Survivors of Hurricane Katrina charged the federal government with racist incompetence for belated relief efforts and appealed for funds and skilled volunteers to help rebuild New Orleans at SF State on Tuesday.

Over two hundred people crowded Jack Adams Hall to hear New Orleans community activists Malik Rahim and Curtis Muhammed, speak at the forum “Voices from the Front: What you can do,” sponsored by SF State's department of health education.

“Racism, greed and corruption imploded the levees,” said Rahim, co-founder of Common Ground, the nonprofit organization that sprang up to aid Katrina victims in the days following the storm.

Rahim said there was no reason for the levees to break. The predominantly black 9th Ward of New Orleans was one of the worst damaged districts, but there was minimal harm to white neighborhoods, he said.

Using a slide show, Rahim traced the path of Katrina that merely sideswiped New Orleans but had it been a direct hit it would have likely killed 100,000 he insisted. The slides also displayed the disparity of destruction from one side of the levee to the other that divided along racial lines. When the levees broke in the industrial canals, black homeowners - 70 percent of whom owed no mortgage but had no insurance - lost their homes. Some owners whose homes were estimated to be worth $200,000 were offered only $26,000 in compensation from the government, said Rahim.

“If we spent some money to preserve the wetlands this would have never have happened,” said Rahim. “The greatest number (of people) caught in New Orleans was elderly and single mothers with infants, mostly with incomes of under $7,000 a year.”

Rahim praised the volunteers who streamed into New Orleans to help with recovery but complained about authorities that derailed relief efforts.

“I’m honored we got help from San Francisco General (Hospital) because we couldn’t get anybody from Louisiana,” said Rahim. “If not for the volunteer doctors from San Francisco, the Midwest, and Europe, God knows how many people would have died. We had a racist sheriff here who turned away volunteers, especially Blacks.”

Rahim complained about a significant decline in civic responsibility in the U.S. and the Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA) and Red Cross would rather let food rot in boxes before giving it out to disaster victims. Common Ground distributed 80 tons of food and served 3,600 persons at their emergency health clinic in two months, Rahim said.

Dr. Michael Kozart of SF General Hospital volunteered in New Orleans and said the slow relief efforts he saw in the press were "painful to his heart" and "a total injustice" to think it could happen in this country. Kozart recalled refilling prescriptions, treating diabetes, asthma, eye infections and performing primary medical care. He said it was a privilege to be down in New Orleans but insisted he only got through police check points was because he was white.

“We just got to address all aspects of class inequality and racism and recognize that what’s happening in New Orleans is happening in the (San Francisco) Bay View (District),” said Kozart. “They are at risk and are undermined by neglect and abandonment. We need to cultivate more mutual aid in our own society and do so in a way to support people. It’s not about taking on power or charity - it’s about solidarity and local empowerment.”

Curtis Muhammed works with the non-profit organization Community Labor United of Baton Rouge Louisiana. He ascribed much of the harm caused by Katrina to indifference by the Bush administration and FEMA and appealed to any attorneys in the audience to investigate the possibility of criminal negligence.

“We charge murder by our national, state and local government,” said Muhammed. “That’s a serious charge. We've got a lot of work to do - legal research to uncover evidence. Did they intentionally try to kill those people? We need to look carefully at what the communication between the weather people and the president was.

“The people in New Orleans did not experience a natural disaster. Katrina was up the highway 70 miles when the levees broke,” said Muhammed.

Muhammed said racism is so deep in the U.S. that even though the country had the skills and resources to help New Orleans, (68 percent African-American) the authorities remained frozen in their tracks. Public education is "rotten and needs to be mended," he said.

“We first have to attack our hatred for dark skins and then we can celebrate our human connection,” said Muhammed. “Katrina put the spotlight on race and environmental abuse in this country. Bush knew he could get away with it because nobody likes poor black people - even among our own people. We the displaced people of New Orleans must take charge of our own recovery but we insist on government participation.”

Leon Breckenridge, 18, is a Cinema freshman. He accused the federal government of “playing with people’s lives, a lot of whom are homeless.” Breckenridge said most people lack the means to care for themselves in the event of a disaster like Katrina and it is the government’s responsibility to intervene.

“These (FEMA) people waited five days to help,” said Breckenridge. “Then they call (survivors) looters and refugees. The government needs to get its priorities straight. Soldiers are dying in Iraq for nothing. Katrina was far more threatening then Al-Qaeda - more likely to have a natural disaster than an Al Qaeda disaster.”