Blues and the Mississippi Flood of 1927 Part 11 Goin to Chicago (Finale)

What if any impact will the investigations into the Red Cross relief camps have? Meanwhile many African Americans who survived the flood and those relief camps decide they can no longer live in the south after all they have experienced. In doing so they take their culture including their music with them.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
My name is Eric Gasco and you're listening to the
Distorted History podcast and program. I can't give you many names,
and you're a blunder. Hey, look I'm raising I'm got

(00:24):
the by terah A long struggle for freedom. It really
is a revolution. When the Mounts Landing Crevass happened on
the twenty first of April, the nation as a whole
sat up and started paying attention to what was happening

(00:45):
to the Mississippi and its various tributaries. The nation then
washed on in horror as lies were ruined, lies were lost,
and entire towns were washed away. The press covered the
disaster in depth, and the people of the United States
rallied as they raised money to aid those affected by
this nightmare. The problem was, though, it just kept happening.
As town after town was washed away, people gradually began

(01:06):
to lose interest. It was all horrible, sure, but the
public had now seen it all before. The Median public
then began to lose interest because eventually it just became
numbers to them. The Mountains Landing Crevass had been shocking,
media and tragic. It is similar scenes played out over
and over again. It started to lose that impact. Instead

(01:27):
of this singular, dramatic moment, it started to become just
numbers of people affected, the number of people evacuated, the
number of acres flooded, and so on. So while the
first levee breakthrough was dramatic, by the fourth and fifth
people had seen it all before. As it just kept happening,
then it was just the same story all over again.
The New York Times would actually talk about this very phenomenon,

(01:48):
as they wrote, quote, the very sweet of such a
tragedy makes it hard to grasp in its full significance.
Read day after damn, new breaks and levees, of more
acres flooded, of so many thousand new refugees. Our sense
has become dulled by iteration of the same secrets of detail,
and it is difficult for those of us who have
never been in a flood to get the real picture
of it. The very numbers involved blur the image, a

(02:11):
sentiment which would be echoed in the nation in an
article that read quote, people can only stand so much calamity.
After a while, it begins to pall, and finally it
has no meaning whatever which to be fair is fair,
As we've seen in our lifetimes, an endless stream of
bad news can be overwhelming, and with a large enough
disaster you can lose the personal, human tragedy and just

(02:33):
the numbers of it all. Then, exactly one month after
the mouths land of Gravaz, the nation and the press
in particular were given a distraction that was much easier
to consume and follow, as only twenty one to May,
the same day that Hoover ordered thirty five thousand people
to evacuate from McRee, Louisiana, the press found a shiny
new object to distract itself in the public in the

(02:54):
form of Charles Lindberg and the Spirit of Saint Louis
mass the future Nazi supporter completed his solo NonStop flight
across the Atlantic. All of a sudden, then the tragedy
of the flood was old news, as the nation now
looked to celebrate this new achievement in aviation. Essentially, the
present public had grown tired of the flood news. What
had originally been unique and dramatic had become as a

(03:15):
result of the very nature of this disaster, almost wrote
After a while, then it just became the same basic
story over and over again, just in different places with
different numbers. In contrast, as The New York Times would
write about the future Nazi supporters achievement quote Lindberg's flight,
the suspense of it, the daring of it, the triumph
and glory of it. These are the stuff that makes

(03:37):
immortal news. Now. Even as the papa's attention began to
shift away from the flooded region, there would still be
the occasional story about the flood. As time passed through
the glowing accounts of the company, the initial rescue efforts
began being intermixed with more critical pieces thanks to some
looking back to consider the causes of this disaster, while
others began to take a closer look if the ongoing

(04:00):
treatment of African Americans in the flooded region. Yet, before
we go any further into those investigations and what they
might mean for the presidential aspirations of one Herbert Hoover, first,
like always, I want to acknowledge my sources for this series,
which include Richard M. Mazone Junior's Backwitter Blues, the Mississippi
Flood of nineteen twenty seven in the African American imagination,

(04:20):
John M. Berry's Rising Tide, The Great Mississippi Flood of
nineteen twenty seven and how it changed America and Susan
Scott Perishes the flood year nineteen twenty seven a cultural history,
and like always, a full list of these and any
other sources like websites that I used, will be available
on this podcast, Blue Sky and CoFe pages. Plus for
anyone who doesn't want to be bothered skipping through commercials,

(04:42):
there is always an ad free feed available to subscribers
at patreon dot com. Slash just started history. And with
all that being said, let's begin. As we saw last time,
when murmurs about how African Americans are being treated in
the Red Cross camp started a league count. Presidential hopeful
Herbert Hoover looked to get ahead of the potential scandal
by appointing his own quote unquote Colored Advisory Commission, doing

(05:04):
so to try and save his own candidacy for the
upcoming presidential election, because, for one, Hoover had deeply tied
himself to the relief efforts and thus their success was
a huge part of his case for becoming president, and
also because since he didn't have the support of the
power players in the Republican Party, he needed the Black
vote in the primaries to secure his nomination. To that end,

(05:24):
he reached out to Robert Russimoe and the head of
the Tuskegee Institute, who was seen as a kind of
safe African American, meaning he was a type that rich
and powerful Whitz consulted with because he wasn't quote unquote radical.
Bote then organized Hoover's Colored Advisory Commission, which featured prominent
conservatives Southern blacks much like himself. These sixteen men and women,

(05:44):
working in small groups, then visited the various Red Cross
camps in the Lower Mississippi Valley. Then, after ten days
of these investigations, the committee prepared their preliminary report on
the fourteenth of June. This report would identify Greenville as
the main source of the negative rumors about the relief effort,
as to confirmed that black refugees quote could not secure
supplies without an order from my white person, and that

(06:06):
black men were regularly assaulted by soldiers and then forced
to labor while armed white men watched over them. Moan
would then release a heavily censored version of this report
to the press, with this version only recommending minor changes
like a screened in area in Greenville where refugees could eat.
As for the uncensored preliminary report that he gave to
Hoover and included the addendum that quote, you may feel

(06:28):
free to make any changes or additions that may seem
desirable to you, which is all to say, Mon was
far less interested in aiding the people of Greenville and
elsewhere who were suffering that he wasn't serving Hoover's ends
and making him look good. Indeed, to keep the more
damaging report from getting out, Mon only had three copies
made of it, one of which he gave to Hoover
and the other two he kept for himself, not even

(06:50):
giving them to his fellow committee members lest they potentially
leaked the contents to the press. This all seemed to
appease Hoover, as by helping to keep this potential scandal
under ramps. Hoover again hitting a Moton that he would
be able to do some substantial things to help black
people out. This Moton was convinced meant that Hoover would
implement changes that would eliminate the system of sharecropping and

(07:10):
instead allow black families to own their own farms. Indeed,
Hoover would propose a plan where he would use Red
Cross funds to purchase large, struggling plantations and then divide
them into small plots that would then be sold to
individual farmers, a program that in theory would benefit both
black and white farmers, but which was supposedly designed to
primarily aid black sharecroppers. A plan that Hoover suggested that

(07:33):
way plantation owners would be cool with because it would
increase land values and that would ultimately benefit them. This
was all music to Moone's ears, and so he was
now more than ever dedicated to aiding Hoover. The thing was,
Hoover knew even as he was presenting this proposal to
Moton that the Red Cross fund could not be used
for such a purpose, and even if it could, the

(07:53):
Red Cross did not support this plan. Indeed, Sanchy plan
was antithetical to the goals of Hoover and the Red Crop.
As you see, their approach to this relief effort was
a conservative one, meaning their goals were to return people
and things to the state that they had been before
the disaster, and nothing more, which meant they had no
intention of doing anything to address the rampant inning quality

