It was on the airport shuttle the next day that I overheard a tourist conversing about his visit to Algiers Point and something about "gun-toting locals shooting people up."
Good grief, I thought. My Algiers Point?
Not Historic Algiers, a neighborhood of porch swings and fish frys, with its quaint small-town charm and orange-and-blue Gulf station right out of an old movie...a place where you can step back in time. Back home, I did some research and did a little more than shiver at what I found.
Algiers Point missed the destructive flooding that eighty percent of New Orleans endured after Katrina. Algiers Point suffered some wind and rain damage but for the most part survived unscathed. However, as the storm took hold and the levees gave way, the citizens of Algiers Point became aware of the mayhem across the Mississippi and battened down their hatches. What if mobs came here? What if those people raced down Canal Street, hopped on a ferry and came to our high, dry land and wanted our stuff? What if?
Algiers Point is a predominately white enclave. A predominately black population lives in the further reaches of Algiers. On September 1, 2005, three days after Katrina made landfall, a group of white townspeople formed a militia. They gathered shotguns, assault rifles, ammunition and formed a vigilante gang. It is so easy to step back in time in Historic Algiers.
In an article for The Nation titled "Katrina's Hidden Race War," journalist A.C. Thompson interviewed victims, witnesses and perpetrators of events that took place in Algiers Point.
According to Thompson, the renegades closed off streets using downed trees and pieces of lumber. They created makeshift motion detectors using aluminum cans and glass bottles to alert them to the thieves and marauders that would surely descend.
As one local put it, "On one side of Opelousas [Avenue] it's 'hood, on the other side it's suburbs. The two sides are totally opposite, like muddy and clean."
Another said, "I'm telling you, it was forty, fifty people at a time getting off these boats...hoodlums from the Lower Ninth Ward and that part of the city. I'm not a prejudiced individual, but you just know the outlaws who are up to no good. You can see it in their eyes."
On this evening, three young African-American men left their battered home in Algiers and walked toward the ferry terminal in hopes of getting to the other side and onto a bus. The National Guard had designated the Algiers Point ferry landing an official evacuation site.
Donnell Herrington didn't make the boat with his two friends because his body was filled with metallic buckshot. At least seven pellets were lodged in his neck and others in his legs, arms and back.
In an interview about that night, Vinnie Pervel, President of the Algiers Point Association, said, "We would yell, 'We're going to count to three and if you don't identify yourself, we're going to start shooting.'"
In a separate interview, Pervel said, "I'm not a racist. I'm a classist. I want to live around people who want the same things as me."
Who shot Donnell Harrington? We don't know. To date, police have investigated neither this event nor the shootings of ten other people in Algiers Point during that time period. Mr. Harrington did not die, but others did. Three and a half years after the event, no charges and no arrests had been made.
I found an online video about the shootings. A Danish team of filmmakers also interviewed the hunters. One fellow faces the camera and jubilantly declares, "It was great! It was like pheasant season in South Dakota. If it moved, you shot it."
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