Racism Legacy Dams Up Post-Flood Efforts -- Albany, Ga. Blacks See Discrimination

ALBANY, Ga. - South-central Albany is a ghost town. Who knows where the people have gone, but their houses sit abandoned. For mile after mile, the homes squat beneath a merciless sun, front doors gaping. Some have tumbled down, half swallowed by gigantic sinkholes.

Seven weeks after floods ravaged southwest Georgia and parts of Alabama and Florida, the task of rebuilding the hardest hit section of the hardest hit town has hardly begun.

But as other communities along the Flint, Ocmulgee and Chattahoochee rivers pull together after what is being called Georgia's worst natural disaster, in Albany the legacy of racial separation and distrust has further torn people apart.

Many in the black community allege that city and county officials deliberately diverted water to their neighborhoods in order to save northern areas where affluent white people live. Local officials strongly deny this. But in an African-American community molded by a history of powerlessness and perceived neglect, the rumors spread with the relentlessness of the flood water.

"Immediately after the flood, that's all people were talking about as they stood in lines," said Mary Young-Cummings, a lawyer and former state legislator who lost her home in the flood.

"What we want to know is, was the water manipulated in such a way that the more affluent neighborhoods were spared devastation to the detriment of the black community?" she said. "They got flooding, but we got devastated. And we got miles and miles and miles of devastation."

The U.S. Justice Department is investigating the way the flood was handled at the request of Jesse Jackson, who has visited Albany twice to hear citizen concerns. Last weekend, during his most recent visit, state and local police provided unusually heavy guard because of high racial tension and alleged death threats.

Overall, more than 5,000 families in the county were displaced by the flood, say officials.

A Georgia State University economist estimated last week that the flood would have a $1 billion impact in the state overall, including $500 million in damage to uninsured property and $200 million in agricultural losses. A number of small towns that already were struggling to survive were nearly wiped off the map.

But in Albany, a city of 80,000 people, the devastation in the south-central section is so widespread that Young-Cummings fears many residents will not resettle there. That could lead to a weakening of black voting strength in a city where blacks make up a majority of the population (57 percent officially) but have only this year won a majority of the seats on the city commission.

While white areas of Albany also received heavy flood damage, Mayor Paul Keenan acknowledges that the lower-lying African-American section of town received the greater residential damage. He insisted, though, that this was the result of geography and nature. "There was no manipulation of water," he said. "You don't manipulate that kind of flood."

He cites a state environmental protection office report issued last week that showed dams on Lake Chehaw and Lake Blackshear were too small to control all the water that was dumped on the area last month by Tropical Storm Alberto.

But many south-side residents are not satisfied. Young-Cummings charged that the report merely "rubber-stamped" conclusions that already had been reached by local officials, alleging that the first draft of the study was reviewed by the officials and by executives of the power companies that own the dams.

South-side residents are particularly suspicious because their area was flooded on a sunny day, they say, two days before the Flint River actually overflowed its banks.

Officials say the wastewater system was overwhelmed. "The flood was not controlled, and no one was capable of controlling the flood," said the report released last week. "The operation of the dams was completely proper, logical and responsible."

Officials acknowledge that water was pumped out of north Albany after that area flooded, but they say the water was pumped to a drainage basin west of the city and away from the flooded area.

Some south-side residents complained that they thought the city was more concerned with protecting downtown buildings such as the civic center than with helping residents or trying to save the predominantly black Albany State College, which suffered massive flood damage.