We need to go beyond the “Right of Return” to the “effective Right of Return.” We need plane tickets, bus tickets, housing, and a job or at least government benefits waiting for us when we do return.

The ability of these groups to attract volunteers has shown the widespread desire to do something to help the people of New Orleans to return and rebuild. The potential for a broad response, however, has not been funneled into the kind of organization or movement that could win the government funds and resources that a large-scale reconstruction would require. The weak state of movement organization is a legacy of the decades of post–civil rights reaction, and there’s no instantaneous way to regain what has been lost.

Unfortunately, Mann doesn’t always draw the lessons that are most crucial. After reading about the willful neglect of the Bush administration—including Condoleezza Rice’s infamous New York shopping spree and night on Broadway while thousands of New Orleanians found themselves knee-deep—you have to wonder how Mann could argue for a cross-class movement of all African Americans. To state that racism has “created the material basis for a multi-class Black United Front” can only sow serious political confusion in a country where Black class polarization has grown sharply since the civil rights era—and where multiracial workers’ unity is a real option.

In the end, Mann asks who will live in the new New Orleans and who will reap the benefits of the rebuilding process, “Will it be those who suffered the pain of the hurricane? Or will New Orleans be ‘whitewashed,’ the goal of many for years?”
The answer will lie in how effectively organization and leadership can be rebuilt at the grass roots. Katrina’s Legacy, even with its contradictions, is a useful contribution to a crucial debate—how to construct the new civil rights movement that is so desperately needed today.