{"product_id":"we-shall-not-be-moved-isbn-9780807044773","title":"We Shall Not Be Moved","description":"“It was heartbreaking, but we couldn’t give up. I just said, ‘Well, I’ve got to get in and do it.’”—Phil Harris, eight-decade-long resident of Hollygrove\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e As floodwaters drained in the weeks following Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans residents came to a difficult realization. Their city was about to undertake the largest disaster recovery in American history, yet they faced a profound leadership vacuum: members of every tier of government, from the municipal to the federal level, had fallen down on the job. \u003ci\u003eWe Shall Not Be Moved\u003c\/i\u003e tells the absorbing story of the community leaders who stepped into this void to rebuild the city they loved. \u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e From a Vietnamese Catholic priest who immediately knows when two of his six thousand parishioners go missing to a single mother from the Lower Ninth Ward who instructs the likes of Jimmy Carter and Brad Pitt, these intrepid local organizers show that a city’s fate rests on the backs of its citizens. On their watch, New Orleans neighborhoods become small governments. These leaders organize their neighbors to ward off demolition threats, write comprehensive recovery plans, found community schools, open volunteer centers, raise funds to rebuild fire stations and libraries, and convince tens of thousands of skeptical residents to return home. Focusing on recovery efforts in five New Orleans neighborhoods—Broadmoor, Hollygrove, Lakeview, the Lower Ninth Ward, and Village de l’Est—Tom Wooten presents vivid narratives through the eyes and voices of residents rebuilding their homes, telling a story of resilience as entertaining as it is instructive. \u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e The unprecedented community mobilization underway in New Orleans is a silver lining of Hurricane Katrina’s legacy. By shedding light on this rebirth, \u003ci\u003eWe Shall Not Be Moved\u003c\/i\u003e shows how residents, remarkably, turned a profound national failure into a story of hope.“Few disasters are ever truly ‘natural,’ and, as Tom Wooten shows, reconstruction after catastrophes like Hurricane Katrina is shaped heavily by individuals, their communities, and the structural barriers they face. Portraying a diverse range of community leaders, Wooten spins a compelling tale based on deep knowledge of local worlds, linked to an understanding of the large-scale social forces that affect these worlds in ways too often invisible to journalists and other chroniclers of events like Katrina. The stories in \u003ci\u003eWe Shall Not Be Moved\u003c\/i\u003e show the essential role of local knowledge in long-term recovery and reconstruction.”—Paul Farmer, author of \u003ci\u003eHaiti After the Earthquake\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“That New Orleans was able to rebuild after the levees broke—without sacrificing the city’s essential and unique character—is one of American history’s most inspiring stories. Future historians studying the resurrection of New Orleans will find \u003ci\u003eWe Shall Not Be Moved \u003c\/i\u003ean invaluable resource.”—Dan Baum, author of \u003ci\u003eNine Lives\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e“A moving portrait of a city’s struggle to rebuild. It is not an account of Katrina per se. . . . Rather, it is a story of the arduous endeavor residents have undertaken in New Orleans. . . . Every bit as gripping and important as tales from the storm itself.” Walter Issacson, from the Foreword \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“In this moving book, Tom Wooten narrates the daily struggles of residents of five neighborhoods in New Orleans to overcome the devastating effects of Hurricane Katrina. \u003ci\u003eWe Shall Not Be Moved\u003c\/i\u003e brilliantly weaves together the stories of community residents, including accounts of their unprecedented organizing and rebuilding efforts. Wooten’s revealing nonfiction narrative is a must-read.”—William Julius Wilson, author of \u003ci\u003eMore Than Just Race\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e“That New Orleans was able to rebuild after the levees broke—without sacrificing the city’s essential and unique character—is one of American history’s most inspiring stories. Future historians studying the resurrection of New Orleans will find \u003ci\u003eWe Shall Not Be Moved\u003c\/i\u003e an invaluable resource.”—Dan Baum, author of \u003ci\u003eNine Lives\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e“Wooten’s gripping narrative account of post-Katrina recovery speaks to the importance of local organizing as a source of community resilience in disaster’s wake. The stories he tells have implications that reach far beyond the particular circumstance of New Orleans, helping us understand the overall dynamics of community recovery.”