NEW YORK (AP) – New Orleans residents displaced by Hurricane Katrina must be allowed to return and must have the chance to profit from the rebuilding effort, NAACP President Bruce Gordon said Sunday.

“We have to make sure that the housing stock that is recreated is ultimately occupied by those who owned a home before Katrina,” Gordon said at a news conference kicking off the annual Wall Street Project conference of the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow/PUSH Coalition.

The president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People said that 20 years from now “there will be generations of families who will become multimillionaires because they participated in the restoration of the Gulf Coast.”

“We need to make sure that the folks who watched their homes washed away are the same ones who have jobs, who run companies, and participate in the economic uplift that I assure you will occur 10 to 15 to 20 years from now,” Gordon said.

Gordon, Jackson, Alden McDonald Jr., president of New Orleans-based Liberty Bank & Trust, U.S. Rep. Artur Davis, D-Ala., and others then took part in a wide-ranging discussion of concerns surrounding Katrina, including financial issues and voting rights for displaced residents.

The Wall Street Project, whose annual conference in New York coincides with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, was created to promote diversity and equity in the financial sector.

New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin and FEMA Acting Director R. David Paulison were invited to Sunday’s opening session, devoted to Katrina, but didn’t attend.

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