In December 2005, just four months after the levees failed in New Orleans, Dyan French “Mama D” Cole took her seat before a congressional panel and told the representatives that there had been a bomb.
“I was on my front porch,” she said. “I have witnesses that they bombed the walls of the levee. Boom! Boom! Mister, I’ll never forget it.” She added, a few moments later, “Debris that is in front of my door will testify to that. So what do we mean,” she asked, “when we say the levee was ‘breached’?”
French was a beloved and well-known New Orleans community activist, and at her appearance before Congress she was a fearsome vision in purple: a deep eggplant sweater, a lavender scarf wrapped around her waist-length graying dreadlocks, and, as the hearing wore on, a look of quiet contempt for Republican Christopher Shays, who didn’t appear to believe her.
“I don’t want to be offensive when you’ve gone through such incredible challenges,” Shays told French and a group of other black New Orleans residents who had come to testify on the government’s response to Hurricane Katrina. With his face pinkening to match his pink shirt, he did, in fact, sound pretty condescending. Referring to claims the panelists were making about the events following the storm, he declared, “I just frankly don’t believe it.” Mama D’s expression was stony.
Right up until her death in 2017, at age seventy-two, Mama D insisted that the levees had been deliberately bombed as Katrina raged. While there’s no evidence that the levee was bombed, and far more persuasive proof that it failed to hold at a number of different points, the bombing theory has retained currency in parts of black America. The idea is rooted in two things: an infamous 1927 decision in New Orleans to dynamite the levees; and a long-standing, multipronged suspicion that the federal government has engaged in depopulation schemes aimed at black citizens. In a TV interview a couple of years after Katrina, filmmaker Spike Lee said plainly, “I don’t find it too farfetched that they tried to displace all the black people out of New Orleans.”
Some people who propagated the levee-bombing theory explicitly cited the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, when levees were blown up—but to save New Orleans, not to drown it. As the flood threatened the city, local leaders decided to take drastic action: to relieve the threat of a levee break within the city proper, engineers used several tons of dynamite to destroy the Mississippi River levee in the unincorporated community of Caernarvon, Louisiana. They promised to reimburse the people in the region who would lose their homes.
The explosion sent the floodwaters surging across the lower St. Bernard and Plaquemines Parishes, where thousands of poor black people lived, many of them sharecroppers eking out a subsistence living. As predicted, their homes and everything they had managed to scrape together were washed away. Blues legend Charley Patton captured what happened next in “High Water Everywhere, Part 1,” recorded in 1929:
I would go to the hill country / But they got me barred.
Dr. Luther Brown, retired founding director of the Delta Center for Culture and Learning at Delta State University in Mississippi, explained to NPR that Patton was referring to the segregation laws of the time: “He’d like to get out of the Delta and find higher ground, but he’s not allowed to.” While white citizens were free to seek safety, black families huddled together as the storm drew closer:
Backwater at Blytheville, backed up all around
Backwater at Blytheville, done struck Joiner town
It was fifty families and children. Tough luck, they can drown
More than half a million people living along the lower Mississippi were left homeless. While many, often white, families began to rebuild or moved into indoor relief camps, black families found themselves crowded into desolate outdoor camps, often with inadequate food and shelter. According to the Colored Advisory Commission, many black displaced people said they were prevented from leaving the camps by armed members of the National Guard, something that didn’t happen at the camps for white familes. In other cases, homelessness and hopelessness forced people to leave the region entirely. The Great Mississippi Flood triggered one of the largest mass migrations in U.S. history and is cited in scores of blues songs. Across the region, between two hundred fifty and one thousand people are estimated to have died in the flooding; we don’t know how many of them were put in harm’s way by the decision to dynamite the levee at Caernarvon. One prominent black businessman, Sidney Dillon Redmond, later complained in a letter to President Calvin Coolidge that black workers were forced at gunpoint to keep working atop the levee, even as white people and mules began to be evacuated.
The Great Mississippi Flood lives vividly in the collective memory of the region: in 1965, during Hurricane Betsy, when the levees were breached by storm waters surging into Lake Pontchartrain, some New Orleans residents again felt certain that city leaders had blown the levees to save the wealthier parts of town. Then, too, according to local lore, survivors said they heard explosions that sounded like dynamite. In 2006, New Orleans rapper Lil Wayne released “Georgia … Bush,” a song in which he made the suspicion plain:
I know some folk that live by the levee
That keep on telling me they heard explosions
Same shit happened back in Hurricane Betsy
It was natural that in the aftermath of Katrina, the past would come to mind, especially for people who felt sure they had heard the sound of an explosion. History repeated itself in the most traumatic ways: even the desolate relief camps of the Great Mississippi Flood were echoed during Katrina at the Morial Convention Center and the Superdome, which in the days following the storm were notoriously overcrowded, poorly staffed, and squalid, with substandard sanitation and medical care. New Orleans resident Leah Hodges told the House Committee that her family was taken to a camp that was even worse.
