Backwater Blues: The Mississippi Flood of 1927 in the African American Imagination

Notes

notes Introduction 1. Robyn Spencer, “Contested Terrain: The Mississippi Flood of 1927 and the Struggle to Control Black Labor,” Journal of Negro History 79 (Spring 1994); John Barry, Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997). 2. Mikko Saikku, This Delta, This Land: An Environmental History of the Yazoo Mississippi Delta (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005). 3. Barry, Rising Tide, 21–32; Pete Daniel, Deep’n As it Come (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 3–17; Lyle Saxon, Father Mississippi (New York: Century, 1927). 4. Saikku, This Delta, This Land. 5. David Cohn, Where I Was Born and Raised (South Bend, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1935), 1–4. 6. Ari Kelman, A River and Its City: The Nature of Landscape in New Orleans (Berkeley : University of California Press, 2003); Keith Wailoo, Dying in the City of the Blues: Sickle Cell Anemia and the Politics of Race and Health (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 19–20. 7. James C. Cobb, The Most Southern Place on Earth: The Mississippi Delta and the Roots of Regional Identity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 1; Robert L. Brandfon, Cotton Kingdom for the New South: A History of the Yazoo Mississippi Delta from Reconstruction to the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967), 24–29; Robert W. Harrison, Alluvial Empire: A Study of State and Local 161 162 notes to introduction Efforts toward Land Development in the Alluvial Valley of the Lower Mississippi River (Little Rock, Ark.: Pioneer, 1961), 5, 20. 8. Cobb, Most Southern Place on Earth, 1–2, 335. 9. Ibid.; Mart Stewart, “What Nature Suffers to Groe”: Life, Labor, and Landscape on the Georgia Coast, 1680–1920 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996); Cohn, Where I Was Born and Raised, 43. 10. Cobb, Most Southern Place on Earth, 153, 183, 231, 324. 11. Saikku, This Delta, This Land, 137. 12. Kelman, River and Its City, 87–119, 161–71; Donald W. Davis, “Historical Perspective on Crevasses, Levees, and the Mississippi River,” in Transforming New Orleans and Its Environs: Centuries of Change, ed. Craig Colten (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000), 92–100. 13. Craig E. Colten, An Unnatural Metropolis: Wresting New Orleans from Nature (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005), 19–32. 14. Ted Steinberg, Acts of God: The Unnatural History of “Natural” Disaster in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). 15. Colten, Unnatural Metropolis, 19–32. 16. Davis, “Historical Perspective.” Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Missouri were among the states who applied for this act. 17. Davis, “Historical Perspective,” 96–100; Charles Royster, The Destructive War: William Tecumseh Sherman, Stonewall Jackson, and the Americans (New York: Random House, 1991); David Potter, The Impending Crisis: America before the Civil War, 1848– 1861 (New York: Harper and Row, 1976). 18. Barry, Rising Tide, 45–53, 88, 100; Colten, Unnatural Metropolis, 19–32; Todd Shallat, Structures in the Stream: Water, Science, and the Rise of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994). 19. Edward Larson, Sex, Race, and Science: Eugenics in the Deep South (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996). 20. Marc Reisner, Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water (New York: Penguin, 1993). 21. Samuel P. Hays, Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency: The Progressive Conservation Movement, 1890–1920 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1999), 2. 22. Hays, Conservation, 3. 23. Ibid., 91. 24. Cobb, Most Southern Place on Earth, 79; Davis, “Historical Perspective,” 92–93; Kelman, River and Its City, 161–71; Barry, Rising Tide, 88, 100; Colten, Unnatural Metropolis. 25. Barry, Rising Tide, 13–32; Gay M. Gomez, “Perspective, Power, and Priorities: New Orleans and the Mississippi River Flood of 1927,” in Transforming New Orleans notes to introduction 163 and Its Environs: Centuries of Change, ed. Craig Colten (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000); Kelman, River and Its City, 157–97. 26. Barry, Rising Tide, 14. 27. Ibid., 14–15 28. Saikku, This Delta, This Land, 27–28. 29. Barry, Rising Tide, 1–14; quotation cited from Barry on Henry Waring Ball. 30. Barry, Rising Tide, 173–209; Daniel, Deep’n as it Come, 3–12; Saxon, Father Mississippi , 279–90; “Mississippi Valley Flood Disaster of 1927: Official Report of Relief Operations” (Washington, D.C.: American Red Cross Printing, 1927). 31. Daniel, Deep’n as it Come, 88–91. 32...