Land, Promise, and Peril: Race and Stratification in the Rural South 1009182560, 9781009182560

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LAND, PROMISE, AND PERIL

In Langston Hughes’s “Mother to Son,” written in 1922, a time of dramatic disruptions in the American economy and continued tyranny in the lives of black people, a mother pleads with her child not to give up, reminding him that in the face of all hardships she has been “a’climbin’ on, and reachin’ landin’s, and turnin’ corners.” Not only did the eight families in this study persist, they also, as domestics, sharecroppers, tenants, and farmers, managed to sponsor a generation of children, some of whose members reached the middle and upper-middle classes. Land, Promise, and Peril chronicles those actions, actors, and events that both propelled and faced down legal racism, showing how essential a role local, state and national leadership, and political institutions play in shaping intergenerational exits from poverty. Mary Coleman is the Senior Vice President and Chief Operating Officer at Economic Mobility Pathways (EMPath, formerly Crittenton Women’s Union), the nation’s premiere direct service, policy advocacy and knowledge sharing institution. Prior to EMPath, Mary was a college administrator, professor of political science and global studies, and director of the Center for University Scholars at Lesley University and Jackson State University, respectively. She holds a PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

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Cambridge Studies in Stratification Economics: Economics and Social Identity Series Editor: William A. Darity Jr., Duke University The Cambridge Studies in Stratification Economics: Economics and Social Identity series encourages book proposals that emphasize structural sources of group-based inequality, rather than cultural or genetic factors. Studies in this series will utilize the underlying economic principles of self-interested behavior and substantive rationality in conjunction with sociology’s emphasis on group behavior and identity formation. The series is interdisciplinary, drawing authors from various fields including economics, sociology, social psychology, history, and anthropology, with all projects focused on topics dealing with group-based inequality, identity, and economic well-being.

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Land, Promise, and Peril Race and Stratification in the Rural South MARY D. COLEMAN

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Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge CB2 8EA, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, NY 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia 314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – 110025, India 103 Penang Road, #05–06/07, Visioncrest Commercial, Singapore 238467 Cambridge University Press is part of Cambridge University Press & Assessment, a department of the University of Cambridge. We share the University’s mission to contribute to society through the pursuit of education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781009182560 DOI: 10.1017/9781009182546 © Mary D. Coleman 2023 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press & Assessment. First published 2023 A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. A Cataloging-in-Publication data record for this book is available from the Library of Congress ISBN 978-1-009-18256-0 Hardback Cambridge University Press & Assessment has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

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Contents

List of Figures

page ix

List of Tables

xi

Preface

xiii

Acknowledgments

xv

       , ,  



1

Families’ Cross-Century Struggles to Leave Dispossession Behind

3

2

The Sunflower County Delta

25

3

Multigenerational Injury, Insult, and Adversity

43

4

Patterns of Dispossession

62

5

Facing Promise and Peril: Black Strivings in an Intemperate Land

91

6

Position-Taking in the Nation

106

       



7

Perennial Sharecroppers

151

8

Quasi-Croppers and Family Interiority

169

9

The Mule-Renter’s Son

186

10 The Byrd Farmers

194

11 Contemporaries of the Second Sunflower Generation

211

12 Central Hills Family and Place in Struggle

222

vii

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viii

Contents

      



13 Beyond Caste in Higher Education: The Ayers/Fordice Case and Its Impact

253

14 The War on Poverty and the Poor in Sunflower

293

15 What the Research Tells Us

324

16 Insights and a Valedictory

367

Epilogue

385

Select Bibliography

389

Index

397

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Figures

2.1 2.2

Map of Mississippi by counties Map of Mississippi by county and county seats

ix

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page 32 38

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Tables

1.1 1.2

The Sunflower Seven Demographics, 1900–1990

page 5 13

xi

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Preface

In Langston Hughes’s “Mother to Son,” written in 1922, at a time of dramatic disruption in the American economy and continued tyranny in the lives of blacks, urban and rural, the Mother pleads with the child not to give up. She tells the child that she has been “climbing on, reaching landings and turning corners.” Not only did the eight families chronicled here not give up, despite losing some ground and gaining some, they managed to sponsor a generation of children who reached the lower, middle, and upper-middle classes. Land, Promise, and Peril: Race and Stratification in the Rural South analyzes the pathways that were routes off the lowest rungs, and others that were dead ends, in Sunflower County and Scott County, Mississippi. Sunflower is a majority black county in the Mississippi Delta. Scott is a majority-minority county in the Central Mississippi Hills. Part I chronicles the actions, actors, and events that propelled legal racism and quelled it, showing how important leadership and political institutions are in shaping the contours of familial trajectories and molding the character of the citizenry and nation. Part II lays out how these eight families coped with the world they entered and the world they made, sometimes stitching together fragments of chance, and sometimes harnessing the force of their imaginations and the scarce resources at hand. What did parents teach their children about economic mobility, and how did intergenerational upward mobility take shape for children of domestics, sharecroppers, tenants, and farmers? Part III examines education and community pathways and plumbs the scholarly literature on poverty over the last century and more. As did Hughes’s poem “Mother to Son,” Land, Promise, and Peril speaks to interpersonal and intergenerational familial and national coping and striving. It calls us to a renewed egalitarian march, begun centuries ago but xiii

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xiv

Preface

still unfinished. The gospel song “Dis Train Is Bound for Glory” conjures up a train pulling for glory, noting all those who got aboard and all those who chose to remain on the platform. The eight families in Land, Promise, and Peril all wanted to board that train here on earth, in rural Mississippi. They wanted their American Dream to be manifested at home in rural Mississippi. They wanted all lands to be lands of promise – lands where intergenerational upward economic mobility pathways radiated their families and households, and high rates of robust equity included their communities.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009182546.001 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Acknowledgments

Over three decades, I benefited from the support of several institutions: the Ford Foundation, when under the leadership of Susan Beresford and the late Lynn Walker Huntley; the Aspen Rural Technology Group, with the support of Susan Sechler; the University of Maryland–College Park postdoctoral fellows program in economics and public policy, under the leadership of economist Samuel Myers, now at the University of Minnesota; the American Psychological Association Task Force on Poverty, then led by my former colleague Geraldine Brookins; the Liberal Arts Fellows program at Harvard Law School, led by Lew Sargentich; and the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars, then ably led by Lee Hamilton. Each of these places and spaces offered opportunities to reflect on the rural poor, comprehend their journeys in the context of time and place, and benefit from teams of multidisciplinary colleagues. They granted me access to some of the nation’s most thoughtful and brilliant professors, scholars, and practitioners. During the years between 1993 and 2010, I also had multiyear opportunities to build indigenous transnational and civil society capacity in places as varied as Cuba and Palestine; to build greater aptitude for democratic learning in Romania, with my colleagues at the University of Romania in Bucharest; and to do likewise in Harare, at the University of Zimbabwe. As a university professor at Jackson State University for decades, I had opportunities to speak in Baku, Azerbaijan and monitor the nation’s first “democratic elections,” and to foster cross-cultural university ties between Mississippi Historically Black Colleges – Jackson State University, Tougaloo College, Alcorn State, and Mississippi Valley State University – and Fort Hare in Alice, South Africa, Agostinho Neto University in Luanda, Angola, the University of Namibia in Windhoek, and Indira Gandhi University in southern India. These opportunities were sparked by the entrepreneurial xv

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xvi

Acknowledgments

intelligence and moxie of Ally Mack, a friend, colleague, former professor, and chair of political science at Jackson State University. These experiences broadened and, I hope, deepened my capacity to observe and actively listen and synthesize knowledge about the conditions of the global and diverse rural poor and intergenerationally dispossessed across the globe. Many colleagues read all or parts of this work or commented on the prospectus and offered ways to strengthen it. I thank a few of them here. For their part, I thank Christine Evans, Al From, Kenya Hudson, Byron D’Andra Orey, Leslie Burl McLemore, Geraldine Brookins, Vickie Madway, Matthew Holden Jr., William Julius Wilson, Nicholas Lemann, Jacqueline Jones, Kiese Laymon, Eve Dunbar, Benjamin Wesley, and several anonymous reviewers. Decades ago, William Julius Wilson was kind enough to accept my invitation to Jackson State University, where a group of scholars from around the nation held a conversation about The Declining Significance of Race. I told William Wilson of my interest in examining rural poverty in Mississippi. He was generous enough to write a set of notes outlining his views on a promising approach. I was touched by his kindness. The late historian Michael Katz reviewed a prospectus for this work and for a center related to it, which I proposed at Jackson State University, my alma mater, in the 1990s. I have benefitted immensely from the scholarship of teachers and authors across diverse fields of study; from the lives my family and hundreds of my students and colleagues have generously opened their lives to me; and from the arduous mission of Economic Mobility Pathways – to holistically support families to achieve and sustain their upward mobility trajectory – where I have been privileged to work for seven years. I am especially grateful to William Darity for his belief in me and in this work, and to Cambridge University Press for guiding this work through to completion. In addition, I thank my parents, Catherine Coleman Myers and the late John H. Coleman, as well as their generation of folks from the “Hill” in Scott County for showing me unconditional love, robust familial resilience, grace, and dignity. During segregation and in its aftermath, I observed the students and staff at E.T. Hawkins and Forest High in Scott County. I saw their humanity on display; I witnessed and was inspired by my fellow classmates’ mastery and grace, their talent and care. I benefitted from the care and kindness shown me by adults and children in both middle-class and working-class homes. At Jackson State University and the University of Wisconsin–Madison (UW-Madison), I had wonderful and steady mentors. Though most of my inspirational UW faculty are deceased, I want to thank several of them posthumously, as they were great mentors, teachers, and

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Acknowledgments

xvii

scholars. I thank Joel Grossman, Murray Edelman, Crawford Young, David Fellman, Ralph K. Huitt, and Clara Penniman for being enthusiastic and steadfast mentors. At Jackson State University, I benefitted from the nurture and spirited teaching of steadfast faculty: Leslie Burl McLemore, Luana Clayton, Taunya Banks, Pius Eze, Alferdteen Harrison, Robert Walker, Iely Mohamed, and George Mitchell. I count myself fortunate to have taught and mentored hundreds of promising students and supported the careers of indomitable faculty at Jackson State University and Lesley University. I gratefully acknowledge the unflinching generosity of families and friends who entrusted their stories to me. For the contents of this book, I, alone, am responsible. This book is for my beloved family. For my son, Kiese, for Eve, Cade, Mom, Dad, Momma Rose, Momma Laura, my sisters, Linda and Sue; for Nechole, Amiel, Jean, Johnny, Albert, and Eric. I dedicate this book to my brother, the late Jimmy Alexander.

