When the Levee Breaks – Memphis Minnie and Kansas Joe McCoy (1929)
Natural disasters are never quite as natural as they seem at first glance.
Some, like the ongoing Canadian wildfires, are of course the product of human (and quite frequently industrial) activities. And what makes them disastrous is hardly foreordained by nature. The devastation and death these events wreak is often determined not by their force itself, but also the ability of human institutions to deliver relief, as well as decisions about who is worthy of that relief. Anyone familiar with the federal government’s pathetic response to Hurricane Katrina (or any number of other tropical storms) will readily understand these truths.
Disasters, as this week’s song suggests, can also leave a profound imprint on human culture.
When the Levee Breaks was written by Memphis Minnie and Kansas Joe McCoy in 1929. The song’s inspiration was the great Mississippi River flood of 1927, an event that is in some ways a mirror image of the drought that would lead to the Dust Bowl eight years later. It is also the source material for Led Zeppelin’s better known rendition. The latter version arguably does a better job conveying a sense of fear, pain, and hopelessness experienced by the victims of this flood in the Mississippi Delta, who could see the still rising river at the top of the strained levees surrounding their communities. But this song wasn’t just written in an atmosphere of fear, pain, and hopelessness. Behind it were social forces around class and race, by which some people with power tried to make sure fear, pain, and hopelessness are visited on those without power, rather than themselves. Because of that, Memphis Minnie and Kansas Joe deserve the Leader‘s “Song of the Week” honors. These accomplished blues musicians would have had first hand experience of the total social and psychological context of this event. It is also representative of one of many blues songs inspired by the flood.
While there are various geographical definitions of the Mississippi Delta, we’re referring to the region along the river from Memphis on south to the Gulf. In its natural state, it’s a jungle, and nature was always trying to reclaim it. Because of that, farming required a lot of investment, and a lot of labor to clear land and keep it cleared, which discouraged the sort of small farms that could develop in the Plains and the upper midwest. That is, it encouraged plantations. The only way to secure the money invested in a plantation was to secure the land from flooding, to keep the Mississippi River within its banks throughout its length, a massive public works project. Controlling the river could be done either by attempting to dominate the river, to force it down a channel via levees at times of high water, or it could be done by accommodating the river, providing a combination of levees along with outlets for the excess water at more benign points. While there were advocates for both strategies, by the early 20th century, the “levees only” solution won out. Levees were built all along the river, often as much as a couple miles back from the main river channel and dozens of feet high, behind which settlements and plantations grew.
The other part of the equation for extracting wealth from the Delta is lots and lots of labor. Maintaining levees, clearing land and keeping it clear, building railroads, working the agricultural land, all required labor, and that was primarily Black labor in the Delta, whether as slaves prior to Civil War, or as wage laborers and sharecroppers after. Efforts were made to attract immigrant labor specifically as sharecroppers, during the early twentieth century immigration boom. However, conditions for sharecroppers in the Delta were so bad that the Italian government advised against emigrating there, and the Austrian government forbade it.
Sharecropping could be little better than slavery. Sharecroppers would need to lease equipment and buy basic supplies like food, fertilizer, and seed on credit. An inadequate harvest and high interest rates could force the sharecropper into debt beyond one year, and tie them to the land and the landlord. Living quarters were shacks at best, and unsanitary. Landlords could even “buy” a sharecropper from another landlord by paying off the sharecropper’s debt and moving them over to work the buyer’s land.
If it keeps on rainin’, levee’s goin’ to break
If it keeps on rainin’, levee’s goin’ to break
In the summer of 1926 the first of many unusually heavy rainstorms hit in the central part of the country. On January 1, 1927, Cairo, Ill. went over flood stage, and the Cumberland River topped Nashville’s 56 ft. high levees. By February 13, New Orleans was at flood stage as was everywhere in between.
A major break in the levees, a crevasse, occurred on the morning of April 21 at Mounds Landing, Miss., about 12 miles north of Greenville, Miss., which was then a major river port. The river poured out through at a rate double that of Niagara Falls. The geography of inequality is such that the land the powerful occupy is always better situated. In the Delta, this means at a higher elevation. After the Mound Landing crevasse, that meant little. Land was flooded for many miles around. The only high land was the levees, and that’s where the residents of Greenville headed, along with refugees from the surrounding region, often with livestock in tow.
