Lessons from the “Great Mississippi Flood” of 1927

Revolution #015, September 25, 2005, posted at revcom.us

At the September 2nd benefit concert for the victims of Hurricane Katrina, Aaron Neville sang a powerful rendition of Randy Newman’s song “Louisiana 1927” that ended with the refrain:

Louisiana, Louisiana.
They’re tryin’ to wash us away
They’re tryin’ to wash us away.

What happened in 1927 and what does it tell us about today? The place to start is the book Rising Tide: the great Mississippi flood and how it changed America by John M. Barry.* While I can not go into all that is revealed in this fascinating study, here are a few striking points:

The report confirmed that black refugees “could not secure supplies without an order from a white person,” and they found “oppression,” that black “men were beaten by soldiers and made to work under guns. That more than one wanton murder was committed by these soldiers... [T]hat women and girls were outraged [raped]... by these soldiers.”

All this was done under the leadership of the Percy family—the most powerful political family in Mississippi who were noted Southern liberals who had consistently opposed the Ku Klux Klan as being too extreme.

New Orleans—which lies on the east side of the Mississippi—was spared the flood when the handful of rich bankers who ran the city had the National Guard blow a hole in the levee on the west side of the river. This flooded the poor parish of St. Bernard and drove out its thousands of residents, most of whom lost everything. And then it turned out that this was totally unnecessary—the river never go high enough to breech the levees anyway!

So if you think the horrors in the wake of Hurricane Katrina are just the product of the “incompetence” of the Bush crowd, reflect on the above history.

NOTES

* A powerful documentary, “Fatal Flood,” based on this book and other accounts of the 1927 Mississippi Flood was recently aired on the PBS program American Experience. The PBS website: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/flood/index.html includes transcripts, film clips, voices of the people who lived through the flood, and Delta Blues music from this show.

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