(08:14):
that existed. For example, on Vicksburg, the Red Cross created
two camps, one for African American refugees and one for whites,
and wouldn't you know it, they close the Black camp
a full seven weeks before the one for whites, doing
so to force those residing within the camp to return
to working the fields, despite some of the said fields
still being under a foot of water. Meanwhile, all around

(08:35):
the flooded region. Instead of giving out supplies directly to
actual individuals displaced by the flood as intended, oftentimes Red
Cross officials made it so the supplies were given to
plantation owners, trusting them to distribute the goods as necessary. Now,
some actually would distribute said goods to their tenant farmers
free of charge as they were meant to. Others, however,
predictably charged their tenants for these free goods, using them

(08:58):
to add even more intent so as to keep them
tied to the land whilestone. Others simply kept the supplies
for themselves and never distributed them to those in need. Plus,
on top of that, even African Americans who owned their
own farms got next to nothing from the Red Cross,
even though by their own policies they by definition should
have been first in line to receive assistance. Now, to

(09:19):
his credit, when Moe learned of these abuses, he did
try to do when he could to help, which included
informing Hoover, believing that he would intervene. Hoover, however, just
ignored these issues, telling Mone to just pass his reports
alone to the Red Cross. All the Wands sayssing that
there were no systemic issues. Yet, while Hoover and the
Red Cross seemed to fully expect Mone's conservative leaning Colored

(09:39):
Advisory Commission to play along with the conservative approach to
disaster relief, it does not seem like all the members
of the Commission were on board with his approach, as
some at least wanted an approach to disaster relief that
would ultimately quote liberate both the white planter and his
negro tenant, because, as they argue, the sharecropping system left
both vulnerable to the quote of an unstable economic system. Essentially,

(10:02):
then you had some people who wanted to try and
make life better, especially for the poor black residents living
by the Mississippi, by using this opportunity to raise up
these disadvantage individuals. Meanwhile, you had Hoover and the Red
Cross who just wanted to return things the way they were,
meaning they wanted to keep the rich rich and the
poor poor. As such, some of the members of the
Colored Advisory Commission, despite being handpicked by Monen, whose goal

(10:25):
was to ultimately clear the name of Hoover and the
Red Cross, were less inclined to do so, especially after
viewing these state of things in the flooded region for themselves. Indeed,
unlike Moan, these investigators were very interested in actually investigating
and getting to the truth of the matter, which is
why investigators from the Commission called Bennett and jesse O
Thomas were so interested in the Sicily Island camp in

(10:47):
northern Louisiana, as despite it no officially being listed as
closed down by the Red Cross itself, they knew it wasn't,
which then made it easier for them to just show
up without contacting the people running the camp because it
wasn't supposed to be open, something that they were especially
interested in doing after speaking with informants from other camps
who told them that when word came down that investigators

(11:08):
were coming, those running these camps made everything look all
nice at first glance, thereby hiding what was really going on.
Claudy and Jesse then figured that if they showed up
unexpectedly at a camp that was supposedly closed down but wasn't,
they would then be able to get an on varnish
few of what was actually going on, and indeed they
would find any Sicily camp that all the work there
was done by African Americans. Meanwhile, Weinstein only got the

(11:31):
best food that was available, but they also had the
opportunity to pick through the donated clothes first, meaning they
took pretty much everything that was good or even decent
for themselves, thereby leaving the camp's black population with these craps. Additionally,
the whites in this camp were the only ones provided
with costs to sleep on, while the African American refugees
either had to sleep on the ground or otherwise provide

(11:53):
their own mattresses. Now, to be clear, the Sicily Island
camp was not alone in any of this, nor were
they the worst. In some camp. For example, African Americans
could not get rations or leave the camp without first
getting the signature of a white person. Meanwhile, in addition
to looking the other way, as plantation owners charged sharecroppers
for supplies that were meant to be free just to
put them further into debt. The Red Cross also assisted

(12:15):
plantation owners by keeping men looking to recruit refugees to
go to work in northern factories and alike away from
the camps. Also, in addition of making sure the plantation
owners were able to maintain their cheap labor force, the
Red Cross camps also made sure they exploited the black
refugees for their labor as well, with the main offender
for this practice being the Greenville camp. But they were
also far from alone. In New Orleans, for example, investigators

(12:38):
would uncover the story of African American insurance agent J. W. Mershon, who,
when asked slash order to work on the levees the
clients so he could do his work as an insurance
agent for his clients who seemed to really be in
need of an insurance agent in that moment. Mershon would
then be shot and killed by wides for this refusal. Meanwhile,
you also had reports from investigators looking into the Crowny,

(12:59):
Louisiana camp of National guardsmen being quote too free with
a few of the colored girls, with similar accounts coming
out of a Vicksburg camp where guardsmen were accused of
taking part in a quote attempted assault of pond colored women.
Plus you also had to report some multiple lynchings taking
place within these camps. In some of these instances, the
black individuals were accused of committing crimes, while others just

(13:21):
appeared to be local whites lashing out without even attempting
to justify their actions. For example, in may and Little Rock, Arkansas,
a mob killed and then proceeded to mutilate the body
of a black man named Carter, before dragging his body
through the black section of town, where they then set
it on fire using furniture from the black neighborhood as kindling.
And even in the absence of violence, commission found that

(13:43):
it was clear who the relief efforts were meant to help,
as they found in Melville, Louisiana, that hundreds of homes
for whites had been rebuilt after the flood, while in contrast,
only seven homes for African Americans received the same treatment. Now,
all this information would be put together in a final
report that would be delivered to Hoover and the Red Cross.
As this waze job of the Colored Advisory Commission. They

(14:05):
were ostensibly there to look into the relief effort, especially
its treatment of African Americans and then provided that information
to those in charge to respond appropriately. For example, the
report found that some of the worst offenders when it
came to the systematic mistreatment of black refugees were northern
white women who served as the administrators in these camps,
while in contrast, according to the report quote, conditions were

(14:27):
best in those camps where the officials in charge had
invited the assistance and cooperation of leaders among the local
colored people. This was a clear piece of advice that
could have been used in this in future efforts, a
lesson that could have been learned. The problem was Hoover
and the head of the Red Cross did not exactly
appreciate this report, as they saw not as problems to
be fixed, but as criticisms of themselves. And they did

(14:50):
not like being criticized in general, but they especially did
not like being criticized by black people. Most offensive of
all for Hoover, though, was that it appeared that he
was being assize by a black assistant, as Mohan had
been unable to personally meet with him to hand deliver
the final report after being in a car accident. Hoover
then informed Moden that the commission's final report had quote

(15:11):
unquote disappointed him as it had not done enough to
praise all the good the Red Cross had done, and
which point desperate to appease Hoover, Mohan claimed that he
had not seen the final seven page report, which by
the way, bore a signature before it had been presented
to Hoover. The great humanitarian, then, instead of addressing any
of the issues brought up by the report, ordered Monen

(15:33):
to have it rewritten. Meanwhile, still oblivious at Hoover and
the Red Cross never had any actual intention of carrying
through their proposed plan of dividing up large failing plantations
to sell to black farmers, Mowden continued to work to
make that program a reality. He would then only start
to realize what type of man he was dealing with
when he organized a meeting with some philanthropists who were

(15:53):
interested in discussing the proposal. As soover responded to the
invitation by saying there would not be desirable to have
a meeting to discuss such a project, a reply that
proved to be the death noell of the meeting, as
without the backing of someone powerful like Hoover, the men
that Mowden had invited were no longer willing to put
up the money to support this plan. Despite this, Moden

(16:13):
was unwilling to admit that he had been tricked and used,
So we simply started lying to himself that Hoover was
too busy with his campaign to win the presidential nomination,
but if he were to win the presidency, then surely
he would take the time to carry through with the
plans he had suggested, doing so despite already getting what
he wanted and no longer needing Moone's support. And so

