National FEMA Trailer Tour

August 23, 2007

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Displaced New Orleans Brass Band and Mississippi Gulf Coast Community Leader to Perform and Speak at Wally’s Jazz Café in Boston

FEMA Trailer Tour joins Finding our Folk tour in Boston

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Media Contact:
Amelie Ratliff
617-524-5156

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Boston, MA — Today representatives of Louisiana and Mississippi communities most affected by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita will speak and perform music at Wally’s Jazz Café, 427 Mass. Ave, Boston, 5-9 PM. The Finding Our Folk Tour, a project of the The Young People’s Project, is in Boston this week with New Orleans’ Hot 8 Brass Band, ten men displaced by Hurricane Katrina, who will share their music and their stories.

Joining the Hot 8 Brass Band will be the KatrinaRitaVille Express Trailer Tour. Derrick Evans, who is Executive Director of Turkey Creek Community Initiatives in Mississippi, will speak briefly about the tour and trailers, which will bring the voices of the Gulf Coast to the rest of the country.

As the second anniversary of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita approaches with only piecemeal recovery, both Finding Our Folk and KatrinaRitaVille Express are bringing current Gulf Coast experiences to the American public and are doing outreach to displaced storm survivors and to volunteers who have assisted with recovery efforts in the Gulf Coast region.

Finding Our Folk is a national effort aimed at shining a light on the current status of displaced evacuees. Tour participants include high school and college students supported by community elders and grassroots activists from around the country. Finding our Folk seeks to draw attention to the plight of the communities of people who lived in New Orleans and who now live in exile and to raise the voices of Katrina’s survivors-many of whom were poor people and people of color. A key feature of the Tour is open forum “story circles”-an opportunity for displaced people to connect with one another through their individual stories, and share how they are faring in their new communities. Audio and video records of these accounts, supplemented with detailed documentation on the status and stories of evacuees gathered during the tour, are the basis of the first independent database of displaced Katrina survivors.

The KatrinaRitaVille Express trailer tour begins this month and will continue for 14 months, up to the 2008 elections, to promote a (finally) comprehensive recovery which includes housing, economic development, environmental concerns, cultural and historic preservation, and human rights. Trucks towing the trailers will be powered by vegetable oil and bio-diesel, and each trailer will be outfitted with museum-like exhibits, a mobile outdoor theater, public art, and video-conferencing for remote interviews. The first public appearance by a KatrinaRitaVille trailer will be today at Wally’s.

The Hot 8 Brass Band has been central to New Orleans street music for over a decade. The Hot 8 has played in traditional Second Line parades-hosted each Sunday afternoon by a Social Aid and Pleasure Club-since its founding by Bennie Pete in 1995. The Hot 8 is a vital expression of New Orleans African American cultural traditions, which have been fragmented in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. The Hot 8 are famous for playing all day in the sun, then hopping to a club gig and playing through the night. But even more than their boundless energy, what makes the Hot 8 special are the sounds they coax from their well-loved, well-worn horns.

Mr. Evans, a Turkey Creek, MS native, is a sixth generation descendant of the freed slaves who founded the community in the 1860’s. He was living in Roxbury and working as a Boston public school teacher when he learned that the survival of Turkey Creek was threatened by casino developers on the Mississippi coast. He returned home, founded the non-profit TCCI, and was working with other Turkey Creek and North Gulfport residents to address the many environmental, economic, and cultural challenges they faced when Hurricane Katrina hit. Mr. Evans has observed that the broader post-Katrina and -Rita Gulf South is now contending with the same issues TCCI has been fighting in Turkey Creek. His vision of making Gulf-wide change and recovery led to the KatrinaRitaVille Express Tour.

Also present at Wally’s today will be Cambridge native Omo Moses. Moses, founder of The Young People’s Project (TYPP), is coordinating the The Finding Our Folk tour. Son of Robert Parrish Moses, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee veteran of the Mississippi voter registration campaign in the early 1960s and more recently the founder and executive director of The Algebra Project, Omo worked with The Algebra Project for several years in Jackson, MS, then founded TYPP in 1996. TYPP recruits, trains, and deploys high school and college Math Literacy Workers for mentoring middle and elementary school students.

Websites

Finding Ouor Folk
www.findingourfolk.org

KatrinaRitaVille Express
www.krvexpress.org

The Young People’s Project
www.typp.org

Turkey Creek Community Initiatives
www.turkey-creek.org