CVS Walks Away From ‘Revitalizing’ a Black Community
The chain’s flimsy commitment is a reminder that for many companies, it’s still business as usual
In early June, just as demonstrations across the country in the wake of George Floyd’s killing snowballed into a massive reset of the entire national discussion of racial equity in America and the deep and systematic socioeconomic roots of racial injustice, customers of the CVS pharmacy in New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward received a text message: The location would be closing in less than two weeks.
At first I shrugged this off. There was a lot of bigger, more significant news going on. But as a New Orleanian, the more I thought about it, the more it struck me as a truly astounding, and profoundly cynical, corporate decision.
The Lower Ninth Ward — a mostly working-class Black area of the city — is best known to the world at large for being devastated when an adjacent flood wall failed after Hurricane Katrina, submerging block after block of the neighborhood in 12 feet or more of water, for weeks, wiping out hundreds of houses. Its 15-year recovery has been painfully slow (the neighborhood’s population even now is about a quarter what it was), particularly in comparison with other, whiter flood-hit sections of the city.
