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"Katrina has posed a challenge to the White House and the country regarding the great divide, which is race and class in America," said the Rev. Eugene Rivers III, president of the National Ten Point Leadership Foundation, a coalition that represents primarily black churches. "It's a challenge and an opportunity which can be won or lost, and ultimately it is the decision of the White House as to which way it goes."

Leaders like Rivers, a Democrat and a supporter of Bush, said the White House still has serious repair work to do among blacks after the images of the desperate and dying victims of the hurricane so shocked the nation and the world. A major first step, they said, is to include blacks in the millions of dollars in contracts to rebuild New Orleans.

"President Bush needs to ensure that we do not see racial divisions reproduced in the reconstruction effort as white millionaires get richer," Rivers said.

T.D. Jakes, the black TV evangelist from Dallas who delivered the sermon before Bush's speech at the National Cathedral, issued a similar warning. "I do think that African-Americans are waiting to see what this administration is going to do about this crisis," Jakes said Friday. "If the appropriate actions are taken in an expeditious, competent way, I think then our community will re-evaluate our opinions of this administration."

But Bush, who said in his speech that the federal government's rebuilding effort would include loans to minority-owned businesses, has already drawn criticism for his administration's decision to suspend the Davis-Bacon Act, the law that requires employers to pay the local prevailing wage to construction workers on federally financed projects.

The White House rationale for the decision, announced Thursday, was not only to reduce the cost to taxpayers for the rebuilding of the Gulf Coast, estimated at as much as $200 billion, but to open up the bidding to minority-owned businesses that have not historically contracted with the federal government.

That explanation did not satisfy Bush critics like the Rev. Jesse Jackson. "It's a hurricane for the poor and a windfall for the rich," Jackson said after the president's speech in New Orleans. Jackson likened the structure for assistance to the post-Reconstruction era that allowed segregation to take hold in the South.