One Army Corps analysis found that 80 percent of the pumps’ financial benefits would flow to farmers (the prevention of damage to roads and other infrastructure makes up most of the remaining 20 percent). But after decades of discriminatory lending, racist government policies, outright theft, and industry trends hostile to small farms, many Black Delta farmers have been pushed off their land. At the beginning of the twentieth century, according to historian John C. Willis, two-thirds of farm owners in the Delta were Black; today, 92 percent of agricultural producers in Sharkey County and 87 percent in Issaquena are white. Black farmers are even being pushed out as farmworkers (and moreover, the EPA cautioned in 2008 that the pumps could worsen job prospects for farmworkers).
The case for the pumps was reenergized in 2019 after a devastating flood lasted over six months, putting 231,000 acres of farmland underwater and damaging hundreds of homes and other buildings. Two people drowned when their car drove off a road into floodwaters. The Delta Council—a business group advocating for farming interests, of which the owner of the Rolling Fork bull is a board member—and some residents of a small, majority-white community banded together to promote the pumps by meeting with Mississippi’s senators, launching a pro-pumps website, and coordinating turnout at community hearings. They’ve been joined by the Army Corps’s official local government partner, the Mississippi Levee Board, which has long focused on helping the area’s agriculture industry.
In a 2021 press release supporting the pumps, the Levee Board said more than 90 percent of homes lost in the 2019 flood “were owned by our Black and Indigenous people of color (BIPOC) neighbors.” But Mississippi Emergency Management Agency data analyzed by environmental groups, as well as local reporting, appears to contradict that claim. The data shows the bulk of housing flood claims came from Warren County, of which only a sliver is inside the Backwater. While Warren County’s white and Black populations are nearly even at around 49 percent, Eagle Lake, the county’s largest community of around 300 people in the Backwater, is over 90 percent white.