—Marshall Ganz, author of \u003ci\u003eWhy David Sometimes Wins\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e“\u003ci\u003eWe Shall Not Be Moved\u003c\/i\u003e weaves together a sociologically rich account of human resilience in the face of collective catastrophe with a compelling analysis.” —Erik Olin Wright, president, American Sociological Association\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“We Shall Not Be Moved\u003c\/i\u003e is recommended for anyone with an interest in New Orleans, in reconstruction after disaster, or in community organizing\u003ci\u003e.\"—YES! Magazine\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Wooten’s book is a hopeful look at the disaster and recovery of Katrina-struck New Orleans, focusing on community leaders, neighborhood by neighborhood”—\u003ci\u003eForeWord Reviews\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e“As Tom Wooten chronicles in his moving portrait, ‘We Shall Not Be Moved: Rebuilding Home in the Wake of Katrina,’ much of the repair work was done through community and nonprofit groups…. [His stories] recall the American frontier days in their demonstrations of human resourcefulness, cooperation and independence…. Mr. Wooten meticulously tracks the work of civic groups in five parts of New Orleans as they labored to prove that their neighborhoods were worth saving, underscoring the importance of fostering such groups long before a catastrophe hits.”\u003cbr\u003e—\u003ci\u003eWall Street Journal\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“\u003ci\u003eWe Shall Not Be Moved\u003c\/i\u003e is a careful and probing document of the near-death and continuing restoration of New Orleans.  In a city where the civic firmament is often shifting and unreliable, the survival of New Orleans has largely depended on ordinary people doing extraordinary things in an unrelenting fashion.  Simply put, the people who live here, who grew up here and know what life here can and should be, refuse to give up on that.  When all else failed, they did not.  They came home and went to work.  Tom Wooten, in writing some of those stories, has been equally faithful.”\u003cbr\u003e—David Simon, creator of Treme and The Wire\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e“Compelling beyond belief, deserving the broadest possible readership, and mandatory reading for urban planners and community organizers, this is a tour-de-force about one American city and what it means to fight for the survival of your hometown. If you love where you live, you need to know this story of what it has taken to rebuild every flooded block of New Orleans.”—\u003ci\u003eBooklist\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cb\u003eTom Wooten\u003c\/b\u003e is coauthor of \u003ci\u003eNo One Had a Tongue to Speak\u003c\/i\u003e. Since graduating from Harvard in 2008 and moving to New Orleans, he has worked as a researcher for the Harvard Kennedy School, as a neighborhood volunteer coordinator, and as a fifth- and sixth-grade writing teacher. \u003cb\u003eFrom chapter 1, \u003cb\u003e“Very Much at Home”\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e It was late afternoon on Sunday, August 29, 2005. Terry Miranda, a white  man in his late fifties, craned his neck to peer out the rear  windshield as the storm that had sent his city into exile churned on the  horizon over the Gulf of Mexico. The storm’s first fast-moving outer  bands had already set upon the westbound traffic that inched forward on  Interstate 10, turning the sky above the cars every hue of gray.  Leveling his gaze to the horizon, back toward his home, Terry was struck  to see that the distant sky was nearly black.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Katrina was casting a dark, slowly advancing shadow across the earth.  Bolts of lightning—far too distant to be accompanied by claps of  thunder—leapt through the darkness to the ground. The storm posed the  cars on this stretch of highway no serious danger. It would be hours  before the worst of its winds and waves would surge ashore, and the  traffic was already well to the west of the area forecast to bear the  brunt of the damage. Still, a shudder ran through Terry’s spine as he  turned his attention away from the dark sky.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Beside him, Terry’s sister sat at the wheel, clutching it tightly and  keeping her eyes fixed on the taillights ahead. The faces Terry beheld  in the myriad car windows around them were etched with tension. In his  nearly six decades of life in New Orleans, Terry had seen his share of  hurricanes, but no other storm had spooked his city this way. At\u003cbr\u003e 9:30 a.m., Mayor Ray Nagin had ordered the first mandatory evacuation  in New Orleans history. Shortly thereafter, the normally stoic National  Weather Service released an uncharacteristically desperate bulletin,  warning of “devastating damage” that would leave “at least one half of  well-constructed homes” destroyed. Those lucky enough to survive, it  warned, would experience “human suffering incredible by modern  standards” in its aftermath.