Worst Than Katrina

As a lot of us know and were alive at the time, Katrina was one of the most devastating hurricanes to hit the US mainland. It made landfall on August 29, 2005. It killed over 1800 people, of which 93% were black. I was a young man back then.. well I was “young at heart.” Look I got my secrets too.. anyway… It was the most destructive natural disaster I had ever witness in my life and the news reports and video coming out of the “Boot,” filled me with a loathing for our government I had never felt before. Growing up as an African American in Washington DC, I knew of racism, after all this was Chocolate City, where Martin Luther King Jr brought tens of thousands to do battle with the denier’s of freedom, home of Jesse Jackson, the first black man considered a serious contender for the White House and the man who from the podium of the 1988 Democratic National Convention told us to “Keep hope alive!! Keep hope alive!!” I still feel emotional when I remember that black man up there… But as usual I’m getting off the subject.. back to my lane…

Growing up in a black city, racism was not as open as it was in the rest of the country. It was still there, but like they say nowadays, it was on the down low. Katrina changed that. Night after night there was news coverage of poor black people stranded on roofs where flood waters had surrounded them. Some had been there for days after the storm dissipated. The horror and inhumanity of the Super Dome, where people literally died while news crews were filming… all the while made so much worst while George Bush flew overhead on Marine One. While thousands perished and he didn’t have a clue. In my life time.. this was the one. But there was another one, far worst than Katrina…

On September 11, 2001, terrorist attacked the World Trade Center in Manhattan New York. It was the greatest lost of life on US soil by a foreign enemy government since the Civil War. That’s quite a statement.. right? But if you know whats good for you, don’t come for me. Anyway, the lost of life was staggering, an estimated 2996 people were killed, with another 6000 injured. Now what if I told you in 1928, at least three thousand African Americans were killed in the second deadliest storm on record. Okay, I am going to tell you.. An estimated 3000 African Americans were killed in 1928, in what historians call the “Great Okeechobee Hurricane.” But survivors, the black folks call it “The Storm Of 28.”

The reason the storm was so deadly, was that it struck during the migration of black labor to harvest the fields in Florida. Seventy five percent of those who were killed were African American. That’s right, out of all that died, 3000 were black. So you might ask, why am I equating a natural disaster and the death toll to racism? Well first, we all know a mere 60 years after the Civil War, some folks was still feeling some kinda way. Its not the natural disaster that has me using the “R” word. Its the aftermath. An eyewitness describes the chaos as “wiping out generations of families. The stench of death everywhere as body after body was pulled from the carnage. One day, three days, five days and they were still finding people. The number of dead became so great that they had nowhere to put them. In the staggering heat of Florida, the bodies began to decay and the health department ordered the immediate disposal of the health hazard. The whites which had died in the catastrophe had already been removed to be buried in the local cemeteries.

They started to burn the bodies, but they kept coming and coming. Men women and children, whose bloated bodies filled the area with the smells of despair and loss. Bringing tears to those survivors some 90 years later, remembering the day when the first 600 bodies where taken away and dumped into a mass grave. After if was all said and done more than 3000 would suffer the same fate. No headstones, no remembrance, no mourning, just a dark pit covered over with rock and dirt, where they would lay nameless and forgotten for all time until… The Storm of ’28 Memorial Park Coalition after fighting the city government for almost 10 years made the city of West Palm Beach create a memorial and fence around the mass grave. In 2003, the city placed a state historical marker at this location. So there it is… one of the greatest stories never told.

There are or were some survivors of the storm. On the 75th anniversary of the storm, the Sun Sentinel published a firsthand account by some of the survivors. You can read that article here.