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A Practice Renewed

Posted: Feb. 1, 2007

By REILLY MORSE

The checkpoints are gone and the barbed wire has been rolled up. The casino barges have been scrapped. The lines for food, ice and gas have disappeared. The debris landfills no longer burn day and night. The dead are buried. No more helicopters rumble overhead. Air Force One's weekly visits stopped more than a year ago. We are back to invisible.

Photo by Hugh Williams

Reilly Morse

On a cold, clear December Sunday, I came back to where my office stood 15 months ago, before Hurricane Katrina's 25-foot storm surge swept everything away. Two or three white Federal Emergency Management Agency trailers now are scattered on lots behind me underneath old live oaks. Plastic debris marking the crest of the tidal surge still flutters in the branches.

I look south from concrete steps, the only remnant of my former law office. From the porch one block north, I used to see the beach through a gap between a restaurant and a Waffle House. Now the Mississippi Sound spreads out glittering and flat for miles on either side. The only structure blocking my view is a newly finished, impossibly clean Waffle House, opening soon.

About 10 miles to the east is my new job.

Last fall, as I was coping with the loss of my practice, Martha Bergmark offered to put me to work helping others deal with the storm's consequences on their lives. She is the founder of Mississippi Center for Justice, the state's only homegrown public interest law firm. We were brought together through some unlikely connections.

Years before Katrina, a Louisiana developer planning to destroy hundreds of acres of wetlands found himself upstream from Rose Johnson, a retired Highway Patrol dispatcher and the first African-American to lead the Mississippi Sierra Club. Downstream from Rose was Derrick Evans, a civil rights history professor and a sixth-generation descendant of freed slaves who settled on Turkey Creek. Derrick left his Boston teaching post to conserve his community's history back home.

The nearest pro bono environmental law firm in New Orleans had closed its doors. I was the coast's only public interest environmental lawyer, so I took the case.

I was a solo lawyer with no staff or budget for experts, so things looked tough. Everything changed when Trisha Miller, a Stanford law student, volunteered to fly herself to Mississippi for a week to help prepare the objections. Soon afterward, the local mayor persuaded the newspaper to endorse the Louisiana developer, but as he walked out of the editorial board room, he scoffed that my clients were "a bunch of dumb bastards."

The next day's headline was "Mayor: Opponents Are 'Dumb Bastards.'" With Trisha's help, I carried this headline to San Francisco and persuaded the Sierra Club to pay for a national wetlands expert. We won the case. Trisha went on to work for the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, where she helped Rose and Derrick set up community land trusts.

One night, weeks after Katrina, I confided in Derrick that I must close my practice.

"This can't happen," he insisted.

The next night, Trisha came into town with Karen Lash, who works for Equal Justice Works, a national pro bono organization. They stayed with me and my family in Gulfport, Miss., as no hotels were open. In the morning, I drove Karen to Hancock County as the gale-force edge of Hurricane Rita passed through. The devastation and neglect of victims one month after Katrina left her stunned and bitter. Everywhere she went, Karen photographed steps remaining from homes and buildings that had been destroyed. On the way back, she urged me to check Equal Justice Works for fellowship opportunities.

In October, Martha interviewed John Jopling and me at a friend's office. John had apartments in Biloxi, Miss., and New Orleans, so he was "bi-damaged." John and I went through law school and clerkships together but parted ways afterwards. John went to work for Southeast Mississippi Legal Services for Martha, while I went to the "dark side" for about 10 years working in insurance, commercial, toxic tort and maritime litigation.

In the mid-1990s I re-emerged and started my own solo practice around the same time John left Legal Services to start his own practice. I pursued a general civil litigation practice, including divorce, estates and small business disputes, but I increasingly took on environmental public interest work.

The interviews with Martha went well. On the way out, I showed Martha my painting of the dead end where John and I lived while attending the University of Mississippi Law School. My college training was in fine art, and I pursued my hero Cézanne (himself a law school dropout) to his native Provence, France. A bilingual Mississippi-born Post Impressionist had no future, so I went to law school. The impulse to paint went into hibernation during my time with law firms, then re-emerged and strengthened along with my involvement in public interest work.

