras morning when I'm the telephone rings.
I mean, I love New Orleans,
but it's not the same New Orleans.
20 years later, it's totally different.
The talk is different.
The walk is different.
The neighborhoods that we grew up in with our families,
it's totally different.
Katrina took a lot.
But it didn't take my pride, my dignity,
or my culture.
That's one thing I can say about New Orleans is
this is some surviving people.
[Malik Rahim] We are the canaries in this coal
mine called America.
The horrors that people done went through after
Katrina didn't have to happen.
There's no way you could justify to me why
Hurricane Katrina turned from a disaster to a tragedy.
I guess the bottom line it shows how much we cared
then for the most vulnerable and how much
we care right now.
What make America great is our ability to reach out
and help others in time of need.
But that's where the lessons is learned.
It's upon us.
It's upon us to wake up.