In the spring of 1927, the Mississippi River unleashed a catastrophe unlike anything the United States had ever witnessed. Swollen by months of relentless rainfall, the river shattered its levees and swallowed an area roughly the size of New England beneath a churning inland sea stretching eighty miles wide in places. Entire towns vanished overnight. Homes, churches, and farmland disappeared under walls of muddy water carrying uprooted trees and drowned livestock. For the African American communities living and working in the Mississippi Delta, the flood became something far worse than a natural disaster. Tens of thousands of Black sharecroppers and laborers found themselves stranded on narrow strips of remaining high ground, trapped not only by rising water but by armed white overseers who refused to let them board rescue boats. Plantation owners  ...