Join the Campaign to Rebuild the Fight Back Center in New Orleans

The Fight Back Center was the epicenter of the struggle to save public housing in New Orleans from 2005 - 2010. The Fight Back Center was stolen by the City of New Orleans from the New Day Collective, its founders, in 2010. This theft was through corrupt government processing and the failure to acknowledge the nonprofit status of the New Day Collective. However, the theft was part of the city's concerted plan to demolish all public housing in New Orleans, which it accomplished in early 2010's.

Cooperation Jackson, whose vision was shaped by many of the experiences its founders and organizers gained while living and organizing in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, reacquired the Fight Back Center in 2020 after the New Day Collective and the Tulane Law Clinic waged a successful court battle with the City of New Orleans and speculator looking to gentrify the St. Bernard Community. In December 2021 Cooperation Jackson and the New Day Collective decided to demolish the original Fight Back Center, because we deemed it to be structurally unsound after 15 years of neglect due to city politics and fighting speculators.

In 2022, the New Day Collective and Cooperation Jackson decided to initiate a campaign to rebuild the Fight Back Center and retake the St. Bernard Community from the speculators, gentrifiers and racial cleansers. We are in Phase One of this initiative, which is the design and dreaming phase. Over the course of the next year, we are looking to raise $2,000,000 to rebuild the Fight Back Center to serve this purpose and to preserve Black land ownership and community in New Orleans.

This video features Endesha Juakali, one of the founders of the New Day Collective, and one of the principal organizers of the movement to save public housing in New Orleans over the last 40 years. The New Day Collective started in the St. Bernard neighborhood, located in the historic 7th Ward, in the 1970's. In this video Endesha shares some of the history of the struggle to save public housing housing since Hurricane Katrina, what the economic and political elite of New Orleans did to undermine this struggle to ensure that nearly 100,000 Black working class and poor folks could not make it back to New Orleans to ensure that the city would become "whiter, smaller, and more affluent".

We strongly encourage everyone who watches this video to join us in the effort to rebuild the Fight Back Center. Help us preserve Black Land ownership in New Orleans and rebuild a base for the public housing movement to defeat gentrification and the advancing racial and class cleansing of the city. Please donate as generously as you can to the Fight Back Center Campaign by donating to Cooperation Jackson at www.cooperationjackson.org/donate.

Thank you! Now enjoy the video and share with you family, friends, cooperators, and comrades!