(16:34):
Moan and the Tuskegee Instidute were protect in shield Hoover
from allegations of his streament of black refugees during his
relief campaign, aid, which to be clear, was vital ass
Republican party bosses very much did not like or support Hoover.
He then very much needed all the help he could get,
including that of black voters. Hoover then was very much
counting on his sterling reputation as a great humanitarian and

(16:56):
as the hero of the Great Flood to carry him
to victory, a reputation at very much risk being tarnished
if all the ugly truths about how black refugees had
really been treated came to light. Hoover and the Tuskegee
Institute then were crucial in keeping the Colored Advisory Commissions
finding under wraps, thereby ensuring that Hoover won the Republican nomination.
With the nomination thus secured, Herbert Hoover ran for president

(17:19):
in nineteen twenty eight, largely based upon the fame and
reputation he had earned as a result of the flood
relief efforts. Meanwhile, remained convinced that the assistance he provided
in keeping the criticisms of Hoover and the flood relief
quiet would be repaid, meaning he was in an unprecedented
position of being able to influence a future president and
thus would be able to change the lives of African

(17:40):
Americans across the country for the better. He had done
the dirty work, but now was all going to pay
off for the good of black people all across the country.
The problem was Hoover was using him and had no
intention of repaying mode for what he had done. Hoover
got what he wanted, the Republican nomination, and the party
basically assumed at this point the black vote in the

(18:01):
general election all sewn up, while with the Democrats still
being deeply enmeshed with the Clan. Indeed, just four years earlier,
the Democrats at their own convention had refused to pass
a resolution condemning the organization. So from the Republican's perspective,
there was no need to do anything to acquire the
Black vote. Plus, Hoover and his allies were, if anything,
looking to appeal to the clan voter. After all, his opponent,

(18:23):
Al Smith was a Catholic, meaning he was someone that
a Clan voter was never going to support. As such,
Hoover and his allies looked to create a Republican party
that was appealing to such voters. Meanwhiles Hoover was looking
to attract the Klan voter, the truth of the flood
relief would not stay buried, as again, the Cloud Advisory
Committee weren't the only ones who had been looking into
what had happened in the flooded region and how African

(18:44):
American refugees were treated, as multiple Black newspapers would send
reporters to the region to discover and report on what
was actually taking place. The Chicago Defender, for example, would
dispatch one Jay Winston Harrington, while Theodore Holmes traveled on
to the auspices of the Associated Negro Press, and jesse O.
Thomas investigated on behalf of the opportunity. Then there was

(19:05):
prominent N Double ACP leader Walter White, who would write
a bowood he uncovered in an article for the Nation
that would also be reprinted by both the Chicago Defender
and the Baltimore Afro American, an article in which he
outlined how African Americans and the floodstone in general were
treated almost like an unsaved labor force, as he wrote,
quote conscripted Negro labor did practically all the hard and

(19:25):
dangerous work in fighting the flood. And this wasn't happenstance either,
as the local powers in charge of the flood relief
efforts had quote permitted the relief organizations to be used
by plantation owners further to unsafe or at least perpetuate
painage conditions. Wright would then expand upon and explain the
way the system of sharecropping worked in the N Double
ACP's Crisis magazine, as he wrote, quote by far the

(19:48):
majority of the Negroes were sharecroppers held in perpetual painage
by the planter. The system is to advance credit at
the plantation store, the amount of indebtedness to be subtracted
from the amount to the tenant when the crop is in.
The crop is never large enough to cancel the indeadenness,
which increases year by year, essentially explaining how rich white
plantation owners had created a system to keep black laborers

(20:09):
perpetually in debt and thus forced to continue working for them. However,
White would point out, per Mississippi law, quote, ain't a
disaster such as a flood which destroys the crop automatically
cancels the indeadenness of the tenant to the landlord, so
that the planter has no legal right to hold the tenant,
Meaning this flood had essentially freed these black sharecroppers and
allowed them, possibly for the first time in their lives,

(20:32):
to leave these lands and ghosts on over someplace new,
which makes all the efforts by the Red Cross to
prevent the black refugees from leaving all them more egregious,
as we're actively working hand in hand to keep these
people trapped. To further illustrate the depth of their complicity,
Whitewood signed papers at the Jackson, Mississippi Daily News and
the Vicksburg Evening Post that assured planters that the Red

(20:52):
Cross camps were making sure that labor agents from the
North were not allowed to enter and encourage black refugees
to leave the soul set up. Walter then road served
to quote crystallizing new slavery almost as miserable as the old.
In forcing this latest version of slavery were the National Guardsmen,
who the nabacp's Crisis would note were quote, of course
armed with guns and pistols, which they showed entire willingness

(21:15):
to use in Greenville, though the guardsmen were said to
have been especially bad, as see Crisis would note, quote
more than one wanton murder was committed by these soldiers,
while also adding that quote women and girls were outraged
by these soldiers, which is a euphemism to say that
they were sexually assaulted. Further outlining the nightmare that was
Greenville during the flood, famed civil rights and anti religion

(21:38):
crusader Ida B. Wells, while writing for The Chicago Defender,
would present to her readers a letter propoorly from a
source currently residing in Greenville who asked a made anonymous
for fear of retribution. This letter writer would then go
on to note how poor blacks were quote made to
work like a dog on her gun and club intact
like a bill of cut And how was only black
folks who received this treatment, as no one else, not

(22:00):
even Mexicans, Italians or Greeks, were forced to work for
food like the black people of Greenville were. That being said,
the most in depth investigation into the Red Cross camps, however,
would be done by the official publication of the NAACP
The Crisis, an investigation that started at to be hest
the publications editor W. E. B. Du Bois, who, upon
reading the other coverage of the flood and likely after

(22:22):
having met with Walter White, decided to send his own
investigator down to the flooded region, likely suspecting as he did,
that the cod Advisory Commission would make no serious efforts
to actually expose the situation and instand looked to whitewash
the whole thing. Undertaking this mission was an unidentified white
female investigator, as it was believed that she would have
an easier time getting a look at the inner workings

(22:44):
of the Red Cross's refugee camps, trusting that the white
officials running these camps would be less likely to be
on their guard around her because she was white, an
assumption that proved to be quite accurate. For example, while
in Louisiana, this unnamed woman pretended to be a Red
Cross worker from another case camp, which then enabled the
investigator to get a local win official to open up,

(23:05):
doing so by fitting him the line that Southerners like
himself understood black people much more than Northerners like herself,
to which the white men proudly started talking about how
the Northern Red Cross workers had foolishly come here initially
with plans of treating everyone equally regardless of the color
of their skin, just because they were suffering from the
same disaster, and was then up to the local Red

(23:26):
Cross committee which he was on, to set them straight
about how equality was not something that people here were
going to tolerate. Indeed, he bragged about how they were
able to convince the organization's national leadership to come around
to their way of thinking, a confession that spoke to
the corruption of the relief efforts and the implementation of
purposely discriminatory practices, and a confession that a black investigator

(23:47):
would likely have not been able to get. Basically, then,
when you get down to in African Americans all throughout
the footed region were forced to labor and were prevented
from leaving the region or even just the camps in general,
putting them in a situation much akin to the one
they had experienced before the abolishment of slavery, and to
be clear, they were the only group to receive such treatment.

