A New York Times Notable Book of the Year, winner of the Southern
Book Critics Circle Award and the Lillian Smith Award.
An American epic of science, politics, race, honor, high society, and
the Mississippi River, Rising Tide tells the riveting and
nearly forgotten story of the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927. The
river inundated the homes of almost one million people, helped elect
Huey Long governor and made Herbert Hoover president, drove hundreds
of thousands of African Americans north, and transformed American
society and politics forever.
The flood brought with it a human storm: white and black collided,
honor and money collided, regional and national powers collided. New
Orleans’s elite used their power to divert the flood to those
without political connections, power, or wealth, while causing Black
sharecroppers to abandon their land to flee up north. The states were
unprepared for this disaster and failed to support the Black
community. The racial divides only widened when a white officer
killed a Black man for refusing to return to work on levee repairs
after a sleepless night of work.
In the powerful prose of Rising Tide, John M. Barry removes
any remaining veil that there had been equality in the South. This
flood not only left millions of people ruined, but further emphasized
the racial inequality that have continued even to this day.