The 1927 flood displaced half a million people and forced enduring migration

Evidence

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

• DEFINE: Supplies the concrete antecedent 1927 event behind the levee-bombing theory of later decades.
• XREF: connects to: Postwar migration expanded in phases bounded by the 1973 oil crisis — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 3860; The Irish famine pushed many to emigrate to other countries. — Winston Churchill, A History of the English-Speaking…, 1781; Documented 1927 levee dynamiting seeded later distrust of flood authorities — Anna Merlan, Republic of Lies, 136

Broader Connections

• Postwar migration expanded in phases bounded by the 1973 oil crisis #contradicts (0.75) — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 3860
• The Irish famine pushed many to emigrate to other countries. #exemplifies (0.75) — Winston Churchill, A History of the English-Speaking…, 1781