The searing image of burning black churches has refocused America’s attention on the South a generation after the civil rights era. Tribune correspondent Jan Crawford Greenburg and photographer Ovie Carter are traveling the region this summer. Today they explore how an eocnomic shift away from King Cotton affects African-Americans.
They stand shoulder to shoulder, in hairnets and thick plastic aprons, working over freshly killed chickens that speed by on hooks and conveyor belts in the chilly mist of the processing plant.
As with any assembly line, the workers’ tasks are specific: Some kill the birds, some remove the feathers that the machines miss. Some cut them into pieces, others package them for shipping.
The work is not pleasant, but most of the employees of Lady Forest Farms are happy to have it, in a state where, just seven years ago, one in four residents lived below the poverty level. Sharon Smith, for one, doesn’t miss a beat when asked where she would be without Lady Forest.
“Sitting at the house,” said Smith, 35, who has been with the family-owned company four years and spends her day arranging entrails of chickens for government inspection.
For people in this farm county just east of the state capital, poultry is a lifeline, a booming industry that has provided jobs where once there were virtually none. Since 1989, the industry has grown 80 percent in the state and now employs about 20,000 people, and at plants such as Lady Forest, chickens mean opportunity.
“As far as right here in Forest, the poultry industry is what keeps it going,” said Jerry Gray, 31, a Lady Forest floor superintendent who makes $45,000 a year. “If they shut this down, there wouldn’t be any jobs.”
The same story, but with different industries, is being repeated across Mississippi, particularly in rural areas that long have been among the nation’s poorest. The three C’s–chickens, catfish and casinos–have completely overshadowed what once was the biggest of them all in the Deep South: cotton.
Taken with the manufacturing jobs that employ a quarter of the state’s work force, the new industries have helped drive up employment rates, as well as Mississippi’s per-capita income.
In the last three years, the state has seen a net gain of 130,000 jobs. In 1994, the state’s estimated per-capita income was $15,793, compared with just $6,680 in 1980.
“When people hear of Mississippi, they have an image that goes back to the 1960s, if not the 1850s,” said Denton Gibbes, of the state’s economic development department. “When they hear what’s going on, they’re shocked.”
In the farmland of the Mississippi Delta, the new industry is catfish, and Mississippi produces more than any state in the country. Near the river along the state’s western border are gleaming new casinos, now a $5 billion-a-year industry statewide.
“It is the last frontier. It’s almost unspoiled,” Gibbes said of those areas. “You still have a solid work ethic, people willing to give a day’s work for a day’s pay.”
Still, there is much about the state that harks back to another era. Despite the new jobs and growth, Mississippi’s per-capita income remains the lowest of the 50 states. And the state continues to struggle to overcome its old economic system, grounded in plantations and, later, in a sharecropping system that kept blacks in poverty.
With the demise of sharecropping in the 1950s, blacks were turned, uneducated and unskilled, into the labor force. To be sure, poor whites suffered from the state’s subsequent lack of industry, but blacks, who also were struggling to adjust to a different way of life, faced the additional burden of discrimination by law and custom.
Mississippi continues to grapple with remnants of the old system, particularly in rural areas such as the Delta, where cotton still blankets the richest soil in the country. Despite all the changes, the basic economic power structure in the state remains the same, with whites in control and blacks often in menial or inferior jobs.
At Delta Pride Catfish Inc., in Indianola, for example, hundreds of black workers process the fish while whites work in the front office, in secretarial jobs or in management.
Extreme poverty remains a way of life for many African-Americans, making the new industry a cruel reminder that, for all the changes, many things are still very much the same.
In the Delta town of Robinsonville, for example, blacks live in tar-paper shacks with tin roofs, and small children play near a ditch where sewage drains–only a mile from a strip of five new casinos.
“The image in many cases is still an accurate image. There’s still racism, there’s still poverty,” said Charles Cannada, a senior vice president of LDDS WorldCom, the nation’s fourth-largest long-distance provider, which employs 700 people in Jackson, where it is based.
“We may never be the richest state in the union,” he said. “We may always be the poorest state. But we’re trying.”
Many believe that breaking that cycle of poverty and racism will be almost impossible without major improvements in the state’s education system, which in many areas is as segregated as it was three decades ago. The school system, they say, keeps blacks and whites separate and, as a result, keeps industry away.
Blacks also must battle the state’s history. In the 1960s, when federal law banned employment discrimination, Mississippi offered few opportunities for blacks beyond the farms. Even there, machinery was quickly replacing them.
