Katrina may prompt new 'black migration'

Interviews with refugees in Houston, which is expecting many thousands of evacuees to remain, suggest that thousands of blacks who lost everything and had no insurance will end up living in Texas or other US states.

Officials say it will take many months and maybe even years before the birthplace of jazz is rebuilt.

"We advise people that this city has been destroyed," New Orleans Deputy Police Chief Warren Riley told reporters on Monday. "We are simply asking people not to come back to this city right now."

Many evacuees like Percy Molere, 26, who worked in a hotel in New Orleans' famed French quarter, say they cannot keep their lives on hold for very long.

"If it took a month, I'd go back, but a year, I don't want to wait that long," said Molere. "Hopefully we're going to stay in Houston just to stay out of New Orleans" for the time being.

Experts caution that it is too soon to clearly predict the long-term impact of the devastation of New Orleans, a city of less than half a million people more than two-thirds of whom are black. But one scenario would be massive resettlement elsewhere.

"You've got 300,000, 400,000 people, many of them low income without a lot of means, who are not going to have the ability to wait out a year or two or three years for the region to rebuild," said Barack Obama, the only black member of the US Senate.

"They are going to have to find immediate work, immediate housing, immediately get their kids into school and that probably will change the demographics of the region," he told Reuters on Monday during a visit to Houston, the largest single gathering point for the refugees.

Because of the legacy of slavery, southern states including Louisiana, Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina have historically been home to the greatest concentration of US blacks. In 1900, 85 percent of US blacks lived in the South and as early as 1830, more than 58 percent of Louisiana's population was black.