(24:07):
Now it seems that much of this was orchestrated by
local forces, but the National Guard and the Red Cross
seemed all too happy to assist in these efforts. Possibly
the most inferiating thing about all this, though, was how
easy it was to see it coming. As at the
starting the flood, William Pickens, who was a prominent member
of the NAACP and who had served as a professor
and administrator in several Southern universities, had more and less

(24:29):
predicted that all of this would happen. Pickens, you see,
was well acquainted with the South and how it worked,
as before earning a bachelor's degree from Meal, he had
grown up in a working class family in South Carolina.
In Arkansas, Pickens, then at the very start of the flood,
had written to President Coolidge suggesting that considering the degree
to which African Americans were being affected by the flood
and the existing racial divide in the South, it would

(24:51):
be a good idea and a way to avoid a
scandal to appoint an African American who serve as the
right hand of whoever was put in charge of the
relief efforts, a letter in which Pickens also made sure
to center the New York Amsterdam News to publish to
try an increase the pressure to take preventative measures against
what he fully expected to happen. However, two weeks would
pass without any kind of action from the government to

(25:13):
indicate that they were considering his advice and mourning, at
which point Pickens sent another letter to the New York
Amsterdam News, writing quote, the fatal flood is swept away
for blacks everything but left the white man's land. The
biggest loser is the Negro. Not only the flood, but
the Red Cross and the Marshall Law will be his enemies,
and forced labor will mean black labor. Blacks will be

(25:35):
put to wark heman and clear the white man's property
without wages or reward. Being poor and homeless, they will
be yoked with new debts in order to get a start.
Except for the few who will be able to escape
through the trapdoors of Marshall Lull. They will all find
themselves more completely enslaved than before the flood, a passage
in which Pickens correctly identified everything that happen to black
refugees and new flood zone as he identified then. While

(25:59):
disasters such as this would have been bad anywhere, it
was especially bad for the Southern United States due to
the way society had been structured, as those in the
affected region, especially those in the Danta, were even before
the flood, already at a kind of tipping point, as
their society existed on a knife's edge thanks to the
way that wealth and property had been divided so that
there was such a stark division between the rich and

(26:20):
so many abject poor, a situation that was only made
even more unstable thanks to the racial components of Jim
Crow and the whole sharecropping, debt peinage system. It was
and in reality, a barely functional system, and as a result,
all it needed was a stiff breeze, or more appropriately,
an excess of water, to not only break it, but
send it spiraling into violence, chaos, starvation, disease, and a

(26:43):
resumption of slavery. Meanwhile, as the reality of Hoover's flood
relief efforts as a pertained to the African American community
came to light, it predictably led to a backlash. As
where Republican presidential candidates had been receiving roughly ninety five
percent of the black vote and prior elections, Hoover lost
some fifty teen percent of Black support in his presidential election,
and this was the beginning of a trend. So while

(27:06):
Hoover ultimately won the presidency in an historic landside where
Southern states like Texas, Tennessee, Florida, North Carolina, and Virginia
when Republican for the first time since reconstruction, this also
marked the beginnings of the Republicans abandoning African Americans and
the resulting shift in their political loyalties. Not realizing this,
Moden would continue to try and influence Hoover. That boat, however,

(27:27):
had sailed. Hoover had gone what he wanted and had
no interest in carrying through what the reforms he had
only hinted at. As a result, there would be no
redistribution of land like Moonet hoped for. Indeed, Hoover would
go on to nominate a Supreme Court justice, who was
so racist that his own party had to block the nomination.
As for the victims of the flood as a whole,
both black and white would receive no direct aid from Congress,

(27:50):
something which was partially the work of Leroy Percy, who
warned that aiding the victims of this disaster in such
a way would quote sent a president as God forbid
we act actually help people. Furthermore, he added, any people
now might potentially make other members of Congress whose constituents
had suffered past disasters jealous, as they had not been
given aid. As because we didn't help people in the

(28:11):
past means we can't help people. Ever, is always such
convincing logic. Leroy Percy then had no interest in helping
the poor and victims of the flood. Instead, his main
concern was making sure that the federal government took charge
of the Mississippi and the building of levees. So basically,
since he feared that the suggestion of direct aid would
turn congressmen against the idea of federal control of the levees,

(28:31):
Leroy insisted that the politicians from the region should simply
outright reject any plan that included direct aid. To the victims. Basically,
then he was negotiating against himself and the interest on
the people of the state. Hooever, meanwhile, fully approved of
this approach, as he was very much against the idea
of direct aid as well. Meanwhile, the still at the
time President Coolidge, who had done next to nothing concerning

(28:54):
the flood, was actively on the lookout for the cheapest
plan to try and prevent future disasters, which you know,
doesn't sound like the ideal criteria when talking about a
plan to prevent disaster. Predictably, then, the plan that he
settled on was the one that every chief engineer on
every levee board in the Lower Mississippi hated. In fact,
they even signed a letter attacking this plan. Additionally, and

(29:16):
when the House of Representatives was considering this plan, three
hundred witnesses would be called upon to give their opinion
of the efficacy of it, and ninety four percent of
those individuals criticize it in one way or another, from
the pitiful compensation to purchase the private land necessary for
the project, to the engineering of the plane itself being
inherently flawed. Everyone seemed he could find a fall with

(29:37):
his proposal. Yet still Coolidge liked the plan because it
was the cheapest and because it focused just on the
lower Mississippi, as he did not want to be responsible
for any other sections of rivers that were prone to flooding.
In fact, he even went so far as to threaten
to veto any legislation that brought the scope of the project.
And so this limited and flawed plan went through. The

(29:57):
thing wasn't doing so it stall set a press sent
by expanding the responsibilities of the federal government as it
was now responsible for the Mississippi River. Meanwhile, I'm back
in Greenville. Will in persed a part of the country
before the controversy broke, and as such never faced any
kind of consequences for his actions. Upon his eventual return.
Will would then go on to become a bit of
a compost character, as he seemed to never really learn

(30:20):
to see black people as truly people, as he instead
remained exceedingly patronizing. At the same time, though, when he
eventually took over the family plantation, he started running actual
contracts for sharecroppers instead of spoken agreements. They could be
freely changed to fit the needs and desires of the plantation.
How Her, indeed, Will would even suggest that the federal
government should start auditing plantations to make sure that sharecroppers

(30:42):
were not being cheated. Additionally, whenever was discovered that black
men were having good sensual relations with white women, will
made sure they were sent out of Greenville rather than
allowing them to be whipped and or lynched. He even
seemed to in general try to protect these city's black
population from abuse from the comps, and even once helped
an individual when damages from the city for their suffering

(31:02):
at the hands of the police. Which is all to
say that again, William was a complex figure man that
the situation during the flood feels like a reaction to
his father undermining him as much as anything else, as
while he never really came to see African Americans as
equals in any meaningful way, his first inclination happened to
rescue them, even if it meant getting them out of
the city and losing that source of labor, because it

(31:24):
was the right thing to do. It wasn't only upon
being forced by his father and the other plantation owners
to keep everyone in Greenville that he began implementing his
infamous policies. Now, that does not absolve him of anything
that happened, but it does paint a picture of a
complicated and at times confusing figure. At the heart of

(32:07):
much of what went down during the flood was the
system of sharecropping, a problem that had existed for some
time but was only further exposed due to these circumstances
surrounding the flood. And talking about this issue, though, it
has to be said that Jim Crow with segregation and
the continuation of slavery through systems like sharecropping were not
foregone conclusions. These were all choices that were made and

(32:28):
pursued following the decision by the Northern States and the
federal government to abandon reconstruction efforts. Understand that there has
long been a tendency to look at history as progress
moving forward, a process of things getting better and moving
toward equality. Yet even before recent events, this was not
necessarily true, as following the Civil War you had African

(32:48):
Americans making significant gains and even serving in places like
the House of Representatives, only to have that all taken
away by regressive racists. When talking about sharecropping, in particular,
during the period of reconstruction, the South was in desperate
need for labor, both to rebuild and also to work
the fields that had previously been occupied by and saved individuals.

