McKinney wants communities that barred Katrina evacuees punished

By Robert "Rob" Redding Jr.

Editor & Publisher    

    WASHINGTON, Nov. 03, 2005,  7:10 a.m. - Rep. Cynthia McKinney has introduced a bill ''to strip all federal funds from the Gretna City Police Department, the Jefferson Parish Police, and the Crescent City Connection security force" for blocking blacks from crossing a local bridge during Hurricane Katrina.

    McKinney said Gretna police chief Arthur Lawson and Jefferson Parish Sheriff Harry Lee and others were involved in the blocking blacks from crossing the Gretna City bridge. 

    "The world got a chance to see what too many of us here in this country already know: that racism is alive and well in America," said the Georgia Democrat.

    Police Chief Arthur Lawson has admitted that he ordered the bridge blocked in order to prevent the crowd from getting into his predominantly white suburb of 17,500 people.

    "There was no food, water or shelter in Gretna city," Lawson has said. "If we had opened the bridge our city would have looked like New Orleans does now, looted, burned and pillaged."

    Neither Lawson nor Lee were immediately available for comment.

    "Could it be that the police chief and the sheriff are guilty of a hate crime?" McKinney asked. "How can federally funded roads be blocked by local officials at a time of emergency? Where was the federal government that should have been ensuring the lives of all Katrina survivors? Didn't the New Orleans survivors have the right to life? And civil rights? 

    "This is not 1965," she said. "Sadly, Gretna City Police Chief Lawson and Jefferson Parish Sheriff Lee sunk to the low ground by denying high ground to people fleeing Katrina's floodwaters. And thanks to their and their officers' actions, the Gretna City Bridge incident will live on in civil rights history just as does bloody Sunday at the Edmund Pettus Bridge."
 

Developing...

Return to ReddingNewsReview.com
Copyright 2005 by
All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.