For half a century, from her house on Lamanche Street, Hattie Craft sold frozen cups, raised seven children, and fought for better conditions in her neighborhood, the Lower 9th Ward.
Today, her daughter, Alice Craft Kerney, is hosting a car parade to celebrate Craft’s 99th birthday. The line of cars will form at 2:45 p.m. on Huntington Park Drive near Benson Court and drive past Craft Kerney’s house in the 7100 block of Benson Court at 3 p.m.
Craft is known for her activism, but also for her generosity, said Craft Kerney, who recalls how her mother discreetly handed frozen cups to children who couldn’t afford to buy them and was always ready to feed hungry neighbors. Their home’s iron security door was crafted with a slot big enough to slip a plate of food outside, at any hour.
“Her kindness always preceded her,” said Craft Kerney. “She has a big heart.”
Craft shrugged her shoulders at the praise. She didn’t know any other way to act, she said. “I don’t like to be stingy.”
Hattie Craft, 99, poses at her home in New Orleans, La., Saturday, Oct. 9, 2021. The power was still out when Lower 9th Ward stalwart Hattie Craft turned 99 earlier this month. Starting a half century ago, Craft helped to lead a group that advocated for neighbors after Hurricane Betsy in 1965 and then continued on with their work, most notably pushing Mayor Ernest “Dutch” Morial for paved streets instead of gravel. On Sunday at 3 p.m., her daughter Alice Craft Kerney is asking people to wish Ms. Hattie a happy 99th by driving by her house in New Orleans East, at 7111 Benson Ct. (Photo by Sophia Germer, NOLA.com, The Times-Picayune | The New Orleans Advocate)
Service to others is such a hallmark of Craft’s life that her favorite poem is about a woman who was rebuked by God for rejecting three needy people at her door.
As a 14-year-old Sunday school student, she won a cake for memorizing the 11-stanza Bible poem, which she later expanded into a complete six-character play and hosted at her church. She can still remember all the lines she wrote for the lead character, speaking to a barefoot, hungry child at her door: “I said, ‘Oh, someone else will feed you, baby — you really are in need of care. But I can’t stop to give it. You must hasten on elsewhere.’”
Craft’s political activism began in 1965, after Hurricane Betsy’s storm surge flooded the Lower 9th Ward, leaving behind saltwater and sewage. She’d met her husband, Sim Craft Sr., when both of them worked at the Roosevelt Hotel. They lived Uptown in a room on Valmont Street until they bought a lot in the Lower 9th Ward in 1955. That year, Craft's husband spent every weekend worked with a group of friends to build their home from the ground up.
After Betsy, Sim Craft scraped and shoveled the mud off the Lamanche Street floors, then washed everything down with a hose. They were given “a small broom and a pail,” and they got a small payment from the Red Cross for furniture, which they had to spend at the same time in a selected store. But it wasn’t enough.
“We didn’t get nothing, hardly, for Betsy,” said Craft.
So she and her husband rebuilt, piece by piece, with their own money.
Craft ended up fighting for flood aid and improvements as the secretary of a group called Betsy Flood Victims, launched to demand food stamps for survivors. Hunger had become desperate, to the point that newspaper accounts noted that police were stationed at the Agriculture Street dump and other places to prevent people from trying to salvage the spoiled food from refrigerators that were being dumped there.
Craft, a graduate of McDonogh 35 Senior High School, took notes, then typed them up after long weekly meetings.
Craft Kerney remembers going with her mom and sleeping on the benches of Mercy Seat Baptist Church during the meetings. Forty years later, Craft Kerney, a registered nurse, would react to post-Katrina health care gaps by helping to launch a clinic in the Lower 9th Ward.
In the wake of Betsy, the flood victims group demanded adequate levees, loan forgiveness for hard-hit homeowners unable to make mortgage payments and $10,000 grants to rebuild damaged houses. Few of their legislative demands were met, but they did finally persuade the city to remove mounds of sodden flood detritus, some of which sat untouched until June 1966, when the feds agreed to pay 90% of the cost to complete the work. The group also helped organize college students sent by the American Friends Service Committee, who organized cleanup squads and built a playground.
For the next few decades, the group continued to push for neighborhood improvements. In mid-1978, Craft and other women stood on street corners to gather signatures on petitions demanding that newly elected Mayor Ernest “Dutch” Morial pave the neighborhood’s gravel and shell-topped roads. The mayor himself came to Lamanche Street and agreed with their conclusions, she said.
“He said, ‘This is a disgrace. Don’t worry. You’re going to get a street,” Craft recalled. Within a few months, records show, city contractors began building concrete roadways in the area.
“The next thing we knew, they were bringing machinery,” said Craft, noting that the flood victims group grew after the street-paving success. “Other neighbors saw we could work together to make life better,” she said.
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Hattie Craft, who inspired others with her kindness, activism, honored on her 99th birthday - NOLA.com
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