I called Martha several days after the interview. She was eager but could only commit to John's slot. Later, she offered to hire me on a short-term basis, no guarantees. Around the same time, the Mississippi attorney general's office offered me a full-time civil litigation position. The idealism of my wife Christina allowed me to choose Martha's offer over a dependable government paycheck.

Early on, John and I worked a jumble of tasks: direct service to people whose homes were lost and whose recovery required someone who spoke "FEMA," and community organizing to secure a just, sustainable and equitable housing policy.

It was chaos. Travel was nightmarish due to busted bridges, gas shortages, lack of street signs or landmarks and curfews. Lodging was just as bad because FEMA had occupied the hotels. We were crowded too in our 1920s bungalow, because another couple who lost their home had moved themselves and their pets in with my wife, our two daughters, three dogs and me.

But visitors found room with us and with my mother-in-law, Jeanne Backstrom; we ended up running a pro bono bed and breakfast for pro bono lawyers. Some nights after curfew we slipped over to a coffee shop to capture its WiFi. Every time Trisha came she brought an interesting array of attorneys, documentary filmmakers and volunteers. Jeanne soon gave Trisha a key.

We worked together to troubleshoot FEMA problems for hundreds of households. People told us about living in unsanitary, storm-damaged apartments or sleeping on baby mattresses in vans. On the way home late one winter night, I passed scores of people huddled by fires outside of tents that had sprung up like a Hooverville on a city golf course.

For weeks we worked from our vehicles, briefcases and cell phones. A sharp-eyed legal services lawyer tipped me to an office building vacancy in East Biloxi. We grabbed it, filled it with donated furniture, equipment and supplies and prepared for volunteers over Christmas and spring breaks.

John fielded teams of law students from the Student Hurricane Network to monitor eviction court outcomes using a form he designed with a visiting Harvard Law School housing professor. I located pre-Katrina data on apartment complexes and sent students out to survey and photograph storm damage.

In the spring, I sent extra teams into historically segregated enclaves to record community histories and identify buildings that might qualify for landmark status. Whether it was eviction courts or apartment surveys, these students were transformed by their encounters with people in crisis. The same was true with a group of intellectual property lawyers sent by the law firm of Weil, Gotshal & Manges over an eight-week period to help with appeals for people whose emergency housing and living assistance claims were rejected by FEMA.

In March, I became the first of nine legal fellows working under The Equal Justice Works Katrina Initiative. My sponsor is the Association of Corporate Counsel, which helped to spearhead the program. This fellowship enabled the Mississippi Center for Justice to extend my position to a two-year commitment.

Last winter, we saw an informal pattern of meetings and phone conferences emerge between groups advocating for the most vulnerable hurricane victims. Some were local, like the groups headed by Rose and Derrick, some were statewide, like the Mississippi NAACP and the Mississippi Center for Justice, and some were national like the Lawyers Committee and Oxfam America.

As problems emerged this network responded, sometimes quite successfully. For example, thousands of people submitted objections to Mississippi's proposal to make billions in homeowner grants without any requirement to target low-income households. In response, the state's next plan targeted low income homeowners. When FEMA announced plans to evict 3,000 households from trailers, the groups surveyed trailer parks, held workshops, developed advocacy manuals, captured national media attention and found the correct Congressional connections to force FEMA to reverse course.

But Katrina was too big of a problem. This nameless network needed clout and organization. In May, Derrick proposed that dozens of advocates hold a retreat to hammer out an agenda and organization. Several of us wrote up a proposal and, weeks later, we found almost 60 people being guided through a mission-building process in the River Room of the Monteleone Hotel in New Orleans.

This network fleshed out five core values or pillars: shelter, community, prosperity, balance and fairness.

On the way home, I called Bill Tyler, an art school classmate in Nashville, Tenn., to describe what happened and ask him to come up with a design for the group. Bill sent back a box with three staggered horizontal lines. He called it "Steps," after the concrete steps left behind by the hurricane — like those Karen photographed and the ones in front of my old office.

The Steps Coalition was launched with 30 member groups on July 27, 2006. Only days later, an alert went out that hundreds of south Mississippi households had received letters that their housing projects would be sold or destroyed. Within two weeks, we submitted Freedom of Information Act requests for the files, drafted tenants' rights materials, held outreach meetings and packed the Housing Authority's board meeting with angry politicians and tenants. We also brought evidence of discriminatory intent to the Department of Housing and Urban Development's Fair Housing officials.