(33:08):
As a result, many a now free to African American
were then able to leverage this need for labor to
get ahead at least somewhat. In the eighteen eighties, however,
following the end of reconstruction, lead planters consolidated and reasserted
their power, with the situation being especially bad in the
Yazoo Delta region of the Mississippi. This was an area
ideally suited for growing common thanks to the soil deposited

(33:30):
there by the river, as it was so rich in
minerals and nutrients that it naturally outproduced other locations that
used fertilizer. In fact, the Delta con crops typically yielded
two to three times when other places could. The problem
was by the nineteen twenties, ninety five percent of the
farms and the Delta were not owned by the people
working the land. This was a reason of the sharecropping scheme,

(33:51):
which was a system where the owner leased outland to
tenants who agreed to work in exchange for living arrangements
and a cut of the profits from the sale of
their crops. Typically, how this work. Land was divided up
into twenty to fifty acre plots, which were then loan
down to the tenant along with the various farming supplies
they had to work it in exchange for a fifty
percent cut of their harvest, a set up which on

(34:11):
the face of it theoretically benefited both parties, especially in
the beginning, as for the former and saved individuals just
getting started, this offered them a chance to work their
own plot of land instead of working in groups like
they had prior to being liberated, which was crucially for
no other reason than to put more distance between life
now and what they had endured in the past. Meanwhile,

(34:32):
for the landowners in white society at large, this kept
the newly freed African Americans in agricultural labor, and for
the landowners in particular, this oftentimes kept the formally enslaved
working the same land they had before, which is to
say it effectively preserved the old status quo, with the
only change being that they had to theoretically pay for
black labor. But for not insignificant number of white land

(34:54):
owning Southerners, this was not something they were particularly interested
in doing, so they set up the share comics system
in such a way to keep their tenants in a
permanent state of debt, as that way they wouldn't have
to actually pay them and the tenants would be unable
to leave. The way this worked was the tenant farmers
only made money at the end of the crop cycle
when what they had been growing was harvested. Just to

(35:16):
reach that point, however, these sharecroppers had to buy the
stuff they needed to survive, like these seeds they needed
to plant their crops, food to eat, clothes to wear,
as well as any tools they needed to farm their land,
all of which then had to be purchased on credit,
oftentimes from the same plantation owner who they were renting
the farm from. Meanwhile, in addition to often have new
buy everything they needed to survive from the plantation owner,

(35:38):
the tenants, per their contract, could only sell their con
to the planner who owned the land. The planter then
had absolute control over the price of the goods they
sold their tenants and how much money they earned from
their cun. Many then made sure that the tenants cut
from the sale of their cun did not exceed the
credit they had been loaned over the course of the year.
Thereby leaving them in debt. Then once they were in

(35:59):
debt of the life I under, they couldn't leave until
they paid off said debt, which the owner would ensure
never happened. Minnie Whitney, who was born the daughter of
former slaves, ter and sharecroppers in nineteen oh two, would
tell historian Charles Hardy in nineteen eighty four about life
under this system and how the rule roston. As a
black person, you had to believe whatever a white person

(36:19):
told them. So quote, if he says, well, you didn't
earn but five dollars this year, they believed him. So. See,
someone was still living under the bonds of slavery. Now,
it was one thing to set up this dead peonage system,
but it was another to keep it going for years
and decades. To that end, planners made sure to ensure
the persistence of the system by supporting the disenfranchisement of

(36:40):
African Americans, as that way they could not vote for
politicians who might crack down on their crooked practices. Then,
to further stack the dank, the planters and their allies
also fostered an environment of racial violence throughout the South
to further ensure that African American sharecroppers had no recourse whatsoever,
as by stepping out of line in any way would
have either a legal or extra legal response i e.

(37:02):
A lynch mob. And to be clear, racial violence in
the Mississippi Delta was extreme, with a lynching happening every
five and a half months. The seemingly random acts of
violence that served the purpose of keeping the Southern black
population in their quote unquote plays with the eighteen eighty
seven Thibideaum massacre serving as a prime example of how
such racial violence was used to maintain the status quo.

(37:25):
As it all started when ten thousand black workers had
gone on strike during the November sugarcane harvest. These workers,
who see lived in old slave shacks and worked in
gangs on these sugar plantations. Although while having to survive
upond starvation wages, basically then there was no hide in
the fact they were still being treated and still essentially
living as slaves. The thing was, since sugar needs to

(37:46):
be harvested and processed quickly, they felt they had some
measure of leverage, especially since the plantation owners had tried
and failed to acquire any kind of replacement workforce. Knowing
then that the planners needed them, especially come harvest time,
lester sugar cro be ruined Black plantation workers reached out
to the Knights of Labor, the largest and most powerful
union in the country, a union that did not concern

(38:08):
us oflf with the erased gender, or even the type
of work being done. They were just there to try
and aid laborers who needed help. The Knights then began
the process of organizing these sugar workers, at which point
they attempted to negotiate with the Louisiana Sugar Planners Association
for better wages. The thing was, if there was one
thing that the repressive forces in the South hated as

(38:28):
much as African Americans finding for anything resembling equality or
even just better conditions, it was labor organizers, as they
saw them as just as much of a threat to
their gym crow society. The Planners then responded to these
repeated requests for better wages and conditions by firing union members. Meanwhile,
newspapers started spreading false stories about violence being committed by

(38:50):
black workers to ensure that the public was on the
side of the planters. Then, as the sugarcane ripened in
the strike showed no signs of stopping without the piners
giving in to their workers demands, the plantation owners reached
out to the governor for aid. The governor then was
quick to respond as he dispatched several all white state
militias who were commended by former Confederate General PG to Boreguard,

(39:12):
a man who, despite being a trader who took up
arms against his own country, was not jailed but instead
allowed to resume positions of power following the war, which
you know, seems like a mistake. The state militiamen then
joined forces with local posses to break the strike, often
using violence to do so as a shot into crowns.
The town of Thibideau meanwhile started to become a bit

(39:33):
of a refuge for the workers, a place to gather
and be safe, which, of course could not be allowed. Indeed,
in response, a local district judge, who also happened to
be a former Confederate, declared martial law, and Thibodeaux then
following this declaration, one morning, after a pair of guards
were wounded by some pistol shots fired by an unseen assailant.

(39:54):
The white forces responded by moving into town and shooting
anyone they suspected of taking part in the strike. Not
the shooting of the guardsmen, mind you, but the strike
in general by witnesses would put the deathtall at at
least thirty five in justice incident alone, with one telling
a newspaper quote, the Negroes offered no resistance. They could
not as the killing was unexpected. As survivors of this

(40:17):
massacre in Thibodeau foot into the woods, killings would continue
on the plantations, with the dead from these incidents just
being dumped in a place that would go on to
become a landfill. In the face of such violence, the
labors had no choice but to return to work under
these same old, slavory like conditions. Meanwhile, the Daily Picky
un would deliberately distort reality as they printed up stories

(40:38):
justifying the murders free by claiming that these strikers had
been planning to burn down towns and kill white women
and children with their cane knives, and which point the
paper claimed that the whites were left with no choice,
as quote, it was no longer a question of against labor,
but one of law abiding citizens against assassins. Local planter
widow Mary Pew, meanwhile, would make no attempt to hide

(41:00):
the true purpose of this massacre when she wrote, quote,
I think this will settle the question of who was
to rule the N word or the white man for
the next fifty years. Indeed, Southern black farm workers would
not attempt to form another union until the nineteen thirties,
roughly fifty years later, and when they did, they were
once again met with violence. Meanwhile, it's likely not a

(41:22):
coincidence that Martin Luther King Junior was assassinated after giving
support to striking sanitation workers in Memphis in nineteen sixty eight.
The sharecropping system, the disenfranchisement, and the violent repression in
response to anyone stepping out of line all work together
to keep the South black population tied to the land
as a cheap labor force on whose back the rest

(41:43):
of society was built. The simplest way to escape this
system then was to leave, but by tying them to
the land through debts and legally binding contracts, they could
not simply leave, as the planters had control of law
enforcement that would hunt them down. Not to mention the
extra legal means of control. E. Lynch Bobs, there was
and really no means of escape under normal circumstances. Indeed,

(42:06):
even before the system was formally established, more than a
few African Americans who tried to leave their plantations after
the war were met with violence. Union General Carl Schwartz
would testify of this before Congress in eighteen sixty five,
stating that quote in many instances, Negroes who walked away
from plantations were found upon the road, were shot or
otherwise severely punished. That being said, for a brief shining moment,

(42:29):
there had been a chance that all this could have
been prevented, as once it became clear that the nation
was moving toward the abolition of slavery. As a result
of this conflict, the question of what to do with
the now formally enslaved population became the question. Black leaders, then,
after speaking with their people, agreed that the best way
to take care of themselves going forward was to have
land of their own to work and reap the benefits of.

