Martha Daniels is a New Orleans native who lost her home and possessions along with her seven adult children in Hurricane Katrina in 2005. While they were able to evacuate, they struggled in Houston as refugees facing discrimination. After returning to New Orleans, they found their homes and community devastated. Though rebuilding has been difficult as they face challenges including lack of jobs and control over the rebuilding of their schools, the family remains determined to recover and advocate for their community. As the matriarch, Martha emphasizes the spiritual lessons of resilience and faith in God that Katrina taught her family.

1. BY TERRY GLOVER PHOTOGRAPHY BY PETER CHIN
NEW ORLEANS NATIVE MARTHA DANIELS
and her seven adult children have never been ones to
make a habit of fighting the power. Most are educators.
All have lived unassuming lives, raising their families
and quietly working within the system.
But there’s something about coming face-to-face with
the worst of nature—and human nature—that will stoke
a fire, even in the most docile types.
The entire family lost virtually everything in 2005
when the costliest natural disaster in U.S. history flood-
ed 80 percent of the city that they call home. Daniels and
five of her children have since returned to New Orleans
(one is in Houston, the other is in Los Angeles). Starting
from scratch, looking to rebuild their lives, hoping to
heal deep wounds.
Their story is one of pain, perseverance and purpose,
borne out of the wrath of Hurricane Katrina, and one
that, probability predicts, bears witness about once
every century.
Odds are better that it could take that long before
Daniels and her children who returned—Cynthia Phipps,
Gwen Payne, Geri Davis, Marcus Green and Harrietta
Reed (and Reed’s daughter Rhonda)—are able give a
complete testimony of their experience. At least without
inviting back a flood of emotions as deep as the storm
surge that submerged their homes in and around the
Ninth Ward in eight feet of water.
As they sit around a nondescript kitchen table, each
recounts, in fits and starts, how Katrina affected them
most. Woven together, their stories run life’s continuum
and counter to the coverage that mainstream media has
given to the plight of Black storm victims.
Contrary to popular belief, most Blacks in New
Orleans—including the Daniels family—were never
looking for a handout. But after what they have
gone through, you’d best believe that they’re now
determined to get a fair shake.
Each journeys back with the realization that they are
the fortunate ones. Some they knew never made it out of
the Crescent City. Others never returned. But on the
road to recovery, destination can turn one person’s bless-
ing into another’s calling.
BY KEVIN CHAPPELL
PHOTOGRAPHY BY VALERIE GOODLOE

2. ONTHECOVER:GABOUREYSIDIBEPHOTOGRAPHEDEXCLUSIVELYFOREBONYBYPETERCHININNEWYORKCITY
70 EBONY l MARCH 2010 MARCH 2010 l EBONY 71
Although it has been nearly five years since Hurricane Katrina, communities have not totally returned and homes are still being rebuilt.

3. 72 EBONY l MARCH 2010 MARCH 2010 l EBONY 73
‘I WASN’T A CHARITY CASE’
The date: August 28, 2005. Katrina was gathering strength in the Gulf of
Mexico. Daniels and her family were along various points on the evacuation
route with enough clothes to last a few days. They had planned to meet
up in Houston, about 350 miles west along I-10.
What they hadn’t planned on was being there for the better part of a year.
Not being able to return to New Orleans after the storm, the family
bounced around from hotel to hotel, finally moving into an apartment
complex when it was confirmed that all of their homes were submerged in
eight feet of water.
Rhonda Reed calls their time in Houston a “living hell.” What hurts her
most, even to this day, was the way her family was treated, especially by
Blacks in Houston. Reed compares it to “the vast exodus to the North
after slavery, and the terrible treatment that slaves endured by other Blacks
who were already there,” she says. “We were told by some Blacks in
Houston that we didn’t know our place, that they didn’t want us there.
We were treated worse by our own people than any other race in Houston.
It was horrific.”
As hard as it was for her, the 37-year-old schoolteacher believes that it
was worse for her three children, who were taunted almost on a daily basis.
“Children were throwing bottles at our children when they got off the
bus. They would tell my children that New Orleans was under water, and
then they would laugh. They called my children ‘refugees.’”
Reed said that it was an emotional roller coaster. “I cried every day,” she
says. “I was upset every day. I was praying every day. I don’t think I prayed
so much in all my life.”
The looks. The insinuations. The whispers. At times, it was too much
to take. “I wasn’t a charity case. I lost my home because of something
that I had nothing to do with. It was not my fault that Katrina happened,
but no one cared,” Rhonda Reed says. “It had gotten so bad in Houston
that one day a Hispanic person told me that I needed to go back to where
I came from. That’s when I knew that had to do my level best to get
out of Houston.”
left | Martha Daniels, mother of seven children, holds a picture of her late husband,
William Daniels, who died before the family returned home to Louisiana.
right | Daniels’ daughter Cynthia Phipps shows some pictures of the water damage
that resulted after the floods caused by Hurricane Katrina.
