When Hurricane Katrina was barrelling toward New Orleans in late August 2005, Mayor Ray Nagin ordered a complete evacuation of the city. But when the storm made landfall as a Category 3 storm on August 29, there were still some New Orleanians who were in their homes. There are a variety of reasons why those people decided to weather the storm rather than evacuate – they may have stayed through previous storms, or were worried about leaving their property unattended-but there’s one thing the vast majority of those who stayed had in common: they were Black.