“Kill a n—-, hire another. Kill a mule, buy another.”
In 1909 an SPCA inspector named George Guernsey was shot by a levee boss for checking on work animals at Mississippi River camps. The real story was about Black workers valued less than mules. Guernsey became a folk legend, preserved in blues songs when official records ignored the murder. Multiple levee bosses got credit for the killing in different oral traditions. The truth fractured into myth because the system had no interest in recording it.