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PART I

THE FAMILY IN AN INTEMPERATE COMMUNITY, STATE, AND NATION

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009182546.002 Published online by Cambridge University Press

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1

Families’ Cross-Century Struggles to Leave Dispossession Behind

What can be learned by examining mobility from poverty in the counties of Sunflower and Scott, Mississippi, two rural communities within the state with the largest share of blacks in the nation? How can learning here shed light on intergenerational rural upward economic mobility elsewhere in the nation and the world? If states like Mississippi or regions like the Mississippi Delta can go from rich to poor, and from middling to rich, how does either happen? And how can Mississippi’s status as a rich state and the Delta’s as a wealthy region be recovered in ways advantageous to the historically disadvantaged – black, brown, and white? Interdependent historical and contemporary factors, mutually cumulative in their effects, are in play. In the early 1900s, 89 percent of blacks lived in the South, mostly in the rural South. Today, roughly 20 percent (2,600,000) of rural dwellers are black in the United States. The rural families examined in this work lived and worked in Mississippi for at least eight decades, some spanning two centuries. They labored, and others profited more than they should have been able to do so by law. The wealthy lived disproportionately off the labor of the disadvantaged. The cycle of poverty and disadvantage the wealthy perpetuated (with the help of federal policies, man-made and natural disasters) is palpable. Both patriarchal and coercive, poverty in the Mississippi Delta was sustained by vestiges of enslavement and Jim Crow caste policies and practices, and their contemporary manifestations. In 1939 John Dollard published a study of caste relations in Sunflower, a place he called Southern town, where he spent five months, and Hortense Powdermaker stayed in Sunflower – her Cottonville – for a year.1 Cynthia 1

John Dollard, Caste and Class in a Southern Town (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1937); Hortense Powdermaker, After Freedom (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1939).

3

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4

Family in an Intemperate Community, State, and Nation

Duncan completed her five-year comparative study of Appalachia, the Delta, and New England in 1999.2 These studies, covering sixty years, offered an excellent foundation to extend their findings into the present. How, if at all, has the trajectory of upward mobility changed over the last hundred years, since the births of the Sunflower Seven: Agnes in 1909, Josie in 1914, Williams in 1916, Jack in 1918, Matthews in 1920, Lonnie in 1922, and Clementine in 1932? In Sunflower County, Mississippi, I found two perennial croppers, three quasi-croppers, a tenant farmer, and a kinship land-owning family. In the mid- to late 1930s, when John Dollard and Hortense Powdermaker examined Sunflower County, the youngest member of the Sunflower Seven, quasi-cropper Clementine Richardson, was in early childhood at age two. Jack Harper, the son of a tenant farmer; Lonnie and Isaac Byrd, Sr., the landowning kinship family; and Matthews, the son of a midwife and mechanic, were coming of age as prepubescent youngsters between ten and twelve years old. The eldest members of the study group, perennial croppers Agnes Brown and Josie Landfair, were born into families with illiterate parents who had been field laborers their entire lives. They would become homeless perennial child laborers, working in the cotton fields with their parents and missing what schooling there was available. The lives of seven intergenerational Sunflower families, mostly the granddaughters and grandsons of the enslaved, are interrogated to examine pathways toward mid-twentieth and twenty-first century upward and downward economic mobility. Depicted in Table 1.1, I refer to these families as the Sunflower Seven. BACKGROUNDS OF FAMILIES

Three primary women-led families – all widowed – and four married households are featured. Seventy-five percent of the men in this study married college-educated women, “one time for life,” increasing their stability and social status in the community and in their families. The brides’ levels of education far outstripped that of their parents and that of their spouses. Varied outcomes are evident among the Sunflower Seven. This work attempts to explain their patterns and diversions. Agnes Brown and Lonnie Byrd both grew up without wedded parents. Agnes Brown was one of seven siblings; Lonnie grew up without any full 2

Cynthia Duncan, Worlds Apart: Poverty and Politics in Rural America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999).

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Name

Birth and death years

Rung/ladder

Years ladder

Schooling

Marital status

Post-field profession

# Children completing education

Grandparents’ education/occupation

Brown

1909–2007

Cropper

45

6th

Widowed

Custodian

(4) College

0

Landfair

1914–1999

Cropper

44

6th

Widowed

(4) College

0

Williams

1916–2005

Cropper

5

GED

Married

Barbershop

(5) MD, HS

0

Harper

1918–2004

Mule-renter

10

JD

Married

Matthews

1920–2015

Cropper

12

MA

Married

(4) MD, JD, MA, [unknown] (1) HS

Byrd

1922–1999

Farm owner

51

12th

Married

Lawyer/ politician Teacher/ minister Farm owner

0

Richardson

1932–2018

Cropper

11

MA

Widowed

Teacher

(4) BA, BA, BS, BA

Sharecropper Sharecropper

5

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009182546.003 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Table 1.1. The demographic characteristics of the Sunflower families

Sharecropper 6th Tenant farmer 6th Midwife 3rd Farm owner 0 Sharecropper

6

Family in an Intemperate Community, State, and Nation

siblings. All the parents – except Lonnie’s cousin by marriage, Hattie – had parents who worked in the fields for some, if not most, of their lives. Hattie’s mother, Leona, did not. Four of the seven families had landless parents. The landless families were the Browns, Landfairs, Matthewses, and Williamses. The parents of the seven families lived in Sunflower County at least a decade or more in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In addition to the Sunflower Seven are the Paytons, an eighth intergenerational family from the Mississippi Hills, and examples from the Sunflower Seven’s children’s contemporaries (families in which economic and familial disintegration happened early, and others where it did not). Black rural families from the Delta and Hills had faced the same inequitable past, but some possessed more, mostly more familial aspiration and land, though not more income security. Like 80 percent of the rural poor in the nation in 1910, the black families in Scott and Sunflower Counties opened life on the agricultural ladder; six were enslaved descendants and five began on the lowest rung – as sharecroppers. Jack, the lone white, began life as the son of a three-fourths mule-renter. Three-fourths of the crop was offered to the white tenant, but the tenant provided the rented mule. Lonnie, one among the enslaved descendants, inherited hundreds of acres of land, while five others – Agnes, Josie, Williams, Matthews, and Clementine – clawed their way out of poverty – most of them off the agricultural ladder. As mentioned, in addition to the Sunflower Seven and the Hill Scott County families, there are, for example, non-college completers, Rebecca and Evelyn, contemporaries of children of the Sunflower Seven. Rather than an intergenerational history, theirs is presented as reflections from which to reason about scholarly economic mobility premises and intergenerational stereotypes. Their economic stories and journeys, and those of their contemporaries, are still unfolding. The trajectories are sometimes troubling. Evelyn and Rebecca were both estranged from their parents; a grandma had reared one, but she died when the granddaughter was nine years old. This age is a critical life stage for children, as they construct a sense of self-worth and compare themselves to peers and seek acceptance. Early pregnancies (while in high school) complicated their high school completion pathways and thus their pathways out of poverty, but, before that, loss of a beloved guardian, childhood despair, and corresponding familial instability had riled their self-confidence and reduced their perceptions of self-worth and heightened their emotional vulnerability. In the early 1990s, Rebecca and Evelyn were no longer responsible for all their

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Families’ Cross-Century Struggles to Leave Dispossession Behind

7

children. As heads of households, they were partially reliant on part-time employment, erratic child support, and government transfer payments. Their lives were in an upheaval. Other contemporaries who did complete college and law school are also found in these pages. They struggled in ways different from Rebecca and Evelyn. Their journeys are illustrative of the stickiness of upward mobility in rural and town contexts, where confirmation bias and discrimination loom from local elites, homegrown white superiority, and holders of authority – mayors, supervisors, state legislators, police, justices of the peace, and sheriffs. Black children and their parents would become multigenerational targets. A prison record, an unjust firing, poor quality high school completion, or non-high school completion, homelessness, and chronic job exploitation could impair employment prospects and set black families up for downward or stalled mobility. African American farmer Lonnie Byrd, a high school graduate and one of the Sunflower Seven, was bequeathed by his father, William Byrd, a modest land inheritance of 700 acres. Both son and father could read and write. Both son and father were ambitious land owners and farmers. The average acreage of farms in Sunflower during the early 1900s was several magnitudes less than the Byrd holding. Lonnie Byrd, who was born in 1922, was the Byrd family patriarch. Jack Harper was born the son of a tenant farmer in 1918. Jack’s father was poor and barely literate. Harper’s father was a tenant farmer, a three-fourths mule-renter. Still, Jack Harper climbed both the economic and political ladder in Sunflower, upending Lonnie Byrd, as Jack accrued both wealth and political power, becoming president of the Indianola Chamber of Commerce and serving a forty-year reign as chancery clerk in Sunflower County. All land records in the county are maintained by the chancery clerk, and the clerk serves as secretary of the Board of Supervisors, functioning as auditor and treasurer. The clerk collects and disburses prior-year delinquent taxes. Jack Harper was an immensely powerful local politician, whose ascendancy to the political class is as integral to Sunflower County as James Eastland’s. James Eastland, the scion of a wealthy planter was propelled into political prominence in Scott County by the economic and political status of his father, Woods Eastland. Jack Harper had no opportunity for sponsorship by his father. Absent generational family income or wealth positioning, Jack would have to claw his way to political and economic power and so would Lonnie Byrd. Eastland, in contrast, would leapfrog over

