Outside community activist Malik Rahim's first-aid station in Algiers Parish, New Orleans, a large wooden sign reads: "This is Solidarity, not Charity." The sign is a reminder of the racial and environmental issues that persist in New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

The subjects were recurring themes in a public forum, "Hurricane Katrina and Its Aftermath: Race, Class and the Environment," Sept. 19 in Cornell's Uris Hall Auditorium.

More than 200 people came to listen to Rahim and three other New Orleans residents: Kalamnu ya Salaam, an award-winning New Orleans author, educator and filmmaker; Kishi Animashuan, assistant professor of African studies at Syracuse University who has studied environmental injustice in the South; and Folake Akande, a graduate student in African feminist literature at Tulane University who is spending this semester at Cornell.

The forum began with a 10-minute video clip in which Rahim was interviewed by the audience- and foundation-supported radio and TV news program "Democracy Now!" Standing next to a dead disaster victim lying in the open, Rahim explained how the authorities neglected pickup requests and how that affected community morale.

He told the interviewer, "Nobody deserves to be left here, and the kids pass by here and they are seeing it … This is what is frightening a lot of people into leaving." Rahim, a veteran of the Black Panther Party, a public housing tenants organizer and a Green Party candidate for the New Orleans City Council, has been running the first-aid station as a community service, providing health care and toiletries. "We need people to come down because they give hope. And hope is what New Orleans has lost," said Rahim.

At the forum, Rahim condemned the government-organized relief effort and blamed what he described as injustice springing from racism. "New Orleans is not only surrounded by water, but it is also surrounded by some of the most racist parishes in America," said Rahim. He noted that the city's blacks, who make up 70 percent of the Algiers Parish population, have an average annual income of $6,000. Many, he said, had no means of leaving the city despite the evacuation calls.

After the storm, he said, "The help that they [relief services] were trying to offer was help that nobody needed," claiming that peanut butter, for example, was given to people who were dying of thirst.

Salaam, a former editor of Black Collegian magazine and executive director of the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Foundation, spoke about race, class and gender issues in post-Katrina New Orleans. He has founded the "Listen to the People" project to chronicle Katrina experiences and archive them on the Internet. "We need to get those stories so we don't dance around the issues," he said.

Animashuan spoke of the need for more scientific tests to be carried out on the polluted floodwater, for the establishment of more buffer zones between chemical plants and their neighbors and for more active relocation efforts.

The forum was hosted by Cornell's African Studies and Research Center in conjunction with the Cornell Black Professional Women's Association, the Society for the Humanities and Cornell's Ujamaa Residential College.

Alex Kwan is a writer intern at the Cornell News Service.