re: #66 Dark_Falcon

Calvin Coolidge didn’t like Jim Crow, it’s a fact, but he didn’t do much to prevent its negative effects on black people. The one chance he had, the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, saw him be far too passive. In the end it was then-Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover who coordinated the federal relief efforts, such as they were. To be fair, that kind of resource management and allocation was something Herbert Hoover was exceptionally good at, but had Coolidge visited the areas near the flood zone and urged more aid, more would have been forthcoming.

HA!! I say again, HA!!

Hoover’s “relief efforts” and “resource management and allocation” for that flood were, quite literally, the worst thing since slavery.

Their strategy to save downtown New Orleans was to dynamite the levees 20 miles north — in an area primarily populated with black sharecroppers in their flimsy shacks. The dynamite was set off in the middle of the night, with no advance notice (deliberately — the City leaders knew weeks ahead of time, and chose the location).

Have you ever heard the song “When the Levees Broke”? That’s what it’s about. 20’ of floodwaters poured out and across the region, while everyone was asleep. Entire settlements were washed away, the death toll is still disputed (hundreds of bodies were recovered), survivors who knew how to swim made their way to smallish remaining portions of the levees where they sat, no supplies, water all around, to wait for help.

When “rescue boats” finally came a few days later, they took all the able-bodied men (no women or children, also didn’t leave any supplies) and press-ganged them into doing relief work downriver in the white areas. Much like slavery, except that it only lasted a few months.

This is why Black voters, who since 1865 had been monolithically Republican, suddenly became monolithically Democrat. This is also why the Great Migration accelerated, why all those black southerners were so eager to move to Chicago and Detroit and New York.