While these various parties stood by pointing fingers, a group of anarchists calling themselves the Common Ground Collective emerged as de facto first-responders to New Orleans.
“Black Flags and Windmills” is this collective’s story, a first-hand account by Scott Crow, one of its founders.
Just a few days after the storm, Crow and a friend set off from Austin Texas with only a boat and what little supplies they could carry with them. They were determined to find out what had befallen Robert “King” Wilkerson, a mutual friend and former Black Panther Party member whom they had lost contact with after the levees were breached.
The devastation they discovered upon their arrival has of course been well documented, but the narrative Crow provides is in stark contrast to that of the mainstream media.
In the days immediately following the storm, primetime broadcasts depicted a warzone, where would-be rescuers were prevented from doing their jobs by residents bent on looting and raping and murder. (It was later discovered that most of this was hearsay perpetuated by bad journalism.)
Crow recalls armed white militias participating in naked displays of aggression—not unlike the Ku Klux Klan—roving the streets in pickup trucks, leaving residents too terrified even to go outside for help.
In those early days, government aid agencies built elaborate temporary headquarters, while providing little in the way of actual aid. At one point he recounts an incident where desperate residents were crowded around trucks from the Red Cross waiting for much needed supplies, only to discover box after box filled with plastic cutlery and napkins.
The cornerstone of Crow’s narrative though, is that with comparatively meager means, Common Ground Collective was able to accomplish what the U.S. government couldn’t or wouldn’t. It was a confederation of activist groups and scores of erstwhile volunteers working tirelessly in the sweltering late-summer heat that established and maintained the first medical clinics, food and supply distribution sites and functional communications centers.
Even the regional head of FEMA sought care at the collective’s medical clinic at one point.
While the prose is a little bland, the subject matter is interesting enough that it’s not really an issue. The book falters, however, when Crow decides to stray from the plot, which he does repeatedly.
In a book that is well under 200 pages, he devotes far too much to space to the Black Panther Party, his personal history of veganism and his various coming-of-age experiences. When he insists upon waxing anarchic, it’s just as bad. It may be my personal bias but, what these anarchists actually did is much more interesting than the theoretical framework that Crow wants the reader to understand it was done in.
For instance, why the need to prattle on about how the use of force or “armed resistance” is necessary, when recounting an incident where a few armed collective members stared down a white militia without blinking?
Even though it occasionally suffers from a preachy tone, “Black Flags and Windmills” makes a pretty solid case for the efficacy of community organizing, and perhaps even more significantly, illustrates where and what kind of help might be expected come the next major disaster.