Black flood victims were forcibly confined and worked while white victims were evacuated

Evidence

More than half a million people living along the lower Mississippi were left homeless. While many, often white, families began to rebuild or moved into indoor relief camps, black families found themselves crowded into desolate outdoor camps, often with inadequate food and shelter. According to the Colored Advisory Commission, many black displaced people said they were prevented from leaving the camps by armed members of the National Guard, something that didn’t happen at the camps for white familes. In other cases, homelessness and hopelessness forced people to leave the region entirely. The Great Mississippi Flood triggered one of the largest mass migrations in U.S. history and is cited in scores of blues songs. Across the region, between two hundred fifty and one thousand people are estimated to have died in the flooding; we don’t know how many of them were put in harm’s way by the decision to dynamite the levee at Caernarvon. One prominent black businessman, Sidney Dillon Redmond, later complained in a letter to President Calvin Coolidge that black workers were forced at gunpoint to keep working atop the levee, even as white people and mules began to be evacuated. — Anna Merlan, Republic of Lies, 135

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the vault’s claims about how state institutions discriminate along race lines — and to the conspiracy-belief chapter theme: this documented 1927 injustice is the real substrate later rumors grew from. — connects to: Katrina’s deaths concentrated in poor Black neighborhoods that were more flood-prone — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project: A New American Origin…, 1296; Abandonment configured as emergency is accomplished as a racial project; Post-Katrina builders bypassed local Black laborers for more easily controlled imported workers — Junaid Rana, Terrifying Muslims: Race and Labor in…, 896
• SHARE: Detail worth sending to someone into disaster response/racial history: black workers kept at gunpoint on the levee while whites and mules were evacuated.

Broader Connections

• Abandonment configured as emergency is accomplished as a racial project #expands (0.82)
• Post-Katrina builders bypassed local Black laborers for more easily controlled imported workers #corroborates (0.80) — Junaid Rana, Terrifying Muslims, 896
• Katrina’s deaths concentrated in poor Black neighborhoods that were more flood-prone #complicates (0.78) — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 1296