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8

Family in an Intemperate Community, State, and Nation

others to jump easily into a privileged economic and political class. He would ingratiate himself with the powerful to maintain political leverage as the twentieth century unfolded. An interrogation of the vestiges of enslavement, legal segregation, and modern discrimination can build a set of empirical narratives to better inform public policy, and familial and community striving. These vestiges include lawlessness, as manifested in mob, individual, and regime violence against black people, the presumption of white superiority, and corresponding physical and mental health, wage, job, career, and educational theft. The vestiges from 1956 until 1965 also included not a single piece of civil rights legislation reported voluntarily from the Senate Judiciary Committee, which Eastland chaired for twenty-two years. It is important to note the passage of the 1957 Civil Rights Act, which occurred during the Eisenhower administration, when Lyndon Baines Johnson was the leading southern Democrat in the Senate. The Act, the first of its kind since 1875, attempted to protect and secure the civil rights of persons within the United States. It created the civil rights division of the Justice Department and established a Commission on Civil Rights. The primary goal of HR 6127 was to protect the African American vote from disenfranchisement efforts of southern Congressmen, including James Eastland, Chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee. The Civil Rights Acts of 1960 and 1964, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, prevailed over the objections of Eastland.3 The most muscular provisions, those wanted by President Dwight Eisenhower, were diluted by Eastland. Stiff penalties for intimidation and taking economic retribution were much needed in the still segregated and tyrannical Deep South. The Civil Rights Act passed the Senate without a single “no” vote from Republicans. Eighteen senators, all Democrats, voted “no.” The senators voting “nay” were from Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Virginia, South Carolina, and North Carolina. Johnson, the Senate Majority Leader, worked to ensure the bill’s passage by appeasing southern senators. These senators had been fully mobilized against black citizenship, not just the 1957 measure; they had earlier recoiled against the 1954 Brown 3

In addition to the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, civil rights legislation has included the Civil Rights Acts of 1866, 1870, 1871, 1875, 1957, 1960, 1964; the Voting Rights Act of 1965; the Fair Housing Act of 1968; the Voting Rights Acts of 1970, 1975, 1982, 2006; the Civil Rights Restoration Act of 1987; the Civil Rights Act of 1991; and the Fair Housing Amendments of 1988. See History and Archives, US House of Representatives, Constitutional Amendments and Major Civil Rights Acts of Congress, Historical Data, Office of the Historian.

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Families’ Cross-Century Struggles to Leave Dispossession Behind

9

v. Board of Education Supreme Court ruling4 and formed a formal massive resistance battalion. Politicians who maintained their roles for life formed a bulwark to maintain the vestiges of legal segregation while also accruing the familial advantages attendant to their roles. At the local and state levels, the ability to maintain political and economic advantage has been made possible by gross policy indifference to the basic life source citizenship needs of blacks and the poor. White familial planter wealth-making in the Delta was ably assisted by government, as were black disfranchisement and poverty. The study of economic mobility in Sunflower will contend with the men who occupied positions of power in state and local governments and in Washington DC, and therefore with governmental and nongovernmental levers of economics and politics and their manifestations. How, if at all, have these stateand federal-sponsored vestiges – intemperate judicial and political elites, regime violence, legal racism, weakened civil rights legislation, and modern discrimination – impeded the upward mobility pathways of the poor and black in rural Sunflower County and Scott County, Mississippi?

RESEARCH QUESTIONS AND METHODS

Families frequently rise above the circumstances of their birth; as frequently, however, in some of the nation’s rural and urban communities, they have not been able to do so.5 Disparate opportunities to achieve upward economic mobility exist in rural and urban America. In a landmark 2014 income mobility study, economist Raj Chetty and his colleagues offered a sweeping national view of the disparate opportunities for intergenerational mobility in the United States.6 Their findings showed that possibilities of climbing to the top of the economic rung, if one is born in the lowest economic quintile, are not good for anyone, but those 4 5

6

Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka Kansas 347 US 483 (1954). Raj Chetty, Nathaniel Hendren, Patrick Kline, and Emmanuel Saez, “Where Is the Land of Opportunity?: The Geography of Intergenerational Mobility in the United States,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, 129(4) (November 2014): 1553–1623; Raj Chetty and Nathaniel Herndon, “The Effects of Neighborhoods on Intergenerational Mobility,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, 133(3) (2018): 1107–1162. Raj Chetty, Nathaniel Hendren, Maggie R. Jones, and Sonya R. Porter, “Race and Economic Opportunity in the United States: An Intergenerational Perspective,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, 135(2) (2020): 711–783; Raj Chetty, David Grubsky, Maximillian Hell, Nathaniel Hendren, Robert Manduca, and Jimmy Narang, “The Fading American Dream: Trends in Absolute Income Mobility since 1940,” Science, 356 (96336) (2017): 398–406.

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Family in an Intemperate Community, State, and Nation

possibilities are especially poor if one is black or brown in the United States. In addition, if one is born in the middle-class or higher, the possibilities for slipping or losing ground are higher for those who are brown and black in America. This study will examine three questions: Why have the greater number of rural blacks not been able to reach the middle-class and stay ahead? How have some, despite unfavorable odds, been able to climb? What might we learn from the experience of this second group and study the factors impeding upward economic mobility? These questions matter for our understanding of intergenerational and intragenerational thriving in rural and urban contexts. In their totality, these, and related questions, enumerated throughout this work, invite an intentional focus on whether there has been and are now patterns to the routes, rates, and stability of movement toward the middle and upper class over two generations. An awareness of the pathways out from poverty in Sunflower and Scott ought to inform policies about how minimal levels of rural poverty exits, entry, and descent have been possible, and under what conditions they have been sustainable intergenerationally. I arrived in Sunflower to conduct research in 1989. I found the Sunflower Seven in two related ways. I chose five of these seven families from among the fifty-three randomly selected property owners born between 1909 and 1935 (on the property and registered voter rolls in Sunflower County in the late 1980s). I looked for landowners and registered voters then in their sixth, seventh, and eighth decades – those who had come of age during the segregation era, when cotton was the essential crop in the Mississippi Delta, and when both white political and economic oppression held African Americans back. I wanted to understand how the oldest living black residents of the county had traversed the economic ladder. Their birth years, land-owning status, and political participation mattered to me for this reason. I visited, observed, listened to, and interviewed residents and institutional actors in the county for well over two decades. As a student of Mississippi politics, I knew of Jack Harper but met him early 1990. I also knew the Byrds, through an eight-year acquaintance with Isaac Byrd Jr., initially through our service with the Mississippi American Civil Liberties Union, where I served as president. I had visited monthly with the Isaac Byrd family for at least seven years before the formal study in Sunflower had begun. During 1980–1990, I would frequently visit Lonnie, Evelyn, Hattie, and Isaac Byrd, Sr., just outside Shaw in what is called the Springhill Community.

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I began face-to-face interviews with the Sunflower Seven in the summers of 1991–1994. Over the next several years, I met and eventually interviewed town elites, including Jack Harper, who had pulled ahead to become a power wielder and a wealthy individual. Like the five randomly selected families from the property and registered voter rolls, Harper and Byrd are and were landowners. Unlike the randomly selected five, Harper and Byrd had positioned themselves on rungs well above their birth cohort. How might their economic mobility stories inform our knowledge of rural poverty exits and their precariousness and sturdiness? As shown in Table 1.1, the Sunflower Seven and their twenty-two children had various levels of schooling. In each instance, three generations had stalled educational pathways – that meant sixty years of delay – of too little exposure to quality education, living wages, opportunities to buy a healthy home in a high-growth community, and participate in civic life. Four spouses of the seven Sunflower families had served in the military – Clementine’s late husband, Elmira; Jack Harper; Lonnie Byrd; and David Matthews. Matthews, Jack, and Lonnie entered the military and returned to Sunflower to build a robust personal and civic life. The military pathway was promising for this generational cohort. In the generations to come, would illiteracy, poor health, and the heavy policing of black boys and girls eliminate or reduce the military as a pathway toward upward economic mobility? Among the Sunflower Seven, one or both parents had been descended from the enslaved – all but Jack Harper’s. The person born into the greatest property assets – the rural outpost Springhill resident, landowner, and black farmer Lonnie Byrd – pointed out the rungs on the black agricultural ladder, starting at the top. “There were black landowners/plantation owners, cash tenants, share tenants, small farmers, the renters, the day workers, and the sharecroppers.”7 In the early 1900s, 25 percent of black farmers owned the land on which they worked.8 By 1930, only 8 percent of the farm owners were black, in contrast with the 40 percent of white farm owners. In 1900, black men were nearly twice as likely to be laborers as white men. In 1900, black and white women were equally likely to list their work 7

8

Lonnie Byrd interviews with the author, July 2, 1991, June 19, 1992, July 2, 1992, August 15, 1992, and January 23, 1993, Springhill, Mississippi. Robert Higgs, Competition and Coercion: Blacks in the American Economy, 1865–1914 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), 121; see also Center for the Study of Southern Culture, Mississippi Encyclopedia, available at http://mississippiencyclopedia. org/entries/sunflower-county, accessed July 19, 2021.

