Dolores D. Parker was born in Bayou Goula, La. The daughter of a minister, she grew up moving around the state. She graduated from Clark High School in New Orleans then earned a B.A. degree in elementary education from Dillard. She taught in New Orleans public schools for 32 years and taught reading in an adult education program. She is the mother of four children: Raymond, Raynelle, Raynette, and Raynard. Raymond, who also contributes to this interview, is her oldest child.

Dorothy Mackey Prevost is a New Orleans native and survivor of Hurricane Betsy. She lived in the Lower Ninth Ward her entire life, attended McCarty Elementary School and Booker T. Washington High School, and worked as a seamstress. She married Charles Prevost in 1953 and had two daughters, Tessie and Tory. Tessie was one of the first African-American students to integrate McDonogh 19 School in the 1960s.

Ida Belle Joshua is a native of New Orleans, La., and survivor of Hurricane Betsy. She moved to the Ninth Ward in 1949 with her husband, Isaac Joshua Sr. They have three children. Before Hurricane Betsy, she worked as a hair dresser. After the storm, she attended the University of New Orleans, Atlanta University (now Clark Atlanta University), and Tulane University and worked as a teacher's aide, social worker, and adjunct professor at Xavier University.

Lucille D. Duminy moved into New Orleans' Ninth Ward around 1949. She survived Hurricane Betsy in 1965 and rebuilt her house and life there.

Scope and Content Note
Duminy discusses her childhood, living in the Ninth Ward in the 1950s and 1960s, her ordeal in surviving Hurricane Betsy, her encounters with relief agencies afterward, Hurricane Camille in 1969, and other hurricanes.

Lucy Boyer Thomas was born in 1923, grew up in the Fazendeville village near Chalmette, and attended school in New Orleans through the eleventh grade. She studied nursing at UCLA and worked as a nurse in California and Louisiana. She married Francis Thomas and they had five children. She lived in the Ninth Ward for more than fifty years, surviving Hurricane Betsy. She died in 2004 at age eighty-one.