Sean’s Blog

Yesterday and today were peeks into the land of the Delta. Yesterday we visited a cotton farm and today, the Levee Museum on the bank of the Mississippi. We also had a day of class for the kids and I got to read a piece by Fannie Lou Hamer that was pretty remarkable; she was a revolutionary, no two ways about it.

What struck me most about the cotton farm was how mechanized it was. The farm was about 9,000 acres and would have been worked by thousands of people back in the day. Nowadays there is a staff of only 20 people. When it comes time to harvest the cotton in the Fall, they spray chemicals over the farm from a plane that cause the leaves to fall off. Then a tractor that uses spinning blades and giant vacuums pulls the cotton from the plants. The tractor is programmed using a GPS system to robotically steer itself through the farm. If I’m not mistaken, at no time before arriving at the cotton gin for processing is the cotton ever touched by human hands. It’s a whole different industry than it was during the slave plantation days or even two generations ago.

So the visit to the farm put two things on my mind. First, how does this effect the current employment situation in the Delta and second, what was the relationship between the mechanization of the cotton industry and the civil rights movement? The way I do the math, and based on some questions I asked, the Delta is producing roughly twice as much wealth as it was fifty years ago and has half the population. It seems like if there was even the slightest truth to trickle-down-economics, this would be a case study in rising living standards for those who stayed. In fact, that’s true for Whites in the Delta, but there has been virtually no increase in the living standards of Blacks (except for cars and slightly out-dated comsumer technology). Visiting houses in the Black communities here I find many families are living in the same houses they were in fifty years ago, but now these houses are now in desperate need of renovation. To be sure, as Mrs. Downey said, there is more opportunity and some African Americans are benefitting from it. But it is obvious that the Black community as a whole is not being given access to the phenomenal increase in wealth that must have taken place over the last several decades. Now, to be fair to Whites in the delta, I can’t say that the wealth is staying here at all. It may not be ending up in the in the bank accounts of White farmers, but in the bank accounts of corporate middle men. I don’t know.

As for the effect of all this on the civil rights movement, I really need to research that more. The mechanization happened at the same time as the civil rights movement’s heyday: the ‘50s and ‘60s. I’m curious about the details about how those two watershed transitions interacted. Despite the notorious resistance to the movement by White racists, the movement was able to be successful in part because the majority of Whites had become much more moderate in their attitudes towards Blacks. I imagine this was in large part because Whites were no longer dependent on exploiting Blacks’ labor to maintain the Delta’s economy. At the same time, it seems Black people must have been becoming more desperate as work became more scarce, pushing them toward more radical action against the racist power structure. And as the emigration of Black people out of the Delta would have picked up steam, I imagine the numbers that swelled the movement would have shifted towards the cities where people went looking for work, perhaps one influence on the shift from the rural civil rights movement of the ‘60s to the urban Black Power movement of the ‘70s. In the popular history of the civil rights movement, it was ended by the murder of Martin Luther King, but perhaps tractors were more important than assassins’ bullets. I’m going to try to look more into this.

As for the river, I’m not sure how much it played into the civil rights movement. It’s certainly one of the defining metaphors for the region, though. Talk about a “fact of nature.” Every discription of it talks about how unstoppable it is. We visited a really well designed museum dedicated to the river and the levee system that keeps it from flooding. But it has flooded. In 1929 it flooded the entire Delta, destroying virtually every building in the entire region. It left almost a million people homeless. Refugee camps were built along the tops of the levees. In all of this, of course, Black people suffered the brunt of the damage and the least of the relief. I’m sure it left a deep impression on those who lived through it as to the fragility of life and the depth of White America’s indifference to the lives of Black people. A book on the subject was recommended to me by several different respectable people. I have to admit, since it seemed interesting but not likely to make my personalo top 20 book list, I already forgot what it’s called. Oh, and did I forget to mention the Confederate memorabilia in the gift shop? It’s still the South. The word that kept coming to my mind was “gross.”

The last thing I’ve learned the last two days is some more about Fannie Lou Hamer. I had a civil rights poster on my wall in my classroom at Jordan with her on it. I had no idea who she was at first, and later learned only that she was involved in taking down the old Dixiecrat political machine. Well, here in Sunflower County, she’s a lot more than that. She is the quintessential revolutionary: outspoken, fearless, confrontational, focused on results, uncompromising. Reading her own words, I can’t imagine her being the polite, humble type of woman that the South is known for. She attacked Black pastors as sell-outs, assembled a small armory in her house to defend against Klan attacks, resisted working with Black moderates working within the political system, refused to put her role as wife before her work. I can’t wait to meet some people who knew her to find out how popular she was when she was alive. I have a sneaking suspicion she’s a lot more popular now that she’s not in people’s faces. I also saw some references to her pushing for the movement to stop concentrating exclusively on voting and desegregation in order to focus on economic issues. I’m curious to see how the layoffs caused by the mechanization of the farms precipitated that and whether it preceded or followed King’s shift towards a focus on poverty.

More to come soon…

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