Tuesday, Aug.22, 2023 at 10 p.m. on KPBS TV / Stream now with KPBS Passport + Encore Wednesday, Aug. 30 at 9 p.m. on KPBS 2
In the spring of 1927, after weeks of incessant rains, the Mississippi River went on a rampage from Cairo, Illinois to New Orleans, inundating hundreds of towns, killing as many as a thousand people and leaving a million homeless. In Greenville, Mississippi, efforts to contain the river pitted the majority Black population against an aristocratic plantation family, the Percys - and the Percys against themselves. A story of greed, power and race during one of America's greatest natural disasters.
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Related Articles:
- LeRoy Percy
- Will Percy
- James K. Vardaman
- Greenville, Mississippi Rejects the Ku Klux Klan
- The Mississippi River Commission and the Army Corps of Engineers
- Sharecropper Migration
- Robert Moton and the Colored Advisory Commission
- Delta Blues Music
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