It has been nearly two decades since Hurricane Katrina changed the city of New Orleans as we know it, and a new docuseries is drawing attention to not only the resilience of its survivors but also the responsibility of mainstream media in accurately informing and representing the masses.
During a panel conducted at the 2025 Essence Fest, which has been held in New Orleans for over three decades, Hurricane Katrina: Race Against Time director Traci A. Curry emphasized that this is not a reframing or revisiting of the natural disaster that continues to have an impact today.
On holding the media responsible
“I think I came to it both as someone who remembers being a spectator and watching the media coverage,” Curry told Blavity’s Shadow and Act in an interview ahead of the docuseries.
“That particular moment that’s in Episode 4, where Wolf Blitzer says, ‘They’re so poor,’ I remember that. I mean, that stood out in my memory, and that’s just sort of an example of a place that I wanted to be intentional about how we put the people in the series in conversation with that moment, because that moment sort of is about this massive, needy Black suffering, and kind of very dehumanizing, and kind of deindividuating people. Until that particular moment, just for example, we put Wolf Blitzer in conversation with General [Russell L.] Honoré and with Kevin Goodman, who’s one of the Black Indians, saying, ‘Let me tell you about what it is to be a poor, Black person in New Orleans. You know how to survive.’ You know how to take a little bit and do a lot, right? That just sort of is an example of how I was just very intentional: that there was a media narrative that was persistent at the time, that I think to some degree persists to this day, that was just erroneous about the people of this city that I just kind of instinctually knew, just as a Black person, but that I also knew in particular about the people of New Orleans because the kind of character and people that they are.”
It’s people like Shelton Alexander, whose real-time footage is used throughout the five episodes in Hurricane Katrina: Race Against Time. No stranger to sharing his story as a survivor, Alexander has been featured in several other documentaries, including Premonition, A Poetic Storm, When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts, and One Note at a Time. At one point during the most current project, he says, ‘God knew I needed to get out there at a certain time.’
How Alexander managed to document everything that was going on while fighting for his survival
“Everything is a spiritual movement with me,” Alexander told us. “From the time you see the video, wherever I would’ve landed, I would have been recording, for the most part. God just wanted me to be there. Some things you can believe, you know, by listening to people, and then it’s like that proof, they want to see it. So it was one of those things.”
He added, “And, once it got going, I was like, whoa, this is way bigger than me. Obviously, God was speaking to me. And then the moments that I caught, and then the areas you will see me go to, I talk about how smelly it was, how hot it was, all of these things going on. But you also see me making sure I was around prayer groups. We did so much marching and singing, they can’t capture all of my story, you know? I mean, you’ve only got so many minutes you can use for it, but, it’s a lot there. I felt the calling for sure. Like, man, I have the tape, I got the video camera, I got the batteries and I was picking my times in different things that were going on. … God just intended for me to be there with that camera and to get out, and then on the backside, being able to get 20 people out with me.”
Key takeaways from ‘Hurricane Katrina: Race Against Time’
While mainstream media chose to hone in on the violence that took place in the city following the hurricane, which occurred on Aug. 29, 2005, Curry said the mission behind this docuseries is to shed light on the people and what they went through as a result of the mishandling of narratives on what was happening in New Orleans at the time.
“I knew, in particular, about the people of New Orleans because of the kind and character of people that they are,” she said. “And so one of my intentions that I hope that we communicated — was there some lawlessness and some opportunists that were sort of taking advantage and doing violent things? Sure. That’s the same type of behavior that you get from people sometimes when their soccer team loses. Right? Was that the story of how the people of New Orleans responded to this dehumanizing, catastrophic event? Absolutely not.”
“The story, as you hear from the people who are in the series, was these very tight bonds of kinship and community that people have in New Orleans,” Curry continued. “People kind of think of New Orleans, I think, as a big city, because it’s got big city vibes and energy, and big love and big culture, but geographically, it’s small. You can drive around all of New Orleans in less than an hour, right? And so there’s these very sort of tight-knit community ties, and those ties did not break. They did not break in the Superdome, they did not break in the Convention Center, even when you see Lucretia in her attic, right? And her children are like, oh, they think they’re going to die. She has this moment of, like, faith beyond her understanding, and that’s something that you see throughout the series. It was very intentional that we correct what was an erroneous narrative about the people of New Orleans during Katrina.”
The first three episodes of Hurricane Katrina: Race Against Time premiere on National Geographic starting July 27, at 8 p.m./7 p.m. Central, with episodes four and five debuting on July 28.
Episodes will also be available to stream on Disney+ and Hulu on July 28.
