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http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20050905/...n_dc&printer=1

Katrina could prompt new black "great migration" By Adam Tanner Mon Sep
5, 3:21 PM ET

If refugees end up building new lives away from New Orleans, Hurricane
Katrina may prompt the largest U.S. black resettlement since the 20th
century's Great Migration lured southern blacks to the North in a
search for jobs and better lives.

Interviews with refugees in Houston, which is expecting many thousands
of evacuees to remain, suggest that thousands of blacks who lost
everything and had no insurance will end up living in Texas or other
U.S. states.

Officials say it will take many months and maybe even years before the
birthplace of jazz is rebuilt.

"We advise people that this city has been destroyed," New Orleans
Deputy Police Chief Warren Riley told reporters on Monday. "We are
simply asking people not to come back to this city right now."

Many evacuees like Percy Molere, 26, who worked in a hotel in New
Orleans' famed French quarter, say they cannot keep their lives on hold
for very long.

"If it took a month, I'd go back, but a year, I don't want to wait that
long," said Molere. "Hopefully we're going to stay in Houston just to
stay out of New Orleans" for the time being.

Experts caution that it is too soon to clearly predict the long-term
impact of the devastation of New Orleans, a city of less than half a
million people more than two-thirds of whom are black. But one scenario
would be massive resettlement elsewhere.

"You've got 300,000, 400,000 people, many of them low income without a
lot of means, who are not going to have the ability to wait out a year
or two or three years for the region to rebuild," said Barack Obama,
the only black member of the U.S. Senate.

"They are going to have to find immediate work, immediate housing,
immediately get their kids into school and that probably will change
the demographics of the region," he told Reuters on Monday during a
visit to Houston, the largest single gathering point for the refugees.

Because of the legacy of slavery, southern states including Louisiana,
Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina have
historically been home to the greatest concentration of U.S. blacks. In
1900, 85 percent of U.S. blacks lived in the South and as early as
1830, more than 58 percent of Louisiana's population was black.

Between 1940 and 1970 economic changes prompted 5 million blacks to
quit the south for cities across the North including Chicago, Detroit
and New York, marking one of the nation's largest internal migrations.

"It could have potentially that kind of effect," said Obama, whose
father immigrated from Kenya.

MIGRATION TRENDS

New Orleans did not always follow the trend. Historically, far fewer
residents have moved from New Orleans than from most American cities,
despite its high poverty and crime rates.

Nicholas Lemann, author of "The Promised Land: The Great Black
Migration and How it Changed America," was wary of predicting that
Katrina would prompt major resettlement.

"It is kind of early to tell," he said.

But he said as officials elsewhere accommodate large numbers of blacks,
they should avoid putting them in confined areas as Chicago did in the
past, which created new urban woes. "They should think carefully on how
to avoid the sort of ghetto phenomenon," he said.

Part of the migration trend will be set by what federal, state and
local agencies do to help refugees rebuild their lives.

"What I do think should be focused on now is what is the Congress is
going to do when they get back," former President Bill Clinton said in
Houston on Monday. "How are we going to find jobs for these people,
where are they really going to live, do they need some cash right
away?"

"They feel lost."