New Orleans suburb rises from Katrina's shadowEditor's note: Learn more about how the Woods family and other residents of Pontchartrain Park banded together to help rebuild their community on CNN In America's "New Orleans Rising" airing August 21 and 22 at 8 p.m. ET.
(CNN) -- "This can be yours," the black-and-white newspaper advertisement promised above an image of a tree-lined ranch home in Pontchartrain Park.
At the bottom, it said "Available to Negroes."
It was the 1950s in segregated New Orleans, Louisiana, and the promise of a slice of suburbia for black Americans lured hundreds to the new community.
That included Meldon Woods, an Air Force corporal who had been given a home loan for his military service through the GI Bill. He and his wife, Audrey, a schoolteacher at the time, purchased a two-story home in 1957 where they raised their four children.
Fifty years later, he was forced to evacuate that home as Hurricane Katrina bore down on New Orleans on August 29, 2005.
"My husband said, no, he was not leaving, because he was upstairs and if the water came, he'd be upstairs," Audrey Woods recalled.
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