Activist, storyteller and proud preserver of Black Southern culture, Wendi Moore-O’Neal honors the legacy left by her parents - both engaged participants in the Civil Rights Movement and dedicated creators of art and culture. In this episode, Wendi shares how her experience as a community organizer and artist impacted how she dealt with rebuilding a battered New Orleans after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina. She is honest about the blockades to bring back residents who were misplaced after the storm, citing that even she, a college educated professional organizer had trouble finding work that paid her enough money to survive and also allowed her the freedom to rebuild New Orleans the way she and its generations of residents needed it to be rebuilt. Wendi also talks about the mismanagement of financial resources that contributed to many black New Orleanians never being able to return home and the strategic way in which governmental entities sent the message that Black culture did not possess the skill set to properly remake a city that had been broken. Wendi’s honesty continues as she shares how “new” New Orleanians contribute to the city’s rebranding in ways that make her uncomfortable. She ultimately addresses this discomfort in the way she knows best: through the creation of art. She regularly hosts get togethers where marginalized New Orleanians sing together and has produced a film, This Little Light. The film tells the story of how the blockade to progress in New Orleans impacted her personally when she was fired from an organization because she married her wife. As Wendi explores what it will take for New Orleans to be free of what blocks it from the kind of progress she would like to see, she continues her pattern of unabashed honesty. “It won’t be free for the same reason none of us are free. Even in 2019, New Orleans, like many places around the world, is based on a plantation economy.” Wendi explains how it is a city built on the backs of the working class. “This is how capitalism works; all of the wealth is gained on the labor of working people.” *Shortly after recording this episode, Wendi’s father, John O’Neal, passed away. We offer her and the entire Black South our condolences as he was an icon and culture bearer in not only the Freedom Movement of the 1960s, but in the Black Southern Arts Movement as well.
