Southern movement organizations invite local, regional, and national groups to sign a Statement of Solidarity with the Katrina 20 Local Organizing Committee anchored by Taproot Earth, Ashe Cultural Center, Junebug Productions and the Foundation for Louisiana, involving over 200 individuals and groups representing the frontlines most impacted by Hurricane Katrina across Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. 

For 20 years, since Hurricane Katrina, grassroots communities have continued to resist and build, and the Katrina 20 Local Organizing Committee plans to commemorate the lessons learned from the crisis and celebrate the power that fuels our collective social movements today.

Hurricane Katrina and the Gulf Coast Crisis that unfolded in 2005 marked a major social movement turning point in the United States. Katrina exposed the combination of a heightened climate crisis and how the state and private forces are arranged not to protect or rebuild but to extract, abandon, and displace our people and our resources. 

Hurricane Katrina, the levee failures, police killings, insurance scams, union-busting, and the continued aftermath across the Gulf Coast exposed the worst of the economic, racist, and predatory systems of capitalism, white supremacy, and the state. The devastating exploitation included: massive displacement and depopulation of Black, immigrant, and working class residents; implementation of informal martial law; immediate dismantling of public health and public education systems; land grabbing and resource extraction; flooded pollution of toxic energy industries; criminalization of mental health and trauma impacts of survivors; and the clear prioritization of the state to protect property instead of people. 

The aftermath of Hurricane Katrina became a blueprint for the exploitation of climate disasters that exacerbate and support the rise of authoritarianism in this current moment. 

If social movements remember our own histories and learn the rich lessons from Hurricane Katrina and the past two decades, we can build our own maps and blueprints for liberation, governance, and people-centered infrastructure over the next 20 years.

This SOLIDARITY STATEMENT affirms and declares alignment with the Katrina 20 Local Committee. Hundreds of Gulf South organizers, artists, educators, and activists have created the Katrina 20 Week of Action to remember and heal from the losses, to commemorate the resistance, and to offer powerful lessons for our current and future movements. 

The Katrina 20 Week of Action includes gatherings, forums, actions, workshops, healing spaces, cultural processions, and ceremonies throughout the week across Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. From August 24-31, each day will offer activities related to themes developed by the K20 Local Organizing Committee over the last nine months. 

Signing this statement offers support to a grassroots effort to build power and remember our shared histories in a moment when the truth is contested and movements face existential threats within the context of climate crisis and rising fascism.

Signing this statement affirms the K20 Local Organizing Committee protocol which includes but is not limited to: entering with respect for and prioritizing local frontline leadership; researching and respecting the history of resistance in the South; and trusting the existing Southern movement infrastructure that has been built over the last 20 years.  

In a time when we need deeper collaborations and stronger movement alignment, Southern organizations invite you to declare and act in solidarity with the efforts to commemorate Katrina 20 and build power together.