Okeechobee 1928: The Lake and the Muck
On the night of September 16th, 1928, a hurricane pushed Lake Okeechobee through the earthen levee protecting its south shore. The lake moved across a muck plain populated almost entirely by Black agricultural laborers - migrants from Georgia and Alabama brought to harvest sugarcane and winter vegetables under a labor system that placed them in the lowest ground, closest to the water, farthest from any warning that might have saved them.
Between eighteen hundred and three thousand people died. The exact number remains unknown. Most of the dead were never officially counted. Many were never found.
In Okeechobee 1928: The Lake and the Muck, Robert Pudlock continues The Storm Council Series with its most searching and morally significant entry yet. The Storm Council does not judge. It measures: the patchwork levee that no federal authority had ever inspected, the Weather Bureau warnings that reached the coast but not the muck plain, the foremen's ledgers whose counts never closed, the mass graves left unmarked for decades. Herbert Hoover arrives after the flood and speaks only of what can be constructed. The Record notes what he does not say.
A book that uses the cold precision of an inhuman observer to illuminate a disaster whose human dimensions - racial, economic, political - have been obscured for nearly a century.
Also in The Storm Council Series:
Volume One: Galveston 1900 Volume Two: Miami 1926
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