Manufacturing jobs began to come to the state in the 1950s, but those were largely unavailable to blacks. And regions such as the Delta actually resisted industry. Plantation owners and farmers, says Sunflower County Chancery Court Judge Jack Harper, weren’t interested in anything “that would take their labor.” As a result, many blacks fled the area for the promise and higher wages of the North.
For those who stayed, there was little work outside the larger cities, and in Mississippi, there are few of those. As recently as 1989, some rural counties of the Delta had more than half of their families living in poverty.
“We grew out of the dark ages, and it was painful progress,” Harper said. “But we have progressed.”
The progress has been particularly marked in counties such as Tunica, which has 10 casinos that employ about 10,000 people. The casinos, which began opening in 1992, lure visitors and workers from neighboring states of Tennessee and Arkansas, as well as far-away states such as Illinois.
“Anybody in Tunica that doesn’t have a job doesn’t want one,” said George Hibbler, 45, a black security guard at Harrah’s Casino.
Hibbler joined the casino almost three years ago, after working 22 years driving tractors for two white farmers. A fatter paycheck from the casino enabled him to build a new house.
Casinos certainly have provided many residents, both black and white, with jobs that are less grueling and better paying than work in the fields and factories. Ten years ago, Tunica County’s unemployment rate was 20 percent. When the casinos came to the area in 1993, it dropped to 9.6 percent, according to the Mississippi Employment Security Commission. In June, the monthly figures put unemployment at 7.8 percent.
“I mean, it’s good,” said Angela Brown, 28, a black woman who works as a housekeeper at Harrah’s. “We’re glad the casinos came. It’s good for people getting off welfare.”
Brown, who makes $7 an hour, was on welfare, supporting three children, before she started working at the casino.
For some, however, life is no better. The shacks of Robinsonville, which is off the main road leading to the casinos, were deliberately cut off from the view of visitors when a new road was built.
“They don’t want folks to see all this,” said Chester Holmes, 36, pointing down the dusty road at the weatherbeaten houses.
Farther south in the Delta, where catfish is the booming industry, the poverty also is starkly evident. In the small town of Sunflower, blacks young and old pass the day sitting in front of stores long closed, some perched on ledges in front of broken-out windows. White businesses left the area after local blacks got control of government years ago.
But down the road, in Indianola, whites and blacks are working together, in government and in the community.
The quality of life is better, as well. Blacks, for example, are building big homes in a spacious new subdivision. They also are represented in government. Two of the five members of the County Board of Supervisors are black.
Many county residents work at Delta Pride, the local catfish processing plant, or on nearby catfish farms.
“The only thing going now in the Delta is the fish ponds,” said A.J. Pearson, 26, who has worked nine years harvesting the fish and makes $4.75 an hour. He stands chest deep in water, inside a net with 30,000 thrashing fish, to help load them into a truck that goes straight to Delta Pride.
The importance of the industry has led to some abuses. Delta Pride, which employs 1,100 people in its three area plants, once worked people at “slave wages, almost sub-slave conditions,” said Carver Randle, 54, a black man who serves on the Board of Supervisors. A strike by workers in 1990 and citations by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration changed conditions, and a new management team is in place.
Randle and others across Mississippi repeatedly point to education as a major problem in luring new industry to the state, which historically put schooling below other concerns. As recently as the 1950s, farm children stayed out of school to harvest the cotton crop. After that, they attended an abbreviated school year because they often were needed in the fields.
White defiance of court-ordered integration in the 1960s still haunts the state and, many believe, hinders its efforts to progress economically. In Mississippi and throughout the South, whites established private academies for their children in the wake of court orders to integrate schools.
That separate and unequal system remains in place in predominantly black counties in the Delta and other states, such as Alabama and Georgia. But in the mostly white counties of those states, such as in northeastern Mississippi and northern Alabama and Georgia, white and black children attend public schools together.
It’s no coincidence to black officials that the northeastern region is also home to most of the state’s manufacturing jobs. Companies that have expressed interest in Delta communities, such as Indianola, shy away when they learn about the segregated schools, said Clanton Beamon, a black member of the board of supervisors.
“When they started asking about the school system . . . well, we continue to flunk that test,” Beamon said.
Another difficulty in attracting new industry was the state’s work force, which, in the poor areas, was uneducated and unskilled. The dynamic became a vicious circle: College graduates left Mississippi with its dearth of skilled jobs, while industry shied away because the state lacked skilled workers.
The situation is changing now with some of the new industries, and the state is working to hasten the process. Six months ago, it mailed letters to recent college graduates urging them to return.
“Mississippi always had a bad name, a bad history. I don’t know if we’ll ever overcome that,” said Bill Haralson, president and chief executive officer of Lady Forest Farms Inc. “We still got a long ways to go. You just have to take it one step at a time.”
