Lessons from the “Great Mississippi Flood” of 1927

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

At the September 2^nd 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 decision to try and entrap the Mississippi River in a narrow channel by using ever higher levees goes back to the mid-1800’s and was designed to free up the maximum amount of land for exploitation by capitalist agriculture. From the beginning many scientists knew this was a recipe for disaster, and the great flood of 1927 proved it with ruptured levees and massive flooding all up and down the river.
• In response to that flood, the representatives of the capitalist class who controlled the country (and immediate area) did everything in their power to protect their own interests and make sure that it was the poor and oppressed who would pay the greatest price for the disaster.
• In the Mississippi Delta area—with the richest soil and the highest concentration of Black sharecroppers in the country—Black people were rounded up at gunpoint and thrown into concentration camps on the levees to keep them from leaving the flood area. The wealthy white plantation owners were determined that their labor force would not escape to the north—from where few Blacks who migrated ever returned.
• After the first wave of the flood receded in the Delta and Black people were released, a second surge threatened the levees protecting the main town of Greenville. This time Blacks were forced—under the threat of being conscripted at gunpoint—to save the city by strengthening the damaged levee system. One thousand Black men, “overseen by several dozen whites,” worked around the clock for eight days in a tremendous act of heroism to save the city. For thanks they got more oppression and abuse, including a stark increase in lynchings. John Barry describes a post-flood report from a committee of Black citizens from Greenville:

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.