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Family in an Intemperate Community, State, and Nation

roles as private custodians. Ninety percent of black men were laborers, on the farm and elsewhere, whereas, more black women than men reported working as laborers; black women were in a virtual tie with white women who reported private services. Significantly, at no point in the year 1900 did black men or women report double-digit work percentages above that of laborers. The average workweek was 54 hours in the late 1800s and early 1900s. The workweek was inhumanely long, but across the century and beyond, the wages were often short. Off the agricultural ladder, there were also domestics – including teachers like Lonnie’s wife, Evelyn – who provided nonfarm income. There were mostly white lawyers, doctors, journalists, elected officials, and business owners connected to the farming industry, such as warehousing compresses and logging companies. Modern Line Products, the company for which David Williams worked as a driver, was a retail nursery and garden establishment in Sunflower. As seen in part B of Table 1.2, in the decade prior to the birth of the oldest member of the Sunflower Seven, important differences in the United States were reported in the ages of children in school by race. Younger children of both races were more likely to attend school than older students in the 14–17 cohort. Females in both age groupings were more likely to attend school than their male counterparts. The differences across races are starker than the differences within the race, with an average of 30 percent fewer attending school among blacks, male and female. When one considers that, in the deep agricultural South, many black day schools were not more than four months out of a year, then it is not difficult to imagine the functional illiteracy of those attending school and the insufficiency of books and enrichment and the inability of some parents and guardians to help children with their reading, writing, and mathematics comprehension. As time went on, older siblings, with access to more education than their parents, often assisted younger ones. Except for Matthews’s mom, who was a midwife, none of the other members of the Sunflower Seven had parents with professional occupations, and none had parents with siblings who had completed high school. Three of the Sunflower Seven members graduated college – Clementine, Matthews, and Harper. Clementine’s four girls, Jack’s three boys and one girl, and Matthews’s one daughter all had opportunities to do so. Among Jack’s four children, three graduated college, becoming a lawyer, physician, and teacher, respectively. All of Clementine’s children completed college. Matthews’s daughter had not. And three of the Sunflower Seven military veterans (Byrd, Matthews, and Harper) had college-educated spouses –

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009182546.003 Published online by Cambridge University Press

1900

1990

Male

Female

Black

White

Black

1.3 0.8 0.2 0.3

3.8 6.9 4.0 4.2

4.2 7.3 25.5

Private service Other service Farmer Farm laborer

Male

Female

White

Black

White

Black

White

1.6 0.2 0.2 0.2

10.7 2.6 5.6 4.1

9.9 6.5 10.7 2.9

17.2 14.7 7.2 6.7

16.6 5.4 29.7 4.1

21.9 10.0 31.9 7.3

15.9 13.4 14.0

0 1.8 6.5

3.1 24.5 1.5

17.4 20.7 12.2

20.7 14.9 7.2

2.3 12.4 2.0

2.1 8.0 1.5

2.2 4.8

0.4 2.4

33.0 20.6

33.2 6.6

0.1 18.5

0 9.0

2.0 25.3

0.8 15.8

30.8 22.7

23.9 11.0

6.7 29.4

6.1 2.0

0.2 1.0

1.4 1.0

0.1 0.4

0.4 0.5

B. Percent attending school by age Ages 6–13 37.8 Ages 14–17 26.7 Ages 18–21 6.8

72.2 47.9 10.4

41.9 36.2 5.9

71.9 51.5 8.6

94.5 91.1 47.7

95.3 93.4 54.3

94.2 92.6 52.9

95.5 93.5 57.1

A. Occupational distribution Professional/technical Proprietor/manager/official Clerical Sales 13

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009182546.003 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Table 1.2. Characteristics of individuals in the United States between 1900 and 1990

Craft Operative Laborer

Source: Based on household heads in Integrated Public Use Microdata Series Census samples for 1900 and 1990.

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Family in an Intemperate Community, State, and Nation

Evelyn, Lily, and Rose. Among the perennial croppers – Agnes and Josie – neither had completed high school, and both had been widowed early. The lone white in the study – Jack Harper – completed high school, college, joined the military, married a college-educated woman, and completed law school. Though childless, Lonnie and Evelyn had first cousins’ children within hollering distance. They were the children of Hattie and Isaac Byrd, and Thomas and Mary Byrd. All eight of Hattie and Isaac’s kids had a chance to attend college; six would do so, becoming an elected official, lawyer, physician, teacher, crane operator, legal supervisor, transportation supervisor, among others. The working poor – Jack and Clementine – produced a generation of middle-class children, as did Hattie and Isaac. Jack, Matthews, and Clementine would join the middle-class and leave Josie and Agnes, the perennial croppers behind. In addition to being college graduates and married, Jack, Clementine, Lonnie, and Matthews were all military families. In the Scott County family, Catherine Payton’s son, Jimmy, also joined the military. All four of Catherine’s children and her two grandchildren attended college, five of them completed college and earned graduate degrees. They constructed meaningful teaching, writing, and public service careers – in elementary schools, universities, and public interest organizations. The Sunflower Seven married at least once. Williams married twice and Catherine Payton from Scott County married three times, to Nolan, John, and Halester and at ninety-two years old, was recently again widowed. Clementine married a soldier and Matthews, himself a veteran, married a college-educated schoolteacher. After military service, Matthews found his way to Morehouse College in Atlanta, from which he graduated; like Matthews, Clementine had graduated from a historically Black College, Mississippi Valley State, in Itta Bena, which is in the Mississippi Delta, a few miles from Sunflower County. Educational attainment and childbearing are important within group differences characterizing the Sunflower Seven. The perennial croppers had no more children than others. Williams and Matthews each adopted a child. Lonnie and Evelyn were childless, but Lonnie’s first cousins, Isaac and Thomas, who lived nearby, raised eleven aspirational children. As intimated above, Jack and Rose’s marriage produced four children – who by profession are a physician, teacher, lawyer and one other, who, like Catherine’s eldest, Jimmy, had delved deeply into the drug culture and had developed a mental health disability. Over time, Jack’s namesake had become a danger to himself and others, while Jimmy had beaten

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Families’ Cross-Century Struggles to Leave Dispossession Behind

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alcohol addiction and graduated to cocaine – a circumstance contributing to Jimmy’s death at fifty-nine. Unmet behavioral health care needs could stall families’ or individual family members’ upward mobility. Not just their ability to work, but their ability to thrive; advance their chances. Unmet behavioral health needs could stymie self-worth and disrupt intragenerational familial legacies. Adoption plays a role in the lives of children. David Williams, as well as Matthews and Lily, adopted a child. David Williams’s adopted son grew up with his other siblings and pursued a career in medicine, as an internist. While Matthews and Lily’s adopted daughter had not completed college, the couple expressed a mighty hope that their grandson would do so. Hattie and Isaac Sr. embraced their young nephews, John and Larry, when their sister died. These adopted and embraced children had care and unconditional affirmation and were spared the despair experienced by their contemporaries who lacked adult care and embrace during critical junctures. Neither greater achievements in the economic status of the Sunflower Seven families nor their affirmation of children, adopted or biological, guaranteed the success of their children, but navigational pathways which led to achievements did cue expectations for practical hopefulness and an outlook of forward momentum. Christian faith allowed many blacks and whites to cope with the injurious legal, political, and economic world elite whites had made and wanted to maintain. Frequently, white Christianity was used in the twentieth century to rationalize white brutality and hatred against blacks. Some whites expected intergenerational payoff from their conception of Christianity’s dictates. Christianity was internalized by many rural blacks in ways that afforded more grace and hopefulness, not only of a better life in the heavenly beyond but as a guidepost for the forgiveness of those who “despitefully” used them on earth. Christianity’s underbelly in the South had a decidedly authoritarian quality, especially as it related to women, gay people, and blacks. Still, in Mississippi, Tennessee, and Alabama, the states with the highest percentage of weekly churchgoers, the social and political fabric has been influenced by church-going blacks and whites, especially white elites, both elected and non-elected.9 Christianity has always had both anti-slavery and pro-slavery sentiments and proponents, as witnessed by the role of Quakers, Congregationalists, Presbyterians, and some Baptists, who were termed nonconformists and 9

Pew Research Center, “America’s Changing Religious Landscape” (Washington, DC, May 12, 2015).

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Family in an Intemperate Community, State, and Nation

dissenters from the pro-slavery orthodoxy. As an institution, however, the church, if not religion, was suspect in complex ways.10 That notwithstanding, for rural families, black and white, the church was a political, social, as well as a religious institution. Black religious faith would pay off in some ways, whereas black entrepreneurial and political action might not pay off and could be severely punished. Still, many rural black ministers’ sermons did not challenge the status quo; some incantations referred to conceptions of the good life, not on earth, but to the good life in an unearthly heaven. In Sunflower County, comprised of at least fifty-six churches, local leaders, and families – black and white, male and female – many cleaved to Christianity and used its teachings to sustain themselves and fortify their beliefs – for good and ill.11 Quite apart from Christianity, laws and customs had fortified black subjugation. Religion had offered a balm to both those who were subjugated and those who had acquiesced in the subjugation of other humans – other humans who had labored and toiled intergenerationally for the great benefit of white elite families and their prized institutions. How had the rural plantation poor exited poverty? How did they leave homelessness, renting, and acquire home ownership? How much time had been spent in sharecropping and tenancy, compared to time up or off the agriculture ladder to the professional class? How was poor schooling compensated for? What did the movement from poor early schooling to high school completion, to college and their professions entail? How had they navigated norms of regime violence and the threat of mob violence to secure familial lawfulness? I asked where they had lived, their health status, how much they had earned and saved, and who had helped them on their economic journeys. I visited churches, talked with ministers, visited nightclubs, and pool halls, and attended political campaign rallies. I observed city hall, read The Enterprise - Tocsin, examined the local city library, and talked to strangers and contemporaries of the original families and their children’s contemporaries. To better understand how the depopulation of the Delta and Sunflower occurred and when it began, I consulted census data and precinct-level county data. Early in my exploration of Sunflower, I visited both Gentry High School and Indianola Academy to examine facilities and at Gentry, talked with Andrew Brown (now deceased) and, where possible,

10

11

Richard Reddie, Abolition: The Struggle to Abolish Slavery in the British Colonies (Oxford: Lion Books, 2007). See C. Eric Lincoln and Lawrence H. Mamiya, “In the Receding Shadow of the Plantation: A Profile of Rural Clergy and Churches in the Black Belt,” Review of Religious Research, 29(4) (June 1988): 349–368.

