Race, Rights and Disaster Relief: Hurricane Camille, Mississippi, and the Transformation of American Disaster Policy

FAIN: FT-230041-15

Andrew James Francis Morris
Trustees of Union College (Schenectady, NY 12308-3256)

Summer research and writing on American Government, Political and U.S. History.

Race, Rights, and Disaster Relief: Hurricane Camille, Mississippi, and the Transformation of American Disaster Policy argues that Hurricane Camille, which devastated the Mississippi Gulf Coast in the summer of 1969, was a decisive turning point in the history of disaster relief in contemporary America. The sheer scale of destruction as well as racial inequities in the subsequent relief programs of the Red Cross and the State of Mississippi, opened a political window for the nationalization of disaster relief. Told through archival research and the experiences of survivors, policymakers, civil rights activists and others, and contextualized in the broader history of disaster relief policy, the Nixon Administration, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast, the project offers the first comprehensive history of this watershed period for disaster relief in the modern United States and offers insights to the dynamics that would play out in Louisiana following Hurricane Katrina in 2005.