(42:52):
In response, Union General William to comes to Sherman issued
a Special Order Number fifteen, which ordered the redistribution of
four hundred thousand acres of land along the coast on
of Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina to the formerly enslaved
in order that has since become known as forty Acres
and a Mule. However, this process was stopped by Adrew
Johnson when he became president following Lincoln's assassination. Now, had

(43:16):
this movement toward reparations not been prevented, and would have
likely helped to prevent economic insecurity for a significant number
of African Americans for generations. With this process now stopped, however,
and with few cities willing to hire black workers, mean
he had little choice but to go back to working
the land. Now, for some, this wasn't entirely involuntary. After all,

(43:37):
they knew agricultural work. It wasn't something they could do
and be successful at, or they could have been successful
had the system not been deliberately rigged against them. Which
is all to say that by doing nothing about massive
economic inequality or to addressing needs of the formerly enslaved,
the federal government then left them vulnerable to those few
who still own the land. Ultimately, then this sent to

(44:00):
over eighty percent of the cotton growing land being worked
by sharecroppers in places like Missouri, Arkansas, and Louisiana. The
flood then only served to highlight this inequality as well.
The Whites, for example, had been able to move their
livestock to higher ground and also move their belongings to
higher floors, or even construct scaffolding to keep their valuables
dried during the flood. Some, like Louise in A journalist

(44:22):
Helen Murphy even turned rooms on the second floor of
their houses into makeshift kitchens so as to be able
to maintain some sense of normalcy during the disaster, options
that black sharecroppers and the LAC did not have and
thus lost essentially what little they owned. Yet still the
wealthy whites felt put out when they were quote unquote
abandoned by their servants. For example, journalist Helen Murphy would

(44:43):
write about how were two servants quote black Matha and
Yellow Merry quote defected due to quote somnuline idleness and
the lure of quote government rations. As without them, who
was going to do all the work around the house?
Certainly not Helen. These people, you see, were wholly reliant
on black labor and yet still constantly called them lazy,

(45:07):
which is why white planters and politicians, as racist as
they were, worked so hard to prevent African Americans from
leaving the region, as they simply could not afford to
loose or cheap labor force. Indeed, one of the main
reasons why the National Guard were deployed in Mississippi was
to keep African Americans from leaving, as one of their
main jobs was to patrol Red Cross camp perimeters so

(45:28):
as to make sure that no African Americans attempted to leave.
In fact, any black person caught outside their relief camp
without what was considered to be an acceptable explanation face
to rest, and it's not like they put any real
effort into hunting what it was they were doing. Everything
was all out in the open for all to see,
as African Americans were given tags that bore their name,

(45:48):
the name of the person they worked for, and the
white individual who had vouched for them, that last bit
being vitally important as black people in the camps where
the system was implemented would not receive food unless they
were by a white person. These tags and had to
be kept visible at all times, as any African American
without a tag would be jailed and forced to work
on the levee. Indeed, little and seemed to changed since

(46:11):
the so called end of slavery, as in these camps,
if the African American had been a sharecropper, they had
to provide the name of the landowner they worked for
just to enter the camp and receive food. It then
was almost as if the person was a landowner as
much as they owned the sharecropper. The tags and were
a constant visual reminder that they weren't free. Indeed, it
was so bad that Walter White of the NUBACP would

(46:34):
receive a letter that read, quote, thousands of us will
choose death by starvation rather than enter another camp. Some,
in fact, in the traditional Maroon communities wherein save persons
fled to remote forests and swamps to form their own
societies in defiance of the white slaveholders, would do the
same now, in defiance of the Red Cross camps, the
National Guard, and the local planters who were dictating everything

(46:56):
to keep their labor force destitute and in place. It's
very courier, then, was not being hyperbolic when they wrote quote,
despite the Civil War and the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth amendments,
the con barons, it seems, are determined to hone their
black slaves in bondage. Author of Invisible Man, Ralph Allison

(47:39):
would describe the blues as a quote impulse to keep
the painful details and episodes of brutal experience alive and
one's aching consciousness to finger its jagged green to transcend
it not by consolation of philosophy, but by squeezing from
its near tragic, near comic lyricism. And indeed, as we've
seen time and again, the nineteen twenty seven flood resulted

(47:59):
in all manner of brutal experiences, which is why, out
of all the available genres of music at the time,
it was the blues that found such fertile ground in
the events of the Mississippi Flood. Tragedy abounded as a
result of this flood and the people it effect and
most were of course African Americans. It was that these
tragic experiences that these blues men were squeezing their lyricism from.

(48:21):
Historian Richard M. Mazone Junior would very much echo this
concept when he wrote, quote, like rios of the past,
black blues musicians kept the experiences of those displaced in
the marginalized folk alive in the music. So while much
of the nature remained blind to the play of black refugees,
blues musician is time and again saying about the flood
and all the tragedies surrounding it. One of the most

(48:42):
lasting effects of the flood, though, wasn't so much the
devastation will what happened as a result of it, because
in the wake of this disaster, despite the efforts of
the Southern planters in their political allies, an increasing number
of African Americans would flee the South, which in turn
also hoped to spread the Blues. Blues by this point
was already spreading beyond its original southern confines and becoming

(49:04):
a nationwide art form due to the ongoing Great Migration,
which is the term given to the widespread movement of
African Americans from southern to Northern States, a movement that
really seemed to kick off in earnest as a result
of the First World War. As you see, many a
black man would volunteer to take part in that conflict,
willing to prove their loyalty and patriotism, and in doing

(49:24):
so hopefully be rewarded for those actions. And indeed, when
actually given the chance to service soldiers, they had performed
impressively and heroically. Yet while they were honored by the
French for their service, these same was not true in
their home country. Indeed, upon returning home they were met
with race riots, lynchings, and the rise of the klu
klux Klan. This then led to more than a few

(49:45):
of the returning soldiers deciding to leave the jim Crow
South behind. Granted, the North was also flushed with race
riots and the like, but still wasn't the jim Crow South. Meanwhile,
those who had not gone off to join the armed
forces were also learned to the north as he won
effort meant more industrial jobs that needed to be filled.
Thanks to white men going off to the war and
the halting of immigration, Northern factories then look south for workers,

(50:09):
with millions leaving for opportunities in northern cities, and in
doing so they brought their culture, including their music, along
with them. Also helping to expand the reach of the
blues was the rise of the so called race records,
which in turn also drew an increasing number of blues
musicians to the North. As you see, prior to the
First World War, these bluesmen primarily plied their trade by
playing in various juke joints and barn dances on southern plantations.