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Families’ Cross-Century Struggles to Leave Dispossession Behind

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teachers and high school attendees, some of whom had finished high school and gone on to college and others not. To understand how the War on Poverty played out in the local context, I obtained original Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) reports and made use of the reports to reconstruct who benefitted from poverty resources and the federal government’s response to the War on Poverty (and the local contestation between Jack Harper, Lonnie Byrd, and Fannie Lou Hamer).12 Finally, where pertinent, I used qualitative data from the Sunflower Seven’s biographies and the Scott family, my own intergenerational familial story, to erect reader signposts and offer points of comparison and contrast in economic mobility pathways – focusing on constraints and opportunities across time. KEY CONCEPTS

Which familial vocabularies sprang up to countenance subordination’s continuation, or to cushion and mediate its effects? In Chapter 2, I allude to the indeterminacy of the term “self-sufficiency.” For now, it is enough to indicate that self-sufficiency is usually applied as a requirement for the poor and is attached to a belief that to the extent possible, families should not rely on the government to meet and sustain their basic needs. Self-sufficiency is a self-serving status-quo (traditional) concept, one that obscures more than it explains. The dynamic interplay and paradox between wanted and unwanted governmental allocation of resources and equitable and inequitable resource allocation are used to chronicle selfsufficiency as a nakedly self-serving political principle. For example, many children from well-to-do families often delay adulthood, staying longer with their parents and relying for longer periods of time on their parents for support to buy a home, finance their education, and offer resources related to childcare. In contrast, poorer adult children are left to find their own adult independence and are expected to achieve self-sufficiency sooner. Similarly, wealthy citizens rely on social networks to advance, obscuring the lines between meritocracy, legacy hires, and opportunities which are given before they are earned. Poor children 12

The Office of Economic Opportunity was the federal agency in charge of administering many aspects of the War on Poverty programs of the Lyndon Johnson administration. Established in 1966, its goal was to provide technical assistance and training to Community Action Agencies. It was assigned to administer the Federal Community Services Block Grant Program in 1981. Its original programs, built to meet the needs of the Great Society Legislative Agenda, have been distributed mostly to the Department of Health and Human Services.

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Family in an Intemperate Community, State, and Nation

like Josie, Agnes, Rebecca, and Evelyn became parents early, looked after younger siblings even when they were themselves quite young, and experienced hunger, homelessness, and income insecurity though their work lives had begun in early childhood. Matthews and Williams experienced some of this, but Jack and Lonnie did not. Other than Clementine, the women heads of household among the Sunflower Seven received less government support and fewer early opportunities to frame their future trajectories. A rigorous analysis of economic mobility must take into explicit account key concepts underscoring economic stratification. The key concepts include the politics and economics of inequitable resource allocation and, the web of legal racism, especially in the United States.13 Of the four million blacks in the United States in 1860, 3.95 million were in bondage. Intergenerational discrimination, irreparable injuries, and insults were passed down from judicial decisions, market narratives, public policies, and Christian rhetoric generated by governing elites and implemented by the administrative state. The eight families in Land, Promise and Peril valued marriage and the family. Marriage is regulated by the states, these regulations award some the right to marry and others not. In some cases, the state prescribed who could marry whom. For much of our history, marriage has been defined as the best kind of family arrangement, as a prized membership into the most civilized realm. Considerable numbers of individuals in marginalized groups have sought access to marital membership and the rewards of marriage as an institution. Marriage has been touted by the government as a sedative against poverty. Marriage is indeed a political institution;14 so, too, is the family. Institutions can both expand and limit capacities and arbitrarily deny some benefits and deny others.

13

14

Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1944), argued that “an inquiry into the Negro problem in America which shrinks for discrimination as a valuation is devoid of social perspective and, indeed, interest” (p. 215). Black progress and productivity in the face of legal discrimination are also central to the lives of the Sunflower Seven and their rural contemporaries in Mississippi and beyond. Priscilla Yamin, American Marriage: A Political Institution (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 2015). This superbly argued book establishes how marriage has been both a feudal arrangement and an emancipatory one, used at times as a tool by the states to deny support to some and include others. Years earlier, British political scientist Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Cambridge University Press, 1988), had made similar insights. I value her work for its view of a basic guaranteed income for the very poor as a much-needed resetting of possibilities for intergenerational familial income security. I am interested in seeing the results of the contemporary variations of this idea.

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Families’ Cross-Century Struggles to Leave Dispossession Behind

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There are gross (inhuman and institutionalized) tyrannical injuries and insults against black families in the four-century long saga of enslavement and its vestiges.  The stealing and selling of human beings into bondage (The Transatlantic and Domestic Slave Trade)  The legal designation of the enslaved as property  Revocation of Field Order Number 15 on January 1865 by President Andrew Johnson (which provided 400,000 acres of land, beginning a fair pathway to land ownership for the formerly enslaved)  Presidential failure to send troops to the southern states (other than South Carolina) to protect the political gains made during the Reconstruction  Century-long de jure discrimination, supported by the US Supreme Court, especially the 1883 ruling that the Civil Rights Act of 1875 was unconstitutional, and the 1857 Dred Scott and 1896 Plessy decisions, among others  Massacres and lynching as part of state-sponsored and random mob violence  The violation of the chastity (bodies) of enslaved and free persons and their progeny  All forms of involuntary servitude and economic and legally sanctioned discrimination – including the exclusion of agricultural workers and domestics from Social Security, unlawful land takings, foreclosures, and red lining practices and ordinances  The lease-convict system, cruel sharecropping contracts, which led to at least a century of wage theft, the greater likelihood of intergenerational poverty, and strong racial antagonism  Centuries-long legal discrimination in the spheres of education, economics and labor, criminal justice, public accommodation, and politics Violence, the threat of violence, and the presumed inferiority of the African American family kept the affective white gaze on what African Americans were not and could not be in the American mind – their intellectual, political, economic, and social equals or superiors. White supremacy meant a negative gaze or valence in matters pertaining to blacks as a group or collective. Gross public injuries and insults were disinformational and utilitarian. They cradled white male supremacy for everyone to see, and feel but not for everyone white to experience. Black insults were needed both to instill fear and to give a psychological boost to

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Family in an Intemperate Community, State, and Nation

poor whites and to justify continuing discrimination/white economic and political advantage. Irreparable harms were allocated and sustained to stabilize white elite families and white supremacy in the state and nation. Many propertyowning elites used white male supremacy in enslavement and beyond to consolidate wealth and allocate political power to themselves; they were both the economic and political actor and the economic and political recipient.15 Whatever the intended effects, white supremacy prevented or stunted continuous black intergenerational capabilities in politics, economics, education, and health. The faces of private economic power are still white, even as the seats of Sunflower local political office are now black. Business life is still the purview of local whites and absentee landowners, some of whom are corporate industrialists, such as TIAA CREF.16 Deep South politicians would erect and resurrect irreparable harms over many generations to justify and maintain their advantages and interests. African Americans appealed to “the Superior God of the World” for justice. On earth, in local communities across the nation, especially in the Deep South, gross insults were legally codified. Frequently, earthly appeals were punished, severely. Insults were frequently internalized by the actor issuing insults and in myriad ways, by the recipient upon whom they were rendered. Irreparable injuries and insults were and are gross – dehumanizing and intergenerationally destabilizing and require robust legal and political eradication and just familial compensation. When, for example, the Daughters of the American Revolution refused to allow the super talented Marian Anderson to sing at the Constitution Hall in 1939, they insulted her and themselves, but this insult was symbolic rather than substantive. Gross insults are frequently both highly symbolic and substantive; their

15

16

Married women gained the right to own and preserve property in Mississippi as early as 1839. Thirty-five Negroes were included in the property given to the estate of a prominent Hinds County family, the first female beneficiary of the Married Women’s Property Act, revised in 1846 and 1857. Journal of the Senate of the State of Mississippi, 1839, p. 231. Vann Newkirk, “The Great Land Robbery,” The Atlantic, September 29, 2019. Available at theatlantic.com, accessed January 19, 2022; Tristan Quinn-Thibodeau, “When Pensions Buy Plantations: TIAA and Other Wall Street Firms Are Amassing Farmland in Mississippi,” ActionAid USA. Available at actionaid.usa.org, accessed January 19, 2022; TIAA, “Responsible Investment in Farmland.” Available at TIAA.org, accessed January 19, 2022.

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endurance stain institutions, like the family, as well as talented individuals, academic institutions, and the nation – past, present, and future. Finally, as intimated earlier, court decisions such as Dred Scott,17 the Civil Rights18 cases, Plessy,19 and others, all constituted gross public institutional and intergenerational injury. What would it take to correct institutional vestiges associated with the edifice of institutional slavery and segregation? Gunnar Myrdal, a Swedish economist, was hired by the Carnegie Foundation to write an assessment of the Negro problem in the United States. He accepted the assignment and traveled to the South in the US, where he spent two months. He noted in 1944 that “in the South, the master-model of economic discrimination – slavery – is still a living force as a memory and a tradition.”20 Enslavement and servitude had been meant to break Africans and make them what they were not: subhuman. Jim Crow had meant to keep African Americans broken and subjugated so that whites might prosper beyond the efforts their talents, alone, produced. The Sunflower Seven, the Scott familiy and their contemporaries stand in for the moms and dads in rural places who aspired to raise children from poverty to the middle-class. These women laborers – sharecroppers, maids, and laundresses – dressed like the ladies they were, instead of the aliens or inferiors many whites presumed or rationalized them to be. They, in my view, did not internalize low self-worth; though illiterate, they saw white justifications for black economic discrimination and labor exploitation as 17

18

19

20

Dred Scott v. Sandford 60 US 393 (1857). In Dred Scott, the Court majority held that the United States Constitution did not confer citizenship to African Americans. It is important to read the dissenting opinions in Dred Scott. In large parts, the dissents were antislavery arguments. The Civil Rights Cases of 1883 concerned five different instances that questioned whether the 1857 Civil Rights Act, which guaranteed all persons the right to use public transportation facilities, hotels and theaters, regardless of race or previous condition of servitude, was constitutional. The Court, in an 8-1 decision, ruled that neither the 13th nor the 14th Amendments empowered the Congress to pass laws prohibiting discrimination in the private sector and that the 14th Amendment applied only to state, not individual actions, and, further, that the discrimination by individuals were ordinary civil injuries, not vestiges or badges of slavery. See US Reports: Civil Rights Cases 109 US 3 (1883). Plessy v. Ferguson 163 US 537 (1896). At issue in Plessy was whether separate railroad cars for blacks and whites erected by the state of Louisiana met constitutional muster. The Court held that segregation did not, in and of itself, constitute unlawful discrimination. A native Kentuckian, John Marshall Harlan, dissented in Plessy. His view of the US Constitution as a color-blind, classless document merits review. Harlan had also ably dissented in the Civil Rights Cases of 1883. For further reading, see Peter Canellos, The Great Dissenter: The Story of John Marshall Harlan, America’s Judicial Hero (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2021). Myrdal, An American Dilemma, 219.

