Mississippi Delta

Coordinates: 33°48′N 90°24′W / 33.8°N 90.4°W / 33.8; -90.4
Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Not to be confused with Mississippi River Delta.
This article is about the geographic region of the U.S. state of Mississippi. For other uses, see Mississippi Delta (disambiguation).

Mississippi Delta – green line marks boundary

The Mississippi Delta, also known as the Yazoo–Mississippi Delta, or simply the Delta, is the distinctive northwest section of the

alluvial floodplain.[2] Originally covered in hardwood forest across the bottomlands, it was developed as one of the richest cotton-growing areas in the nation before the American Civil War (1861–1865). The region attracted many speculators who developed land along the riverfronts for cotton plantations; they became wealthy planters
dependent on the labor of people they enslaved, who composed the vast majority of the population in these counties well before the Civil War, often twice the number of whites.

As the riverfront areas were developed first and railroads were slow to be constructed, most of the

bottomlands in the Delta were undeveloped, even after the Civil War. Both Black and White migrants flowed into Mississippi, using their labor to clear land and sell timber in order to buy land. By the end of the 19th century, black farmers made up two-thirds of the independent farmers in the Mississippi Delta.[3]

In 1890, the white-dominated

Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s.[citation needed
]

The majority of residents in several counties in the region are still black, although more than 400,000 African Americans left the state during the Great Migration in the first half of the 20th century, moving to Northeastern, Midwestern, and Western industrial cities.[citation needed]

As the agricultural economy does not support many jobs or businesses, the region has attempted to diversify. Lumbering is important and new crops such as soybeans have been cultivated in the area by the largest industrial farmers.

At times, the region has suffered heavy flooding from the Mississippi River, notably in 1927 and 2011.

Geography

flood plain
of the Yazoo and Mississippi rivers

Despite the name, this region is not the delta of the Mississippi River. The shifting river delta at the mouth of the Mississippi on the Gulf Coast lies some 300 miles south of this area, and is referred to as the Mississippi River Delta. Rather, the Mississippi Delta is part of an alluvial plain, created by regular flooding of the Mississippi and Yazoo rivers over thousands of years. The climate is humid subtropical, with short mild winters, and long, hot and wet summers.

The land is flat and contains some of the most fertile soil in the world. It is two hundred miles long and seventy miles across at its widest point, encompassing approximately 4,415,000 acres, or, some 7,000 square miles of alluvial floodplain. On the east, it is bounded by bluffs extending beyond the Yazoo River.[2]

The Delta includes all or part of the following counties: Washington, Western DeSoto, Humphreys, Carroll, Issaquena, Western Panola, Quitman, Bolivar, Coahoma, Leflore, Sunflower, Sharkey, Tate, Tunica, Tallahatchie, Western Holmes, Western Yazoo, Western Grenada, and Warren.

Demographics

In the 21st century, about one-third of Mississippi's African American population resides in the Delta, which has many black-majority state legislative districts.[4] Much of the Delta is included in Mississippi's 2nd congressional district, represented by Democrat Bennie Thompson.

Chinese immigrants began settling in Bolivar County and other Delta counties as plantation workers in the 1870s, though most Delta Chinese families migrated to the state between the 1900s and 1930s. Most of these immigrants worked to leave the fields, becoming merchants in the small rural towns. As these have declined, along with other Delta residents ethnic Chinese have moved to cities or other states.[5] Their descendants represent most of the ethnic Asian residents of the Delta recorded in censuses. While many descendants of the Delta Chinese have left the Delta, their population has increased in the state.[6][7][page needed][8][page needed][9][page needed]

The Mississippi Delta received waves of immigration from three areas which have provided many of America's immigrants: China, Mexico, and Italy. The Italians of the Mississippi Delta brought with them elements of Italian cuisine to the region, and possibly most importantly, elements of Southern Italian music such as the mandolin, which became a part of the music of the Mississippi Delta Blues. Mexican immigrants to the Mississippi Delta greatly influenced the cuisine of the Mississippi Delta, leading to the development of one of the Deltas most famous culinary inventions, the Delta-style tamale, also known as the hot tamale.[10][11]

