https://archive.is/UvPzE
Workers Vanguard No. 868 14 April 2006
Black Oppression and the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927
Black people crying for help from rooftops; left to drown, starve or die of dehydration or from lack of medical care—the whole world saw the U.S. capitalist government’s murderous racist neglect in the social disaster that was Hurricane Katrina. Tens of thousands of people, most of them black, lost the little they had. The National Guard came not to provide relief but to criminalize the victims. At all levels, the government covered up the death toll and other evidence of its culpability.
And it had all happened before. John M. Barry’s Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997) tells the story of another historic natural disaster and the government’s cover-up, lies and neglect. Then as now, racist ruling-class callousness and violence sustained the U.S. capitalist order. The Great Mississippi Flood—actually a series of floods lasting several months—deluged 27,000 square miles in seven states. After months of torrential rain, levees burst from Illinois to Louisiana. An unknown number died—certainly in the thousands. Many were buried beneath tons of river mud or washed out into the Gulf of Mexico. Hundreds of thousands lost their homes; more than 325,000 people, most of them black, lived in Red Cross camps for as long as four months.
The unique race and class nexus of the United States spawned the 1927 flood disaster. The Civil War—the second American Revolution—had broken the chains of chattel slavery. But with the defeat of Reconstruction, the most egalitarian period in American history, the old planter aristocracy regained power. The black freedmen were politically disenfranchised, and a social order based on debt servitude—sharecropping—was established. In the Deep South of the 1920s, the machine age had scarcely touched cotton production. Jim Crow segregation, buttressed by the terror of lynch law and the Ku Klux Klan nightriders, enforced sharecropping peonage under the wealthy Bourbon planters. The spirit of white supremacy infected the whole country. The degradation of Southern black labor served to drive down wages for all workers, while the poison of race-hate retarded the development of working-class consciousness North and South.
Control of the wild waters of the Mississippi is key to the Gulf ports of Louisiana and to commercial river traffic. The ri
... keep reading on reddit ➡
https://archive.is/UvPzE
Workers Vanguard No. 868 14 April 2006
Black Oppression and the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927
Black people crying for help from rooftops; left to drown, starve or die of dehydration or from lack of medical care—the whole world saw the U.S. capitalist government’s murderous racist neglect in the social disaster that was Hurricane Katrina. Tens of thousands of people, most of them black, lost the little they had. The National Guard came not to provide relief but to criminalize the victims. At all levels, the government covered up the death toll and other evidence of its culpability.
And it had all happened before. John M. Barry’s Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997) tells the story of another historic natural disaster and the government’s cover-up, lies and neglect. Then as now, racist ruling-class callousness and violence sustained the U.S. capitalist order. The Great Mississippi Flood—actually a series of floods lasting several months—deluged 27,000 square miles in seven states. After months of torrential rain, levees burst from Illinois to Louisiana. An unknown number died—certainly in the thousands. Many were buried beneath tons of river mud or washed out into the Gulf of Mexico. Hundreds of thousands lost their homes; more than 325,000 people, most of them black, lived in Red Cross camps for as long as four months.
The unique race and class nexus of the United States spawned the 1927 flood disaster. The Civil War—the second American Revolution—had broken the chains of chattel slavery. But with the defeat of Reconstruction, the most egalitarian period in American history, the old planter aristocracy regained power. The black freedmen were politically disenfranchised, and a social order based on debt servitude—sharecropping—was established. In the Deep South of the 1920s, the machine age had scarcely touched cotton production. Jim Crow segregation, buttressed by the terror of lynch law and the Ku Klux Klan nightriders, enforced sharecropping peonage under the wealthy Bourbon planters. The spirit of white supremacy infected the whole country. The degradation of Southern black labor served to drive down wages for all workers, while the poison of race-hate retarded the development of working-class consciousness North and South.
Control of the wild waters of the Mississippi is key to the Gulf ports of Louisiana and to commercial river traffic. The ri
... keep reading on reddit ➡https://archive.is/UvPzE
Workers Vanguard No. 868 14 April 2006
Black Oppression and the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927
Black people crying for help from rooftops; left to drown, starve or die of dehydration or from lack of medical care—the whole world saw the U.S. capitalist government’s murderous racist neglect in the social disaster that was Hurricane Katrina. Tens of thousands of people, most of them black, lost the little they had. The National Guard came not to provide relief but to criminalize the victims. At all levels, the government covered up the death toll and other evidence of its culpability.
And it had all happened before. John M. Barry’s Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997) tells the story of another historic natural disaster and the government’s cover-up, lies and neglect. Then as now, racist ruling-class callousness and violence sustained the U.S. capitalist order. The Great Mississippi Flood—actually a series of floods lasting several months—deluged 27,000 square miles in seven states. After months of torrential rain, levees burst from Illinois to Louisiana. An unknown number died—certainly in the thousands. Many were buried beneath tons of river mud or washed out into the Gulf of Mexico. Hundreds of thousands lost their homes; more than 325,000 people, most of them black, lived in Red Cross camps for as long as four months.
