Hurricane Camille, 1969: Race, Rights, and Disaster Relief

• In Event: Environmental Justice Case Studies from the Past and Around the World

Abstract

Hurricane Camille, one of only three Category 5 hurricanes to strike the United States in the 20th century, hit the Mississippi Gulf Coast in August 1969, laying waste to a strip of coastline roughly 26 miles long. It killed 143 people in Mississippi before traveling inland and deluging a portion of central Virginia, where another 113 were killed in flash flooding. Camille caused nearly a billion 1969 dollars of property and infrastructure damage on the Mississippi coast, which had experienced sustained growth after World War Two, thanks to a booming tourist economy as well as federal investment in military and space program facilities in the region.

Camille’s aftermath opened a little-appreciated chapter of what now might be termed “environmental justice,” though that framework would have been unfamiliar to the storm’s victims. Camille in Mississippi was perceived to be largely a “white” storm – as Andrew Karhl has shown, African Americans had been systematically excluded and dispossessed of land directly on the beaches of the coast where Camille’s damage was most visible and intense, pushed to “back of town” in places like Biloxi, though still vulnerable to flooding near the bays and bayous of the Mississippi Coast. White victims were the focal point of relief efforts, and the needs of black victims were generally perceived to be less significant and a lower priority.

The neglect of black victims, along with the racial segregation of evacuee buses from the coast, led to protest by local activists and a high publicity investigation by the American Friends Service Committee that in turn produced Congressional hearings that led to the creation of a permanent set of federal programs for individual disaster victims, embedded in the Disaster Relief Act of 1970 – with the hope that federal policies would produce a more equitable disaster relief regime.

Author

• Andrew Morris, Union College, Schenectady, NY