Journalist Trymaine Lee reveals strength of Katrina survivors in hopeful documentary

In 2005, Trymaine Lee was a young journalist working for the New Orleans Times-Picayune.

- By ARIAMA C. LONG

He was a police reporter in a beautiful, vibrant city, rich with Black community and culture. But on September 29, Hurricane Katrina came. In the days and weeks that followed, the storm virtually wiped generations of that away.

“There was so much loss and so much death and so much uncertainty,” Lee told the AmNews in an interview. “Until you experience an American city and it feels as if the bottom of society has dropped out, where the least and hungriest among us are even more so in desperation ... I can't forget the smell — the smell of death, the smell of despair. But then also, within that, moments where neighbors stood up for each other.”

Two decades since that time, Lee has gone on to win multiple accolades in his field, but his heart has always been in the Big Easy. He has returned to his reporting roots with his first foray into documentary work with “Hope in High Water: A People's Recovery Twenty Years After Hurricane Katrina,” focusing on the precariousness of Black life in a post-Katrina landscape.

A New Jersey native, Lee, 46, was hired as a reporter at the Times-Picayune in 2005, a few months before the storm hit. His coverage of the devastation Katrina wrought earned him a Pulitzer Prize in 2006. Lee went on to become a writer for the Huffington Post and the New York Times, an MSNBC contributor, author, entrepreneur, and host of the “Into America” podcast.