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Before the mandatory call to evacuate that Sunday morning, Terry was not  sure he was going to leave. For one thing, he had weathered a number of  hurricanes at home and was no worse for wear. For another, he did not  own a car, never having lived outside of Orleans Parish. He walked to  the nearby shops in his neighborhood, a predominantly white and  upper-middle-class area of the city known as Lakeview, and until his  retirement several years before, he had ridden his bicycle to and from  his job investigating cases of fraud at a state food stamp office.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Like all state employees, Terry was pressed into service from time to  time as a worker for the Red Cross. Because of his Red Cross experience,  Terry would later explain, “When the mayor declared a mandatory  evacuation, I knew what a desperate move that was.” He did not object  when his sister insisted on picking him up.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Terry hoped he would not be away long; he had never moved from New  Orleans because he loved the city. Of course, New Orleans contained his  entire life: his family, his friends, his house, his possessions, and  his memories. But Terry was also in love with the idea of New Orleans;  he was a true student of the city. He knew all of its neighborhoods  after years of traversing the city by bicycle, and he lapped up its  history through books, visits to historical societies, and conversations  with old friends on the street. After retiring from the food stamp  office, he made several abortive attempts to begin a bicycle tour  company, but Terry’s entrepreneurial drive did not match his enthusiasm  for “narrating New Orleans” to anyone who would listen. More often than  not, he gave his tours for free.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “You either get it or you don’t, New Orleans,” he would tell visitors to  the city. “We’re backwards. We’re not progressive. Some people like  that, and some people don’t.” He would draw visitors’ attention back to  the Catholic roots of the city’s French and Spanish founders. “New  Orleans has a different relationship to guilt than this whole country,”  he would explain. “We weren’t founded by the Pilgrims. We expected to  live good lives. Eat good food. Drink good, live good—as a part of our  lives. We didn’t think that was guilty.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e By this point in his narration, he often had a twinkle in his eye. New  Orleans was a true port city, he would say, a place where races,  religions, cuisines, styles of music, and people of every stripe rubbed  shoulders and mixed together, effortlessly crumbling barriers that held  them steadfastly apart in other areas of the country. The city attracted  “peculiar people of all different kinds” and embraced them, their  presence often becoming a source of citywide pride. The freewheeling,  intermingling, live-and-let-live New Orleans culture, he would point  out, had led to one of the city’s many miracles. Near the beginning of  the twentieth century, in a heady “critical mass” of musical funeral  celebrations and traveling vaudeville shows and brothels, New Orleans  had given birth to jazz, “this beautiful music that changed the world.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e In some respects, Terry was an unlikely champion of his city. His own  neighborhood, Lakeview, was not diverse, and in general, its residents  strove for suburban bliss rather than the bounteous pandemonium whose  virtues Terry extolled. In a city full of overflowing families, Terry  never married, and lived alone. In a city steeped in spirituality and  saturated with houses of worship, Terry did not attend church. And in a  city where work was at best of secondary importance, Terry funneled  nearly all of what he described as his “lifelong hyperactivity” into  hard work, whether at the food stamp office or doing cleanup and  landscaping throughout his neighborhood. Indeed, he acknowledged that  his affinity for New Orleans may well have been an accident of birth.  “It’s all I know,” he would tell visitors. The city has “a lot to love  and a lot to hate, and I just got used to it. It’s like no other city in  the world.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Terry thrived in New Orleans, and he was far from solitary. His four  siblings also lived in the city, and they would all frequently converge  at their mother’s house in the Irish Channel for a meal or a relaxing  afternoon together. Terry’s neighborhood, Lakeview, also embraced him.  