Black cloud : the great Florida hurricane of 1928 /
Eliot Kleinberg
- New York : Carroll & Graf Publishers, 2003
- xvi, 283 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm
In September 1928, when great storms were still unnamed, nearly 700 black men, women, and children were buried in an unmarked West Palm Beach ditch following the nation's second-deadliest hurricane. The savage gusts that churned the waters of Lake Okeechobee into a maelstrom of death afflicted victims of all races and classes, and produced tales of survival and loss among whites and blacks alike. The great African-American writer Zora Neale Hurston, immortalized the havoc the storm unleashed on the great lakes denizens in her classic Their Eyes Were Watching God. The vast majority of the post-storm workers were poor black migrants; even if the hurricane was color-blind, the recovery and rebuilding effort were not