BATON ROUGE, La., Sept. 1 -- It seemed a desperate echo of a bygone era, a mass of desperate-looking black folk on the run in the Deep South. Some without shoes. It was high noon Thursday at a rest stop on the edge of Baton Rouge when several buses pulled in, fresh from the calamity of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. Hundreds piled out, dragging themselves as if floating through some kind of thick liquid. They were exhausted, some crying. "It was like going to hell and back," said Bernadette Washington, 38, a black homemaker from Orleans Parish who had...