““I wasn’t aCHARITY CASE.
I lost my home because of something
that I had nothing to dowith.
NOONECARED.
It was not my fault that Katrina happened,but

4. 74 EBONY l MARCH 2010 MARCH 2010 l EBONY 75
left. It was like I was thinking that if I go into denial––and I don’t talk
about it and I don’t do anything––it would be OK, eventually it was going
to be all right. I was hoping that somebody was going to say, ‘No, it wasn’t
as bad as I thought it was.’ But that never happened.”
“Your survival skills kick in,” says Gwen Payne, moving her sister’s story
forward from one of shock to one of endurance. “When the Red Cross
truck came by and we would hear that bell, we’d get happy, just like kids
running behind an ice cream truck. Sometimes, by the time they got
to you, they only had rice and sausage left. I would say, ‘OK, give me the
rice and sausage.’”
It was during that tough time that someone gave Payne, also a school-
teacher, the book Who Moved My Cheese? by Spencer Johnson. “It had a
profound impact on me. It was a book that talked about how sometimes
we get so comfortable with our living status that we take things for granted
and think things are going to always be there,” says Payne, who recalls that
two days before Katrina hit, she had the time of her life with her son at
a taping of the TV game show x at the New Orleans Convention Center.
“You never think that something of that magnitude could happen and
would happen and change your whole life the way Katrina affected our
lives.”
‘THIS IS NOT AN EXPERIMENT’
In many ways, what frustrated the family the most in the initial days
after they returned to New Orleans was their inability to really do for self.
The first thing Payne’s sister Geri Davis did when she returned to New
Orleans was attempt to get back her job as an assistant principal. “But they
wouldn’t hire any of us,” she says. “My school went from [being a] public
school to [being a] charter school. They were turning all of the schools into
charter schools and hiring people (mostly White) from outside of New
Orleans as teachers and administrators.”
Davis eventually moved to Chicago to accept an assistant principal job.
She lived there for a year, using her salary to rebuild her home in New
Orleans. She calls it “shameful” that city officials seem to be using recovery
funds to pay outsiders to show them the “right way” to rebuild. It was a
notion even put forth by President Barack Obama during his visit to the
Martin Luther King Jr. charter school in New Orleans late last year. “I love
Barack Obama, but it really hurt me when he said that New Orleans schools
were bad before Katrina,” Davis says. “He’s pushing charter schools . . . but
the people running these charter schools don’t care about our kids.”
Davis says that the large number of Mexican immigrants working
construction jobs during the recovery has also had an impact on the school
system. “They came in and brought their entire families,” Davis says.
“While the dads were out doing the rebuilding, we were forced to educate
their children. As a result, the city brought in teachers [who] weren’t
certified but could speak Spanish.”
Test scores in New Orleans reportedly are up since the city began
its move toward charter schools, but Davis wonders what will happen to
students once the recovery money dries up. “They are not worried about
teaching our children,” she says. “They are in it for the money. They need
to stop the madness. These are our kids. This is not an experiment.”
According to Marcus Green, Davis’ brother, “The pre-Katrina days in
New Orleans weren’t that great.” But being a testing ground for every
urban renewal project imaginable is not so great, either. “Since Katrina, so
‘WHO MOVED MY CHEESE?’
But making it back home after the floodwaters had receded turned out
to be the easiest part of the family’s ordeal, recalls Cynthia Phipps, Reed’s
aunt, as she continued where her niece left off. Awaiting them back in New
Orleans was a witch’s brew of decay and rot that continues to haunt
Phipps so much that, “I haven’t really talked about it. What I found when
I returned home was so devastating to me.”
First, it was the smell. “God, I can’t even describe it,” says Phipps, who
had lived in her house for 26 years. “It just penetrated you. It went in your
nose, went in your throat. It was spoiled food, rotting wood. It was just a
whole mixture of stuff. It’s a smell that I will never forget.”
Then, it was the sound. “I had never witnessed silence like that before,”
Phipps says. “You didn’t hear a bird. You didn’t hear a dog. You didn’t hear
a cat. You didn’t hear anything.”
Nothing looked the same. “The mildew had gone up the wall,” she says.
“It was black and thick. I had never seen anything like it before. This
was toxic mildew.”
Nothing felt the same. “Everything you touched. Everywhere you walked.
The lawn was gray. It was like something out of a science-fiction movie,”
Phipps says. “Everything that you had saved was full of stinky water. That
water was just like acid. It had eaten through everything. It was the weirdest
thing. I opened my photo album. The pictures were there. They were fuzzy,
but they were there. But when I lifted the plastic off, they just dissolved in front
of my eyes. Every picture, even the baby pictures. It just broke my heart.”
