Solomon Tate Remembers What the Archive Forgot

Editor's note: Solomon Tate does not appear in any surviving archive. No intake form from the Greenville levee camp bears his name. No Red Cross ledger records his rations. The Colored Advisory Commission, appointed by Herbert Hoover in June 1927 to investigate conditions in the refugee camps and chaired by Tuskegee principal Robert Russa Moton, documented that "unless a Negro representative had sufficient authority to inspect the records in local Red Cross offices, it was impossible to get sufficient fact to substantiate the conditions reported by the Negroes themselves."¹ The Commission substantiated the conditions anyway. Hoover suppressed the report.² The individual voices were never recorded at all.

What follows is a reconstruction. One sharecropper's experience assembled from the documented conditions of the Greenville camp as recorded by the Moton Commission, NAACP field investigator Walter White, the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, and the clandestine letters that Black refugees smuggled to the Chicago Defender while under National Guard guard.³ Solomon Tate is a composite. Everything that happens to him happened to someone. That we cannot name that someone is, as they say, part of the historical record.

The interview is set in Washington County, Mississippi, late fall 1927. The camp at Greenville closed September 15. Tate has been back on the land for two months.

You were on the levee at Mounds Landing the night it broke.

Solomon: I was on it. April twenty-first. They come through the quarters before dawn with the truck. Didn't ask. They came and said get on. Two thousand of us, maybe more, filling sandbags and throwing them up. You could feel the ground moving under your feet. Not shaking like an earthquake. I don't know what an earthquake feels like. But breathing. The levee was breathing. And the water on the other side was boiling. One man said that and it was right. Boiling up through the ground.⁴

Every man on that levee knew it was going. The guards knew too. But they had rifles and we had sandbags, so we kept filling. I remember thinking: this is the dumbest way to die. Filling a bag with dirt to put on top of a thing that's already gone.

When did you run?

Solomon: When the first crack opened. Maybe fifteen, twenty feet from where I was standing. The sound was like a tree splitting, but it didn't stop. It just kept splitting. I dropped the bag and ran up the slope. Some men ran the wrong way. I don't know how many went into the water.

The official report said no Guardsmen were lost.⁵ That was true. They were standing further back.

You ended up in the Greenville camp.

Solomon: Everybody ended up in the Greenville camp. Thirteen thousand of us on eight miles of levee crown, sleeping on the slope in the rain.⁶ When the Red Cross came, they put up tents and kitchens, and I thought, alright. This is relief. This is what relief looks like.

Then they gave me a tag.

A tag.

Solomon: Cardboard tag, like you'd put on a piece of luggage. Said "laborer" on it. You wore it or you didn't eat.⁷ White folks in the camp didn't have tags. They got rations and went about their business. We worked for ours. Stacking sandbags, hauling debris, unloading boats. Whatever they pointed at. And you couldn't leave. National Guard on the perimeter, passes required. The Commission wrote it up later: white people came and went at will, colored people couldn't get a pass without their planter's say-so.⁸

I want to say something about that tag. I been sharecropping since I was fourteen. I know what it is to work another man's land and owe him for the privilege. But there was always a story you could tell yourself. That you were working toward something. That the debt would clear one day. The tag took the story away. The tag said: this is what you are. Not what you do. What you are.

You're a lay preacher. What did that mean inside the camp?

Solomon: It meant people looked at me expecting something useful, and I had nothing useful to give. What am I going to tell a woman whose house is under nine feet of water, whose husband got taken to work the levee at Vicksburg three weeks ago and she hasn't heard a word since? God is good? God was not in that camp. I don't say that lightly.

I'll tell you what I did instead. I sat with people. That's all. Sat with them and didn't pretend to have an explanation. Turns out that's most of what preaching is anyway, once you strip the performance off it.

The letters to the Defender. Were you involved?

Solomon: (long pause)

I can read and write. That's not common and I don't say it to boast. My mother taught me from a Bible with half the pages gone. In the camp, that made me useful in a different way. People would come to me and say, write this down. Write what's happening. So I wrote. And there were ways to get a letter out. I won't say how, because the people who helped are still here and the people who'd punish them are still here too.

I wrote what I saw. Men beaten for not working fast enough. A man shot for refusing to unload a boat.⁹ Women. I won't say what happened to the women. I wrote it down. I don't need to say it again.

Did you believe the letters would change anything?

