Support for Louisiana.

The state we're in is provided by.

Every day I go to work for Entergy.

I know customers are counting on me.

So Entergy is investing millions of dollars to keep the lights on and installing new technology to prevent outages before they happen.

Together, together, together.

We power life.

Additional support provided by the Fred Bea and Ruth Ziegler Foundation and the Ziegler Art Museum located in Jennings City Hall.

The museum focuses on emerging Louisiana artists and is an historical and cultural center for southwest Louisiana and the Foundation for Excellence in Louisiana Public Broadcasting.

With support from viewers like you.

People want to know exactly.

But we're asking people to predict something that's not terribly easy to predict.

The dynamics of Hurricane Ian.

And the math just doesn't add up.

Campaign ads that trigger.

They believe that they're legally coming to this country for refuge.

There are more refugees detained in Louisiana than you might think.

What's life like in detainment?

About the origins of black Greek life.

We're very lucky and.

Grateful to be here to tell our story.

But it was.

It was nasty.

I think it's unbelievable how.

People are just helping each other.

And maybe everyone in this world can learn a little bit from the storm.

Florida is in just the beginning stages of recovery.

They sure are.

And it won't be quick.

After the fury unleashed by Hurricane Ian, Louisiana knows all about this.

We offer prayer and support.

And in a moment, more on AM.

But first tonight, a clearer picture of our upcoming governor's race.

This week, Attorney General Jeff Landry officially declared he will run.

He joins Lieutenant Governor Billy Nungesser.

They're the two who've already announced.

State Treasurer John Schroeder expected to announce soon.

A bunch of other candidates are expected, including Senator Bill Cassidy and Senator John Kennedy.

The list is already pretty long.

Hey, there could be some good news in the looming homeowner's insurance crisis.

A legislative package that passed this week aims to beef up protection for policyholders.

And we'll have Jim Donelon in next week to talk about this.

On why the pictures and video from Hurricane Ian's destruction in Florida are stunning and heartbreaking.

They're also teaching us about storm surge in real time and the forces that encircle the eye wall of a hurricane.

LSU hurricane climatologist Jules Trapani and LSU coastal meteorologist Paul Miller.

Explain.

Jill, you mentioned that you use this video.

We're watching video of Fort Myers Beach as the storm surge comes in.

In your class this week?

Absolutely.

I use it as a great example of what storm surge can be when it's at its worst.

I think it's about the learning about how it actually happens and where it comes from.

So a hurricane, when it's out over the open ocean, has a lot of real estate beneath the surface of the oceans, water all the way down to the depths and the ocean floor.

As the storm approaches a coast, it reaches that continental shelf.

And in the Gulf of Mexico, the shelf is very gradual.

So you can think about a small depth change over space, but there's a large space as the storm approaches the actual coastline, it now has lost a lot of that real estate.

And so that depth between the surface and the ocean floor just got a lot shorter.

So the water goes up.

Then it reaches the coast of Florida where you have a massive amount of infrastructure throughout a cityscape that water spills over the landscape and floods the roads in a relatively quick way.

And that's why it's so different than we would see if we would see it in Louisiana.

And we've not ever seen anything like this in actual time, but we know what happens.

But it looks so different.

And that's because we have the marshlands and we have so much of that and much and much less building right on the coast.

Absolutely.

So part of it is in Louisiana, we have so much swamp land, so much marshland that thankfully for that, we have what we call an ecosystem service where that environment actually provides a service to the people in Louisiana by taking some of that energy, dissipating it outward away from the actual landscape.

Now, certainly we do reach land.

It does actually spill over the area that we've seen in, you know, in Lake Charles, for example.

But a lot of that energy is pushed to different places into greater depth because of that swamp vegetation or marshland vegetation.

So this is really a super visual instruction of when we say preserving the coast marshlands as the buffer.

That's why Florida doesn't have that.

Louisiana does.

Absolutely.

Absolutely.