As noted, landowners, primarily white, depended heavily on Black labor, who were the majority of the total population in that area. This dependence wasn’t lost on anyone. It was only a question of how to control the situation. How do you keep labor, nominally free to leave, from doing just that? In Greenville, the solution was to treat Black laborers better than other places in Mississippi, at least relatively speaking. That veneer of civility peeled away in this crisis. By April 25, barges arrived to evacuate the refugees, but controversy arose concerning the evacuation of Black citizens. The bulk of them were sharecroppers who lost everything in the flood. The fear was they would never return. That labor power would be lost. In the end, barges with white women left. Black residents who had been loaded on separate barges were unloaded, and left nearly empty. That was just the beginning of their abuse.
And the water gonna come in, have no place to stay
People in general were allowed to stay in their homes if they thought they could make a go of it, but the homes of Black residents, being in the lowest lands or just bad quality sharecropper shacks, were mostly destroyed. 5,000 of them were put in warehouses and other buildings, and 13,000 continued to live on the levee camps. Worse, they were not allowed to leave those camps unless plantation owners, “desiring their labor [emphasis added] to be returned”, made an application for that. They were imprisoned there by the Mississippi National Guard. This was a general condition throughout Mississippi. Less than 55 years since emancipation, with slavery still in living memory, Black people once again were a captive labor force.
I works on the levee, mama both night and day
I works so hard, to keep the water away
In Greenville this captive labor was put to work keeping the refugees and the livestock supplied, cleaning out the mud, repairing the levees, etc. In May, as things seemed to be getting back to normal, the river started to rise again, and the levees still needed repair. Black residents, and only Black residents, including those still in their homes, were conscripted, forced into labor, their access to food and water conditioned on their willingness to work for it. The Black residents pushed back, but they could only go so far. In the end, the Black leaders of the city organized volunteers on condition that their white overseers didn’t carry guns.
While the flood waters were still rising further north, the citizens of New Orleans were feeling increasingly uneasy, a feeling exacerbated by a 15” rainfall on April 15. Officials at the U.S. Weather Bureau and various government civil engineers had mixed opinions on the adequacy of the levees for the water coming down the river, many feeling that levees upstream would fail, relieving pressure on the city levees. The wealthy and well connected were especially concerned that a major disaster, or even the perceived threat of one, could lead to the withdrawal of investments from the city. They needed to show the situation could be controlled.
A board of five unelected city power brokers (bankers and business leaders) presented a plan to Louisiana Governor Simpson, and then presented it in a meeting of 50 members of the city elite. This group agreed to the plan presented to them: blowing up levees downstream from New Orleans, which would flood St. Bernard and Plaquemine Parishes, an area populated by mostly poor white trappers and fishing communities, which would be wiped out. They did have a compensation plan: $150,000 total, about $20 per person. The citizens of the parishes to be sacrificed were naturally irate and forced a change. Instead of the original plan, a reparations committee was formed, consisting of four members from those parishes, three from New Orleans, and two appointed by Governor Simpson.
The Reparations Commission pledged complete recompense for the citizens of the downstream parishes. However, the two representatives of the commission appointed by Governor Simpson were citizens of New Orleans, giving the city control over it, and approval of reparation claims went through the New Orleans Levee Board, which was controlled by the people who came up with the plan to flood St. Bernard and Plaquemine Parishes in the first place. Total claims made eventually came to $35 million. $2.9 million was actually paid out. Of that, $1.5 million went to a single fur trapping company and $600,000 went to the Louisiana Southern Railroad. 2,809 claimants received the remaining $800,000 between them, and 1,024 got nothing.
It took until summer for the Mississippi River, 80 miles wide at the height of the flood, to recede back to its channel, and for things to start to get back to normal. Nevertheless, some things changed irrevocably. Black migration north had started early in the 20th century, but the flood greatly increased the pace. As John M. Barry said in his book Rising Tide, “the great flood of 1927 was hardly the only reason for Blacks to abandon their homes. But for tens of thousands…it was the final reason.” Greenville never recovered its status as a major Mississippi River port. In Louisiana, the trappers and fishing people in Plaquemines and St. Bernard Parishes got their revenge when Governor Simpson lost his election in 1928, replaced by the populist Huey Long, whose tenure marked a change in the power structure, at least temporarily, away from the power elite in New Orleans.
