Four speakers with close ties to New Orleans will discuss how Hurricane Katrina devastated that city's poor and African-American residents – and how environmental damage may disproportionately harm those residents in the future.

"Hurricane Katrina and Its Aftermath: Race, Class and the Environment," a free public forum hosted by the Africana Studies and Research Center at Cornell University, the Cornell Black Professional Women's organization and Ujamaa Residential College, is scheduled for Monday, Sept. 19, from 4:30 to 6:30 p.m. in Uris Hall Auditorium.

The forum will include a panel and audience discussion, moderated by Robert L. Harris Jr., Cornell professor of Africana studies and vice provost for diversity and faculty development.

Topics will include the effects of Hurricane Katrina on black and poor people in the New Orleans area, and the invisibility of poverty in a city that presented a public face of prosperity. The panel also will discuss environmental damage to the region and the injustice associated with environmental hazards for the poor in the United States.

Panelists will include:

• Kalamu ya Salaam, an award-winning New Orleans author, educator and filmmaker and founder of the "Listen to the People" project, which will go to shelters and far-flung communities where exiled New Orleanians are now living to develop social profiles of displaced residents and chronicle their hopes and dreams, as well as their challenges and struggles;
• Malik Rahim, a community activist in New Orleans, a veteran of the Black Panther Party and a featured guest in the broadcast media discussing the effects of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans;
• Kishi Animashuan, assistant professor of Africana studies at Syracuse University, who has studied environmental injustice in the New Orleans area, economic and environmental inequality in the South, and female environmental activism; and
• Folake Akande, a graduate student in African feminist literature at Tulane University, who is a student this semester at Cornell.

For more information on the forum, contact Salah Hassan, associate professor and director of Africana Studies and Research Center at Cornell, at (607) 255-0528 or (607) 254-8668.