Yes.

I want to show you now just some of the aftermath.

And Paul, as you look at this, describe why it's as bad as it is.

Well, I think what we're seeing here is some of the absolute devastation that can occur in these eyewall winds.

You know, sometimes you might be a parish or a county or two away from where the eyewall makes landfall.

You might think, oh, well, it wasn't that bad.

I had a tree down my yard, but that was it.

But what we can see here is that in that immediate core of the strongest winds associated with the tropical cyclone, that we see things being literally leveled, that you see houses scraped off their foundations.

Some of that's through a combination of the surge and the force of that water literally coming in and wiping the slate on foundations.

But it's also these extreme hundred and 50 mile an hour winds that encounter these areas as well.

That we've had and seen.

Obviously, bridges collapse.

New Orleans, of course, had that Mississippi about in Katrina.

This storm is comparable in damage, it seems, to Katrina.

And in the water, I suppose.

I think they'll be talking about that.

Am I correct to say that?

Mm hmm.

Yeah.

You know what's important to point out when we were watching that storm surge video, that that is ocean water.

I think sometimes it's confusing when we hear these reports of 20 plus inches of rain to maybe confuse what's happening over the Florida peninsula with all the riverine flooding and the localized flooding associated with that rain and then maybe the storm surge that's happening on the coast, there were really kind of two components of this storm.

One is that massive storm surge that we were viewing.

And tons of rain.

Exactly right.

So they had both those things happening.

There's been discussion about the forecasting and that people were confused about the forecasting.

And as I listened to it, I wasn't.

But I saw the cone.

They wouldn't say anything unusual about that, but yet still people in Florida are saying that they feel the forecasting was confusing.

Can you see why they would say that?

Yes, I think it's a mismatch of expectation and then reality.

So what people want, the weather state, the Weather Channel or the National Hurricane Center to be able to do is not exactly what they actually are able to do.

The fact that they had it within a couple of hundred miles is quite the accurate forecast, if we think about it historically.

We are getting closer and closer to being able to pinpoint where that storm is going to make landfall.

But I think that people want to know exactly.

But we're asking people to predict something that's not terribly easy to predict.

Sometimes in these forecasting scenarios, just legitimately, we'll get conflicting guidance from our computer models.

Last year with Hurricane Ida.

There was remarkable agreement among the different climate models, all suggesting a landfall in southeast Louisiana.

And so that was a relatively straightforward forecast with a lot of consistency.

That's not always the case, though.

Sometimes we see different global models kind of giving us different ideas of what might happen as the cyclone continues to evolve.

And Hurricane Ian was one of those cases, and I think that maybe resulted in a little bit more fluctuation in that forecast as people were trying to make their final preparations.

Any take away from what people have seen here in Louisiana and what we experience in Louisiana and that we know very well, because we have fresh, fresh memories of 2020 and 2021.

I mean, I think that a lot of the lessons that we're learning from Hurricane Ian are are showcased in some of the successes that Louisiana actually has.

As hard as that is.

Right.

I know we get hit with hurricanes a lot, but we are successful in some ways.

And, one, having people get out of harm's way quickly, but also because we do have some of that added vegetation along the coast, it helps to protect us.

And Florida does not have that.

They used to.

Right.

And we've taken them out and build things in their way.

And that's reasonable.

But part of the risk of what we see in Florida compared to Louisiana is related to how we treat that landscape.

And fascinating.

Never thought about it in some of those ways.

Thank you both.

Again for coming in and talking to us.

Midterms are about a month away and it's been pretty quiet until this week when a campaign ad from the heavy favorite, Senator John Kennedy, hit the airwaves.

His anti-crime ad is what grabbed so much attention.

Violent crime is surging in Louisiana.

Woke leaders blame the police.

Many on the left said the ad was blatantly racist, filled with words that triggered.

Look, if you hate cops just because of the cops.

The next time you get in trouble.

Call a crackhead.