What Phipps experienced in the year that it took her to move out of her
FEMA trailer and rebuild her home not only broke her heart, but also
threatened to break her spirit. “I was just in shock. It was like my brain just
above | Harrietta Reed surveys one of her properties that was dam-
aged by Hurricane Katrina. The property has not been repaired, but
there is a family living there rent free.
opposite, top | Teacher Rhonda Reed consoles a student. A majority
of the schoolchildren suffer stress directly related to Hurricane
Katrina. (bottom) Arianne Randall and Jeremiah Reed, Martha
Daniels’ great-grandchildren, recite the Pledge of Allegiance.
“
”
Everything you
touchedEverywhere you
WALKED
Thelawnwasgray.
Itwas like somethingout of a
SCIENCE
FICTION
MOVIE.

5. 76 EBONY l MARCH 2010 MARCH 2010 l EBONY 77
many more things are exposed,” says Green, a 25-year school-
teacher who has rebuilt his home completely. “It’s like people
see a chance to conduct social experiments on Blacks to keep
us in our place.”
Many who made up the once-large middle-class progressive
Black community have not returned. But some, like Green,
who have returned are committed to picking up the slack.
“It’s a struggle, and we’re trying to overcome,” Green says.
“You have to stay enlightened and drag as many people along
as possible. Now, if we can get our economics straight, we will
be a lot better.”
‘WE HAVE A VOICE’
That has proven to be the toughest part of the recovery,
according to Green’s sister Harrietta Reed, as she brings the
family’s story full circle. “We don’t have economics on our
side,” she says. “We are still the majority in the city, so we have
the numbers. But even though we are the majority in New
Orleans, we’re not the majority in the state. We’re a Black city
in a Southern state, one of the reddest states around. We don’t
hold any real seats of power at this point.”
Reed, who is in the process of rebuilding her home,
tells stories of laws being arbitrarily changed, substandard city
services, no street lights, skyrocketing food and gas prices, and
unresponsive government officials and insurance companies.
“Every pressure point that can be applied is being applied,
and no one is hearing about it,” Reed says. “We’re like
an island down here all by ourselves. We don’t have a bully
pulpit to yell from. We don’t have the microphones. We don’t
run the media.”
Reed and her siblings have turned to Black radio as a way to
channel their discontent into activism. She compares one local
AM station, WBOK, to Radio Free Europe. “Without it, we
wouldn’t be able to survive,” she says. “It has galvanized us.
We have a voice. We talk about the issues. Most of the politi-
cians realize that they have to come to the radio station to
address the people. We hit them with a bunch of questions,
and we get to see what their agenda really is.
Reed has helped organize marches, shuttled people to the
polls to vote and spoke at numerous city council meetings. With
the help of the radio station, there has been a real push to
patronize Black businesses, hire Black contractors and help
Blacks find jobs. “Either you turn to activism and try to find
a way out of no way, or you perish,” Reed says. “I am willing
to step out front because I have no other choice. The racial
tension here is at an all-time high. It has to be resolved for us
to move forward. We’re going to fight back. Either we move
forward together, or we don’t move forward at all. We’re not
going to give up.”
Organizing has put an end to the political games that
were being played shortly after Katrina. “We are becoming
politically savvy, so that we will know how to vote the next
time,” Reed says.
For Harrietta Reed (shown here at her home), the years of rebuilding have taken a toll.

6. 78 EBONY l MARCH 2010 MARCH 2010 l EBONY 79
‘YOUR LATTER WILL BE BETTER THAN YOUR PAST’
As the matriarch of the family, Martha Daniels can appreciate her children’s
post-Katrina push to make things right in New Orleans. But at 75, she says
that she understands the bigger message of Katrina.
“Katrina taught me how important it is to always have a personal
relationship with God,” she says. “I didn’t have any doubt before and I
definitely have no doubt now. I’ve always understood that you have to go
through to get to. I don’t know why God allowed this. But I do know one
thing: He was going to see through those who allowed Him to.”
Daniels not only lost her home to Katrina. She also lost her husband, who
died while in Houston during the evacuation. But because of her faith, she
says that things are better now than ever. “Before Katrina, I would some-
times I hear this voice. It would whisper to me, ‘Your latter will be better
than your past.’ So far, it is beginning to be better now than in the past,” says
Daniels, who has rebuilt her home. “Not from a materialistic perspective, but
from a spiritual point of view. I understand so much more now. I thought I
was close to God before. But I’m so much closer to Him now.”
It’s a message, and an understanding, that she is trying to impart on
her children: Be active, but also be thankful. “I’m thankful for what Katrina
taught me,” she adds. “I’m thankful for how I saw the hand of God
working through this. I can’t say that I’m thankful for Katrina, but I’m
thankful for everything that God has shown me. I’m thankful that I was
able to see how powerful He is.”
