NOLA Deja Vu

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From http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/04/13/reviews/970413.13watkint.html :

April 13, 1997

Boiling Over
By T. H. WATKINS

The 1927 Mississippi flood was a caldron of racism and greed
RISING TIDE
The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927
and How It Changed America.
By John M. Barry.
Illustrated. 524 pp. New York:
Simon & Schuster. $27.50.

(snip)

Near the end of John M. Barry's extraordinary history there is a kind of epiphany that is as dark as the gelatinous, stinking muck the Mississippi left behind after one of the most devastating floods in American history. For weeks, Will Percy of Greenville, Miss., the son of the Delta plantation owner and Southern entrepreneur-aristocrat LeRoy Percy and the future adoptive father of the writer Walker Percy, had floundered, frustrated by circumstances and his own incompetence as head of the Washington County Red Cross and chairman of a special flood relief committee. Black work gangs and their refugee families resented being held as virtual prisoners in dreadfully squalid ''concentration camps'' set up along miles of the Greenville levee. Water, food and medical supplies were inadequate. Percy's subordinates held him in contempt, and his equals, including his own father, undercut his authority and ignored his decisions.

(More at link above)