In 1927 New Orleans dynamited levees to save itself by flooding black communities

Evidence

Some people who propagated the levee-bombing theory explicitly cited the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, when levees were blown up—but to save New Orleans, not to drown it. As the flood threatened the city, local leaders decided to take drastic action: to relieve the threat of a levee break within the city proper, engineers used several tons of dynamite to destroy the Mississippi River levee in the unincorporated community of Caernarvon, Louisiana. They promised to reimburse the people in the region who would lose their homes. … The explosion sent the floodwaters surging across the lower St. Bernard and Plaquemines Parishes, where thousands of poor black people lived, many of them sharecroppers eking out a subsistence living. As predicted, their homes and everything they had managed to scrape together were washed away. — Anna Merlan, Republic of Lies, 128

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: This is a concrete historical instance of a ruling group sacrificing a subordinated community to protect itself — a direct parallel to the sacrificial logic traced in ‘On Sacrifice: The Real Kind, with Corpses.’
• XREF: connects to: Documented 1927 levee dynamiting seeded later distrust of flood authorities — Anna Merlan, Republic of Lies, 136

Broader Connections

• Documented 1927 levee dynamiting seeded later distrust of flood authorities #corroborates (1.00) — Anna Merlan, Republic of Lies, 136