Calendar photo caption: New Orleans residents walk down a levee together during a candlelight vigil on August 29, 2009, to commemorate the fourth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. (Sean Gardner/Getty Images)
In the spring of 1927 the Mississippi River flooded, creating a torrent of water 50 miles wide and 100 miles long. One of the places hit hardest was Greenville, Mississippi, a town in the Mississippi Delta, where tens of thousands of Black people had lived and worked on cotton plantations for generations, producing great wealth for white landowners under enslavement and later under the cruel, exploitive sharecropping system.
As the river rose, Greenville police rounded up Black men and children and forced them at gunpoint to reinforce the levee while white residents were evacuated to safety. Plans to evacuate Black residents were scuttled by white planters fearful of losing their labor force. National Guardsmen instead prevented Black people from fleeing as the levee failed and people were washed away.
More than 10,000 Black refugees were crowded on an eight-foot-wide stretch of high ground along the river with no tents or sanitary facilities and very little food. They were not allowed to leave.
When Red Cross supplies arrived, police forced Black people to perform disaster relief work, including distributing supplies to white residents who took what they wanted first. When a Black man objected to working back-to-back shifts, he was shot and killed on his front porch. Tens of thousands of African Americans fled the Delta when the floodwaters receded.
Nearly a century later, when the Mississippi River flooded New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina, tens of thousands of Black residents suffered brutally and hundreds died, swept away by rising waters, abandoned without food and water for days, and murdered by white vigilantes and police.
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