Life, Death, and Race in 1920s Miami

To understand how the 1926 hurricane affected different groups, it is necessary to first gain an overview of Miami’s unique social history. While most eastern U.S. cities developed slowly around commerce and industry, Miami was hacked quickly out of Florida’s coastal wilderness in 1896. That year, Florida developer Henry Flagler completed the extension of his Florida East Coast Railway to Biscayne Bay, a sparsely inhabited coastal area near the state’s southern tip. The next year, Flagler’s workers completed his Royal Palm Hotel on this site, which overlooked a vast green expanse of Everglades swampland to the west.

Over the next twenty years, a “porously” segregated frontier town grew up around tourism and commerce with the Caribbean, historian Nathan Connolly has noted. Although Flagler directed his white workers to live on the eastern (coastal) side of the railroad track and black workers on the western (inland) side, whites and blacks worked side by side clearing land and erecting structures, and sometimes interacted socially. Black men from the Bahamas, who were accustomed to unrelenting heat, humidity, and tropical diseases, and knew how to clear away tropical trees that “would break the edge of an axe,” were instrumental in building the city. African Americans, along with Haitians, Jamaicans, and others, also fled plantations for the relatively freer life on this southern frontier. The black community comprised between 30 percent and 40 percent of early Miami’s population, and when residents met to vote on the Miami charter, nearly a third of the voting members were black men.^{Footnote 8} Italian, Greek, Russian Jewish, and Chinese immigrants also came to Miami in the early decades to find work and open businesses. Cubans, however, did not become a dominant presence in the city until much later in the century.^{Footnote 9}

During this early period, black real estate entrepreneurs built shotgun-style rental homes for black workers west of the railroad track, while others opened businesses nearby. This soon-bustling area became known as “Colored Town.” Many Bahamian blacks settled in another area, Coconut Grove, where they built a cluster of Bahamian-style homes on stilts that adjoined the white Bahamian settlement. Other black residents moved north and west of Colored Town to settle areas such as Liberty City. In later years, black settlers and migrant workers also moved into the Everglades, where state engineers oversaw the bulldozing and filling of wetlands to make farming possible on the rich black “muck”—soil that never dried out.^{Footnote 10}

Following World War I, Miami underwent a rapid transformation. Real estate developers bought large tracts of undeveloped land, built planned communities, and began promoting the city as a tropical paradise for affluent northern whites. Miami mushroomed in population, from thirty thousand in 1921 to one hundred and thirty thousand in 1925. Thousands more settled in new municipalities being incorporated in surrounding Dade County. Between 1925 and 1926, the city again doubled in population as a real estate speculation boom spun toward a frenzied climax.^{Footnote 11}

As developers lured buyers to their subdivisions, they began enforcing racial segregation with a strong hand. The lush new town of Coral Gables restricted property sales and hotel patronage to a non-Jewish, white clientele. Miami Beach, a new municipality comprised of barrier islands that had been cleared and filled by a largely black labor force, restricted Jews to living and operating business on its southernmost tip, and barred blacks from visiting its beaches, resort hotels, and homes, except to work in building or service positions.^{Footnote 12} Other settlements such as Hialeah, a town on the western edge of the city with homes, nightclubs, and a famed horse-race track, restricted black residents to a small, flood-prone area. Black labor was needed in most outlying areas for building and service occupations, while public transportation remained nearly nonexistent, so many newly settled suburbs also included small black residential districts.

None of these racial restrictions was mandated by law, but business interests, the all-white police department, and white vigilantes kept them in full force. As Connolly has noted, Miami’s developers sought to construct a fantasy world for white visitors in which they could indulge their delusions of racial superiority. White visitors to the beachfront could “shore up their fragile sense of racial self” by enjoying “the privilege of riding in what was colloquially known as an ‘Afromobile,’ a wicker chair mounted on a three-wheeled cycle frame and propelled by a Colored servant pedaling from the rear.”^{Footnote 13}

In 1921, the Ku Klux Klan held its first march in Miami and five years later opened its first office in the city’s downtown. By this time, the organization had attracted a million members nationwide. H. Leslie Quigg, named Miami’s police chief in 1921, played an active role in the Klan. Quigg was known to routinely assign his most bigoted officers to patrol Colored Town and to torture black suspects in custody by applying live electrical wires to their genitalia. Organized racial violence, such as the KKK’s 1921 abduction and whipping of a leading black minister for publicly demanding that blacks be given voting rights, or the beating that year of members of a black orchestra that had played for a white audience at a local hotel, made Miami a dangerous place for residents and visitors of African ancestry.^{Footnote 14}