Many in the community came to know him through his work for the Lakeview  Civic Improvement Association—work that won him widespread affection,  gratitude, and respect. “I was kind of their manual labor. I didn’t want  to be on any boards,” he said. He spent countless hours cleaning the  neighborhood’s wide “neutral grounds”—narrow strips of parkland  separating opposing traffic on major roads. He would wake up before dawn  to set up tents for the annual Lakeview Fest, staying up to strike the  tents the same night. He usually begged out of attending the Lakeview  Civic Improvement Association’s community meetings, with the exception  of one the year before at which he had been presented with the  association’s citizenship award.\u003cbr\u003e The award meant a great deal to Terry, whose affinity for Lakeview and  its residents was every bit as strong as his love of the rest of the  city. He liked and admired his neighbors, many of them whitecollar,  well-educated professionals. “Lakeview has easily some of the most  talented people in the city of New Orleans,” he said. “A lot of doctors,  a lot of lawyers, a lot of engineers—smart people, great people. I have  absolute faith in those people.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Lakeview encompassed a large area, with approximately 7,000 homes and  17,000 residents, but it was a cohesive community in spite of its size.  Much of the neighborhood consisted of 1950s housing, bungalows built on  recently drained swampland. Young families purchased new homes under the  GI Bill and never left. Decades later, many children who had grown up  in Lakeview during the neighborhood’s first boom bought houses down the  street from their parents and began families of their own. As the years  went on, many in the neighborhood would come to marvel at the strength  of their community, likening it to Mayberry, the fictional idyllic town  in \u003ci\u003eThe Andy Griffith Show. \u003c\/i\u003e“People \u003ci\u003esettled \u003c\/i\u003ein Lakeview,” Terry said.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e The neighborhood’s geographic isolation helped it maintain its community  cohesion; it was bounded to the south by expansive cemeteries, to the  north by Lake Pontchartrain, to the east by a canal and City Park, and  to the west by a canal and the Orleans Parish line. It was an island,  cordoned off from the outside world. These confines allowed Lakeview’s  residents to nurture a suburban utopia inside of— and yet apart from—the  city of New Orleans.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Community meetings in Lakeview were serious business. The Lakeview Civic  Improvement Association—“LCIA,” as everyone called it—was the oldest  incorporated civic group in Louisiana. Over the years it had come to  serve as the neighborhood’s de facto government, tasked with helping  Lakeview’s residents maintain their suburban standard of living in a  poor, corrupt, crime-ridden city. Lakeview constituted a substantial  portion of the city’s residential tax base, and residents were  perpetually frustrated that their tax dollars never returned to the  neighborhood in the form of adequate city services. Though the  neighborhood’s houses were well kept and its lawns immaculately  manicured, its streets were pothole-ridden, its sidewalks were cracked,  and its sewer system was in perpetual disrepair. Most of its children  attended parochial schools, as residents tended to distrust the city’s  public school system. Historically, many had also complained about  inadequate police protection.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Residents’ frustration came to a head in early 1980s, when the LCIA  mounted a push for Lakeview to secede from Orleans Parish and form its  own city. The proposal made some progress in the state legislature, but  ultimately proved futile when the City of New Orleans, reluctant to let  one of its cash cows slip away, refused to sign off on the deal.  Instead, Lakeview became the first neighborhood in the state to form its  own special tax district. From then on, Lakeview residents paid  additional property taxes to support the neighborhood’s own police  force. Officers were members of the New Orleans Police Department, but  patrolled only Lakeview, using equipment and squad cars the neighborhood  had purchased.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Now, as Terry sat next to his sister, lulled by the stop-and-go of the  traffic on Interstate 10, the thought of Lakeview’s special police force  gave him comfort. There had been speculation about looting, but the  looters would not come to Lakeview, and they would be caught if they  did. His house was safe.","brand":"Beacon Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46305277247717,"sku":"NP9780807044773","price":19.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780807044773.jpg?v=1767743695","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/we-shall-not-be-moved-isbn-9780807044773","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}