Sociologist Rupert Vance wrote in the 1930s of the “cotton obsessed, Negro obsessed” Mississippi
Delta as “the deepest South.” A half century later, writer Richard Ford called the Delta “the
South’s South.” In the 1990s, historian James Cobb referred to it as the “most southern place
on earth.” Few other regions within the American South have taken on the overtones of representing
that larger region as the Delta has done, but its history shows shifts in meanings ascribed to it,
reflecting environmental forces, the dynamics of an evolving biracial society, and the Delta’s
relationship to broader southern, American, and global forces.
The “Mississippi Delta” is actually the delta of the
Yazoo River,
in the eastern floodplain of the lower Mississippi River. It is 60 miles at its widest point from the
Yazoo to the Mississippi, in what poet
William Alexander Percy
called “a badly drawn half oval.” Elevation goes from 205 above sea level below Memphis to 80 feet at Vicksburg,
averaging 125 feet in height from Greenwood to Greenville. Flooding has been endemic,
as formative as any factor in shaping the life and culture of the Delta.
Native Americans lived on the land that became known as the Delta from around 1000
B.C. They practiced small-scale farming and took part in a commercial hunting economy
with whites after their arrival around the turn of the nineteenth century. The Delta
became officially open to white settlement after Indian treaties between 1820 and 1832.
One traveler in the 1820s, Paul Wilhelm, described a rich ecology, noting migratory birds,
kingfishers, herons, ducks, eagles, and the soon-to-disappear Florida panther. Prevalent
trees included sweetgum, hackberry, cottonwood, persimmon, and river cane, the latter
growing in dense patches.
Whites and their black slaves soon transformed the land, building vast
cotton fields to replace the forests, canebrakes, and marshes, changing
the economy, ecology, and visual landscape. Successful agricultural work
required reservoirs of slaves and money, making the Delta a region dominated
by a planter elite from the early nineteenth century. The
Hamptons
of South Carolina, one of the South’s most famous and successful families,
bought land in the Delta in the 1840s, and by the time of the Civil War,
Wade Hampton III owned 900 slaves on property scattered over two Delta
counties. Greenwood LeFlore was another successful planter, a Choctaw
who owned 400 slaves and decorated his home with the finest furniture
from France. Large cotton yields and accumulating wealth created a powerful
social group, the Delta planters, who would dominate the region’s economic
and political life for generations.
The Civil War and Emancipation brought major changes to the Delta, challenging
the preeminence of the planter definition of the Delta as the site of
a slaveholders’ empire and forcing them to confront new visions of the
Delta among African Americans.
Freedmen
from across the South saw in the post-Civil War Delta a frontier of opportunity,
a relatively undeveloped region without the long settled social arrangements
of the eastern South and with land that could be richly productive if
cleared. Blacks hoped for land ownership during Reconstruction and asserted
their political rights in the Delta, and even with the restriction of
political rights at the end of Reconstruction, African Americans continued
coming into the Delta through the end of the century in hopes of gaining
greater economic opportunity there than elsewhere.
Outside forces helped remake the Delta after the Civil War. Timber companies
cleared land for sale, and railroads entered the region, connecting Delta planters
to newly accessible
markets. The federal government passed flood control legislation, providing
funds to begin containing the tumultuous floods that prevented the agricultural
utilization of much Delta
land before the Civil War. In the early twentieth century, foreign investors
began buying and operating Delta plantations; the British-owned Delta and Pine
Land Company became one of
the world’s largest cotton-producing operations. All of these forces nurtured
the economic modernization of the region, not as a commercial-industrial site
but creating plantations as
factories, marked by industrial-like management techniques and close control
of costs, including exploitation of a large pool of cheap labor, on which Delta
plantations depended.
By 1910, tenants operated 92 percent of Delta farms, and 95 percent of those
tenants were African American. New ethnic groups also appeared in the region
in this
period, including
Chinese, Jews,
Italians, and Syrians.
