(WWL-TV.com is beginning a new, periodic series, which profiles the new New Orleanians, people who have moved to the city post-Katrina for a variety of reasons, from charity causes to capitalist ones.  If you know someone who has moved to the city since the storm, contact us and tell why this person should be profiled at mluke@wwltv.com)

Underneath massive live oak trees in Audubon Park, Charles Anderson was neatly dressed as he sat calmly by a fountain in the morning sun recalling for me why he had to come to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.  At the same time, Hurricane Gustav was churning like a saw blade in the Gulf, making a lot of locals awfully nervous.    

An idealist, a self-professed vegan and a compassionate 27-year-old man, he said it wasn’t to ease the suffering of people who had begged for water at the Convention Center; and he said it wasn’t to help people reclaim their lives after seeing them lose everything they owned.

No, it wasn’t that suffering that brought Anderson, rather it was another wound he sought to heal: New Orleans’ age-old struggle with violence. 

After Katrina, when he watched Rev. John Raphael Jr., the Central City minister from New Hope Baptist Church, on CNN giving an impassioned speech following the senseless, brutal killings of Dinerral Shavers and Helen Hill, he found his moment and his cause.

“I was looking for a place to put all of my ideas about non-violence and education,” he said.  “And that’s when the march happened on January 11.  I turned on CNN and I saw Reverend Raphael speaking about non-violence.”

As Anderson watched, he said he heard Raphael, a former NOPD cop, say “Floods of water aren’t going to wipe out our city.  We’re not going to let floods of blood wipe out citizens.”

Patrick Chriss

Anderson leads United New Orleans for Peace during a moment of silence for Robin Malta, killed at the age of 43.

He became inspired and empowered.  That moment -- when thousands of New Orleanians enraged by violence marched on City Hall -- Anderson was thousands of miles away in New Jersey, but it became his epiphany, forcing him to pack his few worldly possessions in a van with no air-conditioning or radio and hit the road for New Orleans.  By the end of January, a few weeks after seeing Raphael on tv, he was living in the city.

“New Orleans wasn’t on my radar,” he recalled in the park, as he searched for a purpose for his life following college. 

Now, Anderson says the city is his home, and he is committed to peace, organizing United New Orleans for Peace, an organization committed to ending violence, especially black-on-black violence which comprises the majority of homicides in New Orleans. 

You can find Anderson almost every Tuesday evening near the corner of Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard and South Liberty Street in Central City surrounded by others and holding vigil for those killed by violence. Anderson began holding the moments of silence around Katrina’s second anniversary in 2007.

Every week, Anderson and 10 to 15 colleagues find a victim of violent crime and memorialize them with spoken word, paintings, songs or poems, recreating the narrative of their lives.  This is after Anderson interviews the family of the victim.  Friends and family members talk about the person who was lost, their lives and their loves, so the victims are not lost amid the staggering numbers of homicides that New Orleans is notorious for.

The odds are long that he will stop the violence, violence that has been going on for centuries, which he readily admits, but that doesn’t stop his unbridled optimism. 

Patrick Chriss

Anderson's artwork is displayed at his vigils.

Not all that are memorialized are angels either, as Anderson admits some were caught up in the culture of violence.  He makes no apologies for humanizing the lost.  He feels all that are killed deserve some memorial. They are memorialized if not for the victim, for the families. Tuesday nights end up being a therapy session of sorts on the street.

Anderson is one of many whom, following Hurricane Katrina, had to come, pulled by forces outside of his control -- whether to help, to make a few bucks or to be part of a great renaissance. He is one of thousands who had to be here following the storm.

“I was shocked,” he recalled of his first impressions in the area. “I was not really aware, and up North you really don’t hear about it, so you think everything is back to normal.”

With everything not back to normal, Anderson was expecting to see government forces in place and hear hammers, but he didn’t. Instead, he found strength in volunteers who had come from all over the world to help rebuild.

When he first moved to the city he stayed at Camp Hope, a primitive camping site setup in an abandoned school in St. Bernard by Habitat for Humanity for volunteers and worked on the Musician’s Village.

Working for Habitat was not the fulfilling experience that he was looking for, recalling the frustration he felt spending an entire day drawing and redrawing a chalk line on a house. “We spent the entire day making a line,” he said. “After that, I said, ‘Sorry guys.’”

He met Rev. Raphael and attended his church, but Anderson was looking for something else, something of his own creation.

Raised in Clinton, N.J., in a lower middle-class family, but benefiting from a wealthy grandmother, Anderson said he was educated at a private school in Pennsylvania were he where he began to get serious about his studies and the world around him.

Talking with him, it is obvious how well read his is, as he quotes and references major writers like Nietzsche, Hobbs and Plato, as if making laundry list. But Anderson said he spent his years after college lost finding solace in drugs, alcohol and writing before finding a cause in New Orleans.    

“Honestly, when you are in that college life it is so selfish and obsessive about what is going around you,” he said.

“There were thoughts of going down (to New Orleans) and helping animals with my mother,” he said, but “We never took the courage to abandon our life and go and find and help those people in need.”

I called Anderson after Gustav and Ike and asked him if he changed his mind about making New Orleans home.  It was the first hurricane that he experienced, but he said no flatly and was committed as ever to the city and planning another moment of silence.

Before he evacuated to Baton Rouge as Gustav approached, Anderson said that he went Audubon Park, a place that is special to him. “I thought, What if this all went away?” he said. He did not say it outright, but it was obvious that he felt New Orleans, with its sinking landscape, vanishing wetlands, leaky levees, problematic violence and systemic corruption, was worth fighting for.