Pollster and professor Dr. Silas Lee called the spot typical of ones we see these days.

Some candidates, they exploit the fears and the stereotypes that may exist in society and a lack of understanding about an issue.

In an attempt to see if that will give them some momentum or increase their level of support.

And that's the difficulty.

Sometimes people know less about an issue than we think, and therefore they tend to rely on using fear as a motivating to to generate support.

Political analyst Jim Inkster says Kennedy positions himself to win races.

Kennedy knows by virtue of having lost two races for the United States Senate before he finally won one that as a liberal Democrat, which he ran in 2004 and finished third and as a moderate Republican when he ran in 2008 and lost to Mary Landrieu.

So he realized then that he had to go hard.

Right.

And he did so.

And it's working for him.

Kennedy's nearest challengers are both Democrats.

Progressive voice Gary Chambers and Luke Mixon, who looks a bit like a younger John Bel Edwards.

And in an open primary, the only way John Kennedy was going to be forced into a runoff is if there were another viable Republican taking votes away from him.

But there's no Republican there.

So he's basically out there alone appealing to about 60% of the electorate.

And then you've got Luke Mixon and Gary Chambers who are appealing to the other 40, and the math just doesn't add up.

A federal appeals court judge ruled that Dhaka violates U.S. immigration laws, putting nearly 600,000 young immigrants in limbo.

The judge is keeping the policy intact, which means first time applicants will be turned away for now.

I sat down with Noor Ahmed, the legal director for Louisiana's ACLU, to talk about immigration's impact on our state.

When people think of immigration, they may not understand exactly why people are coming here.

So in your experience working with these groups, why are they coming?

So you have a number of reasons that people will come and present themselves at the border.

We're talking about issues related to gang violence.

We're talking about climate related issues.

We're also talking about extraordinary poverty.

And we're talking about government persecution and truly people who are living in countries who feel as though they have no hope and that if they stay in their countries, they will die there.

They will die from lack of food.

They will die because groups are coming to kill them and their only hope is to work to get out of that situation.

And so we see people coming from the continent of Africa.

We see them traveling through 11 countries in Latin America, facing rapes, muggings, the Darian Gap.

Everyone who has traversed that actual pathway, they see dead bodies as they walk through.

And oftentimes they lose people who they started on that journey with.

So the people we see at the border are the absolute most desperate human beings.

One can think of people who are coming to this country believing that they will be provided with refuge.

And most importantly, these people believe that they are coming and presenting themselves legally.

They see themselves as following through on the United States legal process for seeking asylum.

So there's really a lack of understanding whenever they come here, an absolute lack of understanding.

And even though this country says that these individuals are in, quote, civil detention, so they're not, quote, criminals, they wear tags that say inmate identification and they wear jumpsuits with stripes on them.

So even though we have a system that says these are not, quote, criminals, they are treated exactly like criminals and they are housed in facilities that once housed people who were convicted of crimes in this country.

So about how many immigrants do we have in Louisiana?

So that's a difficult number that we've been working on because the data is ever changing.

But we have now started to visit all of these facilities.

And by our count, it seems as though we're talking about 3000 people within the state.

But that number is ever changing and there are more facilities and beds available.

So there are ten ice contract facilities in operation in this state, but we're talking about eight that are housing immigrants.

Seven of the eight operating facilities are for profit prisons.

That means we are profiting off the backs of immigrants.

Some of those for profit prisons are traded on the New York Stock Exchange.

So that means investors are making money off of immigrants.

There is an extraordinary disconnect between detention and allowing investors and profiteers to engage in this business.

And the fact that our federal government approved this is extraordinarily concerning.

And while it may have stopped in the Department of Corrections context, it has to stop in the immigration context because the number of people we see with severe medical needs who are telling us that they're being given nothing but ibuprofen is shocking.

We're talking about people who have a pound hemorrhoids.

We're talking about people with cancer.

