The 1927 Flood: How Planters Kept the Sharecroppers Captive

The Great Mississippi Flood of nineteen twenty-seven inundated twenty-seven thousand square miles of the Mississippi River valley from Illinois to the Gulf of Mexico. It was the most destructive river flood in American history to that point. The Delta, where the land is flat and the levees were the only thing between the river and the cotton fields, was among the hardest hit.

In Greenville, Mississippi, where the Percy family were the most powerful planters in the Delta, the response to the flood revealed something that had been true about the sharecropping economy all along. When Red Cross relief boats arrived at the flooded refugee camps, Black sharecroppers attempted to board for higher ground. The Percy family, acting through their influence with the Mississippi National Guard, stopped them.

The reason was simple: if the sharecroppers left, they might not come back for planting season. The cotton couldn't be planted without their labor. The Percys and planters like them throughout the Delta used armed National Guard troops to prevent Black workers from boarding relief boats and to confine them in improvised camps on the levees and in warehouses and stores, sometimes for weeks. An estimated thirteen thousand people, overwhelmingly Black sharecroppers, were held at the Greenville levee camp alone; accounts from the period describe conditions of severe overcrowding and inadequate food and shelter.

Herbert Hoover, who was Secretary of Commerce and who oversaw the federal relief effort, visited the Delta and made a series of promises to Black community leaders: land reform, better conditions, federal protections. He made the promises because he needed the cooperation of Black leaders to manage the relief effort. After the flood receded and Hoover's presidential campaign began in earnest, the promises were not kept. Hoover's betrayal of the Black leaders who had trusted him is documented in correspondence from the period and contributed to the shift of Black voters away from the Republican Party, which had been their traditional political home since Lincoln.

The flood accelerated the Great Migration. People who had been held at a levee camp at gunpoint decided not to return the following season. The broken promises gave them a reason they could name.