Librarians Volunteer While Media Forget the 'Rediscovered' Poor: A Librarian at the Kitchen Table. No. 394.

Katrina's Vanishing Victims
Media forget the 'rediscovered' poor

Newsweek (9/19/05) put the face of a crying African-American child on its cover, alongside the headline "Poverty, Race and Katrina: Lessons of a National Shame." Inside, in an article titled "The Other America" (echoing the book by Michael Harrington that launched the "rediscovery" of U.S. poverty in the 1960s), senior editor Jonathan Alter noted, "After a decade of improvement in the 1990s, poverty in America is actually getting worse," and argued that "it takes a catastrophe like Katrina to strip away the old evasions, hypocrisies and not-so-benign neglect."

Coverage of poverty and Katrina.


VOLUNTEER DAYS AT ALA ANNUAL CONFERENCE 2006.


Dubbed “the yellow swarm” because of their distinctive bee-colored “Libraries Build Communities”T-shirts, a volunteer workforce nearly 1,000 strong descended on New Orleans libraries for two days of hard labor, painting, fixing, sorting, and stacking at more than 20 locations all over the city.