(CIVIL RIGHTS MIGRATION) Refugees of the Great Flood of 192

Sale 2342 - Lot 250

Price Realized: $ 750

?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price

Estimate: $ 800 - $ 1,200

(CIVIL RIGHTS--MIGRATION.) Refugees of the Great Flood of 1927 at Cleveland and Rolling Fork Mississippi. Two 8 x 10 silver print photographs, linen backed. Mississippi, Late April, early May, 1927 * [together with] three original 8 x 10 press photographs from the same flood; one showing a huge number of refugees waiting by a steamboat, and the other showing farmers, fleeing in an old truck. The steamboat photo has a small chip to the upper left corner, not affecting the image. Vp, 1927

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In the late summer of 1926, heavy rains pummeled the central basin of the Mississippi. On April 15, 1927, 15 inches of rain fell in an 18 hour period, dumping more than four feet of water into the already saturated City of New Orleans. A group of bankers and businessmen met and decided, in order to protect the wealthier sections of the city, they would set off 30 tons of dynamite and blow the levees protecting the parishes of Plaquemines and St Bernard. This all but destroyed the already impoverished black communities of the city. To add insult to injury, city and state officials forced black men to build levees at gunpoint while people in their own parishes starved. A black man was shot for refusing to unload a relief boat. Thousands of displaced people spent months starving in tent camps, while whites received aid. This was the essential 'last straw.' Tens of thousands of blacks moved to the big cities of the North, especially Chicago, and over the next decades thousands more followed in the 'Great Migration.'