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 U.S. 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 U.S. blacks. In 1900, 85 percent of U.S. blacks lived in the South and as early as 1830, more than 58 percent of Louisiana's population was black. Between 1940 and 1970 economic changes prompted 5 million blacks to quit the south for cities across the North including Chicago, Detroit and New York, marking one of the nation's largest internal migrations. --more 2310 Local Time 2010 GMT
