Other than its founding, the most important date in Greenville history has to be April 21, 1927 when the levee broke at Mounds Landing and created the largest flood of the Lower Mississippi Valley in its known history.
The flood, the response to it and the resulting fallout have set Greenville’s path for the next 95 years, and in many ways, we are still feeling its effects.
A new podcast from Wondery took on the subject of the 1927 flood and its consequences for Greenville in a series just ended this week.
The podcast, American History Tellers hosted by Lindsay A. Graham, uses both dramatization and narrative history to tell stories of America’s past. There are so far 45 different series.
I’m a fan of history podcasts. My favorites are Dan Snow’s History Hit, Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History, We Have Ways of Making You Talk and The Rest is History.
While most podcasts in the history world seem to be a person talking with a subject expert who has just written a book, the American History Tellers takes a different approach.
For the podcast on the flood, there was a researcher Ellie Stanton, producer Andy Hermann, the host Graham and a couple of voice actors for the dramatizations. There were also technical staff to create the show.
This re-telling of historical events is a deliberate choice by the people at Wondery.
“The dramatic reenactments on American History Tellers are a hallmark of the Wondery style,” Hermann said. “Across many of our shows, we use a combination of narration, dialogue, music and sound effects to tell audio-only stories in a cinematic style. We want listeners to sometimes feel fully immersed in the events we’re recounting – not like they’re just hearing a lecture about them.”
Each of the sections of the podcasts begin with the word “imagine,” and then the host sets the scene.
“Sometimes we’re able to lift dialogue directly from sources like court transcripts, contemporary newspaper accounts, or other primary sources,” Hermann said. “In this series, for example, Ellie based much of Will Percy’s dialogue on writings in his memoir. Other times, since exact verbiage from the distant past can be hard to come by, we do invent dialogue. That’s why we begin each reenactment scene with the word ‘Imagine’ – that’s both an invitation to the listener to picture the scene in their mind’s eye, and an acknowledgement that the picture is based on a dramatization.”
When stories are told about “our” history in the Delta, I often take a look with a jaundiced eye. I wonder what the teller will get right, what they’ll get wrong and what they will miss. After all, the totality of history, even recent history, can’t really be known, though you can find out a lot.
In her research, Stanton used a variety of sources.
“Along with ‘Rising Tides,’ I used Pete Daniel’s ‘Deep'n as It Come’ and Susan Scott Parrish’s ‘The Flood Year 1927 A Cultural History’,” Stanton wrote in an email. “We interviewed Parrish as a guest on the podcast. I also sought out more recent scholarly articles to find stories of survivor agency and resistance. Black newspaper articles and Will Percy’s memoir ‘Lanterns on the Levee’ were hugely helpful primary sources.”
I recently purchased the Stanton book. While I haven’t read it yet, I am a bit intimidated by its 100 pages of footnotes.
There are several instances of poor actions by the locals in charge of relief efforts recounted in the podcast and with good reason, but Stanton said she also found some bright spots.
“During the initial rescue effort, 200 Black men, women and children were waiting on the levee at Scott when a steamer stopped and lowered the gangplank,” Stanton wrote. “Two armed white men, desperate to retain their sharecroppers, refused to allow anyone to board. A doctor on board the steamer named S.W. Douglas strode down the gangplank. He declared, ‘I come here by the authority of the American Red Cross and the God of all creation. If either of you has guts enough to pull the gun you carry please start now or get out of my way, and I don’t believe either of you has the guts.’ Dr. Douglas pushed past the pair of white men and helped the 200 survivors board the steamer, which evacuated them to safer havens.”
Of the tragedy, perhaps the greatest was the treatment of the black community during and after the flood.
“I felt that one of the biggest tragedies of this flood was that so many white authority figures, from Delta planters to Herbert Hoover, betrayed the Black survivors they had promised to protect,” she wrote.
In reading any history of the era you’ll find those in charge at the time saw the black workforce as a commodity to be preserved and the loss of which was a threat to their, the planters, way of life. Many of the leaders did whatever it took to keep the black community from being evacuated to safety because there was a good chance they’d never come back.
Other than the loss of life and property, the saddest story from the flood is most assuredly the treatment of what was then seen only as a mass labor force. That prevailing view was simply a continuation of the efforts to keep the workforce in as near a state of slavery as possible after the Civil War.
That state worked to keep a majority of the population subjugated into a life of near, if not abject poverty. The Delta is still seeing the effects of it today.
Works like this podcast, “The Most Southern Place on Earth,” and “Rising Tides,” try to tell a valuable story of the history of our region. Whether the picture is a pleasant one, or a tough one, there are lessons to be learned from each.
Jon Alverson is proud to be publisher and editor of the Delta Democrat-Times. Write to him at jalverson@ddtonline.comor call him at 662-335-1155.