(50:33):
The rise of race records, though which saw the three
largest record companies involved in the style songs from five
to six million copies annually opened up new opportunities for
blues men to perform in other parts of the country.
This flight to the north would then only be accelerated
thanks to the nineteen twenty seven flood In its aftermath,
as he troubles didn't just vanish along with the water. Indeed,

(50:53):
as he flood wooters finally began to recede in July,
a British reporter from the Manchester Guardian would report, quote,
the fertile fields of early spring are now great desolate
waste of mud, in which appear windless, doorless houses, many
of which have been moved from their foundations and partially
or completely overturned. Adding further, as he continued to survey
the desolation left behind by the flood, quote here and

(51:16):
there half submerged in these simon mud are the decaying
bodies of farm animals, poisoning the air with their stanch,
clearly showing that just because the flood itself was coming
to an end did not mean that all had returned
to normalcy. Indeed, as the refugees left, the horrors of
the red cross camps. They were now faced with the
daunting task of trying to clean up and rebuild. But
the first thing they had to do, just out of

(51:38):
pure necessity, was to plant crops, both to subsist off
of and to sell so they could get some money,
because again the vast majority of the flood victims received
a little to no relief. They then planted things like
all falfa, wheat, peas, and soybeans. Yet just as things
were starting to grow, the pendulum swung in the complete
opposite direction, as the flooded region now experienced a drought,

(52:00):
which in turn was followed by a plague of insects
and worms, with the drought having the effect of impeding
the growth of the crops and the insects and worms
effectively consuming much of what had managed to grow. Then,
if that wasn't enough, and early freeze also struck that year,
which cut off a chunk of the planta had managed
to survive that long. Ultimately, then just twenty to twenty
five percent of what had been planted actually made it

(52:21):
to harvest time, meaning they had lost seventy five to
eighty percent of their crops, with their soybeans in particular,
being almost completely wiped out. Meanwhile, as all this was
going on, tens of thousands of refugees were developing a
disease called polagra, a disease which first presents by making
it suffers weak and tired. Then, in some cases it
results in skin sores that form a thick black crust.

(52:45):
Pelager can also cause hallucinations, morose feelings, the sensation that
the victims had inspired, or on fire, and if left untreated,
can be deadly. Now, this disease is not caused by
a bacteria or even a virus, but is instead the
result of a poor diet, which meant that since many
had been subsisting office supplies provided by the Red Cross,

(53:05):
the Red Cross was responsible for their condition. May fact
that the organization very much trying to keep under ramps.
You can very much understand, then, given everything these people
had been through since the flooding started, that they just
had enough of the South and were ready to start
over someplace else, an attitude that w eb De Boys
very much supported in an editorial for the Nubacp's Crisis

(53:27):
that he had penned even before the publishing other investigation
of the camps. As he wrote, quote we hope that
every Negro that can escape from these safe camps guarded
by the National Guard and the National Red Cross, for
the benefit of the big planters of Mississippi and Louisiana
and the lyncherds of Arkansas, will leave this land of
deviltry at the first opportunity. Let them run, run, and

(53:48):
crawl out of this hell. Indeed, as he hints that
in that passage, it wasn't just a manner of forced
labor and substandard supplies, as when the flood started receding,
the region experience an extraordinary rational violence, violence which by
the way, was separate from the quote unquote legal violence
of the authorities using force of course black men to
work on the levees and elsewhere, as this was an

(54:09):
outbreak of mob violence aka lynchings. In Louisville, Mississippi, for example,
two black men accused of killing a white farmer were
arrested by the local sheriff, only for a mom to
quote unquote take them from police custody, at which point
the mom burned the two men at the stake. Meanwhile,
in Yazoo City, Mississippi, a black man who had been
accused of attacking a white girl vanished, only for his

(54:31):
body to be found hanging from a tree, reddle with bullets.
Then there was the black men in Little Rock who
had allegedly attacked two girls. This man, then, again, without
any kind of evidence or confirmation of his guilt, was
tied to a car and dragged through town during rush hour,
meaning they were not in the least trying to hide
what they were doing. In ded a dozen cars were
said to have fallen behind this horrifying scene, hugging their

(54:54):
horns in celebration before ultimately the man in question was
thrown onto a pyre and in cinner while the cops
washed on. For many then, the flood, the campsy virtual enslavement,
and now this was all too much. This was the
final straw, and they could not continue to live in
the South any longer. This notably included the black residents

(55:15):
of Greenville, which had once seemed to be a special place,
a place that was protected from the clan, a place
where they had and at least somewhat different relationship with
the city than most every other place in the South.
Yet now, following everything that had happened during the flood,
that was no longer the case. There was no sense
of community with the rest of the city, no sense
of loyalty, no sense that Greenville was home, and so

(55:37):
bit by bid, black individuals and whole families started packing
up and leaving. Indeed, he became kind of a weekly
ritual for Greenville's African American community to gather at the
train station at the end of every week to see
who was leaving this time, as basically, after working through
the week, a not insignificant amount of people would collect
their paycheck, leave and never come back. Now, to be clear,

(55:59):
prior to this, the flow of African Americans leaving the
South had been gradual. In fact, prior to the First
World War, the process had been very slow, as in
the first decade of the nineteen hundreds, some two hundred
thousand African Americans would lead the South. The First World
War then started the great migration in earnest as five
hundred and twenty two thousand left during the following decade,

(56:20):
with most doing so in just three years from nineteen
sixteen to nineteen nineteen. Things only ramped up from there
in the nineteen twenties and especially following the flood, as
some eight hundred and seventy two thousand African Americans left
and never came back. Now, for those making this move,
it was often quite the drastic change. Indeed, alay In Locke,
the so called Dean of the Harlem Renaissance, would say

(56:42):
this was not just a move from the quote countryside
to the city, but instead of a move from quote
medieval America to modern which when you think about it
isn't really all that much of an exaggeration, as they
were going from living in shacks on plantations, where the
most generous read of these situation was were being treated
like feudal serfs, to more alten than not moving to

(57:03):
major cities. Indeed, one of the most popular destinations for
Southern Blacks was Chicago, which can be seen in the
city census data as in nineteen ten it had a
black population of just forty four thousand, but by nineteen
twenty that had grown to over one hundred and nine thousand,
and it would more than double again come nineteen thirty,
as two hundred and thirty four thousand African Americans now

(57:26):
called the Windy City home. As they did the broad
Width and the Blues which then became entrench in Chicago,
and as it did, it started to change and develop
into a style which, while its roots were still in
the Delta, became its own thing in the meantime. One
of these standard bears of the classic blue style, Bessie Smith,
whose Backward Blues was the first blue song about the

(57:46):
flood to really strike a chord with the public, would
then follow up that success with another song titled Homeless Blues,
which in some ways quietly reflected the changing understanding of
the flood within the black community. Now keep in mind
should you go check Homeless Blues out for yourself. The song,
which was recorded in September nineteen twenty seven, is very
much in the quote unquote classic blues tradition, meaning that

(58:08):
it is a far cry from what most today would
consider to be the more traditional blue sound heard in
the Delta, or from various other country blues artists where
it's just voice and guitar instead. Bessie's a comedy by
a piano and an alto saxophone, which gives it more
of a feel of just a popular song of that
era than a blue song. Regardless, we set off by
setting the tone as she sings, quote own Mississippi River,

(58:30):
what a fix you left me in mud holes? Of
water clear up to my chin. In doing so, Bessie
is very much placing the initial cause of this hardship
on the river and the flooding, which is further emphasize
when she sings quote monpo got drowned Mississippi. You're inna blame.
As again we're met with the tragedy of this disaster,
and it's caused the Mississippi River itself. The song, though,

(58:52):
makes it clear that in many ways, the tragedy is
still ongoing, as the song's narrator sings, quote homeless, Yes,
I'm homeless, might as well be dead, with the loss
of their quote plain old two room shanty being an
example of how even when the waters received, the disaster
is not over, as ramchuckles it might have been. The
shanty was quote my home, sweet home. It is here

(59:14):
then that we get a quiet shift in the messaging,
because while the flood might have been to play for
much of this disaster, the fact that the character in
the song was quote hungry and disgusted no place to
lay my head was actually a reflection on other unspoken
factors that were keeping them in this terrible situation, which
is why Bessie sings quote wish it was an eagle,
but I'm just a plain black crow, with the color

(59:37):
and type of bird being no coincidence, as it was
a veiled reference to being black in the Jim Crow South,
as she is indicating that her blackness is now the
primary cause of her distress, which is why she then
sings quote I'm gonna flap my wings and leave here
and never come back no more, a sentiment that was
becoming increasingly popular among the African American community that had

