They started to evacuate the city and they evacuated the whites, but the planters got together and decided that if they evacuated the black sharecroppers, the labor force for much of the Mississippi Delta would disappear and would never return, and so they decided to keep them on the top of the levee and formed a camp for them for - stretched about 11 miles; thousands of people, many animals, and these people became almost slave labor. One of the great ironies - the great irony of all that is that Greenville, Mississippi, before the flood was easily ... the best city in the South to be a black person. You know, the Greenville public schools actually - while other Mississippi counties seriously debated whether they wanted to teach African-Americans to read - in Greenville, African-Americans were being taught Latin. And that was because of the elite, aristocratic planter class, who did feel a certain noblesse oblige toward their sharecroppers, but they didn't let that interfere with a fairly ruthless sense of dollars. John Barry