The Flood of Nineteen Twenty-Seven, The River Reclaims the Delta

In April of nineteen twenty-seven, the Mississippi River and its tributaries broke loose from their levees in the most destructive flood in American history. The waters came down from rains that had been falling since the previous summer across the entire drainage basin of the central continent. When the crest arrived, it inundated twenty-seven thousand square miles across seven states.

More than five hundred people died. Perhaps seven hundred thousand were driven from their homes, the majority of them Black tenant farmers and sharecroppers in the Mississippi Delta and the Arkansas lowlands. Little Rock sat above the worst of the flooding, but the Arkansas River rose dramatically and the lowland communities east and south of the city were inundated.

The Red Cross set up camps that at their peak held more than three hundred thousand displaced people. The flood exposed the social structure of the Delta with brutal clarity. Black workers were pressed into involuntary levee labor at gunpoint in some locations, held in the camps under armed guard when they tried to leave, denied the resettlement assistance that reached white flood victims.

The sociologist and civil rights advocate Walter White of the NAACP traveled through the region documenting these conditions and brought them to national attention. The federal government's response, led by Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover, who used the flood to build his national profile, was substantial but deeply unequal. Hoover promised Black leaders that conditions would improve in exchange for political support.

After the election of nineteen twenty-eight, those promises went largely unfulfilled. Historians including Pete Daniel and John Barry have argued that the nineteen twenty-seven flood accelerated the northward migration of Black Southerners, reshaping the demographics of American cities for generations.