Agriculture and the Delta economy

Plantations

For more than two centuries,

Sugar cane and rice were introduced to the region by European settlers from the Caribbean in the 18th century. Sugar and rice production were centered in southern Louisiana, and later in the Arkansas Delta.[12]

Early agriculture also included limited tobacco production in the Natchez area and indigo in the lower Mississippi. French yeomen settlers, supported by extensive families, had begun the back-breaking process of clearing the land to establish farms. European settlers in the region attempted to enslave local Native Americans for labor, though this proved unsuccessful as they frequently escaped. By the 18th century, the settlers had switched to importing enslaved Africans instead as a source of labor. In the early years of European colonization, enslaved African laborers brought critical knowledge and techniques for the cultivation and processing of both rice and indigo. Hundreds of thousands of Africans were captured, sold and transported as slaves from West Africa to North America.[12]

The invention of the cotton gin in the late 18th century made profitable the cultivation of short-staple cotton. This type could not be grown in the upland areas of the South, leading to the rapid development of King Cotton throughout what became known as the Deep South. The demand for labor drove the domestic slave trade, and more than one million African American slaves were forced by sales into the South, taken in a forced migration from families in the Upper South. After continued European-American settlement in the area, Congressional passage of the Indian Removal Act of 1830 extinguished Native American claims to these lands.

The Five Civilized Tribes and others were mostly removed west of the Mississippi River, and European-American settlement expanded at a rapid rate in Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas. In the areas of greatest cotton cultivation, whites were far outnumbered by their slaves.

Many slaves were transported to Delta towns by riverboat from slave markets in New Orleans, which became the fourth largest city in the country by 1840. Other slaves were transported downriver from slave markets at Memphis and Louisville. Still others were transported by sea in the coastwise slave trade. By this time, slavery had long been established as a racial caste. African Americans for generations worked the commodity plantations, which they made extremely profitable. In the opinion of Jefferson Davis, typical of that of Mississippian whites of his day, Africans being held in slavery reflected the will of Providence, as it led to their Christianizing and to the improvement of their condition, compared to what it would have been had they remained in Africa.[13] According to Davis, the Africans "increased from a few unprofitable savages to millions of efficient Christian laborers."[14]

By the early 19th century, cotton had become the Delta's premier crop, for which there was high international demand. Mills in New England and New York also demanded cotton for their industry, and New York City was closely tied to the cotton trade. Many southern planters traveled so frequently there for business that they had favorite hotels. From 1822 cotton-related exports comprised half of all exports from the port of New York City.[15] In 1861 Democratic mayor Fernando Wood called for secession of New York City because of its close business ties to the South.[16] Eventually the city joined the state in supporting the war, but immigrants resented having to fight when the wealthy could buy their way out of military service.[16]

Comparing cotton's preeminence then to that of oil today, Historian Sven Beckert called the Delta "a kind of Saudi Arabia of the early nineteenth century."[17]

Demand for cotton remained high until well after the American Civil War, even in an era of falling cotton prices. Though cotton planters believed that the alluvial soils of the region would always renew, the agricultural boom from the 1830s to the late 1850s caused extensive soil exhaustion and erosion. Lacking agricultural knowledge, planters continued to raise cotton the same way after the Civil War.

Plantations before the war were generally developed on ridges near the rivers, which were used for transportation of products to market. Most of the territory of Mississippi was still considered wilderness, needing substantial new population. These areas were covered in a heavy dense growth of trees, bushes and vines.[3]

Following the Civil War, 90 percent of the bottomlands in Mississippi were still undeveloped. The state attracted thousands of migrants to its frontier.

tenant farming to survive.[3]

Sharecropping and tenant farming replaced the slave-dependent plantation system. African American families retained some autonomy, rather than working on gangs of laborers. As many were illiterate, they were often taken advantage of by the planters' accounting. The number of lynchings of black men rose in the region at the time of settling accounts, and researchers have also found a correlation of lynchings to years that were poor economically for the region.

