After 17 years of practicing education, civil rights and labor and employment law, Tracie Washington found a career path she had never envisioned - she began practicing public interest law.
It began with Hurricane Katrina, which struck Washington’s hometown of New Orleans 18 months ago and left her home under three feet of water. The office that housed Washington’s private practice survived, but “I realized, ‘Nobody’s coming back to New Orleans,’” Washington said. “It was like a nuclear bomb hit.”
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| Tracie Washington |
After Hurricane Katrina hit, Washington began looking for a job in another city. During her search, Bill Quigley, director of the Law Clinic and Gillis Long Poverty Law Center at Loyola University New Orleans School of Law, asked for her help to build a case against the City of New Orleans.
Washington filed suit to prevent the city from red-tagging thousands of homes to demolish, mostly unbeknownst to the homeowners. During the next year, she would work with Quigley to file six more suits to protect the housing, education and voting rights of New Orleans and Louisiana residents.
“Hurricane Katrina exposed our region’s inequalities in race and class and gender,” Washington said. “We had them before, and we can’t ignore them now. As a community, it’s not too late. We know – as lawyers and as moral people – that we can do better.”
According to Washington, New Orleans residents are currently struggling with a lack of education, healthcare and infrastructure. For 60,000 families still living in FEMA trailers, housing tops the list of concerns.
“More than half of New Orleans adults were renters before the hurricane, so when Hurricane Katrina hit, it basically decimated our stock of rental properties,” Washington said. “We still need 30,000 affordable rentals and we don’t have them.”
Washington said that other lawyers in the area joined her in responding after the natural disaster.
“We never thought that we would be called to do this work,” she said. “This ‘work’ is to figure out a way to rebuild the social and justice foundation of an entire community. (But) isn’t it wonderful that we, as lawyers, can be the catalyst for social change?”
She urged USC Law students to be a vehicle for change throughout their careers.
“We all have an obligation right now, whether it is 10 percent or 100 percent of our time, to look around Los Angeles, New Orleans or any community where we live and find a social justice issue and work to change it,” Washington said. “It gives what you do some meaning and some life.”
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