Poorer white migrants, though not targets of racist violence, were also largely excluded from the Miami boom. During the early 1920s, scores of “tin can campers” arrived in rickety Model T’s stuffed with belongings and erected tents in “tourist camps” that proliferated in undeveloped areas of the city. Some were elderly couples, while others sought work in the burgeoning service industries and building trades. The life they found often fell short of their sunshine dreams. The tourist camps, run by private operators, charged by the week and often lacked proper sanitary facilities, despite strict state health regulations governing their operation. Apartment dwellers who worked in the tourist industries fared little better. Landlords raised rents to match the budgets of affluent tourists and real estate speculators, despite refusing to make needed repairs to buildings, while merchants raised prices of staples such as milk and bread as high as the inflated market could bear.^{Footnote 15}

Health conditions in 1920s Miami reflected the city’s racial divisions. Overall, disease and mortality patterns in Florida were beginning to resemble those in the industrial North. Rates of infectious disease were plummeting due to improved public health and sanitation, while chronic diseases of old age such as cardiovascular ailments and cancer were becoming the leading causes of death. Black Miamians, however, did not share in this epidemiologic shift. Health data for this era point to large racial gaps in mortality rates, including a black infant mortality rate in Miami that was double that for white infants.^{Footnote 16}

This racial mortality gap can be attributed to a number of factors, but crowded, unsanitary conditions top the list. Such conditions facilitate the spread of infectious diseases such as influenza, malaria, diphtheria, smallpox, and tuberculosis.^{Footnote 17} Colored Town, with its unpaved streets and outdoor plumbing, was already crowded in 1920: social workers who surveyed the area that year recorded one hundred families living on a single block. The city government did not provide trash or other sanitation services to the area. A continual influx of workers to build and staff the new hotels, homes, and restaurants that were opening, combined with tightening restrictions on where black residents could live, only exacerbated the situation.^{Footnote 18}

A large racial disparity in homicide rates also helps to account for the higher overall mortality among black Miamians. These rates peaked in Dade County in 1925–26, reaching twelve times the national average, according to a statistical analysis of death certificates and newspaper reports conducted by William Wilbanks and Paul George. These rates were triple the height reached in Miami-Dade during the drug wars of the early 1980s, and far exceed any U.S. urban homicide rate for 2012. Even though black Miamians in the 1920s constituted a shrinking minority due to the greater in-migration rate of whites during the boom, the vast majority of the homicide victims in 1925–26 were black. Additionally, 12 percent of homicides were “white on black” crimes (in comparison to 7 percent in Dade County in 1980), and most of these were “police killings of blacks,” according to Wilbanks and George.^{Footnote 19} This toxic pattern of violence and victimization, combined with segregation and boomtown boosterism, shaped the way black and white communities fared following the 1926 storm.^{Footnote 20}

Conscription and Resistance

Soon after the winds subsided, it became clear that the city’s black communities had not been spared. The communities were “hard hit as to property” and almost all of the black churches had been “demolished,” black education pioneer Mary McCleod Bethune wrote in the Defender after visiting the area in the hurricane’s aftermath. After passing over Miami, the storm had also wreaked havoc on Moore Haven, a farming community along the southwest bank of Lake Okeechobee. Churned up by the winds, the waters of the 730-square-mile lake had overtopped dikes and flooded the town. “The condition at Moore Haven is indescribable,” Bethune wrote. “Two-thirds of the inhabitants went under and those who are left have been forced to evacuate.” Estimates of the number of dead ranged from two hundred and fifty to four hundred. About half were black, according to Red Cross and newspaper reports. Many black workers had migrated to the area for seasonal work picking crops, living in “small shacks” that the storm had destroyed, and lacked family in the area to identify their bodies or report them missing. Bodies had also been carried miles through the muck, making them hard to find and identify.^{Footnote 21}