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Family in an Intemperate Community, State, and Nation

logic twisted to reconcile whites’ economic liberties and social interests. They understood their own beauty, their own intimacy, their unfolding lives, the deep joy, and unimaginable sorrow, and the unbecoming world white supremacy had made, all of which we will trace in detail later in this study. It was in the macro-historical and familial context of economic, political, and social racism that low-income working-class children watched parents, neighbors, churchgoers, and extended kin pick through shards, threads, and fragments of opportunity. This patchwork of stitches was the private edifice on which the rural poor built. Familial upward economic mobility trajectories were built upon this edifice.21 It was in the social and economic context of historical local discrimination that durable pathways toward upward economic mobility were forged by parents and grandparents who were single, dual and multiple wage earners – and members of the penniless aspirational class. If intergenerational upward economic pathways can be fostered in Sunflower, in the land of centuries-long black oppression, if there are patterns to those economic mobility trajectories, can they be stitched together to inform twenty-first century exits toward the middle-class and beyond in rural places in America? In this study, upward mobility contexts include the legal and political capacity and structured asset-based opportunities of parents and children to improve their human development and economic and social class status in high-growth communities. Equitable upward mobility pathways contain legally codified equitable opportunities leading to an income sufficient to power families’ upward economic trajectories toward and beyond the middle-class over two generations. Income and wealth are both implicated in upward mobility pathways – both for families and communities (places), not merely individuals or one sibling or one generation. A study of upward and downward mobility pathways in Sunflower and Scott is also a study of cultural, physical, and emotional contexts – of human geography and interiority; it is an examination of how intergenerational injury accrues to the least advantaged members of a society and how a trend or a pattern can be reversed and/or discarded. Interiority is comprised of a set of seen, expressed, and implied ideas, imaginations, and beliefs about human capabilities, values, virtues, and our familial and communal past and present, and future trajectory. Interiority is influenced by observations, self-belief, and unfettered practical opportunities to imagine and advance. Related to the quality and pace of upward mobility is the accretion of intergenerational wealth. Lonnie Byrd and his kinship farm family wanted

21

Forgotten Genius, PBS’s NOVA Documentary on Percy Julian, 2007.

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Families’ Cross-Century Struggles to Leave Dispossession Behind

23

to accrue wealth. He wanted to leverage the 700 acres of land left by his father. Therefore, like poverty, often wealth is handed down, both during one’s lifetime and at death. The poor do not hand poverty down; the nation and its policies and practices are often directly implicated, generation after generation, in handing poverty down, in much the same way that the nation’s policies and practices permit wealth to be handed down.22 According to economists, Laura Feiveson and John Sabelhaus, in this dynastic system, wealth follows the wealthiest for several generations, resulting in what is aptly termed multigenerational wealth transfer on top of the advantages accrued from being privileged and white and having access to the best schools and colleges in the nation.23 Lonnie Byrd’s timely inheritance required an equitable chance to launch. An equitable chance required nation-state receptivity to equitable farming wealth pathways. Chance was fragmented because blacks could not count on political patronage and the ole boy network as many whites do and did. Chance was fragmented because justices on the United States Supreme Court participated in the white gaze as often as they did not. When Dutch Reformist, Mr. Associate Justice Joseph P. Bradley opined that there must come a time when the Negro ceases to be the special favorite of the laws,24 22

23

24

Isabel Sawhill and Richard Reeves in “A New Contract with the Middle Class,” point to how tax and fiscal policy undermine the working classes in the United States, squeezing wages and overtaxing wage income. Their work offers five foundations of a good life: money, time, relationships, health, and respect. These foundations are consonant with the primary narratives of the Sunflower Seven and are useful touchpoints for examining upward mobility trajectories for rural workers in the United States and elsewhere. The chapter was published by the Brookings Institution, Washington, DC, September 2020. Available at www.brookings.edu. Laura Feiveson and John Sabelhaus, “Lifecycle Patterns of Savings and Wealth Accumulation,” Finance and Economics Discussion Series (2019-010). Washington Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. https://doi.org.10.17016/FEDS (2019). 109 US 3 (1883). The Associate Justice’s jurisprudence was consequential in the Slaughter-House cases and in the Colfax Massacres of 1873, in which Bradley was the presiding justice of the circuit. The residing circuit court judge, William Woods, upheld the convictions of the white terrorists, but Associate Justice Bradley, the presiding justice (of the circuit), for the recently expanded United States Supreme Court, overturned them, arguing that the federal government held no power over individual citizens such as the white terrorists. In Bradwell v. Illinois, which held that the right to practice law was not constitutionally secured under the Privileges and Immunities Clause of the 14th Amendment, Bradley denied Myra Bradwell, a married woman, the right to practice law; in dicta Bradley urged that women had to know and keep their place, as the “respective spheres of man and woman.” Whether speaking for the majority, in dissent, or in concurrence, his views in Colfax, Bradwell and the Civil Rights Cases were at odds with the freedom of blacks and women. In the 8-1 decision, Chief Justice Samuel Chase dissented without opinion. The jurisprudence of the Court just after the 13th, 14th, and

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during, arguably, the most violent period of African American history, he helped to shutter the Civil War Amendments in 1883. The cycles of edicts handed down by intemperate justices destabilize and render unseen the most economically vulnerable families, citizens, and communities. This analysis of families born poor in Sunflower County and a family in Scott County offers insights into why economic mobility for the working and middle-class slowed during the last century in rural black America. Significantly, for more than a century after slavery, the economic trajectories of African Americans of all classes were formed under conditions of legal racism, political disenfranchisement, organized terror, and economic oppression. Some (on the agricultural ladder and off ) pursued upward economic mobility and achieved it; their routes to the middle-class and the durability of their status are worthy of examination. The more one can learn about rural economic mobility pathways, the more helpful such knowledge can be to rural communities across the country and the world. What’s more important is a need to understand how intergenerational familial upward and downward trajectories form and are disrupted in rural places with large shares of historically disadvantaged people and communities. In Chapter 2, I examine the settings of Sunflower and Scott counties, Delta, and Hill country, with the primary focus on Sunflower.

15th Amendments highlight the grip of tradition on citizenship inclusion. Which freedoms could one exercise as a matter of federal law and which ones would be prohibited by the states and individual private actions?

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The Sunflower County Delta

Sunflower County is, and has been since its founding, a majority-black community. Scott is a minority-majority community but was predominantly white for most of its history. Football greats like Archie Manning, the late B. B. King, Little Milton, Fannie Lou Hamer, Mae Bertha Carter,1 and Senator James O. Eastland all lived in Sunflower County. Fannie Lou Hamer is best known for advancing the life chances of the black majority and Eastland for holding their life chances in abeyance. Born in rural Doddsville in Sunflower County, Eastland’s father, a prominent attorney, activist in the Democratic Party, and cotton planter, moved his family from Sunflower County to Scott County (Forest, the county seat), in 1905, when James was just under a year old. The Eastlands traversed both Scott and Sunflower Counties during young James Eastland’s formative years. His great grandpa, Hiram Eastland, had settled in Forest during the fifth decade of the 1800s. Senator James Oliver Eastland’s parents, Woods Eastland, and Alma Austin, put stakes in the ground in both Sunflower and Scott Counties. The Senator’s body was interred in February 1986 in Forest, in the segregated Eastern Cemetery. Eastland’s family and his own actions as a politician intersected with and harmed the long-term prospects of his obscure black neighbors. Hamer, born in Montgomery County, Mississippi to parents who were sharecroppers, was herself a sharecropper in Sunflower’s Ruleville, where she worked as a timekeeper and her husband, Perry Hamer, worked as a tractor driver. Hamer embraced the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in the 1960s and, along with a few others in Sunflower, she fought for 1

Mae Bertha Carter and Constance Curry, Silver Rights: The Story of the Carter’s Family Brave Decision to Send Their Children to an All-White School and Their Claims to Civil Rights (New York: Harcourt, 1996).

25

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the right to advocate for the “sick and tired”;2 for children’s head starts; for upward economic mobility for adults, through a pig farming cooperative; for unimpeded voter registration and participation; for raw political power. Retaliation was swift and severe. She was fired and evicted; the house she moved to after the eviction was shot at 16 times; she was beaten by black prisoners to within an inch of her life in a Winona, Mississippi jail. Before her political activism, when she had done nothing to offend white supremacy, she had been sterilized without her consent, and she and her parents had been sentenced to poverty and ill-education and ill-health, just for being black in the United States of America, in Mississippi, the “most southern place on earth.”3 Lesser-known Sunflower natives endured white supremacy, while Eastland fostered it. The Sunflower Seven are featured here to examine intergenerational exits from poverty in an intemperate community and nation. They are Josie Landfair and Agnes Brown, who sharecropped for half a century; Jack Harper, who began his economic trek as a white tenant farmer; David Williams, David Matthews, and Clementine RichardsonWilliams, who jumped off the agricultural ladder early enough to jumpstart new career trajectories; and Lonnie Byrd, who inherited several hundredacres of kinship farmland outside Shaw, Mississippi in Springhill. For most of their lives, the Sunflower Seven had done nothing to offend white supremacy, unlike Hamer. Their lives were conditioned by the nation’s intemperate policies, as well as by some of the actions and practices of “better known” members of the County. They were at the same time sustained by their own agency and tenacity. The perennial sharecroppers’ children found ways to cut through poverty, as did the children of the tenant farmers, quasi-croppers, and the kinship landowning Byrds. This study will trace their economic mobility pathways.

