On September 16, 1928, a Category 4 hurricane with winds of 140 miles per hour tore through Palm Beach county Florida. The storm was the second deadliest tropical cyclone in the history of the United States; only six tropical cyclones developed during the season. The greatest hit areas were small farming communities. The hurricane destroyed a levee that protected the area. Most of the residents of these low-lying communities were #black migrant farm workers. When the levee was destroyed, water from Lake #Okeechobee rushed into these communities, killing thousands.
After the storm, the black survivors were treated horribly by whites. They were forced to recover all the bodies of those who were killed. Food was only provided to the blacks who worked, and if a black person was not helping to remove the bodies they were shot. Only the bodies of white storm victims were allowed to be buried in coffins in local cemeteries. Blacks were refused proper burials or coffins for black victims. The bodies of Black victims were stacked in piles by the side of roads and doused with fuel, and burned. The authorities then bulldozed the bodies of 674 black victims into a mass grave in West Palm Beach. The mass grave was never marked and the site was later sold for private industrial use; it was later used as a garbage dump, slaughterhouse, and a sewage treatment plant.
The city of West Palm Beach did not purchase the land until 2000. In 2008, on the 80th anniversary of the storm, a plaque and historical marker was erected at the mass grave site. The effects of the hurricane on black migrant workers was dramatized in Zora Neale Hurston’s novel Their Eyes Were Watching God.
source:
http://www.ibiblio.org/uncpress/hurricanes/sept28.html
http://racialinjustice.eji.org/timeline/1920s/
19 Comments
This is great information about the pathetic mentality of ignorant white people who showed disregard and disrespect for non-whites.
Every time I read about the HORRIBLE circumstances that my people endured while living in this country, there is always something new to learn. White people are barbaric, with no conscious.
Damn!!!!
And if you read Ms. Hurstons book or any historical account of what was going on during the days following the storm, you would understand that it was an emergency to bury the dead. Bodies were swollen to the size of cattle from laying in the Florida sun for days. Resources to the Glades were almost non existent. The water table was too high to bury the bodies in Belle Glade. Fear of spreading disease was high and something had to be done immediately. Many of the deceased were migrants and had no family to identify and remove them for proper burial. There is much more to this than what you have stated here. While I mourn the loss of all life and have great respect for burying the dead, it doesnt always happen the way we would like. Confederate soldiers were buried in mass graves by the union army but i guess you wouldn’t care about that.
Thank you Mary…well said
BS lady. the idea that Blacks were held at gun point by whites shows your ignorance. Like black people don’t know how to bury their bodies.
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