Meanwhile many whites in Miami and the Everglades, desperate to clear the hurricane’s wreckage, viewed black residents as sources of labor rather than neighbors in need. Many black men were conscripted around Miami for “hard clean-up work and the gruesome tasks of corpse removal,” the Defender reported. National Guardsmen, who had been sent in by the governor to maintain order, used threats of violence or jail to force black men to work, and shot several in the process, the report said. The New York Times also reported that two Marines “patrolling the negro district” were shot by two black men from Nassau when the Marines tried to “force them to join a labor gang.” Some black women were also forced to work. Wilhelmina Jennings, a Bahamian American black woman interviewed by Connolly in 2006, remembered that National Guard units had dragged her Aunt Mabel out of one of the family’s houses in Colored Town. When Mabel refused to go, her male relatives tried to protect her. A melee ensued and a Guardsman shot Mabel, her father, and another Guardsman in the legs. The injured family members were carted off and assumed to have been murdered; only later were they discovered alive at the black ward of a local hospital.^{Footnote 22}

As historian Pete Daniel has written, “Natural disasters had a way of exposing the unnatural caste system of the South.” Black men were often forced at gunpoint to perform the dangerous work of shoring up levees during Mississippi floods.^{Footnote 23} The 1926 hurricane, however, was notable for the local and national black community’s organized resistance to such forced labor. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) filed an official complaint to the federal government protesting the conscription; collecting affidavits from black Miamians who had been shot by soldiers, it sent them to President Calvin Coolidge, the attorney general, and the secretary of the navy. While the federal government failed to investigate the matter, the NAACP’s action was noted in newspapers. In the Everglades, black residents also resisted forced work. With few National Guardsmen in the area to enforce whites’ orders, they enjoyed some success. A Red Cross report stated that local whites were having trouble getting the “colored people” in these towns to do cleanup work, because most were “Nassau Negroes” who “won’t work unless they have to and demand higher wages than most of the white people are getting.”^{Footnote 24}

This resistance was especially bold in light of the constant threat of violence under which black residents lived. In late September, according to reports in the Defender and the Associated Press, a white mob burned to death three black men on a road ten miles from downtown Miami. The AP report stated that the men had allegedly been looting.^{Footnote 25} Lynchings, ritual crimes in which white mobs hanged, burned to death, and mutilated black men or women upon the slightest pretext of a crime or social insubordination, were not uncommon in Florida. Of the 4,737 lynchings that occurred in the United States between 1882 and 1968, 282, including 257 lynchings in which victims were black, took place in the state.^{Footnote 26}

Race Tracked Relief

The relief effort led by the American Red Cross seemed to promise black Miamians a respite from this violence. In her report to the Defender, Bethune stated that she was coordinating with the Red Cross in organizing black women’s groups and civic organizations to establish relief stations “to give medical attention and such assistance as refugees will need.” Bethune asked Defender readers to donate to the Red Cross on behalf of these groups, implicitly expressing trust that the organization would distribute aid in a racially equitable manner. The American Red Cross, a privately funded, quasi-governmental entity chartered by Congress as the nation’s official disaster relief body, professed an ideal of “neutrality” with regard to the race, religion, nationality, or sex of those it assisted. By the mid-1920s, the organization had established a long if uneven track record of aiding African Americans in disasters.^{Footnote 27}

The Red Cross had also, however, grown during the war into a sprawling entity with thousands of local chapters. Red Cross policy dictated that chapter volunteers take responsibility for immediate response to a disaster until a “Mobile Disaster Relief Unit” from Red Cross National Headquarters in Washington could arrive. In Miami, Red Cross chapters, local citizens’ committees, and other groups worked for four days before the Mobile Disaster Relief unit took charge.^{Footnote 28}

Other organizations also responded to the emergency. The Chicago Herald-Examiner newspaper, using funds raised from subscribers, sent forty-seven nurses, thirty-three doctors, and an X-ray technician to Miami. The Cuban government sent doctors and nurses on a battleship loaded with two hundred and fifty tons of supplies and provisions, along with five thousand doses of typhoid antitoxin. The Army Air Corps also flew in hundreds of thousands of doses of typhoid antitoxin. The American Legion and Knights of Columbus distributed food and other relief supplies.^{Footnote 29}

