06:55 PM CDT on Friday, September 2, 2005

Doug Simpson / Associated Press

BATON ROUGE -- Racism is partly to blame for the deadly aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the Rev. Jesse Jackson said, calling President Bush's response to the disaster "incompetent."

"Today, as the President comes to Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi for his ceremonial trip to look at the victims of the devastation, he would do well to have a plan more significant than a ceremonial tour," Jackson said Friday. "His whole response is unacceptable."

Bush has acknowledged that the federal response has not been acceptable, but promised that the government would get supplies to survivors and crack down on violence in New Orleans.

Jackson questioned why Bush has not named blacks to top positions in the federal response to the disaster, particularly when the majority of victims remaining stranded in New Orleans are black: "How can blacks be locked out of the leadership, and trapped in the suffering?"

"It is that lack of sensitivity and compassion that represents a kind of incompetence."

U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Russell Honore, head of the military task force overseeing operations in the three states, is black. His task force is providing search and rescue, medical help and sending supplies to the three states in support of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Jackson was in Baton Rouge to take part in a local project using a caravan of buses to pick up people stranded in New Orleans and transport them out. He spoke at a news conference at the state emergency center.

The civil rights leader said the flooding that caused thousands to be trapped inside the city was caused by a lack of federal funding for its levee system and hurricane planning. The resulting tragedy, he said, has largely hit New Orleans' black residents, because they were too poor to evacuate before the storm hit.

"There's a historical indifference to the pain of poor people and black people" in this country, he said.

Jackson also said the news media has "criminalized the people of New Orleans" by focusing on violence in the city.

When he returned from helping to evacuate people from Jefferson Parish onto seven buses Friday, Jackson said about 5,000 people awaited help on I-10 in Metairie. And he said that help didn't appear to be coming -- although lines of buses sat empty miles away in LaPlace, because the buses would not pick up evacuees without a place to relocate them.

"They've been out there all day in the blistering sun," Jackson said. "There is no bus picking them up because there is no destination for the people."

(Copyright 2005 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)