“We were dropped off at a site where we were fenced in and penned in with military vehicles,” she testified. “The armed military personnel brought in dogs. There we were subjected to conditions only comparable to a concentration camp.” Hodges added, “People died in the camp. We saw the bodies lying there. They were all about detention, as if it were Iraq, like we were foreigners and they were fighting a war. They implemented warlike conditions. They treated us worse than prisoners of war. Even prisoners of war have rights under the Geneva Convention.”
And then there is the uncomfortable fact that after the storm, people from historically black neighborhoods were indeed displaced. Post-Katrina New Orleans was rebuilt with a focus on the wealthier, whiter areas. An Army Corps of Engineers map showed that only twelve out of twenty-eight flood-prone (mostly black, mostly poor) neighborhoods were less likely to flood than they had been before the storm. Public housing, which served a lower-income, predominantly black population, was, in several neighborhoods, not reopened even after being declared safe.
“There is a real question of equity and justice in terms of what neighborhoods are being assisted,” William P. Quigley, a civil rights activist and law professor at Loyola University of New Orleans, told the Chicago Tribune. “There is a sense that by their actions, our public officials are indicating that some people are more welcome back to New Orleans than others.”
The attention to conspiracy theories and their impact tends to focus on those believed by mostly white Americans: Pizzagate, for example, is a very white phenomenon, as is birtherism and the claim that climate change is a hoax. The most visible aspects of conspiracy culture can seem overwhelmingly white: people like Alex Jones and Glenn Beck, or sites like Drudge Report and WorldNetDaily, don’t explicitly appeal to white audiences. But their fulminations about “thugs” or President Obama or organizations like Black Lives Matter (Jones has said the activist group is designed to “destroy America”) make it difficult to imagine black Americans feeling welcome.
Yet a variety of studies going back decades show that in the past, at least, conspiratorial beliefs were slightly more common among black and, to a lesser extent, Latinx communities. In 1994, Rutgers sociology professor Ted Goertzel wrote that “minority status” was strongly correlated with a belief in conspiracy theories. So was what he called “anomia,” a belief in the breakdown of the social order, characterized by three attitudes: “The belief that the situation of the average person is getting worse, that it is hardly fair to bring a child into today’s world, and that most public officials are not interested in the average man.”
Goertzel found that black and Latinx people were more likely to display anomia and what he called “low levels of interpersonal trust,” which are positive indicators of a belief in conspiracy theories; so was answering affirmatively to the question, “Thinking about the next 12 months, how likely do you think it is that you will lose your job or be laid off?” That pattern has more or less held true. “In relation to whites,” Uscinski and Parent wrote in 2014, “being black or Hispanic is a significant and positive predictor of conspiratorial predispositions when accounting for level of educational attainment and family income.”
Uscinski and Parent have also argued that conspiracy theories are for “losers,” meaning they are coping mechanisms to deal with perceived threats that “tend to resonate when groups are suffering from loss, weakness or disunity.” Thus it would make sense that marginalized ethnic or religious groups would be predisposed to conspiracy thinking: their experiences of the social order make them more inclined to see conspiracies as possible.
But Uscinski and Parent claimed that the predisposition among African Americans seems to have faded over time. “We find that older blacks are more conspiratorial than younger blacks, presumably because they experienced more discrimination and were socialized by parents who experienced more discrimination,” they wrote in 2011. “With the election of Barack Obama and the other strides blacks have made up the social ladder, we expect blacks to become less conspiratorial over time as they gain power.” But that logic is, frankly, naive: it relied on the assumption that American society was steadily becoming more just and that young black and brown people would naturally face less discrimination and institutional injustice than their parents and grandparents.
Richard Hofstadter was inclined to pathologize conspiracy thinking: he talked about the “paranoid style” as a fundamental sickness of the mind. It was distinguished from the paranoia of individuals—“a chronic mental disorder characterized by systematized delusions of persecution and of one’s own greatness”—but only by degree. The spokesman for the paranoid style, he wrote, sees not himself as under attack, “but a nation, a culture, a way of life whose fate affects not himself alone but millions of others.”
But Hofstadter never quite reckoned with groups of people who have well-founded grounds for mistrust, even as he recognized America’s tendency to demonize and scapegoat Jews, Catholics, Masons, and “Negroes.” There’s often (though not always) some relationship in America between conspiracy theory and actual conspiracy, between the shadows on the cave wall and the shape of the thing itself. But that relationship tends to be more direct where black America is concerned. Like many conspiracies particular to black Americans, the levee-bombing idea has its roots in generations of genuine injustice, cover-ups, and human rights abuses so horrific the wounds are still open generations later.
We have only to look at the early 1960s, when Hofstadter himself was writing, for proof. We now know that the federal government plotted to undermine its own citizens, with the FBI secretly plotting against black activists, fearful of the political and social power those groups could amass if left unchecked. In 1964, Martin Luther King, Jr., received an anonymous letter that called him evil, abnormal, and an animal, and threatened to expose his sexual affairs.
