Great Mississippi Flood Exposes Racial Labor Exploitation and Plantation System

The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, the most destructive river flood in American history, inundates 27,000 square miles across seven states and displaces approximately 700,000 people, disproportionately affecting African Americans in the Mississippi Delta. The disaster response, coordinated by Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover, exposes and reinforces the brutal racial labor exploitation of the plantation system. Black flood refugees are confined to camps on levees, forced to work at gunpoint filling sandbags and performing rescue labor, forbidden to leave, and fed inadequate rations while white refugees receive preferential treatment and freedom of movement.

Delta planters, led by LeRoy Percy and the planter aristocracy of Greenville, Mississippi, maintain armed guards to prevent Black workers from fleeing to northern cities where wartime migration has created job opportunities. The National Guard enforces the planters’ labor needs, barring Black refugees from Red Cross supplies unless local planters vouch for them as “their” workers. Black workers are issued tags identifying their employer and cannot board evacuation boats or trains without planter permission. When Black families attempt to leave, planters threaten to deny them credit for the upcoming planting season, effectively preventing escape from the sharecropping system.

The Colored Advisory Commission, appointed by Hoover to investigate conditions after NAACP protests, documents systematic discrimination but its report is suppressed. Robert Russa Moton of Tuskegee Institute serves on the commission and privately warns Hoover that Black voters, loyal to the Republican Party since Lincoln, may defect if conditions are publicized. Hoover promises reforms that never materialize. The flood response accelerates the Great Migration of African Americans northward, as survivors who escape the camps never return to the Delta. The disaster demonstrates how “natural” catastrophes operate within social structures of racial capitalism, with planters using crisis to intensify labor coercion while federal authorities enable rather than challenge the exploitation.