Malik Rahim: Community organizer eyes New Orleans’ top officee

To that end, Rahim is running for mayor of New Orleans. The primary election is set for February 2006.

The community activist made an unsuccessful run for a City Council seat, on the Green Party ticket, a few years back. He lost the race but won several thousand votes from progressive voters. Among them were Blacks weary of a Black bourgeois, who held elected office and did nothing to help their own, and from whites tired of corruption in a city seemingly stuck in the 1950s.

“I’m running for mayor to make sure that what transpired during this hurricane doesn’t happen again and to make sure that New Orleanians play a part in the rebuilding process,” Rahim explains.

Rahim has been an activist and organizer throughout his adult life. He started organizing the Ninth Ward, doing community service as a founder of the New Orleans chapter of the Black Panther Party. The shoot-out between the Panthers and police back in the 1960s set the tone for a lifetime of challenging the actions of those in authority.

Running against the slave syndicate

Earlier this week, Rahim joined a coalition of organizations in a march across the Crescent City Connection Bridge in a protest over the barring of Katrina victims from entering Gretna on the other side of the Mississippi River.

The city narrowly escaped a full-scale race war, says the activist. “Martial law was imposed only on Black people. It was ‘shoot to kill,’” he continues. The anger in his voice belied his calm telling of the racist and immoral act of Gretna Police Chief Arthur Lawson Jr., who ordered deputies armed with guns and police dogs to stop Blacks fleeing from the hurricane from entering his predominately white town, population 17,000, in Jefferson Parish.

Lawson’s action made national news after the mainstream media picked up the story from a socialist newspaper. (Learn more about Chief Lawson on his official website at http://www.gretnapolice.com.)

“Basically, we had people thrust at our doorstep, and we were unprepared,” Lawson told reporters. “If the city of New Orleans was unprepared, how can we, in a city of 3.5 square miles, be prepared?”

“It was a situation that was hostile and volatile because people in New Orleans were given misinformation. And when they got there, after being in the water and walking all the way from across the river and found out they were lied to, they weren’t happy,” Lawson said. “Our community has been painted unfairly.”

However, no one disputes that Lawson’s action was, if not immoral, certainly a racist slap in the face of New Orleans’ Mayor C. Ray Nagin, who allowed New Orleanians to cross the bridge for shelter, as a way of downsizing overcrowded conditions in city facilities.

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