Lake Providence Floods

Vivien Thomas was born in the Deep South in 1910, less than fifty years after the Civil War ended. For the older folks, slavery was still a living memory. Vivien’s first few years were spent in Lake Providence, Louisiana. The town was very close to the Mississippi River and each spring the Mississippi would flood, making the Thomas family flee to higher ground. When the water subsided, they’d return to their house to face the backbreaking task of shoveling out the stinking mud and debris left in the flood’s wake.

Wanting a better life for their children, Vivien Thomas’s parents, William and Mary Thomas, moved to Nashville, Tennessee when Vivien was two years old, knowing that Nashville was a relatively modern and progressive Southern city. Vivien’s father was a master carpenter, and Vivien and his four siblings were soon part of Nashville’s thriving Black middle-class community. Fortunately, they already were in Nashville in 1927 when this photo, showing the typical Louisiana floods that they escaped, was taken.