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The flood’s most dramatic moment occurred on April 29, when authorities—hoping to protect New Orleans—dynamited the levee 13 miles below the Crescent City at Caernarvon in order to flood the relatively less populated Acadian region of St. Bernard and Plaquemines parishes. The black-and-white photograph of the blast, with earthworks catapulted skyward, looks like a scene from the Great War in Europe.

Without trees, grasses, deep roots, and wetlands, the denuded soil of the watershed could not do its ancient work of absorbing and stalling water after seasons of intense snow and rain.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/devastating-mississippi-river-flood-uprooted-americas-faith-progress-180962856/

Effects on African Americans and poorer people:

The Great Mississippi River Flood disproportionately impacted African Americans, like many other floods in U.S. history. It is estimated that of those who lost their homes, more than half a million were black. Hundreds of thousands of African Americans were displaced from their communities and workplaces.

The railroads and plantations affected by the flood feared their laborers, who lost everything when forced from their homes, would never return. In the Delta lowlands, African American families made up 75% of the population and supplied 95% of the agricultural labor force. Many of these laborers were trapped in situations far worse than sharecropping, stuck in a system that bound them perpetually to the plantations.

The federal government didn’t contribute a dime of direct aid to the thousands of flood victims, despite a record budget surplus. The Red Cross established racially segregated camps in the flood zones. Black families lived in floorless tents in the mud without cots, chairs or utensils, eating inferior rationed food. Sometimes forced to work on the levees without pay, black men had to wear tags identifying that they were laborers in order to receive rations, and to show which plantation they “belonged to.” Women with no working husband did not get supplies unless they had a letter from a white man.