Solomon: I believed someone in Chicago would read it and know. That's different.

Herbert Hoover sent a commission to investigate the camps. Did you know about that at the time?

Solomon: I heard the name Moton. Heard some men from Tuskegee came through. I didn't see them myself. What I know is that nothing changed after they came. The tag stayed on. The guards stayed on. We were in that camp until September.¹⁰ Nearly five months.

When they finally let us out, we went back to the same land, the same planter, the same debt. Except now the land was ruined and the debt was bigger, because the Red Cross had been feeding us and the planter counted every meal against our account. You understand what I'm telling you? The man didn't lift a finger for us. The government fed us. And he charged us for it.

You didn't go north.

Solomon: Not yet. A lot of people did. A lot.¹¹ I got my mother here. I got the piece of ground I been working, which isn't mine but it's the only ground I know how to work. And I keep turning it over in my head. If I go to Chicago, I'm free of the tag. But I'm also a man nobody ever heard of, starting from nothing in a city already full of people starting from nothing. Here, at least I know which snakes are poisonous. I mean that in every sense.

What do you want people to know?

Solomon: That the flood didn't do this to us. The flood was water. Water doesn't hand out tags. Water doesn't check your pass. Everything that happened in that camp was done by men who knew exactly what they were doing and did it anyway, and then a man who wants to be president made sure nobody would hear about it.¹²

Solomon Tate, or whoever he was, however many people he was, would have lived to see Hoover win the presidency in 1928 on the strength of his reputation as the "Great Humanitarian" of the flood. He would have lived to see Hoover lose the Black vote in 1932, after the promises made to suppress the Moton Report went unkept.² He may have been among the tens of thousands who left the Delta in the years after, accelerating a Great Migration that would reshape American cities for the rest of the century.¹¹

The Moton Commission's report sat in the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library for decades. The conditions it documented were substantiated, filed, and buried. Today, when disaster hits and the question arises of who gets evacuated first, whose claim gets processed, whose neighborhood gets rebuilt and whose gets bought out, the sorting happens fast, and it happens along lines that would not have surprised Solomon Tate at all.

Footnotes

1. Colored Advisory Commission, Final Report, December 12, 1927. Herbert Hoover Presidential Library. Excerpted at PBS American Experience: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/flood-moton-second-report/ ↩

2. PBS American Experience, "Robert Moton and the Colored Advisory Commission": https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/flood-moton-cac/ ↩ ↩²

3. Walter White's NAACP field report, 1927, NAACP Records, Library of Congress. Summarized in John M. Barry, Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America (Simon & Schuster, 1997). ↩

4. Contemporary account of levee conditions at Mounds Landing, cited in Barry, Rising Tide, and corroborated by Mississippi Department of Archives and History: https://www.mshistorynow.mdah.ms.gov/issue/the-flood-of-1927-and-its-impact-in-greenville-mississippi ↩

5. National Guard officer's official report, cited in Barry, Rising Tide. ↩

6. National Museum of African American History and Culture, "The Great Mississippi River Flood of 1927": https://nmaahc.si.edu/explore/stories/great-mississippi-river-flood-1927 ↩

7. The "laborer" tag requirement is documented in multiple sources, including the Moton Commission findings and NMAAHC: https://nmaahc.si.edu/explore/stories/great-mississippi-river-flood-1927 ↩

8. Colored Advisory Commission, Final Report: "Negro inmates complained whites came and went at will without passes, while colored people were not given similar privileges." ↩

9. Shooting of James Gooden, Greenville, July 1927, corroborated by Moton Commission findings and Barry, Rising Tide. Additional incident of a Black man shot for refusing to unload a relief boat documented in BlackPast.org: https://blackpast.org/african-american-history/mississippi-river-great-flood-1927/ ↩

10. Red Cross camps maintained through September 15, 1927. Mississippi Department of Archives and History: https://www.mshistorynow.mdah.ms.gov/issue/the-mississippi-flood-of-1927 ↩

11. Post-flood migration estimates from NMAAHC and Mississippi Encyclopedia: https://mississippiencyclopedia.org/entries/mississippi-river-flood-1927/ ↩ ↩²

12. Hoover's suppression of the Moton Report is documented in PBS American Experience and Barry, Rising Tide. The Commission "presented the findings to Hoover and advocated immediate improvements to aid the flood's neediest victims. But the information was never made public." ↩