Above: Forced labor on the levee
If the word “fair“ means “arbitrary“, then the Mississippi River believes in fair play. Men are seldom as civilized as the muddy water of the Mississippi however. When the levees began to break up and down the river business men began to protect their interests. The first such act was the dynamiting of levees around New Orleans. Thirty tons of dynamite was used to spare the city and flood all of St. Bernard county instead. Later it was generally determined that the city was not in real danger anyway since some more northerly levees were already “leaking“ water at rates faster than Niagra Falls.
This charging water and its aftermath killed hundreds and left 700,000 homeless. This number included 330,000 African Americans who re-settled in “relief camps“ when able. Some, like 13,000 flood victims in and around Greenville, MS were rounded up and used as slave labor, forced to repair the levees at the point of a gun. The relief camps were subject to every abuse. When rumors surfaced that soldiers were robbing, raping and murdering displaced flood victims, then Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover worked quickly to silence such information.
Hoover who was planning to run for president the following year made contact with prominent blacks on the national level, keeping bad reports out of the press with promises to improve the plight of blacks when elected to the White House. One man lured in to this trap was the head of the “Colored Advisory Commission“, Robert Russa Moton. When Hoover went back on every promise after being elected Moton and others led the African-American constituency out of the Republican party they had supported since Lincoln and into the camp of the Democrats where they have, for the most part, remained.
American Red Cross relief was centered in Greenville, MS, but it only benefited whites and blacks who wore a “laborer“ tag around their neck. All others were left to fend for themselves. Will Percy, a noted war hero and poet was given charge of this relief effort. Contrary to all of the reports regarding his basic goodness, Percy quickly gave way to political pressures from planters and even his own father, a local plantation owner.
Above: Young flood refugees
In the wake of the flood the migration north that had already begun reached a peak. In areas such as Greenville African-Americans were forced from train stations at gunpoint in an effort to keep cheap labor in the cotton fields. Years later when the first cotton picker was invented the same men with guns would provide one-way tickets to black workers seeking a decent wage in the factories of Chicago and Detroit.
Herbert Hoover was elected president in 1928, but the Wall Street crash and subsequent depression of 1929 assured that he would never be re-elected. This flood also birthed the political career of Huey Long, the colorful and opportunistic governor of Louisiana who would one day run for president of the United States, then later be gunned down in cold blood.
Memphis its self was spared the worst. Although the water rose very high in parts of the city, it subsided in a few days rather than a few months as was the case in the Mississippi Delta. Many songs from the era of the Delta blues / Memphis blues deal very directly with this event, probably the most notable would be Memphis Minnie's “When the Levee Breaks“ later made popular again by the British rock group Led Zeppelin.