Three hundred years ago, generations of black families were separated by slavery through Goree Island’s infamous Door of No Return, the hellish slave port in Senegal, West Africa where millions of enslaved Africans once walked though the narrow wooden door in chains. They were herded aboard slave ships and sailed away from everything familiar, their families scattered across several continents.

Today, again, an unprecedented number of black families are separated -- only this time, the story is set in America 2005.

Black Americans are witnessing history repeating itself, not because of slavery, but because of something equally insidious: benign neglect, a stalled response to a national catastrophe as a result of Hurricane Katrina and the nation’s decades-long failure to provide adequate resources for America’s black and disadvantaged residents.

This festering crisis of the poor in the South was exposed by the storm and should serve as a collective rallying call for black America. If the federal government can’t -- or won’t -- provide a comprehensive plan to provide for black Americans in time of critical need, then black people should create their own methodical, long term strategy for economic survival. If black folks sit idly by after watching the poignant images of the poor being left for dead, then we are directly contributing to our own collective demise.

But at the D.C. Armory in Washington, hundreds of area residents over the past two weeks came to the facility to offer their homes to those who need a place to live. Last week, basketball star Shaquille O’Neal toured the Armory, hugged hurricane survivors, signed autographs and offered hope. In addition, the District’s citywide call center has received more than 30,000 calls from folks trying to help.

Perhaps this is the future for black Americans: Drawing on the power of our ancestral spirit to care for those in need, neighborhood by neighborhood, block by block.

Black families are experiencing the largest national displacement since the Civil War. As a result of near-criminal ineptitude by government officials, husbands are separated from their wives, parents separated from their children. Scribbled notes are taped to walls asking for help in locating family, and the displaced carry photos of their loves ones hoping someone –- anyone –- will help locate them. A few days ago, a black mother appealed on CNN to help find her 14-year-old son.

Ernie Allen, CEO of The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, appeared on CNN Friday saying the number of missing children as a result of Hurricane Katrina has now increased by 500, bringing the total to a staggering 2,393.

"The numbers are overwhelming," Allen said.

He said the center gets calls from scores of parents every day who are trying to locate their children. In a measured appeal to the nation, he added, "We need the public’s help."

Allen said he’s "confident" the center will eventually reunite children with their parents, but acknowledged that "it’s going to take time ... one child at a time."

The center has set up a website that shows the photos of children who can't find their parents or guardians.

The New York Times reported that some parents told officials that when they were evacuating New Orleans, they placed their children on buses with the mistaken belief that when they boarded later buses, the entire family would be reunited in the same location.

"It’s just like slavery where families were torn apart," Dr. Lucy Perez, the NAACP’s national health director, told BlackAmericaWeb.com last week.

Black families are suffering today, Perez said, "because of the trauma this system has created."

Black families from the South took journeys to places like Texas, Michigan, New York and Nevada -- places not of their own choosing, but places they may eventually call home. Should New Orleans ever be rebuilt, however, black residents can always choose to return.

But the similarities of the past are strangely ironic: Enslaved Africans had no voice in their destinations. Most of today’s displaced storm survivors are of African descent. They were transported from their homes, not knowing where they were going and unaware of what challenges await them.

The Rev. Jesse Jackson saw black residents in Louisiana packed behind fences to maintain order.

"They were reaching out and desperate," Jackson told BlackAmericaWeb.com. "It looked like the hull of a slave ship."

The aftermath of one of the most catastrophic storms in U.S. history has highlighted America’s gross inability to care for its most vulnerable citizens. It’s a travesty that the United States government, which benefitted from the free labor of enslaved Africans who built this country, neglected to marshal its rich cache of resources to save black people from environmental devastation.

How can a federal government that has rescued residents in Bosnia and dropped food in Afghanistan fail to mobilize quickly to deliver food and water to poor people a short flight from the White House?

New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin appeared on the Tom Joyner Morning Show recently and responded to criticism that he didn’t move fast enough to evacuate families out of the city.

"Even if I used those buses we had available, we needed at least 1,200, and we only had a couple hundred buses," Nagin said. "And we didn't have enough drivers."

History is repeating itself.

Like thousands of other black Americans who bolted the South after World War I, in what is known as The Great Migration, black Americans are again leaving the South for the North, this time because of mass relocation.

But unlike The Great Migration, where cities like Detroit, Chicago and New York offered better economic and educational opportunities for blacks, today’s relocation offers little. Jobs are scarce. Unemployment is rising.

According to the census numbers that were released just last week, there were 37 million people living in poverty in 2004. About 3.5 million were over the age of 65, and nearly one in five American children lived in poverty during 2004. Nearly 25 percent of all black Americans were living in poverty in 2004, and many still remain in poverty in 2005.

"The truth is that we have ignored the poor for far too long," Howard Dean, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, said in a recent speech to the National Baptist Convention. "And until it washed right up on our front doorsteps, we might have continued to ignore the reality that poverty has too many of our fellow Americans in its grip, and we have a shared moral responsibility not to ignore it anymore."

Because of the hurricane, its aftermath and the legacy of indifference toward America’s black and poor, the newly displaced may continue to suffer unbelievable poverty in the years ahead.

And this month, several hundred displaced black Americans are expected to arrive in Detroit, this reporter’s hometown, a city that now holds the dubious distinction as the most impoverished big city in the nation. They can now be counted among the thousands of black families who remain separated as a result of the government’s herding of humanity without a plan to keep families together -- a modernized door of no return.

And history repeats itself.