We're talking about people who do not have their medication for severe medical illnesses.

And they are not being given the care that they need.

And in fact, the care that the performance based detention standards require.

And that is part and parcel of what it means to incarcerate people who are coming to this country when it's very possible to allow them to live their lives as they go through the legal process of seeing whether they will or will not be granted asylum.

And, in fact, it's virtually impracticable and mainly extraordinarily difficult to actually win your case in the absence of a lawyer and while you're in detention.

So where does the ACLU come in?

So we come in because we could not get answers to a lot of the questions you initially asked me.

How many people are in detention?

Who's in detention?

How do they have a deportation order?

So we along with three other coalition partners, we're talking about RFK, human rights and IP.

LG, we're actually going to all of the eight operating detention facilities providing know your rights information, answering questions from the general group, and then meeting with people one on one for consultations about where their current case stands.

So it's a really complicated process.

Is there anything that people at home should definitely know about this?

Everyone at home should understand that those individuals coming to the border, they believe that they're legally coming to this country for refuge.

So there seems to be a disconnect in this country because a lot of people think those presenting themselves at the border are, quote, illegal.

But you have to understand it from the perspective of people who have given up everything, who have gone through torture and torment to present themselves.

They are saying, Hello, ice, I'm here because I would like to engage in a legal process when they're responded with being thrown in jail.

They don't understand what else they should have done in order to seek refuge when they couldn't continue to survive in their home country.

Well, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me.

It's been really interesting information.

Thank you.

Thank you so much.

In the early 1900s, African Americans found themselves navigating new terrain on college campuses.

Students organized underground networks that provided community service and camaraderie.

Eventually, those networks expanded into nine fraternities and sororities called the Divine Nine.

Tonight, we're excited to present the first episode in the special series A Crossing Over Black Greek Life 1105.

Hey, look came the Divine nine.

I've heard about this organization my entire life, and I'm a bit of a legacy.

My sister's a delta.

My cousin's a Delta.

My aunt's an AK.

I could go on and on.

But the truth is, even though I'm surrounded by this incredible culture, I only know the basics.

And who could blame me?

No one teaches you this in school.

So to learn about this incredible culture, I called Todd Sterling.

So what makes up the Divine Nine?

The Divine Nine is the group of the nine black Greek letter organizations that make up the Divine nine.

Why were these organizations founded?

Wait, wait, wait.

Time out.

If you want to really understand the history of the Divine Nine, you need to take a step back.

A couple steps back, actually.

My name is Walter Kimbrough and I am the author of Black Greek One on one The Culture, Customs and Challenges of Black Fraternities and Sororities.

This fraternity and sorority movement in the United States begins in 1776 with the founding of Phi Beta Kappa.

It really sort of branches off from the literary societies that existed in higher education, but they served an even broader purpose.

Like most things, at that point in time in American higher education, most of the students were white and upper middle class.

There were very few black students, and they didn't really arrive to campus until the early 1800s.

Why were these organizations founded?

The organizations were originally founded because there were so few African-Americans going to college, and it gave African-American who were like minded, an opportunity to come together.

It sounds to me like trying to create a network, a safe haven to be in at an all white university.

Absolutely.

That predominantly white university was Cornell in 1904.

Six black students attended and they didn't come back the next year.

So by 1906, new black students were desperate for community.

Alpha Phi Alpha was the result.

The Alpha Phi Alpha was founded December 4th, 1906, and it was founded by our Seven Jewels.

Alpha Phi Alpha was just the beginning.

After that, black fraternities started popping up in droves.

Kappa Alpha PSI Incorporated, founded in 1911 at Howard University in Washington, D.C.. Omega Sci Fi Incorporated.

Founded in 1911 at Howard University.

Phi Beta Sigma Incorporated.

Founded in 1914 at Howard University.

I ordered Phi Theta Incorporated.

Founded 1963 at Morgan State University in Baltimore, Maryland.

