Backwater Blues: The Mississippi Flood of 1927 in the African American Imagination by Richard M. Mizelle Jr. (review)

Backwater Blues: The Mississippi Flood of 1927 in the African American Imagination, by Richard M. Mizelle Jr. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, Press, 2014, 224 pp. This book recovers the voices and experiences of African Americans during one of the most destructive environmental disasters in American history. The 1927 Mississippi River flood devastated communities in seven states as excessive rain created a slow-moving disaster. Patchworks of levees, not yet standardized and coordinated by the Army Corps of Engineers, failed from natural forces and human intervention. The river flooded areas along its main corridor, as well as its backwaters-those places and people long forgotten and marginal.