Toward the end of my first semester in college, some older student radicals I admired announced they were driving down to New Orleans. Two and a half years after Hurricane Katrina, they were going to protest the demolition of public housing. I was elated when they agreed to let me tag along. I didn’t know much about the political context, but I trusted them.

Our caravan arrived in Louisiana from Ohio late at night, and we settled onto some friendly activists’ couches. In the morning, we reported for duty at a meeting assembled by local organizers and public-housing residents. From there, we deployed to New Orleans’ vacant projects, known as “the Bricks.”

It was only after standing in front of the buildings themselves that I understood the nature of the injustice that had brought us to New Orleans. I’d seen Spike Lee’s When the Levees Broke, the iconic footage of wooden structures reduced to splinters. But the Bricks didn’t look anything like that. The city, which planned to tear them down, had declared them uninhabitable — but from what I could tell, they were basically unscathed.