(Mia Bay – History) Transportation and the Racial Geography of New Orleans. The essay I might write on Katrina comes out of my interest in black access to transportation (the Travelling Black project).  In particular, I keep thinking of Louisiana as the site for Plessy vs.  Ferguson in which the lone dissenting justice noted  something  to the effect that the right of locomotion—the right to travel freely from one place to another— should be protected by the court as one of the most fundamental of all American rights. The essay I would want to write would be as meditation on this issue, which would explore who could and could not get out of New Orleans, and how they travelled during the days before and after Katrina, with reference to the history of racial divisions in access to transportation in the state, as well the racial geography of new Orleans. It would tell the story how and why much of the city’s white population was able to move out of the path of the Hurricane, while many blacks remained behind with reference to ongoing racial divisions in mobility, created by the economics of car ownership, and the politics of public transportation in an era when it is increasingly under funded and used primarily by the poor.