Washington Monthly - September/October 2020 - 26

Scarce resource: Millard McElwee, a PhD student at UC Berkeley, aims to become one of America's relatively few Black engineering professors.

WHY STEM NEEDS
TO FOCUS ON
SOCIAL JUSTICE
Black students do well when schools let them do good.

M

illard McElwee was 12 years old when Hurricane
Katrina slammed into Louisiana. Having evacuated to
the relative safety of Shreveport before the storm hit,
McElwee at first didn't realize the enormity of the catastrophe.
But as his family drove back to their suburban New Orleans
home, the carnage was unmistakable. Trees were down. Towns
all along Interstate 55 were in blackouts. Even Baton Rouge appeared to have no power. "It's still something I vividly remember," McElwee said of the outages. "You could tell the difference, even in the cities during the day."
While McElwee's own home was without electricity
for a month, he was still lucky: Located north of the city, his
house hadn't flooded. Many of his relatives, who lived in New

26  September/October 2020

Orleans's Ninth Ward and Metairie, weren't so fortunate.
Some moved in with McElwee temporarily. At one point, his
family's two-bedroom house and office trailer hosted 13 people. They depended on canned water and National Guard-
issued ready-to-eat meals, or MREs.
"It was nasty," McElwee said of the meals, which are used
by the Department of Defense to sustain troops in combat. He
chuckled. "It was nasty back then when they gave it to us. It
was nasty years later when we tried it again to see if it would
get any better."
Eating the foul-tasting MREs is one of McElwee's most
striking Katrina memories. But it's hardly the only facet of the
storm that left a lasting impression. McElwee remembers engi-

Courtesy of Millard McElwee

By Daniel Block



Washington Monthly - September/October 2020

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Washington Monthly - September/October 2020

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