Movie Review

The 1927 Mississippi River flood is a major part of the historical memory of the Mississippi Delta. Anyone interviewing residents of the Delta who lived through the disaster will find that the flood always emerges as a topic, regardless of the subject of the interview. Memories of the flood, however, are shaped by the contours of race and class that defined the plantation economy, which stretched from southeastern Missouri and northeastern Arkansas to the Gulf of Mexico. This vast region, broadly defined as the Mississippi Delta, was known in the early twentieth century for harsh labor practices that included convict labor, peonage, and murder. Efforts to control the Mississippi River when it flooded in 1927 and to administer relief to the victims revealed to the world the dark side of planter rule in the Delta.

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Fatal Flood tells the story of this major disaster, one previously documented by the historian Pete Daniel in his Deep'n as It Come (1977) and more recently by the nonfiction writer John M. Barry in Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi River Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America (1997)—both of whom are interviewed in the documentary. The film combines amazing film footage of the flood's devastation and of life for the black refugees in the Red Cross camps, with interviews from black and white survivors. The white people tend to recall the scope of the flood and the amount of land and cotton it destroyed. Black people in the film remember how, when Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover called in the Red Cross to administer relief, planters used the rations to keep them on the plantations at starvation wages.

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