THE PRIMARY SITE: SUNFLOWER YESTERDAY AND TODAY

Sunflower has a population of 27,255, slightly less than Scott’s population of 28,263. Sunflower is one of eighteen persistently majority black poor 2

3

Kay Mills, This Little Light of Mine: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1992). See Hamer’s speech, “I’m Sick and Tired of Being Sick and Tired,” December 20, 1964, Harlem, New York. Available at Iowa State University Archives of Women’s Political Communication, awpc.cattcenter.iastate.edu. She was in Harlem with Malcolm X to support the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party Congressional Challenge. James Cobb, The Most Southern Place on Earth: The Mississippi Delta and the Roots of Southern History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).

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counties found on the alluvial floodplains in the Northwest section of Mississippi, often termed the Mississippi Delta, which runs about 200 miles from Memphis, Tennessee to Vicksburg, Mississippi. Sunflower County is a place where for over a century and eight decades, the government and employers have both failed to supply the greatest good for the greatest number of citizens. In this nation of 3,144 counties, Sunflower County Mississippi’s per capita income, median household income, and median family income are placed at 3,127; it is among the top nineteen counties/ communities of the deepest disadvantage in the nation when measured by income, health, and social mobility.4 During the Great Depression, Sunflower was the second-most densely populated county in Mississippi, with 66,000 residents, three quarters of whom were of African American ancestry. Since the dawn of the twenty-first century, though, there has been a 27 percent decline in the white population of Sunflower and a 14 percent decline in the black population. Violence and the threat of violence challenged rural blacks’ economic mobility pathways. White lawlessness meant that white men with and without legal authority such as sheriffs, judges, police officers, or bailiffs could take black lives without legal consequences. In Sunflower, in February 1904, Senator James Eastland’s relatives lynched a man and a woman as hundreds watched and many onlookers cheered as they drank lemonade. A black man, Luther Holbert, was accused of fatally shooting James Eastland – Senator James Eastland’s uncle. Woods Eastland, Senator James Eastland’s father, and his uncle, Hiram, were leaders of the group that captured Holbert and the woman with him. Holbert’s fingers were chopped off and distributed as souvenirs; the pair’s ears were likewise chopped and given away to the crowd.5 Lawlessness prevailed, and it did so as spectacle and theatre. The taking of black lives was normalized, as was the taking of blacks’ liberties – which meant the lack of freedom to pursue political, civic, social, and economic opportunities as their resources, talents, and desires dictated. Denied opportunities to strive

4

5

Jessica D. Ulrich and Cynthia M. Duncan, “People and Places Left Behind: Work, Culture, and Politics in the Rural United States,” The Journal of Peasant Studies, 45(1) (2018): 59–79; Kathy Edin, Luke Shaefer, and Tim Nelson, The Index of Deep Disadvantage, funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (University of Michigan Poverty Solutions, Princeton University, 2019). J. Todd Moye, Let the People Decide: Black Freedom and White Resistance Movements in Sunflower County, Mississippi (1945–1986) (University of North Carolina, 2004), 3–4; Greenville Weekly Democrat Times, February 27, 1904.

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and wages on which to live and shelter their families, 13 percent of Sunflower’s population is housed in prison.6 Prior to 1840, the Mississippi territory, which then excluded Alabama, was in possession of Choctaw Indians. The mounds characterizing Sunflower – Marlow, Eastland, and Prentiss – were dug by Indians. They owned these lands in the 1700s through the 1820s, before the Treaty of Doak’s Stand.7 Their lands would be taken, along with many of their lives. Sunflower County, with its 26,000 residents, stretches on for 70 miles and is found on Highway 49 West, with an equal distance between Jackson, Mississippi, and Memphis, Tennessee. Archivist and historian Dunbar Rowland wrote in 1925, “Sunflower County was one of the wealthiest counties in Mississippi and no agricultural section of Mississippi has developed more rapidly within the past twenty years.”8 He expounded further, “It is a typical section of modern Southland, with its more than 800 negro farmers working, with their thousands of mules, the great plantations of cotton, tending millions of livestock and cultivating extensive farms of corn and other grains, not to mention vegetables for home consumption and the market.”9 Known also as the black belt, it is part of a multi-state impoverished region that includes Arkansas, Louisiana, and Alabama. In its first census, taken in 1850, Sunflower County had a total population of 1,162 residents, including 754 enslaved and 348 free people. Slaves were brought into Sunflower in 1840 to work the lands. In 1861, the number of slaves under sixty years old in Sunflower was 4,636; two years later, the number was 5,014. By 1860, Mississippi reported 437,000 enslaved, up considerably from 33,000, forty years earlier.10 By 1880, a decade and a half after the Civil War, African Americans accounted for 2,867 of Sunflower’s 4,662 residents. The entire population of Sunflower County grew significantly, and by 1890, it stood at 16,000. Its population in 2020 was 23,000. Before the Civil War, when cotton had become a stable and profitable crop, and when slaves were counted as property in perpetuity, Mississippi 6

7

8

9 10

Kristen Crandall, “An Equity Profile of Sunflower County,” Policy Link, The Kellogg Foundation (2012). On October 18, 1820, under pressure, the Choctaw Indians ceded 5,000,000 acres to the US in the second Choctaw Cession. Dunbar Rowland, Mississippi: The Heart of the South, Mississippi Department of Archives and History (Chicago–Jackson: Clarke Publishing Company, 1925), 259. Ibid., 826. Charles Sydnor, Slavery in Mississippi (New York: Appleton-Century, 1933).

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had been among the wealthiest states in the Deep South, and Bolivar County, which borders Sunflower County to the south, had been one of the wealthiest cotton enclaves in the nation. After the Civil War, most of the Mississippi Delta region’s bottomlands were undeveloped. Migrants, including descendants of enslaved and free African Americans, went there, voluntarily, looking for work and opportunities to buy cheap land. They wanted to make the Delta their land of promise. In several cottonproducing counties, with majority black populations, wealth and farmland values had been quite high even into the early twentieth century. The densely wooded forests and dense marshlands of the Delta in the late 1880s made the land work harsh and fevers abundant. Accompanying these adverse physical conditions were legal racism and lawlessness, which meant no formal opportunity for enslaved descendants to earn a living wage or good public education in Mississippi. For many decades, the state lacked virtuous white leaders and virtuous white followers – the Eastlands were not anomalous. Still, individual families could grab onto chance if they could avoid mob violence and have even a modicum of cash, or social capital, or an inheritance to begin their journey. The magnitude and timing of the inheritance would matter, as it had for Lonnie Byrd. Land in the Delta was initially sold for 0.25 cents an acre, not more than one might pay for a pound of butter in the late 1880s. From 1888 through the 1890s, the Yazoo and Mississippi Valley Railroad (Illinois Central) was selling land in Sunflower County at 5 dollars an acre, on installment plans. That same land was resold in 1917 and 1918 for $150 to $450 an acre. Buying low and selling high would become a multigenerational business practice. Many hands were in the capitalist land sales, including railroad companies. Professor John Hudson of Northwestern University (1979) is illuminating on the subject: By 1878 the state auditor of Mississippi held 51 percent of all lands in the Delta. These lands were producing no tax revenue, creating an even heavier burden for the tax-paying citizens. The cause was not so much the direct effects of war as it was the product of postwar land speculation. Cheap Delta lands, selling often at a few cents an acre, were grabbed up by speculators who, in the time-honored fashion, assumed that they could turn them over at a profit. When they could not, the lands reverted to the state in lieu of unpaid taxes. With more than half the lands off the tax rolls, and with only one of every three acres of owned farmland improved, the Delta was ripe for development and cried out for the capital to make it happen.11

11

John Hudson, “The Yazoo Mississippi Delta as Plantation Country,” Talltimbers.org, p. 71.

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The prospecting and marketing of acreage in the Delta engaged the interests of two developers, Delta and Pine Lands and the Illinois Railroad. Hudson is again instructive: The great bulk of the tax delinquent Yazoo Delta lands held by the state did not pass directly into the ownership of small farmers, nor even into the possession of the established planter-class. Most of it went to two companies: The Delta and Pine Land Company and the Memphis and Vicksburg Railroad. The legal complexities of both deals, and the repercussions that resulted, were to play a vital role in Mississippi’s economy and politics for years thereafter.12

At the turn of the last century, only 8 percent of the 2,172 black farmers in Sunflower County owned the land on which they worked. The average size of Sunflower County farms was 272 acres in 1900. According to the landowning African American farmer, the late Lonnie Byrd, in Sunflower, the top economic rungs, not just the agricultural ladder, consisted of bankers, plantation owners, medium to small landowning farmers (with fiscal capital), and teachers. The bottom economic rungs consisted of laborers (farm day workers), croppers, domestics, and renters/tenants. Some preachers were in the middle of the ladder if they were literate and landowners. Many of the croppers and five of the Sunflower Seven lived on someone else’s land for most of their lives, starting as child laborers and toiling alongside their parents. As with farmers, “time on the ladder”13 for sharecroppers, positioned indefinitely on the rung of origin, was a challenge. Some rungs were sticky and others slippery. Immediately after enslavement, legal racism, racial lawlessness, and discrimination created deeper tracks of intergenerational poverty for enslaved descendants in the Delta. Some had a modicum of land, their own home, and little money. Many landowners paid slave wages to field laborers even as crops generated cash and eventually wealth for owners. Additionally, the illiterate, the poorest descendants of the enslaved, even when they signed labor contracts, had no means of enforcing or contesting them. In Sunflower, a highly formalized racial locale, legal racism meant the absence of both equal protection and due process, both procedural and substantive.

12 13

Ibid. Lee Alston and Joseph Ferrie, “Time on the Ladder: Career Mobility in Agriculture, 1890–1938,” National Bureau of Economic Research Working Papers 11231 (March 2005).

