Sept 2014

Breaking The Set w/ Abby Martin
The unheard story of Hurricane Katrina 9 years on: Blackwater, white militias & community empowerment

Below is the interview with Rahim and crow.

Two weeks ago the NRA's Cam Edwards show stupidly praised a racist armed white vigilante group called the Algiers Point Militia  that killed black men and bragged with  impunity about it after Katrina. Abby Martin of Breaking The Set and Media Roots has been the only journalist and the news program to cover the controversy outside of the pro/anti-gun lens.  She talked to Malik Rahim and myself about how we took up arms in self defense of a wider community against the racist attacks in Algiers from the white militia. This is the part of the story that is often left out of the narratives and is quite painful to relive for both of us.  Some of the men who also took up arms to defend their community were targeted and almost killed by these vigilantes including Malik.  The story is more complicated because the other white man from Texas  who took up arms later became an informant for the FBI.

These are not stories of heroes and architects as much as decades of political organizing histories, principles, personal relationship and sheer fear out of necessity that lead to these actions. With serious consequences of PTS that we have all carried from those days.

From all of this violence was to emerge the Common Ground Collective within days.

Below is the full show.

Common Ground Collective is featured  onthe second half of the show.

Abby Martin features special coverage dedicated to the ninth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, the military response and why Blackwater mercenaries were sent in to New Orleans as first responders. Ward ‘Mack’ McClendon, founder of a community center that served as one of the only sanctuaries in the Lower Ninth Ward, the area hardest hit by Katrina, shares his experience with the storm and how he is revitalizing his community. Finally, two co-founders of Common Ground Collective, Malik Rahim and Scott Crow, talk about the white militias that patrolled the Algiers Point neighborhood and killed as many as 11 black people in the aftermath of the storm.