When the great Mississippi River rampaged the levees built to hold her back, she inundated thousands of farms, hundreds of towns and killed perhaps a thousand people, leaving homeless almost a million of those surviving along its banks all the way down to the delta and New Orleans.

In the days that followed, racial tensions rose between the mostly poor African American victims and the Southern whites of the Mississippi Delta. When relief supplies finally reached the area, they were distributed on the basis of race, leaving many of the suffering blacks with nothing. Black men were rounded up and forced to work rebuilding levees and when a white policeman killed an African American for refusing to work a double shift, a prominent politician told a meeting of blacks, “That foolish policeman is not the murderer. The murderer is …”

George W. Bush! The cause of the storm was the result of global warming. The federal government could not help because there were too many military troops overseas.

NO! He did NOT say that. The Fatal Flood of Spring 1927 was one of America’s greatest natural disasters, but it was not caused by George Bush who was not yet even born, nor global warming which had not yet been discovered. World War I was long over and there were few if any troops abroad, so that had no effect on relief efforts. So what was the cause of the disaster? Could it have been nature?

What has changed along along the Mississippi Delta since the great flood that changed the course of history for America? It is now seventy-eight years later and almost four generations of Americans have come into being. Did we learn much during those seven plus decades? Robert R. Moton, Chairman of President Herbert Hoover’s Colored Advisory Commission, wrote reports regarding conditions among the flood victims after the disaster.

December 12, 1927: The Mississippi flood in its relationship to human life affected the Negro chiefly. A number of the counties along the Mississippi River and in the Delta district of Mississippi, Louisiana and Arkansas had more than 75% of Negro population. The problem faced was that of dealing with Negro life as we found it there. Not only was there congestion, but we found a class of people who were lacking in schools, who were living in homes scarcely worthy of the name, who existed in unhealthy conditions under an economic status unsound and unfair. It was impossible for such a people to develop a reserve sufficient to deal with an emergency so great as the flood because they were practically helpless, without initiative and with little self-control and self-reliance.

Katrina Posts by Kerfuffles

The Great Flood of 1927 introduced the rest of America to the music of the Delta region, known as Delta blues. More than thirty songs were written and recorded by the blues musicians about the Mighty Flood. This one is from John Lee Hooper, 1959.