The Red Cross Mobile Disaster Relief Unit sought to coordinate all these activities. It brought in 197 family caseworkers, 40 doctors, and 341 nurses, and campaigned to raise $5 million to fund its efforts. Its newspaper and radio fund-raising appeal sought to dramatically convey a picture of widespread destruction, suffering, and dire need. Miami’s mayor and Florida’s governor, however, soon began publicly contradicting these reports. Concerned that such news would hurt tourism, they repeatedly stated that the hurricane’s devastation had been exaggerated. As a result the public was confused, and the Red Cross failed to meet its fund-raising goal.^{Footnote 30}

The Red Cross meanwhile directed most of its limited resources to white neighborhoods. Two days following the storm, however, a single white Red Cross worker, Lazelle Margaret Smedley, and a “colored welfare worker from Palm Beach,” Mamie Frederick, opened a relief station in the black residential neighborhood of Liberty City. The station was soon feeding up to twelve hundred people per day and supplying clothes, tents, army cots, stoves, and bedding, as well as roofing material for rebuilding. “Within a few days reports came in from other colored communities that they had had no relief, and as this information came in they were added to the area served by my station,” Smedley reported to her Red Cross supervisors. This station served about six thousand people, or eleven hundred families, from seven black residential and commercial areas of the city. By comparison, twelve Red Cross caseworkers were assigned to Miami Beach, where they fed three thousand people in the first days after the storm but served a long-term caseload of only two hundred families.^{Footnote 31}

For the first two weeks, Smedley worked with a caseworker, a medical student, and three nurses from the Chicago Herald Examiner group. These workers had to travel by car to reach people in need, given the wide territory Smedley’s station covered and the lack of public transportation. Despite the fact that the Red Cross had procured twenty-seven cars for its workers in Miami, Smedley found auto transport for the medical team “nearly impossible to obtain.” So the Chicago caseworker, who had her own car and driver, often “took care of persons in urgent need of dressings in their homes.” Once the Chicago unit left, Smedley had to work alone, with intermittent help from doctors and nurses assigned to other areas.^{Footnote 32}

Black Miamians were also last in line for clothing and food. To obtain clothing for children whose clothes had been ruined in their storm-damaged homes, for example, Smedley accepted clothes “not in condition for use by adult white people” from other relief stations, then procured three sewing machines and recruited women from local black churches as volunteer seamstresses. These women sewed the clothing remnants into “useful garments” for black children. In another instance, the Red Cross worker at Allapattah, a predominantly white neighborhood northwest of Colored Town, distributed food supplies and clothing to white and black families. Only black applicants, however, were instructed that in return for accepting food, they would be expected “to give a portion of their services, such as cleaning up around the cafeteria, sweeping, washing dishes, etc.”^{Footnote 33}

The situation that developed in Hialeah further illustrates the racial and social inequities in assistance. In this suburb of two thousand families, the hurricane killed thirty-three people, destroyed fifteen hundred homes, and left floods behind. “The houses that crumpled like paper before the wind are the houses of the poorer classes which were not as substantially built,” wrote a Red Cross official. Many residents were tenants who “owned nothing” and a number were elderly. While some boarded trains for points elsewhere, others desperately needed shelter. But the Red Cross did not assign a worker to Hialeah until October 1.^{Footnote 34}

In this vacuum, a Hialeah Citizens Committee led by local business owners took charge. This committee quickly established a camp for displaced white residents, but housed two hundred displaced black residents at the stables of the Hialeah Park Race Track. The Miami Jockey Club, which ran this prestigious horse-racing facility as a major winter attraction, sheltered the black families at the stables in order to ensure a ready supply of black labor for quick rebuilding, according to a Red Cross report.^{Footnote 35}

In late September, a Miami “Colored Citizens Relief Committee” wrote the Red Cross to complain of the unsanitary, crowded conditions at the track. The Red Cross sent a staff member to investigate. The staffer reported that the people were living “as in one large room,” but that a plan was under way to house some in a tent camp. The Hialeah Citizens Committee then built a black tent camp on the site of a local dairy, over the owner’s objections. They also used the camp to lodge black men who they said had been “imported” from Jacksonville after the storm to clean up the track. Neither this camp nor the white tent camp had showers or toilets. In October, the town sanitation department requested funds from the Red Cross to make sanitary improvements at the white camp only.^{Footnote 36}

