[StBernard] Article from Baton Rouge Advocate website

[Westley Annis]

When Mayor-President Kip Holden said several days after Hurricane Katrina
that he didn't want "New Orleans thugs" roaming the streets of Baton Rouge,
storm evacuees were listening - and they haven't forgotten.
 
Holden, who spoke after learning knives were confiscated from people
sheltering at the River Center, said a day later that he recognized most of
the evacuees were good people looking for help.
 
But 51-year-old Charlotte McGee, a New Orleans evacuee now living in FEMA's
Renaissance Village  trailer park, still bristles at the mayor's initial
comment.
"When your black mayor, who looks like me, makes racist comments, it hurts,"
she said. 
 
 "He doesn't want us here, and now no one does."
 
For the evacuees of the costliest hurricane in American history, the past
year has been a crash course on how to radically adapt to new homes, jobs
and schools. 
They desperately cling to and still defend the reputation of their native
city. Some feel persecuted, blamed for crime in Baton Rouge.
 
"I've read about racism, I've heard people talk about it, but I never saw
it," McGee said. "It hurts me to the core. You hate me because I am black,
because I am from the city of New Orleans. I am not an illegal alien. I am
your neighbor. I am an American."
 
Margaret Chopin, a 56-year-old from Gentilly, said that on a recent trip to
Wal-Mart she heard a group of people talking about how the "good blacks have
to suffer for the bad blacks from New Orleans."
 
It's the kind of comment that might rub nerves raw. But Chopin, who said
she's been insulted repeatedly the past 15 months, chooses to pray instead.
 
"Usually I don't say anything," said Chopin, who lives in Renaissance
Village. "I don't want to be ignorant like them. I pray, I thank God for
what I do have."
 
Chopin said the perception that the evacuees are simply criminals
overrunning Baton Rouge is wrong.
 
"That's how everybody thinks up here," Chopin said. "Some of us are
professionals. I have a bachelor's degree in political science, but you
don't hear about those people. Sure, more people is more crime, but is it
us? Is it the evacuees? No."
 
Unlike McGee and Chopin, 38-year-old Percy Clennon did not spend weeks of
sleepless nights inside the River Center. He spent them sleeping on the
floor with his wife at a relative's home in Old South Baton Rouge.
 
Clennon knew the move would be tough but didn't expect to be treated harshly
in the food stamp line and at grocery stores. More than a year later, the
dirty looks and nasty comments persist, he said.
 
"Where's the Southern hospitality?" asks Clennon, who is from the Third Ward
of New Orleans. "I am shocked. I didn't think my own race would treat me
this way. I am not racist, but I thought the white people would have been
doing this. In the end I actually got more love and support from them."
 
Now living on Coolidge Street just north of LSU, Clennon is trying to get
over the past while he reconciles with his new future.
 
"I hurt every day. I lost a lot of things, a lot of friends, but I am trying
to adapt. I am a survivor. I hurt about the way I was treated here, but I
will make it," he said.