Lucy Thomas
Hurricane Betsy Survivors Oral History Project
Nilima Mwendo conducted these interviews in 2003 with residents of New Orleans' Lower Ninth Ward who survived Hurricane Betsy when it made landfall on September 9, 1965. Interviews focus on the Lower Ninth Ward neighborhood from the 1930s and 40s, when the area was only partially developed and rural, to the early 2000s. Interviewees discuss their experiences during the hurricane, the evacuation of the neighborhood, disaster relief from the state and federal government and Red Cross, and the hardships they and other residents encountered in the months and years they spent rebuilding their homes and lives after they returned to the neighborhood. Interviewees describe the neighborhood before Betsy and discuss changes in the community after the storm. Several interviewees also discuss social activism and advocacy for the neighborhood in the 1960s and 70s.
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Transcriber: Teresa Bergen
Auditor: Heather Sellers
Editor: Erin Hess
Lucy Boyer Thomas was born in 1923, grew up in the Fazendeville village near Chalmette, and attended school in New Orleans through the eleventh grade. She studied nursing at UCLA and worked as a nurse in California and Louisiana. She married Francis Thomas and they had five children. She lived in the Ninth Ward for more than fifty years, surviving Hurricane Betsy. She died in 2004 at age eighty-one.
Scope and Content Note
Thomas describes country living as a child, growing up with farm animals, a father who treated with folk remedies, and the daily routines of farm life. She describes a year in Los Angeles studying nursing around 1943, life in the Ninth Ward before Hurricane Betsy, and her experiences during that hurricane. She also discusses the subsequent rebuilding of her house, changes in the Ninth Ward, and suspicions about the deliberate breaking of a levee to flood her neighborhood and save richer parts of the city.
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