Complaints about the treatment of black storm survivors soon reached Harlem residents active in New York’s Red Cross chapter. When these Red Cross members wrote to white New York chapter leaders to inquire about these complaints, the New York leaders, anxious not to lose Harlem’s support in their fall fund-raising campaign, wrote to Red Cross officials in Miami to seek reassurance that black storm survivors were “receiving exactly [the] same consideration as all others.” In reply to the New York leaders, a Red Cross official telegraphed from Miami that “colored refugee camps” at Hialeah and Fort Lauderdale demonstrated racially equitable treatment. The Red Cross meanwhile provided $1,100 to build sanitary toilets and showers at the white camp in Hialeah, and sent a nurse to each camp, but refused to make any sanitary improvements to the black camp. The Hialeah Citizens’ Committee requested flooring for tents in the black camp and screening for a mess hall, as standing water in the camp was breeding mosquitoes, but Red Cross officials ignored this request.^{Footnote 37}

By early November, the situation had worsened. The track’s owners told the City of Hialeah that the stables would have to be cleared of “refugees,” as horses were arriving for the racing season. To resolve the situation, the Red Cross obtained land from the city for another black tent camp, brought in flooring from tents no longer needed elsewhere, and provided bottled water. Red Cross officials publicly indicated that they constructed this camp primarily to aid employers. “One particular phase of the work has been to endeavor to save for Hialeah the colored labor that is constantly needed in this community,” an official wrote in a local newspaper. The track opened on time for the racing season.^{Footnote 38}

Red Cross caseworkers also canvassed the area to determine what people needed to make their homes habitable. They set up a local advisory committee to review their recommendations for awards of assistance. According to committee minutes, awards ranged from $3.25 for tar paper to $2,222 for “building repairs, household goods, clothing, and maintenance.” The awards averaged about $400 to $1,000 per family—about three to eleven months’ wages. But while some people received funds for long-term medical care, food, and clothing, the committee distributed most funds to homeowners and landlords for rebuilding. The minutes do not indicate the names or races of recipients, but the addresses indicate that only a few resided in Seminola, the “colored district” of Hialeah. Those who possessed land and owned salvageable homes benefited most from the Red Cross’s rebuilding aid, and most of these property owners were white.^{Footnote 39}

This pattern of favoring homeowners pervaded the Red Cross’s long-term Miami area assistance program. The organization allocated $2.69 million—over 64 percent of what it raised—to building, repairs, and furnishings, which it mainly awarded to homeowners. The Red Cross’s own surveys indicate that this policy of favoring homeowners disproportionately disadvantaged black residents, as the overwhelming majority of black residents rented their homes.^{Footnote 40}

Stuck in the Muck

Moore Haven residents faced circumstances even more dire than those in Miami. The Red Cross evacuated about eight hundred survivors to a “first class” resort hotel in the town of Sebring, sixty-two miles away, where it provided them with food, clothes, and medical care. The race of these people was not specified in Red Cross reports, but hotels were strictly racially segregated in Florida, so it is unlikely that black residents were welcomed into this establishment. The Red Cross also sent out a white doctor and nurses to assist people in areas surrounding Moore Haven. Blocked by impassable roads and facing the danger of alligators and snakes, the nurses fought “through miles of thick tropical undergrowth” to find “many isolated cases of injuries,” a Red Cross report stated. The doctor, visiting an area called Miami Locks, found a “precarious” health situation. “Whites are doing fairly well with exception of disposal of sewage and garbage,” he reported. “Colored people, about forty in number, are living in four small shacks in a very crowded and unsanitary condition. Shacks have no roofs at present.” The doctor administered typhoid inoculations to all who would permit him to do so. At Sebring Farm, an area abandoned by all but two white residents, he examined a black couple who he suspected were sick with typhoid. Others refused to be examined by this white stranger. “Unless all these colored people move out their outlook is bad,” the doctor wrote. The Red Cross assigned a nurse to this area to administer inoculations and care for the people. Desperately needed, she remained through the following February.^{Footnote 41}

Several weeks after the storm, the Red Cross began to encourage residents to return to Moore Haven by “floating” tents on the muck to provide temporary lodging. But much of the town remained flooded for months. Florida’s governor balked at appropriating state funds for these residents, and the Red Cross withdrew from the area in January 1927 as its funds ran out. Prior to the storm, up to two-thirds of black residents had lived in cabins provided by employers, but only one employer made a commitment to “rehouse” his employees after the storm. In his final report, the Red Cross worker assigned to the area stated the need for “large numbers of negroes” to pick crops and “housing of such help.”^{Footnote 42}