WHEN IT COMES TO REBUILDING
HIS CITY in the aftermath of Hurricane
Katrina, New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin
has not let anyone or anything stand in his
way. In the four-plus years since the storm,
he has taken on bureaucrats on every level,
including President George W. Bush. Nagin
has been praised by some for his dedication,
and criticized by others for the recovery’s
slow progress and misguided funds. EBONY
Senior Editor Kevin Chappell sat down with
Nagin, who will leave office in May, to discuss
the city’s historic rebuilding efforts.
EBONY: How much rebuilding money
has flowed into the city since President
Obama took office?
NAGIN: I can’t put a dollar figure on
it. I was just looking at some numbers, and
just on the FEMA side, [it] had authorized
30 percent of what outside engineers said
was needed to repair our public facilities.
According to the Stafford Act, the federal
government, after a disaster, is required to
repair public facilities. Since Obama has taken
office, we have seen a 65-percent increase in
that fund. That’s just one example. All of the
public housing developments that have been
torn down are being revitalized. We did the
ribbon cutting on the last one. That was a
goal of the Obama administration.
EBONY: How would you assess the
rebuilding efforts so far?
NAGIN: It’s coming along. It’s such a
unique challenge. No other American city has
had 80 percent of it damaged at one time,
with every citizen being evacuated. We’ve
studied other disasters. We looked at the
earthquake in Kobe, Japan. We looked at the
L.A. riots way back when. We even looked
at the 9/11 site in New York. The average
recovery takes anywhere from 10 to 15 years.
We’re in year four. We have about 80 percent
of [our] citizens back. We know that we have
a long way to go, but we’re moving along.
EBONY: What’s the racial breakdown in
New Orleans now?
NAGIN: It was 68 percent African-
American pre-Katrina. The last numbers I’ve
seen, we were at 62 percent.
EBONY: There’s quite a bit of talk that
the city is moving toward not being a major-
ity Black city. Is that true?
NAGIN: There’s a lot of misinformation
out there. African-Americans are coming
back. Whites are coming back. We have a
much larger Hispanic population now. We
have a good Asian population here also. But
it’s definitely a majority Black city. I don’t
see that changing. I don’t know how it
could. If Katrina didn’t change it, I don’t
think anything else is going to change it.
EBONY: What are your plans to rebuild
the Lower Ninth Ward?
NAGIN: It’s our plan to rebuild every
area of the city, especially the Lower Ninth
Ward. There’s a dividing line within the
Lower Ninth Ward, which is Claiborne
Avenue. As you go closer to the river, it’s the
highest side of the Lower Ninth Ward. The
other side of Claiborne that goes toward the
lake is the lowest side. And we haven’t really
pushed that, but we haven’t had a moratori-
um on it. People are very smart. The ones
who have rebuilt have built higher and
stronger than pre-Katrina. That’s where the
Brad Pitt homes are. The Army Corps of
Engineers will finish their work, and then
the Lower Ninth Ward will be fully protect-
ed. Then we can really start to focus on that
lower side of the ward.
EBONY: How do you plan to provide
affordable housing for people returning to
the city?
NAGIN: We have a good flow of afford-
able housing. We looked at the affordable
housing that we had available pre-Katrina,
and by 2011, we’re going to get to 94
percent of the affordable housing we had
pre-Katrina. Right now, it’s still a little tight
with the rental market, but we’re going to
get there. As far as the Ninth Ward, there
were a lot of homeowner successions, people
who had passed their homes down over
time. Unfortunately, many people sold their
homes after Katrina to get that Road Home
check. So what we have done is to encourage
more homeownership by partnering with the
state and an organization called the Finance
Authority of New Orleans [to provide loans
to purchase a home].
EBONY: Do you think New Orleans will
ever be the same?
NAGIN: I don’t think the city will be the
same. It has the potential to be better. I think
the infrastructure will definitely be better.
The school system looks like it’s going to
be better. The streets are going to be better
at some point. We have a lot of activity going
on. We are approaching $700 to $800 mil-
lion of street work that’s in progress. Crime
is still a challenge. Young people involved in
the drug game, for the most part. It’s like a
lot of urban cities. We also have had an
increase in domestic violence, and mental
health issues are definitely a challenge in this
community with post-traumatic stress disor-
der. We’re in the process of building a new
medical complex. We’ve identified 70 acres
of land right off downtown where we are
going to build two teaching hospitals that
over the next four or five years will provide
better services than we’ve ever had in this
community. But that’s down the road.
Q
A&
four generations of the Daniels family (top) returned to New
Orleans and are reclaiming their lives. (Bottom) Harrietta Reed turns
activist to bring health care back to the Black communities.
ALEXBRANDON/AP