The Mississippi River and the Nineteen Twenty-Seven Flood

The Mississippi River made Louisiana. It deposited the very land beneath your feet, carried down grain by grain over ten thousand years from the Rocky Mountains and the Appalachians, spread out across the delta in a fan of silt and sediment that built the wetlands, the bayous, the cheniers, and the rich black soil of the river bottoms. The river is not a thing that flows through Louisiana.

Louisiana is a thing the river built. For centuries, humans have been trying to control it. The French began building levees in the early seventeen hundreds, and the Americans who came after them built higher and higher, pressing the river into an ever-narrower channel, raising the river's own bed until by the early twentieth century the Mississippi between Cairo, Illinois and the Gulf ran above the level of the surrounding land, held in place by earthen walls and faith.

In the spring of nineteen twenty-seven, that faith broke. Weeks of extraordinary rainfall overwhelmed the levee system from Cairo to the Gulf. The river crested at levels never recorded.

On April twenty-first, nineteen twenty-seven, the levee at Mounds Landing, Mississippi broke with a roar that witnesses said sounded like Niagara Falls. Ultimately, the flood inundated more than twenty-seven thousand square miles across seven states. Seven hundred thousand people were displaced, the majority of them Black sharecroppers in the Mississippi Delta and in the Louisiana parishes below.

Relief camps were organized along racial lines. Black workers were held at gunpoint and forced to work on the levee repairs. The flood accelerated the Great Migration as Black southerners who had endured the flood concluded, reasonably, that the system that had failed to protect them would not protect them next time either.

Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover managed the federal response and rode the publicity to the White House in nineteen twenty-eight. The river had made him, too.