Now, these organizations and the Divine Nine were just the ones that stuck.

What if I told you there were actually dozens of black Greek life organizations?

Let's check back in with our expert for some context.

When we think about historically black fraternities and sororities a day, we hear the term the divine nine.

So most people think there are only nine of these groups.

In actuality, there have been over 70 black fraternal organizations that have existed in the United States.

They might be known as wine, sapphire or whiskey sour.

Five others then might have more Afrocentric names and are now Swahili name like Malik Sigma PSI.

Start off all Swahili.

They added Greek letters later on as a part of what they did.

So we focus a lot then on people who want to be part of the Divine Nine organizations.

But of course, there's another aspect of black Greek life that I've been neglecting.

It's the women's side de ville Essex is a 101 year old, a.k.a.

from Louisiana, making her the oldest member in her chapter.

So what year did you cross?

I don't say cross.

What year did I become an Alpha Kappa Kappa?

It was in 1953.

On May 2nd at Gramling Epsilon PSI Omega was the chapter there, and I was among the first women added to that charter chapter.

I graduated from Grambling in 1945, and Greeks were not a part of Grambling at that time.

I had been out of college 11 years when they graduate chapter after LaSalle Omega was chartered at Grambling.

Well, if they didn't have any Greek activity on the Grambling University in 1945, how did you find out about a case.

Where we had teachers, members of the faculty who were A.K.

A's?

And really, when they got ready to charter that chapter, they had to get women from Mendon Monroe in Shreveport to make the number for chartering.

So I knew about it and I was inclined if you follow that.

And when it came along, they invited me and I accepted.

Yes.

Suppose you were not invited.

Would you be able to just sign up?

No.

Some some organism, Greek organizations, they can apply, but you have to be invited.

And we are encouraged.

Not say that you're going to invite.

I wouldn't tell you I was going to invite you just in case the membership said no.

Alpha Kappa Alpha was the first black sorority.

It was founded by Ethel Hagin at Howard University.

She gathered 12 other ladies to organize it, and it was modeled after both Alpha Phi, Alpha and White only women's organizations at Brown.

Our theme service to All Mankind.

You look at all people who need help and help them.

But you have you carry yourself in such a way that those looking at you want to be like you.

That's the basic thing.

More sorority started after the case.

Delta Sigma Theta Incorporated.

Founded in 1913, Howard University.

Zeta Phi Beta Incorporated.

Founded 1920.

Howard University Sigma Gamma Rowing, Inc..

Founded in 1922 at Butler University.

Things have certainly changed since 1906.

Black Greek membership is up, and it's not uncommon to find members in different parts of the world.

I'm learning that this culture is rich.

It's historic, and it's unique.

Another example of Black Perseverance episodes of Crossing Over Black Greek Life will air on Fridays for the rest of this month.

So I hope you guys stay tuned with us.

Well, they made it happen.

They were crusaders.

They were definitely crusaders.

They made a network.

And it was very imperative for.

Them that we keep on saying that.

And everyone, that is our show for this week.

Remember, you can watch anything live any time, wherever you are with our LP, the PBS.

App, you can catch LP News and Public Affairs shows as well as other Louisiana programs you've come to enjoy over the years.

And please like us on Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, and Instagram.

So everyone here at Louisiana Public Broadcasting, I'm Andre Moore.

And I'm Care sings here.

Until next time that's a state run.

Support for Louisiana.

The state we're in is provided by.

Every day I go to work for Entergy.

I know customers are counting on me.

So Entergy is investing millions of dollars to keep the lights on and installing new technology to prevent outages before they happen.

Together, together, together.

We power life.

Additional support provided by the Fred B and Ruth B Ziegler Foundation and the Ziegler Art Museum located in Jennings City Hall.

The museum focuses on emerging Louisiana artists and is an historical and cultural center for Southwest Louisiana and the foundation for Excellence in Louisiana Public Broadcasting.

With support from viewers like you.