(59:58):
been displaced by the flood and subsequently treated even worse
by local wet authorities and communities, which brings us back
to the song that first brought us down this path,
Memphis Many and Kansas Joe McCoy's When the Levee Breaks,
as even though led Zeppa would add the line about
going to Chicago, that very much fits with the growing
attitude of the time and the original song, which notably

(01:00:18):
contains the line quote when the levee breaks, crime won't
help you. Praying won't do no good. When the levee breaks, Mama,
you got to move, which again many ultimately did. Mass
The reality was for many African Americans, whether it was
their choice or not, their life in the South was over.
Moving on for many then was the only answer to
everything they had been through. After all, African Americans by

(01:00:41):
and large had not chosen to live where they had
near the River. They had only lived there because the
land was good for growing cotton, and had thus been
forced to resign their thanks of the plantation owners in
the Jim Crow system that had worked hand in hand
to ensure that they and their families would be tied
to that land. Increasingly, them, individuals and families took part
in the gray mind as he left the South it's

(01:01:02):
blatant in your face of racism, its casual violence, and
its manipultive sharecropping system behind to instead settle in northern cities, which,
while stolen, racist and where being black met you were
going to live a harder life. But he still found
it better than the places where they had come from.
That being said, those who settled in these northern environs
would still periodically visit the places where they and their

(01:01:23):
family had come from. There was, after all, still history there,
and they need to remember where they had come from
and the sacrifices they had made just to survive on
a daily basis. Meanwhile, the Levy's only posse, which had
ensured that this disaster was as massive and widespread as
it was, was now dead, as in nineteen twenty eight,
Congress passed a new flood Control Act that provided funding

(01:01:44):
for the construction of various outlets, so that when the
Mississippi flooded, the excess water would now have some place
to go, rather than just rising higher and higher until
it overflowed and drawn the surrounding countryside. The work of
this new Mississippi flood control project was then contracted out
to various local businessmen and planters, who, to ensure they
got the most profit possible, made tree to use black workers,

(01:02:06):
whom they could then take advantage of and thus pay
as little as possible. Indeed, those African Americans who were
unable to escape the perpetual cycle of dead that kept
them trapped as sharecroppers, now in the off season, just
to survive, found themselves working in the so called levee camps,
where the workers would rise around three in the morning
and begin their workday. Among these laborers was one Robert Brown,

(01:02:27):
who had been born on the fifteenth of July nineteen
ten and Walnut Ridge, Arkansas, Eventually, Robert, like many others,
would move to Chicago, where he started recording under the
pseudonym Washboard Sam for Bluebird Records. Burman to be the
half brother of Big Bill Brunsey. Among the songs that
Washboard Sam would record was one called Levee Camp Mown,
a strangely upbeat sounding song for one that would illustrate

(01:02:49):
these struggles of black levee workers with fines like quote,
I worked in a levee camp just about a month ago.
We supplied dogs eat beans both not and day, but
I never did know just when we were do our
pay little then a change for those who had been
unable to flee the region, ultimately the flooded labor For
all who were paying attention, the true nature of the

(01:03:10):
Southern system as became more obvious than ever before, how
much they wanted to recreate the old system of slavery
that had existed before the Civil War, and the extent
to which they were willing to go to preserve that
fasimile they had created. They had carefully crafted the sharecropping
system to keep their black labors tied to the land
and unable to escape. The fund, though had endangered that system,

(01:03:31):
and so they had done everything within their power to
prevent those same black labors that they sowed a tested
from leaving, as otherwise their entire system would collapse. Sadly, though,
things have changed little as inequality stole reigned supreme in
the South and throughout the entirety of the country. Indeed,
following Hurricane Katrina in two thousand and five, many a
blues and jazz singer in New Orleans revived those own

(01:03:53):
tunes from nineteen twenty seven, as once again a disaster
revealed the ugly truth of American inequality and race. Where
they already wealthy, were favored by the relief system, while
the means of those in the lower rungs of society
were seemingly ignored. As for the floods impact on the Blues,
in addition to the dozens of songs written about the
flood and its impact, it also served too quick in

(01:04:14):
the exodus from the South in the regions around the
Mississippi in particular, which was important for these spread of
the Blues, because wherever these people went they brought their
culture with them, with a part of that culture, of course,
being the Blues. It was and more than any other
regional style blues, the kind of dirty, grungy dounta blue
style that was then taken to the big city where
it got an ejection of electricity. So while the blues

(01:04:37):
in urban cities like Chicago and particular developed into its
own style, featuring electric guitars instead of acoustics, and even
featuring bands instead of lone singer guitars, it still had
its roots down in the Delta. It was also in
these urban centers like Chicago that the blues started its
road toward eventually becoming rock and roll. After all, many
a famous English classic rock band like The Who, the

(01:04:58):
Rolling Stones, led Zeppin and many other had their roots
in the American blues. Indeed, it's not a coincidence that
led Zeppelin would record a cover when the levy breaks.
The lasting legacy of the flood on the blues can
also be seen in the life and career of John
Lee Hooker, who has been called the last great Delta bluesman. Hooker,
you see, was born sometime around the twenty second of

(01:05:18):
August nineteen seventeen in Clarkstown, Mississippi. He was one of
eleven children, and as he grew up he would work
on a step father, William Morris farm, although to be clear,
William Moore did not only farm, as he, like most
other African Americans living in the Delta, was a sharecropper.
Hooker that was more influenced by the fact that his
stepfather was a local blues guitarist. Indeed, young John was

(01:05:40):
not exactly a fan of farm work as a child.
He then first learned how to play using his stepfather's guitar,
and when he got the chance, he would play in
local fish fries and dances. Yet with limited opportunities in
the area other than sharecropping, when John turned fourteen, he
ran away from home to go to Memphis looking for work.
Hooker then lived in Memphis for a couple of years
before moving on to Cincinnati, working a variety of jobs,

(01:06:03):
all the while he continually absorbed the unique blue stylings
of these locales. Eventually, though, John, like many other Southern blacks,
moved up north, settling in Detroit, where he found work
as a janitor in a steel mill, while he continued
to make music on the weekends, obviously finding an audience
there thanks to all the other African Americans who had
fled north over the years, Then, in nineteen forty eight,

(01:06:24):
Hooker got his break when a local black record store
owner introduced him to a record distributor who was so
impressed by John Lee Hooker that he helped him to
release Boogie Chillin'. This was Hooker's first record, and it
was enough of a success that he was able to
quit his job and focus on music full time. Now
over the years, John Lee Hooker style would range for
the more modern urban electric blues to the classic acoustic

(01:06:46):
country blues that he had initially grown up with, as
he worked both as a part of a band and
with other artists as was just a solo act with
just him his voice, his stomping feet, and his guitar.
It was then in nineteen fifty nine, during a period
when he was dipping into his classic roots, that John
Lee Hooker released his song Tupelow Blues, in which he
looked back at that climatic Mississippi flood some three decades later.

(01:07:10):
John you See had been just ten years old when
the flood had happened, but it had obviously loved a
strong mark on him, and so it is with this
last song about the flood, written decades later by the
last great Delta bluesman that I will bring this story,
at long last to a close. As for where we
go next, I think it's about time I take him
a lated look back at the one and only Ozzy Osbourne.

(01:07:31):
In doing so, I think I will be taking a
look at his first solo album, as I'm not really
at all familiar with his run as a solo artist.
But before doing that, though, I think I will be
taking a look at his final run with Black Sabbath,
another era that I'm not particularly familiar with either. So
this will likely end up being a bit of a
mini multi part series where I go over multiple albums

(01:07:52):
covering the end of the original Black Sabbath lineup and
the launch of Ozzie's solo career. However, like always, that
particular till will have to for now remain a story
for another time. Thank you for listening to Distorted History.
If you would like to help out, please rate and
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(01:08:14):
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(01:08:34):
as it's just a convenient place to go to access
that information regardless. Once again, thank you for listening and
until next time. Inval