The unique race and class nexus of the United States spawned the 1927 flood disaster. The Civil War—the second American Revolution—had broken the chains of chattel slavery. But with the defeat of Reconstruction, the most egalitarian period in American history, the old planter aristocracy regained power. The black freedmen were politically disenfranchised, and a social order based on debt servitude—sharecropping—was established. In the Deep South of the 1920s, the machine age had scarcely touched cotton production. Jim Crow segregation, buttressed by the terror of lynch law and the Ku Klux Klan nightriders, enforced sharecropping peonage under the wealthy Bourbon planters. The spirit of white supremacy infected the whole country. The degradation of Southern black labor served to drive down wages for all workers, while the poison of race-hate retarded the development of working-class consciousness North and South.
Control of the wild waters of the Mississippi is key to the Gulf ports of Louisiana and to commercial river traffic. The ri
... keep reading on reddit ➡https://archive.is/UvPzE
Workers Vanguard No. 868 14 April 2006
Black Oppression and the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927
Black people crying for help from rooftops; left to drown, starve or die of dehydration or from lack of medical care—the whole world saw the U.S. capitalist government’s murderous racist neglect in the social disaster that was Hurricane Katrina. Tens of thousands of people, most of them black, lost the little they had. The National Guard came not to provide relief but to criminalize the victims. At all levels, the government covered up the death toll and other evidence of its culpability.
And it had all happened before. John M. Barry’s Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997) tells the story of another historic natural disaster and the government’s cover-up, lies and neglect. Then as now, racist ruling-class callousness and violence sustained the U.S. capitalist order. The Great Mississippi Flood—actually a series of floods lasting several months—deluged 27,000 square miles in seven states. After months of torrential rain, levees burst from Illinois to Louisiana. An unknown number died—certainly in the thousands. Many were buried beneath tons of river mud or washed out into the Gulf of Mexico. Hundreds of thousands lost their homes; more than 325,000 people, most of them black, lived in Red Cross camps for as long as four months.
The unique race and class nexus of the United States spawned the 1927 flood disaster. The Civil War—the second American Revolution—had broken the chains of chattel slavery. But with the defeat of Reconstruction, the most egalitarian period in American history, the old planter aristocracy regained power. The black freedmen were politically disenfranchised, and a social order based on debt servitude—sharecropping—was established. In the Deep South of the 1920s, the machine age had scarcely touched cotton production. Jim Crow segregation, buttressed by the terror of lynch law and the Ku Klux Klan nightriders, enforced sharecropping peonage under the wealthy Bourbon planters. The spirit of white supremacy infected the whole country. The degradation of Southern black labor served to drive down wages for all workers, while the poison of race-hate retarded the development of working-class consciousness North and South.
Control of the wild waters of the Mississippi is key to the Gulf ports of Louisiana and to commercial river traffic. The r
... keep reading on reddit ➡https://archive.is/UvPzE
Workers Vanguard No. 868 14 April 2006
Black Oppression and the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927
Black people crying for help from rooftops; left to drown, starve or die of dehydration or from lack of medical care—the whole world saw the U.S. capitalist government’s murderous racist neglect in the social disaster that was Hurricane Katrina. Tens of thousands of people, most of them black, lost the little they had. The National Guard came not to provide relief but to criminalize the victims. At all levels, the government covered up the death toll and other evidence of its culpability.
And it had all happened before. John M. Barry’s Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997) tells the story of another historic natural disaster and the government’s cover-up, lies and neglect. Then as now, racist ruling-class callousness and violence sustained the U.S. capitalist order. The Great Mississippi Flood—actually a series of floods lasting several months—deluged 27,000 square miles in seven states. After months of torrential rain, levees burst from Illinois to Louisiana. An unknown number died—certainly in the thousands. Many were buried beneath tons of river mud or washed out into the Gulf of Mexico. Hundreds of thousands lost their homes; more than 325,000 people, most of them black, lived in Red Cross camps for as long as four months.
The unique race and class nexus of the United States spawned the 1927 flood disaster. The Civil War—the second American Revolution—had broken the chains of chattel slavery. But with the defeat of Reconstruction, the most egalitarian period in American history, the old planter aristocracy regained power. The black freedmen were politically disenfranchised, and a social order based on debt servitude—sharecropping—was established. In the Deep South of the 1920s, the machine age had scarcely touched cotton production. Jim Crow segregation, buttressed by the terror of lynch law and the Ku Klux Klan nightriders, enforced sharecropping peonage under the wealthy Bourbon planters. The spirit of white supremacy infected the whole country. The degradation of Southern black labor served to drive down wages for all workers, while the poison of race-hate retarded the development of working-class consciousness North and South.
Control of the wild waters of the Mississippi is key to the Gulf ports of Louisiana and to commercial river traffic. The ri
... keep reading on reddit ➡