Lanterns on the Levee by William Alexander Percy

He later resigned and left for a trip to Japan the following day. Percy continued to head the relief effort for months until the floodwaters had receded sufficiently that residents could return to their homes. After conditions on the levee deteriorated, Percy was strongly criticized in the national press. To Percy's dismay, the relief committee voted unanimously not to relocate the black residents, and the ships left Greenville empty. They worried that if the black workers were removed from the area, they would never return. But, local planters, including Percy's father, a forceful former US senator, opposed this decision. Percy believed that the refugees needed to be evacuated to Vicksburg to receive better care and food, and arranged for ships to prepare to remove them. ĭuring the flood, thousands of blacks fleeing farms and plantations under water sought refuge on the levee in Greenville. Ī friend of Herbert Hoover from the Belgium Relief Effort during the early years of World War I, Percy was put in charge of relief during the great Mississippi flood of 1927, when an area larger than all New England (minus Maine) was inundated in the spring. He then served in the US Army, earning the rank of Captain and the Croix de Guerre Template:Disambiguation needed. He served in Belgium as a delegate until the withdrawal of American personnel upon the U.S. After returning to Greenville, Percy joined his father's firm in the practice of law.ĭuring World War I, Percy joined the Commission for Relief in Belgium in November 1916. He spent a year in Paris before going to Harvard for a law degree. His father was elected in 1910 as the last United States Senator from Mississippi elected by the legislature.Īs an attorney and planter with 20,000 acres under cultivation for cotton, William Percy was very influential in the state Episcopal University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, a postbellum tradition in his family. Percy was born to Camille (a French Catholic) and LeRoy Percy, of the planter class in Mississippi, and grew up in Greenville, Mississippi, on the big river.

Lanterns on the Levee by William Alexander Percy