At noon on September 29, 1927, the clouds over St. Louis began to take on an ominous darkness. In the distant western sky, sharp lightening appeared and low, deep rumbles of thunder sounded. By one o’clock heavy rain commenced, accompanied by increasingly forceful wind. Within minutes the cell touched down, forming a large and devastating tornado, which was attended by a dull, drumming sound and a swirl of black dust that engulfed the city. Along the cyclone’s nearly six-square-mile path, up from the southwest quadrant to the northeast of the city and then across the Mississippi River into Venice, Illinois, it took the lives of at least sixty-nine people and created millions of dollars in damages, including the destruction of approximately 5,000 homes.
To date, the infamous St. Louis Cyclone was one of region’s most destructive weather episodes. It was particularly damaging for the Black communities of St. Louis who reported roughly fifty casualties, more than one hundred injuries, and the total destruction of some of its premier Westside enclaves. As one Black journalist lamented, areas that were “once showplaces of the Race,” boasting the region’s most “pretentious” Black owned homes, were in the aftermath reduced to “piles of brick, mortar and stone.” Despite the disproportionate number of Black victims of the tornado, however, mainstream white newspapers outside the region, including the New York Times, emphasized the loss of white life, the destruction of white-owned property, and efforts to avoid “disorder,” including the deployment of troops to “shoot looters on sight.”
Along with journalists at the Chicago Defender, the Philadelphia Tribune, and the Baltimore Afro-American, Blues performers stepped in to fill the gap in public acknowledgement. Blues performers recovered the event’s unfolding destruction from the vantage of Black working-class witnesses and victims. Translating the details of the sudden and destructive weather event into the vernacular idiom of the genre, they restructured its meaning from the vantage of a collective defined not by property ownership but rather from a shared analysis originating in overlapping social and ecological vulnerability.