Even when they actually used to teach history in our schools, a lot of the real history of change in America was overlooked. The Mississippi Flood of 1927 is a great case in point. Not only did this most destructive flood in American history kill almost 250 people, cause hundreds of millions of dollars in damages, and cover 27,000 square miles across seven states with up to 30 feet of water, it had far-reaching socioeconomic, political, and racial consequences for the region as well as the nation as a whole.

Fatal Flood is a truly excellent installment of the American Experience series and a penetrating look at the terrible flood that changed the social fabric of America. It approaches the story from multiple angles, including a truly personal one that seems to render the flood's repercussions in a telling microcosm all its own.

The focus of the story is the city of Greenville, Mississippi, in many ways the economic hub of the Mississippi Delta region where cotton was still king. Tragically yet predictably in this land where blacks outnumbered whites, the flood all too quickly came to be defined in largely racial terms.

It's important to note that Greenville was no hotbed of imminent racial conflict; the video describes how the most prominent local planter, LeRoy Percy, spoke out for the humane treatment of sharecroppers and personally convinced the town to repudiate the presence of the Ku Klux Klan during its 1920s heyday. When push came to shove, though, Percy put greed over honor. When his son Will, head of the Flood Relief Committee, called for the evacuation of the thousands of blacks stranded on the levees with little more than the shirts on their backs, LeRoy Percy convinced the other committee members to change their mind, betraying his own son in the process. The local planters were scared that the black laborers they depended on for their wealth would not return if they were evacuated elsewhere.

Surprisingly, the documentary goes on to show how the rebuked Will Percy seemingly betrayed his own nature to become nothing short of a race-baiter who blamed the black population for the cold-blooded murder of a black worker by a white policeman. Both of the Percys make for most interesting case studies in Southern racism, and this documentary does a great job of telling their story in the context of the great flood and its pervasive consequences.

The documentary features a number of interviews, some of them quite moving, with both white and black survivors of the 1927 flood. Even here, though, the race question colors their personal narratives. Once the flood waters receded -- which took a couple of months -- Greenville was never the same. Planters' fears were soon realized as blacks began leaving in droves, most of them migrating north to Chicago. Within a year, half of the blacks in the Mississippi Delta had left -- and the very fabric of the nation had changed in the process.

Somewhat surprisingly, this otherwise excellent program does not mention Herbert Hoover's duplicitous dealings with Robert Moton and the Colored Advisory Committee. As the man in charge of all flood relief projects, Hoover was made aware of the deplorable conditions of the 1,300 or so blacks consigned to the levees at Greenville. Rather than doing anything to help these unfortunate victims, Hoover somehow convinced prominent African-American leader Robert Moton and the Colored Advisory Committee not to reveal the horrible abuses, promising them all sorts of things, even the parceling out of white planters' land to all the sharecroppers, in the event that he realized his presidential ambitions.

Hoover was lying, of course, as he proved after moving into the White House in January 1929. It was this act of betrayal by Herbert Hoover that signaled the beginning of the huge shift of African-American voters from the Republican to the Democratic ticket.