The sharecropping and tenant system, with each family making its own decisions, inhibited the use of progressive agricultural techniques in the region. In the late 19th century, the clearing and drainage of wetlands, especially in Arkansas and the Missouri Bootheel, increased lands available for tenant farming and sharecropping.

Planters needed workers and recruited Italians and Chinese workers in the 19th century to satisfy demand. They quickly moved out of field labor, saving money as communities in order to establish themselves as merchants, often in the small rural towns.

Mechanization and migration

During the 1920s and 1930s, in the aftermath of the increasing

labor force, and entire families moved together, many going north on the railroad to Chicago. People from the same towns often settled near each other.

The view that mechanization sparked the Great Migration—both Black and White—has been challenged by two of the most prominent recent chroniclers of the event. Isabel Wilkerson characterizes the migration as a flight for freedom from the political terror of lynchings and the hardening of Jim Crow restrictions on Black freedom: "They did what human beings looking for freedom, throughout history, have often done. They left."[18]

Nicholas Lemann notes the onset of the Great Migration coincided with the passage of immigration restrictions that throttled the supply of immigrants who had been willing to take the worst of the jobs of the industrial North, which was relatively free of the suffocating breadth of Jim Crow. Further, Lemann wrote, "it was undeniable that the economic opportunity [in the North] was vastly greater; that moment in the Black rural South was one of the few in American history when virtually every member of a large class of people was guaranteed an immediate quadrupling of income, at least, by simply relocating to a place that was only a long day’s journey away."[19]

In this view, Southern Blacks were the agents of the Great Migration and not passive objects. Instead, they actively fled oppression and sought freedom, especially in the years between World War I and World War II. A slow mechanization of Delta agriculture during the first phase of the Great Migration was the effect of the migration of a workforce, not its cause. It was not until the mid 1940s that the doctrine of White supremacy demanded that Blacks be displaced. By that time, Lemann writes, Delta Whites feared socio-political changes that might be forced on the Delta by the Roosevelt Democratic coalition and the pressure of returning WWII veterans; the Delta was three-quarters Black, so their voting potential was huge. As Delta native Aaron Henry, who was born in 1922, put it, "They wished we’d go back to Africa, but Chicago was close enough."[19]

From the late 1930s through the 1950s, the Delta enjoyed an agriculture boom, as wartime needs followed by reconstruction in Europe and Japan expanded the demand for the Delta region's farm products. As the mechanization of agriculture continued, women left fieldwork and went into service work, while the men drove tractors and worked on the farms. From the 1960s through the 1990s, thousands of small farms and dwellings in the Delta region were absorbed by large corporate-owned agribusinesses, and the smallest Delta communities have stagnated.[20] One company that served the agricultural industry in the region was an aerial crop dusting service that eventually became Delta Air Lines, which is currently a major U.S. based passenger air carrier.[21]

Since the late 20th century, lower Delta agriculture has increasingly been dominated by families and nonresident corporate entities that hold large landholdings. Their operations are heavily mechanized with low labor costs. Such farm entities are capital-intensive, where hundreds and thousands of acres are used to produce market-driven crops such as cotton, sugar, rice, and soybeans.[20]

Diversification

Remnants of the region's agrarian heritage are scattered along the highways and byways of the lower Delta. Larger communities have survived by fostering

railroads
and, more significantly, highways, have left the river cities struggling for new roles and businesses.

Due to the growth of the

automobile industry in the South, many parts suppliers have opened facilities in the Delta (as well as on the Arkansas Delta side of the Mississippi River, another area of high poverty). The 1990s state legalization of casino gambling
in Mississippi has boosted the Delta's economy, particularly in the areas of Tunica and Vicksburg.

A large cultural influence in the region is its history of hunting and fishing. Hunting in the Delta is primarily for game such as whitetail deer, wild turkey, and waterfowl, along with many small game species (squirrel, rabbit, dove, quail, raccoon, etc.) For many years, the hunting and fishing have also attracted visitors in the regional tourism economy. The Delta is one of the top waterfowl destinations in the world because it is in the middle of the Mississippi Flyway (the largest of all the migratory bird routes in America).

Political environment