It was discouraging to see the humanitarian impulse that swept through the immediate rescue and relief phase replaced with bigotry when it came time to rebuild. It seems easier for us to shed our prejudices when we are all equally impoverished.

On the weekend before the anniversary, North Gulfport hosted a national Town Hall sponsored by Oxfam America and the NAACP. The featured panelists included Ray Offenheiser, President of Oxfam America; Bruce Gordon, President of NAACP; and actor/activist Danny Glover. I was one of several local panelists from the Steps Coalition. Over 450 people demanded to know why the recovery is so delayed and why the poorest were being left out.

Earlier in the day, I took part in an NAACP panel to discuss the recovery with funders. On Sunday, I went to Mount Pleasant Church in Turkey Creek, where Lawyers Committee President Barbara Arnwine delivered the only full gospel litigation report I ever expect to hear: "Injunction after mighty, righteous injunction!"

The service ended, unforgettably, with Reverend Edward Moses calling forward the congregation and guest lawyers and activists to lead us all in that memorable hymn: "Glory, glory/Hallelujah/FEMA don’t treat me/Like it used to."

After dinner Monday night I drove over to Waveland, about 20 miles west of Gulfport past Bay St. Louis, and set up a tent on the grounds of Gulfside Assembly. Something I cannot explain impelled me to recreate the conditions people endured after the storm. I was alone, just me and 10,000 insects. It was hot and still. Before dawn broke, vehicles began to show up. I directed traffic with a flashlight. Shortly after sunrise, 60 people gathered in remembrance with words from an imam, a rabbi, two bishops and a local choir.

To my surprise, one minister read "Thank You Katrina," a piece I had co-written with Tom Teel, an attorney who owned and shared the office building that Katrina took from us. The prayer expressed gratitude to this concussive storm for awakening ourselves to our better nature and forging new friendships. We crossed the road and spread flowers onto the low, still waters of the Mississippi Sound.

That afternoon, people gathered in a Biloxi Baptist church to march downtown to urge the governor to work with us, not over us. Two months later, the governor's office invited Steps to discuss how to shape future disaster recovery programs. This work has borne fruit even as I write. We have succeeded in doubling the maximum grant for low-income homeowners.

As the recovery has progressed, I have continued to paint. In July, my family had a short trip to a cabin in North Carolina where I finished my first two post-Katrina scenes: one of shrimp boats aground on the banks of a canal and the other a beaten up brick horseshoe-shaped fort on one of our barrier islands. In October, the couple we housed for two months invited us to join them in Italy for a week. I finished one painting there of the farmhouse and surrounding vineyards.

Tonight, as a cold front settles in, I think about the past year and feel good about our progress. It has been exhausting, heart-breaking but also exhilarating for all of us who have taken part. What lawyers here along the Gulf Coast and across this nation have done for the storm's invisible victims has made me intensely proud of our profession. We should be done with this recovery in another several years — plenty of time for every lawyer reading this to experience it yourself. The reward will be priceless.

In mid-December, the Lawyers Committee brought Rose, Derrick and me to New York to receive an honor at their annual awards reception for our community work following Hurricane Katrina. It was overwhelming to be recognized before a room of nationally distinguished attorneys, and we were delighted to learn that the recipient of the prestigious Founders Award, Jerome Hyman of Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton, was a native of Rosedale, Miss.

When I think about where I am today, I recall Derrick's words from last year, but give them an optimistic twist: "It can happen!"

Tell us what you think by visiting our comments page.

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Fatima J Valentine

Awesome article! It was well worth the entire read. It touched on so many aspects of humanity, and so many facets of society. It is a GOOD NEWS article amidst so much negative press. What I really liked also was the fact that the negatives were candidly journaled and explored, but they were not the “last word.” At the end, there is HOPE.

posted on 02/09/2007

Martha Ertman

what an outstanding portrait of a personal and professional response to natural and political disaster. So glad to have read it and get a sense of this man and the way his experience paints Katrina’s broad impact.

posted on 02/05/2007

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