“There is only one thing left for you to do,” the letter read. “You know what it is. You have just 34 days in which to do it (this exact number has been selected for a specific reason, it has definite practical significance). You are done.” He was warned: “There is but one way out for you. You better take it before your filthy abnormal fraudulent self is bared to the nation.”
King understood that the letter was urging him to commit suicide. He quietly told his friends and advisors that he believed it had been sent by the FBI at the direction of J. Edgar Hoover. King was right: in the 1970s, evidence suggested that the agency was behind the letter, and in 2014, reporter Beverly Gage found a copy, “a full, uncensored version,” she wrote, tucked away in Hoover’s official and confidential files at the National Archives.
King was far from the FBI’s only target during the civil rights era. As the Black Panthers rose to prominence in the 1970s, the agency used disinformation, plants, and informants to create division within the group and with other activist organizations such as the Young Lords, with whom the Panthers had begun to form an alliance. In March 1971, the FBI’s outrages were exposed by a group of burglars who broke into an agency field office in Pennsylvania, where they found proof that the Panther operation was part of what the FBI dubbed COINTELPRO (Counterintelligence Program), a grim and extensive campaign to sow distrust among activist groups and undermine civil rights leaders, political organizers, and suspected Communists. The burglars also found proof there that the King letter was written by the FBI.
Additionally, the FBI used paid informants to infiltrate the American Indian Movement throughout the 1970s. The AIM accused the FBI of using agents provocateurs to disrupt the movement, fomenting violence and division and suggesting illegal activities—that was one of the hallmarks of COINTELPRO. And in 2012, in an interview on National Public Radio, AIM member Milo Yellowhair talked about the movement’s suspicions that the feds were behind a string of deaths on the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota throughout the 1970s and his belief that during that time they had worked with the tribal police to assault, murder, and disappear activists. “There had been a tremendous amount of carnage on the reservation … it was almost a daily occurrence, when people were disappearing or died or were found dead,” Yellowhair said. “We always called it a ‘reign of terror.’” (The FBI denied any role in the deaths, many of which remain officially unsolved. One, the execution-style shooting of Anna Mae Pictou Aquash, a thirty-year-old AIM leader, was eventually semi-solved when two AIM members were convicted of her murder. Arlo Looking Cloud confessed to the crime, while John Graham maintained his innocence and tried unsuccessfully to appeal his conviction.)
A Senate investigation in the mid-1970s revealed more information about COINTELPRO’s activities and generated fairly widespread public fury. According to the FBI, everything changed after that. In 2014, the agency told the New York Times that such mass surveillance and interference with the lives and civil liberties of activist groups wouldn’t happen today. The exposure of COINTELPRO, a spokesperson told the paper, “contributed to changes to how the F.B.I. identified and addressed domestic security threats, leading to reform of the F.B.I.’s intelligence policies and practices and the creation of investigative guidelines by the Department of Justice.”
Not that many changes, though: in 2010, the Department of Justice’s Office of the Inspector General released a report revealing FBI investigations into several activist groups initiated on “factually weak” grounds. The groups included PETA, the Thomas Merton Center in Pittsburgh (a social justice hub), Greenpeace, the Catholic Worker Movement (a long-standing pacifist organization), and a Quaker peace activist named Glen Milner. The investigations were tagged as domestic terror probes, even when the supposed crimes were on the lines of trespassing or vandalism. This meant that people were improperly placed on terror watchlists for doing things like participating in First Amendment–protected antiwar protests. To investigate a 2002 antiwar rally organized by the Thomas Merton Center, the FBI had claimed it had evidence of a possible terrorism link. The OIG report derided the surveillance as “an ill-conceived project on a slow work day.” And in 2013, Edward Snowden’s revelations of the National Security Agency’s warrantless wiretapping of American citizens were seen by many as yet more proof that state institutions were not to be trusted.
Under the guise of national security, the FBI and other agencies also made a point of targeting Muslims, among other minorities. Consider the way the government responded to Black Lives Matter and Native-led environmental activism, such as the opposition to building the Dakota Access Pipeline through the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation. The movement at Standing Rock was allegedly infiltrated by private security contractors from a company called TigerSwan, according to reporting from The Intercept; those contractors were hired by Energy Transfer Partners, the company building the pipeline, to gather information on the water protectors that would later be used to file a lawsuit accusing activist groups of conspiracy. The TigerSwan contractors also passed information on the protesters to state, local, and federal law enforcement agencies, including collecting photo and video evidence intended to be used in future prosecutions. A constellation of other federal agencies were, at the very least, monitoring the Standing Rock demonstrations and gathering information on the water protectors from social media, including the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, the Justice Department, the Marshals Service, and the Bureau of Indian Affairs.