Jackson, Sharpton Lead N.O. Rally

Hundreds of protesters led by the Revs. Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton rallied Saturday, demanding the right of all displaced New Orleans residents to vote after Hurricane Katrina.

The system set up for the April 22 election for mayor and other city positions makes it difficult for displaced voters to cast a ballot, Jackson and other activists said.

"We want the Voting Rights Act," Jackson said at a news conference before the rally. Black leaders have argued city elections could violate the landmark 1965 law.

The city election could have a broad effect nationwide, Sharpton said: "What happens in New Orleans will affect voting rights all over the United States."

Jackson and other activists are demanding satellite polling places for displaced voters in cities outside New Orleans, and even outside Louisiana. Fewer than half of the city's 460,000 residents have returned since the Aug. 29 storm flooded the city.

Activists also urged the release of updated lists of displaced voter addresses, a request the Federal Emergency Management Agency has denied, saying it would breach privacy.

About 2,000 people attended the rally and march, said New Orleans police Capt. Juan Quinton.

The rally was held at the convention center, site of some of the most vivid scenes of desperation out of Hurricane Katrina. It included state and federal lawmakers and comedian Bill Cosby, who urged residents to rebuild without the murders and drug dealing that plagued New Orleans before the storm.

"It's painful that we can't heal ourselves unless we cleanse the wounds," Cosby said.

After the rally, protesters marched across a Mississippi River bridge where residents trying to leave the city after Katrina were turned back.

A lawsuit filed by two state legislators claims police in the city of Gretna used excessive force when refusing to let fleeing evacuees cross. State prosecutors are also investigating allegations of civil rights violations.

Gretna officials continue to defend the decision, saying they lacked the resources to feed or shelter evacuees and could not ensure their safety because of hurricane damage.

"The symbolism of crossing the bridge is dead wrong, mainly because of the conditions after the storm," Gretna Mayor Ronnie Harris said. "They're marching to an area to that had nothing to offer."

Lurking beneath the surface of Saturday's rally was a discussion of poverty.

When Katrina struck Aug. 29, thousands of people who had not known loss suddenly knew what it was like to be homeless and jobless. To taste hunger and feel thirst. To go without medical care or even toilets.

And those who didn't experience the misery and chaos firsthand saw it in graphic detail every day and night on television. The desperate, angry masses at the Superdome and convention center. The rampant looting. The floating bodies.

With much of New Orleans still under water, President Bush stood before the stately St. Louis Cathedral in Jackson Square and declared the nation had "a duty to confront this poverty with bold action."

Katrina was the cataclysmic event that was supposed to launch a vigorous "national dialogue on poverty." It didn't happen, many say.

"From my perspective, it's kind of like one hand clapping," says Maria Foscarinis, executive director of the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty. "We'd love to have a dialogue, but there needs to be someone to have a dialogue with."

Not long after Katrina struck, the Census Bureau released figures showing that the poverty rate had climbed for the fourth straight year. More than 37 million Americans live below the federal poverty level (defined as an income of $19,000 for a family of four), including 12 million children.

Five million of those children live in families that earn less than half the poverty level.

Jane Knitzer, director of the National Center for Children in Poverty, says it's not so much that Americans don't know that poverty exists. They just don't want to think about it, because it's just too hard.

"Very often people feel that there's no solution to poverty, that's it's intractable," she says. "It's a secret nobody wants to deal with."

But how big a secret, really?

Stanford University researchers Emily Ryo and David Grusky, hearing pundits insist that Katrina "unleashed a newfound commitment among the public to take on issues of poverty and inequality," decided to measure this supposed awareness-raising effect.

The researchers analyzed data from Syracuse University's Maxwell Polls on Civic Engagement and Inequality, conducted in 2004 and shortly after Katrina. Ryo and Grusky divided respondents based on their answers to detailed questions on their attitudes toward poverty. They created four basic categories: "activists," "realists," "moralists," and "deniers."

Activists, defined as those who support state intervention to reduce poverty, went from 58 percent of respondents in the 2004 survey to 60 percent post-Katrina; and there were small gains for deniers, who believe poverty and inequality are "neither substantial nor growing" (from 21 percent to 25), and for moralists, who see poverty as a motivator, not a social problem (from near zero to 1 percent).

The most dramatic gain was among so-called realists, who don't believe in the state's ability to reduce poverty or inequality; their numbers nearly doubled to 11 percent.

Interpreting the findings, Grusky, a professor of sociology, says they show a majority of people already accepted that there was a problem and were doing something about it. The rest, he says, either see poverty as an individual problem or simply don't care.

"This idea that it's a dirty little secret, this poverty and inequality," he says, "just doesn't pass muster."

News coverage could partly explain the rise in denier and realist views. Some "did not take well to the liberal lesson that they no doubt regarded as foisted upon them," Grusky and Ryo wrote in their report, and so "the `call for action' story ... was countered by the equally powerful lesson that government intervention is all about inefficiency and ineptitude."

In the seven days between the storm's arrival and his own evacuation from his ruined Uptown apartment complex, the Rev. Randall Mitchell swam through the murky waters to the Superdome, and walked the trash- and corpse-strewn streets at the now-infamous Ernest N. Morial Convention Center. He sees a lot of politicians and pundits ``pimping'' those images for their own agendas.

He says it's time