Backwater Blues: The Mississippi Flood of 1927 in the African American Imagination

3 Racialized Charity and the Militarization of Flood Relief in Postwar America

3 Racialized Charity and the Militarization of Flood Relief in Postwar America In early June 1927, Neval H. Thomas, president of the Washington, D.C., chapter of the NAACP, addressed a large crowd of black Washingtonians at a local theater. He spoke at length about the 1927 flood and the responsibility of black Washingtonians to help members of the race during this disaster . Thomas also stressed the need to find a suitable method of sending charity down south that did not directly involve the American Red Cross. While the growing middle class of black Washingtonians had the potential to make a significant contribution to flood relief, Thomas remained adamant about the American Red Cross’s failure to treat black flood survivors as American citizens. Thomas addressed the audience with conviction: “This great organization [the NAACP] is ever on the ramparts in defense of your civil and political rights without which we are slaves, yet it stands for aid and succor to the victims of such an unparalleled affliction, not only at the hands of nature but by those who claim a mission of mercy.”1 Thomas’s words highlighted not only the exigencies of nature but also the culpability of humans during the relief process. Washingtonians should not fall into the trap of Red Cross solicitation in newspapers; to do so would victimize them along with black flood survivors in the Yazoo Delta. Instead, he told the crowd, “I am seeking out responsible Negro agencies in that state [Mississippi ] to which I shall send every dollar you contribute, which will assure you that it will reach the peon for whom you give it.”2 Thomas’s words hit an 75 76 racialized charity and militarization of relief important mark of race and charity in the 1920s, particularly the ways in which black Americans located outside the flooded region expressed reservations about the American Red Cross, pressing into service their own forms of benevolence. It is impossible to estimate how much of the money donated to the Red Cross came from black Americans; just as difficult would be defining the extent to which they circumvented the Red Cross as a rebuke. Both amount to finding needles in haystacks. The use of charity as a form of social control and exploitation of survivors after an environmental disaster is well documented .3 Fears of exploitation among those providing charity, in contrast, remains largely unexplored. The 1927 flood offers hints of an obscure history of race and charity ripe for future investigation. The Great Migration was not a “one-way ticket.” Between 1915 and 1970, close to 3.5 million African Americans migrated from the rural South to urbanized spaces. Southern landscapes were not simply places of birth, but also landscapes where ancestors rested and family members continued to live. In the years and decades after migrants left for the “Promised Land,” many would return to visit family; attend weddings; bury parents, grandparents , and siblings; and bring sometimes reluctant children reared in the North back to the place of their ancestral roots. It was a ritual practiced by countless black families. As much as parents would not tolerate living in constant fear of violence, death, and the shadow of sharecropping, and wanted to provide their children with better opportunities, they could not allow future generations to be unaware of previous sacrifices.4 Former migrants and native-born northerners were connected in other ways to southern landscapes. Those intimately familiar with the South had not forgotten the lynched and mutilated bodies of family and friends hanging from trees and dragged through town as a reminder for black people to stay in their place. Black women had not forgotten being raped by white men when working as cooks and domestics in white households.5 Black families, working as sharecroppers from sunup to sundown, had not forgotten how strong and sullen that mule could be or the sting of being cheated by unscrupulous landowners after a hard year’s labor. The reality of having to constantly say “yes sir” and “yes ma’am” to adult whites and children without reciprocity never left them. Southern migrants could not forget the subtle slights of having to step racialized charity and militarization of relief 77 off sidewalks for white people twenty or thirty years younger and the way it made their stomachs churn to have to do so.6 Migrants remembered the South with a conflicted identity, making...