Happy faces, to be sure, but not the same faces. As unifying as the Saints are -- around town you're likely to see black fans in Drew Brees jerseys and white fans in Reggie Bushes -- Katrina highlighted the divide that cleaves New Orleans. Both the poorest residents and the members of the Katrina diaspora are primarily black. As the Saints thrive in a smaller, whiter, richer city, many African-American evacuees who want to return and rebuild can't. Before the storm the Lower Ninth Ward, poor as it was, had a high rate of home ownership, as families passed down houses through generations. Now most of those homes are gone, memorialized by weed-obscured slabs. FEMA won't provide a trailer until a site has power and potable water, and city services are only beginning to make their way across the Industrial Canal to the Lower Ninth and New Orleans East. If white professionals like the Thorntons give up on it, there may indeed be no city -- but without its ethnic flavor, New Orleans would be unrecognizable.

When city planners speak of "a smaller footprint" to be served by a drastically reduced tax base, they envision cutting loose much of the city east of the Industrial Canal -- and in that many black New Orleanians hear "ethnic cleansing" or see a Trojan horse for an opportunistic landgrab. Before Katrina, there were 117 schools in the city; this year there will be 82, 42 of them charter schools. The New Orleans Recreation Department, whose services are essential to the one third of the population living in poverty, lost most of its facilities and 90% of its staff after the storm and is only now ramping back up thanks to donations, funding from nonprofits and settlements from FEMA and insurance carriers. Since Katrina the New Orleans murder rate has more than doubled to become the nation's highest per capita, and virtually every homicide involves a young black man killing another as they jockey for turf in a redrawn city.

Watching this, Ron Gearing and Walter Tillman want to weep. Gearing, athletic director of the Orleans Parish public schools, and Tillman, who holds the same position for the state-administered Recovery School District, are graduates of Dillard, the historically black college in the Gentilly section. Today men make up only 22% of the students at their alma mater, a percentage that they believe would soar with the building of a football stadium on campus for both Dillard and New Orleans high schools to use. Get high school kids into football, goes the thinking, and they'll set their eyes on the prize of a diploma and a chance to play in college. Get Dillard to bring back football with the 26 scholarships allowed by the NAIA, and more boys would stay home for another four years. (Tulane, the lone NCAA Division I-A football school in town, has loftier entrance requirements and attracts mostly out-of-staters.) Get those boys to graduate from Dillard, and they'll follow the path of Gearing and Tillman as yeomen of the city.

"Every time I look in the paper and see a young face, the next word is 'gunshot,'?" Gearing says. "It's a proven fact that those who participate in extracurricular activities graduate at a higher rate. Take a trumpet and give it to a kid, and that kid will graduate because he played in the band. Or we can [give him] a jersey, and he'll graduate because he was on a team. A cheerleader, a majorette, a dancer -- those are the kids who make it. The kids who don't embrace those things are the ones we lose."

For a basic 15,000-seat stadium, Gearing and Tillman figure they'd need $15 million. But for the moment Dillard has no funds or plans to reintroduce the sport it dropped in the '60s. Hard by the London Avenue Canal, the campus suffered more than $400 million in damage from flooding, looting and burning. Still, Gearing and Tillman have piqued the interest of several trustees, who are conducting a feasibility study and focus groups with students, faculty and Gentilly residents. An architect has inspected several parcels and begun to sketch out plans. And though Gearing and Tillman haven't yet started to raise funds, they talk up their vision to anyone they meet -- including current and former NFL players, and corporate sponsors of a high school all-star football game they organize that pits athletes from New Orleans against players from other parts of Louisiana -- and hear only encouraging words. Besides, they argue, the city sorely needs another high school football facility. Tad Gormley Stadium is the only one back on line, and to play there a team must win a lottery for field time and pay rent of $1,800 per game, plus a $1 surcharge for every seat filled. "We're averaging six or seven murders a day, so failure is not an option," says Gearing. "We're going to get this done."

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