The Mississippi Delta is the distinctive northwest section of the U.S. state of Mississippi that lies between the Mississippi and Yazoo Rivers. The region has been called "The Most Southern Place on Earth"[1] because of its unique racial, cultural, and economic history. It was one of the richest cotton growing areas and, before the American Civil War (1861-1865), attracted many wealthy planters and their attendant black slaves. The region remains heavily African-American, and is economically poor. It has a musical tradition that includes much of modern blues and jazz. It has often been subject to heavy flooding from the Mississippi, notably during the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and the floods of 2011.
Contents |
Technically not a delta but part of an alluvial plain, created by regular flooding over thousands of years, this region is remarkably flat and contains some of the most fertile soil in the world. It includes all or part of the following counties: Washington, DeSoto, Humphreys, Carroll, Issaquena, Panola, Quitman, Bolivar, Coahoma, Leflore, Sunflower, Sharkey, Tunica, Tallahatchie, Holmes, Yazoo, and Warren.
The river delta at the mouth of the Mississippi lies some 300 miles south of this area, and is referred to as the Mississippi River Delta. The two should not be confused, as may happen in some media references or casual conversation.
The Delta is strongly associated with the origins of several genres of popular music, including the Delta blues and rock and roll. The music came out of the struggles of lives in which poverty and hardship were ever present for mostly black sharecroppers and tenant farmers.[2][3][4]
Gussow (2010) examines the conflict between blues musicians and black ministers in the region between 1920 and 1942. The minister condemned blues music as "devil's music". In response blues musicians would satirize preachers in their music, as for example in the song "He Calls That Religion" by the blues group Mississippi Sheiks. The lyrics accused black ministers of engaging in and fomenting sinful behavior. The blacks were poor, and the musicians and ministers competed for their money. The Great Migration to northern cities seriously depleted black communities and churches.
Author David L. Cohn famously located the Mississippi Delta: it "begins in the lobby of the Peabody Hotel in Memphis and ends on Catfish Row in Vicksburg."[5]
Southern Living calls the Mississippi Delta "a back road traveler's paradise," showcasing the region's character in its March 2008 piece, "Delta Journal". The story begins:
For over two centuries, agriculture has been the mainstay of the Delta economy. 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.
Early agriculture also included limited tobacco production in the Natchez area and indigo in the lower Mississippi. What had begun as back-breaking land clearing by yeoman farmers, supported by extensive families, was expanded into a labor-intensive plantation system dependent on the labor of enslaved Native Americans, who were rapidly supplanted in the 18th century by enslaved Africans. Thousands of Africans were captured, sold and transported as slaves from West Africa, with many entering the Mississippi Delta through the slave market at New Orleans. As slavery became institutionalized as a heritable status, Africans and African Americans for generations worked the commodity plantations, which they helped make extremely profitable. African laborers brought critical knowledge and techniques for the cultivation and processing of both rice and indigo.
The invention of the cotton gin in the late 18th century enabled the widespread production of short-staple cotton, which until then had been too labor-intensive to process. By the early 19th century, cotton had become the Delta’s premier crop, for which there was international demand, and would remain so 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 provided transportation of products to market. At the end of the Civil War, most of the bottomlands behind the ridges were still covered in heavy dense growth of trees, bushes and vines. Most of the acreage of the Delta was uncultivated.
Following the Civil War, 90 percent of the bottomlands in Mississippi were still undeveloped, which led to the state attracting people to its frontier, where their labor in clearing land could be traded to purchase it. Tens of thousands of migrants, both black and white, were drawn to the area. By the end of the century, two-thirds of the independent farmers in the Mississippi Delta were black. The extended low price of cotton had caused many to go deeply into debt, however, and gradually they had to sell off their lands. From 1910-1920, the first and second generations of African Americans after slavery lost their stake in the land and had to resort to sharecropping and tenant farming to survive.[6]
Sharecropping and tenant farming replaced the slave-dependent, labor-intensive plantation system. This labor system inhibited the use of progressive agricultural techniques. 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.
Mechanization starting in the 1930s again altered agricultural economics, as thousands of laborers were no longer needed and migrated North in the Great Migration.
Since the late 20th century, there was an increasing dominance of lower Delta agriculture by families and nonresident corporate entities that held 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.[7]
During the 1920s and 1930s, in the aftermath of the increasing mechanization of Delta farms, displaced whites and African-Americans began to leave the land and move to towns and cities. It was not until the Great Depression years of the 1930s and later that large-scale farm mechanization came to the region. The mechanization of agriculture and the availability of domestic work outside the Delta spurred the migration of Delta residents from the region. Farming was unable to absorb the available labor force and entire families moved together.
From the late 1930s through the 1950s, the Delta experienced an agriculture boom, as wartime needs followed by reconstruction in Europe expanded the demand for the Delta region’s farm products. As the mechanization of agriculture continued, women continued to leave the fields and go 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.
Remnants of the region’s agrarian heritage are scattered along the highways and byways of the lower Delta. Larger communities have survived by fostering economic development in education, government, and medicine. Other endeavors such as catfish, poultry, rice, corn, and soybean farming have assumed greater importance. Today, the monetary value of these crops rivals that of cotton production in the lower Delta. Shifts away from the river as a main transportation and trading route to railroads and, more significantly, highways, have left the river cities struggling for new roles and businesses.
In recent years, 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). Moreover, the 1990s 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.
Following is a list of various festivals in the Delta:
October: The King Biscut Blues Festival Helena, Ar
The Mississippi Department of Corrections operates the Mississippi State Penitentiary (Parchman, MSP) in in unincorporated Sunflower County,[8][9] within the Mississippi Delta. John Buntin of Governing magazine said that MSP "has long cast its shadow over the Mississippi Delta, including my hometown of Greenville, Mississippi."[10]
Newspapers, magazines and journals
Television
The Northern Delta is served by Memphis, Tennessee TV stations.
Air transportation
Highways