05/14/2026
Over 2,500 people died here. Most of them were buried in a hole in the ground with no names. 🌊
Over 2,500 people died here. Most of them were buried in a hole in the ground with no names. 🌊
On September 16, 1928, a Category 4 hurricane made landfall near Palm Beach and pushed the waters of Lake Okeechobee over a poorly engineered earthen d**e. The surge was 20 feet in some areas. The towns of Belle Glade, South Bay, and Pahokee were submerged within hours. It remains the deadliest natural disaster in Florida history and the second deadliest in American history, behind only the 1900 Galveston hurricane.
What followed the storm was its own atrocity. White victims were collected, coffined, and buried in marked graves. Black victims, who made up the majority of the dead, were loaded into trucks and buried in a mass grave at Port Mayaca. A separate mass grave in West Palm Beach held hundreds more. For decades, the site had no marker, no ceremony, and no official acknowledgment.
The d**e that failed had been flagged as inadequate years before the storm. The Army Corps of Engineers knew. The state knew. The people living in its shadow were mostly Black farmworkers and poor white laborers who had no political power to demand better.
What did they teach you about this in school?
They didn't teach this to me in school. My grandfather told me. He helped bury the people