Despite their embrace of agricultural modernization, planters nurtured their self-image as
an Old South gentry. Their style emphasized personalism and paternalism, and they indeed
pursued the good life, with their financial resources enabling frequent travel, elaborate
parties and dances, tasteful decoration of homes, the best food and drink, and education of
children at fine schools and colleges across the South and the nation. The railroad linked
the Delta to New Orleans and nurtured a cosmopolitanism among planters who could afford its
pleasures.
Cotton culture pervaded the Delta. David Cohn referred to cotton growing
in the Delta as “a secular religion,” one that “was the staple of our
talk, the stuff of our dreams, the poesy of many of our songs.” As the
white landowning class prospered around cotton, African American fortunes
grew more desperate. Delta society was rigidly segregated along racial
line, and blacks living there in the early twentieth century had to face
the devastation of their post-Civil War dream of the Delta as a place
for upward mobility. They faced declining economic fortunes, political
disfranchisement, rising violence, especially lynching, and virtual powerlessness
in the criminal justice system. Coupled with inferior educational institutions
and poor health facilities, these social problems led African Americans
increasingly to head out of the region, especially to Chicago, a main
migration location for Delta blacks. The
Illinois
Central Railroad became a powerful symbol to African Americans of
escape from the Delta and connections to a broader world.
African Americans in the Delta produced a vibrant culture that sustained them through hard
times. The region produced the blues, a music that grew out of traditional work songs and
articulated the sufferings of blacks and the way music could transcend them. The black
church also insulated its believers from the traumas of living in an oppressive society.
The one institution controlled by blacks under racial segregation, the church offered a
sense of self respect and esteem for people who rarely received respect from the institutions
and customs of the larger society.
The federal government also helped to define the Mississippi Delta in the mid-twentieth
century. It began with the government’s reaction to flooding, which continued to disrupt the
agricultural economy. Delta people lived through 11 major floods between 1858 and 1922, but
the 1927 Mississippi River flood was the worst of all, devastating the Delta, killing between
250 and 500 people and leaving more than 16.6 million acres and 162,000 homes under water.
Soon after, Congress appropriated $325 million for an extensive flood control system. The
New Deal introduced the most extensive federal government presence in the region since
Reconstruction. Planters used New Deal appropriations to their advantage, accepting payments
to take land out of production and leaving their tenants with few resources. World War II
provided jobs that drew tenants away to the military and defense projects, creating a labor
shortage that promoted the consolidation of farm lands, diversification of crops beyond
cotton, and the mechanization of plantations.
Beginning with the
Dixiecrat
movement of the 1948 presidential campaign, the Delta became a stronghold
for the final defense of legal segregation. Estimates are that 95 percent
of the Delta vote went for the Dixiecrat ticket, which included a Deltan,
Fielding Wright, as vice presidential candidate. The Delta birthed the
Citizens’ Councils in the 1950s, which organized intimidation of civil
rights advocates and cooperated with state government efforts to defend
the Jim Crow caste system.
The civil rights movement nonetheless found crucial support in the Delta, putting
forward a vision of the region as a source of African American political influence
if its predominantly
black population became empowered through enfranchisement and economic improvement.
Voter registration drives became the battles that eventually brought political
change, leading to
increased African American political participation in the Delta. Civil rights
leaders like Fannie Lou Hamer, Aaron Henry, and Amzie Moore became central figures
in a new iconography
of the Delta.
The Delta’s writers, musicians, and artists have invested the region with
imaginative appeal, from Tennessee Williams’s theatrical plays of the
decadent white elite, to
Robert
Johnson’s brooding blues of a haunted crossroads in Delta, to
William
Faulkner’s stories of the taming of the natural environment in the
Delta. German filmmaker Wim Wenders, in
Wings
of Desire, portrays a dying man in Berlin who muses on what he
has not done in his life—including visiting the Mississippi Delta, still
a distinctive place in the imagination.
