Louis Blackmon was 11 when the floodwaters unleashed by Hurricane Katrina churned through his family’s East New Orleans home, filling it with brackish water and plastering the ceiling with mud and mold.
Few of his friends and relatives made it back to the poor, mostly black neighborhood where he grew up. Far fewer had found their way to college a decade later.
It was fitting that he has enrolled at nearby Southern University at New Orleans, a public, historically black university whose 11 buildings were submerged in as much as 11 feet of water after the city’s levees burst on August 29, 2005.
Like Mr. Blackmon, SUNO is a survivor, though it has struggled more than any other college in the city in the decade since Katrina.
Read more at The Chronicle of Higher Education: http://chronicle.com/article/A-Decade-After-Katrina-One/232691