WI Online Editor
Six years after Hurricane Katrina ravaged New Orleans, causing thousands of residents to flee the mostly black Ward 9 and relocate outside the city, a sense of racial division still prevails among its neighborhoods.
The Times Picayune reported recently that after the August 2005 hurricane that shrank New Orleans’ population by a quarter, data from the U. S. Census Bureau showed parts of the city to be more segregated last year than a decade ago.
"Paradoxically, while much of greater Gentilly and eastern New Orleans lost large numbers of African-Americans in absolute numbers, they simultaneously became more African-American in a relative sense, because the few whites who lived in those areas departed in even greater numbers than their black neighbors," the Times quoted Tulane University geographer Richard Campanella, as saying.
In addition, according to Campanella’s own findings – when compared to tracts where fewer than 15 percent of residents who were African American grew in 2000, an area where at least half the residents were black, almost all fell below the threshold.
Overall, "the battle cry that you hear from folks in New Orleans East is that this is a majority African-American community and we don't have a hospital," Campanella was quoted as saying. "If you venture Uptown, you find majority-white communities that have hospitals."
