As the 10th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina approached in August 2015, plans for President Barack Obama to mark the occasion in New Orleans — and not on the Mississippi Gulf Coast — stung many residents of a region that bore the storm’s deadliest coastal blow. The frustration found an unlikely spokesman: veteran Mississippi editorial cartoonist Marshall Ramsey.
In an open letter to the president posted on Facebook, Ramsey acknowledged that anniversary visits are often shaped by politics, but argued that the Coast’s story deserved a national audience. He recalled Obama’s earlier trip to the region during the BP oil spill and pointed to years of hardship that followed the storm — the recession, battles over insurance, and redrawn flood plain maps — that tested communities long after the water receded.
“You should be proud of the people on the Gulf Coast,” Ramsey wrote, describing residents who were “hammered hard” by both the storm and its economic aftermath yet kept rebuilding anyway.
The letter resonated quickly, drawing more than 1,000 likes and hundreds of shares within hours of being posted. In a follow-up essay on his own website, Ramsey declined to relitigate the long-running debate over whether New Orleans or the Mississippi Coast suffered more. “Both got the crap kicked out of them,” he wrote, adding that the anniversary was less about politics or regionalism than “a celebration of human resiliency.”
The episode captured a familiar feeling along the Coast: pride in how far the region had come since Aug. 29, 2005, paired with a sense that its recovery story too often played second fiddle to New Orleans in the national memory of the storm.