In 1941, the Santee Cooper Project dammed the rivers of Berkeley County, South Carolina, and flooded the lowlands for electricity. White cemeteries were relocated to higher ground before the water rose. Three thousand Black graves were left where they were.

Della Mae Simmons owned forty acres in the flood plain. Land her family had worked since Reconstruction. She had two sons: Curtis, seventeen, full of a young man's fury, and Isaiah, twelve, gentle and slow from a birth injury. She refused to leave.

Four men decided she didn't have a choice. The alderman who rezoned the land. The councilman who buried the lawsuits. The police chief who terrorized the family. And the engineer who opened the floodgates while the chief held a gun to his head and said: "Let their black asses drown."

Reverend Ezekiel Boone was at the Simmons farm t ...