Aftermath

The 1926 storm signaled the death knell for boomtown Miami. In February 1927, despite the fact that the Miami Race Course in Hialeah was drawing crowds and Miami Beach resorts were still attracting visitors, even the boosters on the editorial board of the Miami Herald could not help but noting, “there is a great deal of actual destitution in Miami.” The editorial attributed the misery to the fact that many people had come to the area without funds and expecting work that was not “forthcoming,” and described how “little children,” women, and men were going hungry. The local welfare board had “exhausted its funds” and the Community Chest was struggling with the slow pace of charitable giving. The Great Depression had blown into Miami a few years early.^{Footnote 43}

Paradoxically, the storm and economic bust appear to have improved public health. Health officials used the storm as an opportunity to close down many Miami area tourist camps as unsanitary, and to secure passage of state legislation in 1927 that gave tourist camp sanitary regulations the force of law. State sanitary engineers also made improvements to water-treatment systems in Miami following the storm and enacted stricter regulations on septic tanks.^{Footnote 44} Over the following five years, death rates dropped consistently throughout the state. By 1930, smallpox nearly disappeared from Florida, and typhoid fever and diphtheria deaths plummeted. Health officials attributed this drop to the economic downturn. The boom had caused a “swelling of the population” that had introduced “new strains of disease organisms” while interfering with public health interventions such as inoculations, they asserted in a 1932 report. By 1930, homicide rates also fell to 31 percent of their 1926 rates. The only major exceptions to this trend were malaria—which increased following the storm given the abundance of standing water in which mosquitoes could breed and the lack of protection from screens—as well as rabies and automobile accidents. While the state Board of Health began promoting local licensing and inoculation requirements for dogs in 1932, these requirements were difficult to enforce without paid workers. Auto death rates also remained high but matched rising trends in auto death rates across the United States.^{Footnote 45}

The specific impact of the statewide health improvements on black South Floridians is unclear. Death rates and infant mortality rates for black residents of Dade County remained significantly higher in 1931 than those for white residents. This pattern also persisted in Moore Haven. The storm, however, did prompt members of Miami’s black community to build grassroots organizations to address infant and maternal mortality. A state public health nurse in Miami organized a club for African American midwives following the storm. In 1931, this group was involved with the state Board of Health in initiating a midwife licensing program—a measure aimed at improving maternity care.^{Footnote 46}

Overall, the most profound effect of the storm on African Americans was likely its message about the treatment they could expect following future natural disasters. When the Mississippi River began rising to record levels in the spring of 1927, a writer for the Baltimore Afro-American had only to evoke the Miami situation as a harbinger of abuses to come:

This prediction proved accurate. White planters forced black men at gunpoint to sandbag the levees as the waters rose around them. Some of these workers drowned, while other black flood sufferers were forced to remain in racially segregated, unsanitary Red Cross camps.^{Footnote 48}

The bitter experience of black Miamians following the 1926 hurricane also meant, however, that when a hurricane struck Palm Beach and Lake Okeechobee two years later, national black leaders took steps to avert a repetition of 1926. Bethune, along with NAACP leader and scholar W. E. B. Du Bois, traveled to the affected area to investigate. After surveying the situation, Bethune concluded in a letter to Red Cross officials that “the game in this disaster has been played absolutely fair.”^{Footnote 49} Whether her assessment reflected wider conditions requires investigation. It is clear, however, that the protests by black Red Cross members, citizen’s committees, and the NAACP following the 1926 hurricane marked the beginning of organized resistance by African Americans to unequal treatment in disasters. The Red Cross now began to realize that it could no longer ignore such protests without consequence. Complaints now traveled quickly through the medium of national black newspapers and wire services and through the national communications channels of African American organizations, and could lead to organized protests or boycotts of Red Cross fund-raising efforts. In 1927, when black newspaper correspondents in the Mississippi Delta reported that the Red Cross was treating black flood sufferers inequitably, national Red Cross leaders appointed a “Colored Advisory Commission” to visit camps where flood sufferers were living and to advise on improvements to these camps.^{Footnote 50} While the Red Cross ignored much of the commission’s advice, the continued activism of some commission members and other black leaders prompted the Red Cross to hire more African American disaster relief workers in the 1930s and 1940s, and to work more conscientiously with black communities affected by disasters.^{Footnote 51}