Back in New Orleans, working for justice

Two years ago, a pair of young interns at the Fellowship of Reconciliation, Danae Davis and Virginia Wilber, led a delegation of nine young people to post-Katrina New Orleans. For one week, the group worked as part of the massive cleanup effort, breaking down destroyed homes as volunteers in support of the local grassroots movements Katrina on the Ground and the People's Hurricane Relief Fund.

Following her internship at FOR, Danae Davis returned to New Orleans, where she worked for several more months. This week, Virginia Wilber — now a graduate student at the City University of New York School of Law — went back as well. Virginia was accepted to CUNY's Mississippi Project, which is working in partnership with human rights organizations in the South to provide legal assistance to underserved populations.

Virginia and her colleagues in the project will be posting reports regularly over the coming fortnight to a blog set up for the Mississippi Project, "Fighting injustice in the Mississippi Delta." Virginia's first blog entry was last night, and discusses her group's meeting with representatives of the Innoncence Project of New Orleans, who are working to address the incredibly disproportionate incarceration of African Americans in the state of Louisiana. Check out their blog and let them know you support this good work!