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In the aftermath of Hurricane Betsy, Lucille Duminy made it to the American Red Cross office in New Orleans. When she finally reached the front of the line, she recalled, the woman at the desk asked her if she needed help. Duminy straightened her back and stared at the woman, incredulous: '"Could you repeat the question, please?'" So the agent asked again, "'Do you need assistance?"' Duminy believed the government had risked killing her and her family because they were black. She had barely slept in days. Her husband was in the hospital. She and her two children had nearly drowned. "'Miss, do you think I would waste my time coming over here to ask to get whatever you're going to give me?"' she asked. Duminy had been through hell and "was getting, what they say, pissed off." So she continued, "'Well, you know the Gulf of Mexico, ... do you see the water they have in there?"' '"Yes,"' the agent said. "'Well that's how much water we had,"' Duminy shouted. "'I could see just the tip, the roof of my house.' I said, 'That's all I could see. And you're asking me what I need? I need everything! I need a house and everything that goes in a house!' I said, 'I lost things that 1 can never replace.'"1
Lucille Duminy was desperate, and she was not alone. When Hurricane Betsy came down on Louisiana "like a 125-mile-per-hour sledgehammer" on September 9, 1965, the Industrial Canal levee broke-or perhaps, as Duminy suspected, was bombed-allowing an ocean of water to surge through New Orleans's Lower Ninth Ward. While much of the city escaped any terrible damage, in the Lower Ninth over six thousand houses flooded. Almost all of those houses belonged to African Americans.2 The water stood for more than a week, washing the smiles from photographs and disintegrating furniture, floors, and walls. The flood drowned at least sixty people in Louisiana, some in the attics of their own homes, houses that represented a hard-earned piece of the American Dream. Lucille Duminy and thousands of others did need help. This article is about the help that these New Orleanians did, and did not, receive in the course of what was called at the time "the...