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In Sunflower County, African Americans, Jews, Chinese, and Anglos had coexisted, with some on parallel economic, social, legal, and political tracks and others much less so. Jews and Chinese arrived in the Delta in the 1840s and 1870s, respectively; the latter soon left fieldwork for the retail sector. And more Jews, fleeing persecution, growing German nationalism, and the horrors of the Third Reich, would also arrive in the Delta as the early 1920s approached. Immigrant Jews were town merchants, initially traveling peddlers. The opportunity for wealth-based farming and land ownership brought the Byrds from Sumter County, Alabama, itself a settlement originated by Seminole Indians, to Sunflower County, Mississippi, the Mississippi Delta, 205 miles away. The challenges they left behind included an outbreak of Yellow Fever and the ones they met consisted of densely wooded marshlands prone to flooding and hordes of mosquitos.14 Not everyone who worked unflinchingly benefitted from their own labor. As late as 1935, African American rural families like Sunflower natives and sharecroppers Agnes Brown and Josie Landfair, featured here, earned about $330 a year, while rural whites earned four times that amount.15 As shown in Figure 2.1, Sunflower County is located adjacent to Coahoma on the north, Tallahatchie, to the northeast, Leflore to the east, and Humphreys to the south. Washington and Bolivar’s counties are located to the southwest and northwest of Sunflower, respectively. Indianola is Sunflower’s County seat. Not shown here are the Sunflower townships of Stephenville, Drew, Inverness, Ruleville, Parchman, Doddsville, Moorhead, and Shaw. Indianola is two-thirds black and has a population of 10,000. Drew was once known as the most dangerous place in the Delta for African Americans. A native of neighboring Bolivar County recalled that before the family left for Chicago, his parents warned him “to never let the sun go down on you in Drew.” When schools were ordered to desegregate, whites in Inverness built Central Delta Academy, a white private school to shelter their children from blacks. The academy was demolished in May 2010. Inverness, now evenly populated by race, was once a bustling economic site, with the largest cotton gin in the Delta.

14

15

Scott Huffard, Jr., “Infected Rails: Yellow Fever and Southern Railroads,” Journal of Southern History, 79(1) (February 2013): 79–112. Bureau of Labor Statistics (1935), Richard Sterner, The Negro’s Share (1943), as cited in Myrdal, An American Dilemma, 364.

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Family in an Intemperate Community, State, and Nation

Figure 2.1 Map of Mississippi by counties

PARCHMAN

The subjugation of black people in Mississippi included but was not limited to the imprisonment of black men; the profiling and vulnerability of black boys to charges of rape and social violations of the caste code; black job discrimination; and economic intimidation. A potent symbol of imprisonment and black man and black boy injustice is Parchman. Parchman, one of Sunflower’s incorporated townships, is most well known as the state’s 13,000-acre maximum-security penitentiary. It is located

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The Sunflower County Delta

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thirty minutes from Money, Mississippi, where Emmet Till, a black fourteen-year-old child, was brutally murdered by white mobsters for reportedly winking at a white woman in 1955.16 At capacity, Parchman holds 3,400 inmates. In 1904, the Mississippi legislature established the prison, Parchman Farms, on Parchman Plantation in Sunflower County. Parchman was called a Penal Farm when it was founded in 1905, just as convict leasing ended in Mississippi. Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Douglas Blackmon wrote that convict leasing was “Slavery by another name,”17 and Oshinsky has argued that convict leasing in Mississippi was worse than slavery.18 Hundreds of men died, and at least 7 percent died from tuberculosis and pneumonia.19 In 1906, 90 percent of Parchman’s “convicts” were African American men. In its first year of operation, the prisoners’ labor generated just over five million dollars in 2009 currency. After the Civil War and the Thirteenth Amendment, these prisoners, so-called convicts, constituted a huge part of the newly exploited labor force and the newly disenfranchised. They were doubly targeted as they moved from slave labor to free labor status to criminals and convicts. In addition to shattering their health, the convict leasing system cemented prisons as an unregulated labor market institution, where inmates earned well under half of the federal minimum wage. Moreover, they exited prison life with additional sentences – with restricted access to voting rights, professional licensing, and public housing. The prison record is itself, in most instances, a barrier against upward economic mobility. As young boys and adult men, Williams, Lonnie, and Matthews stayed clear of prison. But for those who found themselves on the wrong side of the caste laws, absent upskilling, greater functional literacy, and greater prospects for health care, second chances would not materialize, and when they did, little would change unless employment and social esteem could be found and restored. The shallow networks of “second black chances,” low-wage work, ill-health, and social isolation awaited and await the parolees. In a recent study of over

16

17

18

19

Hugh Whitaker, “A Case Study in Southern Justice: The Emmett Till Case,” MA thesis (Florida State University, 1963); Interview with Ben Hampton, Chicago, “American Experience: The Murder of Emmett Till, Mississippi Resident” (2003); “What Really Happened That Day in the Store?” The New York Times, January 27, 2017; Timothy Tyson, The Blood of Emmett Till (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2017). Douglas Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II (New York: Anchor Books, 2008). Ibid.; David Oshinsky, Worse than Slavery: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice (New York: The Free Press, 1996). Report of the Penitentiary Board of Control (1905).

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700 mostly black adults conducted by the Glenn Family Foundation, 18 percent of Sunflower County respondents indicated that they had grown up in households where someone went to jail or prison.20 Illiteracy, violence, and prison pathways are frequently linked to the fate of black men in the United States. Powdermaker explained black-on-black crime in Sunflower, especially homicides, as a diversion of resentment, brought on in part by white policies and attitudes. The penitentiary was filled with black men accused of harming whites, not white men who took the law into their own hands and lynched black men. The lynch law was rarely punished. She explained: The courts punish with great severity Negro violence against whites. But they function in a way that serves inducements to the Negro to take the law into his own hands when his difficulties involve other Negroes. Since he can hope for no justice and no defense from our legal institutions, he must settle his own difficulties, and often he knows only one way. He is the more ready to use it, since the same court which would crush him if he accused a white man of cheating him will let him off if he is accused of killing a black man.21

When Powdermaker studied Sunflower in the 1930s, the homicide rate in Mississippi was 20.5 percent per 100,000, while for the US, it was 9.3 per 100,000. In 2021, the homicide rate in Mississippi was 15.4 per 100,000 and about half that of the United States. Powdermaker wrote that in 95 percent of the cases in 1933, it was that of a Negro killing a Negro. A quality education or high school completion, which all the men among the Sunflower Seven accomplished, offered the potential to avoid engagement with the criminal justice system. Just sixty years after the freeing of the enslaved, a different kind of servitude awaited at Parchman. As was true early in the last century, Parchman is today highly symbolic of the broken pathways between servitude and citizenship. Laws created conditions that narrowed black liberty and self-determination. The protection against enslavement offered by the Thirteenth Amendment to the US Constitution did not extend to the convicted criminals. The Amendment banned enslavement or involuntary servitude except as a form of criminal punishment. White plantation elites read the loophole as an opportunity to acquire free labor – to legalize the forced labor of prisoners. Post-enslavement “convicted” young men were brutally beaten by cage bosses and trusties; trusties were often the most violent offenders in the

20 21

The Glenn Family Foundation, November 13, 2021. Powdermaker, After Freedom, 174.

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prison, and they used “Black Annie,” the lash, on prisoners’ bare flesh.22 The lash was powered by humans who had committed the worst offenses against other humans. The subhuman living conditions at Parchman were used to break men and women. The imprisonment of men left children without fathers, mothers without sons, and wives and lovers without husbands and breadwinners for the family. These imprisoned men, descendants of the enslaved, became breadwinners for the wealthy. The prison rented out their labor to planters. All the while their labor and living conditions relegated them to the status of beasts. These were the grand and greatgrandchildren of the formerly enslaved. In 1971, Gates v. Collier, a class action suit filed to improve the deplorable living conditions at Parchman, succeeded.23 Later lawsuits were needed to remove the deprivations that robbed inmates of their health and discriminated against them in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment. In March 2020, the United States Department of Justice investigated the rash of deaths at Parchman.24 In addition to the families of the inmates, with the United States government also as plaintiffs, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Southern Poverty Law Center were champions of the prisoners’ rights and liberties. According to the Prison Policy Initiative’s research, States of Incarceration, Mississippi has the third-highest incarceration rate in the United States; only in Oklahoma and Louisiana is the rate higher. Only two southern states, Maryland and North Carolina are among the states with low ratios of incarceration.25 Thirteen percent of Sunflower’s population is incarcerated.26

SHAW

Covering less than 2 square miles, most of Shaw’s residents live in Bolivar County, but a tiny portion of land spreads eastward into Sunflower. Its racial population is 92 percent black. Fifty-three percent of those under

22 24

25

26

23 Oshinsky, Worse than Slavery. 349 F. Supp. 881 (1972). Clarion Ledger, January 8, 2020; Kim Bellware, “15 Dead in Six Weeks,” Washington Post, February 7, 2020. Peter Wagner and Wendy Sawyer, “Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie,” March 14, 2016, Prison Policy Initiative. Crandall, “An Equity Profile of Sunflower County.”

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eighteen years of age and 31 percent of those over 65 are below the poverty line, and 55 percent of the population is between 18 and 64. The median income for a family in Shaw was $19,393 in 2020. The income per capita was $12,951, about half the amount for Mississippi. Thirty percent of the town’s residents are married.27 White lawlessness was common in Shaw. White men with and without legal authority as sheriff, judge, police officer, or bailiff could take black lives without legal consequences. In June 1914, in Shaw, Mississippi, Jack Farmer, an African American resident who was accused of killing Earl Chase, a white resident, was chased by a white posse of nine. In their chase, the posse killed Jennie Collins (someone they believed to have helped Farmer escape) and James Jolly, two African Americans; Jack Farmer escaped.28 Shaw, a town of 1,600 people and 548 families, is best known for Hawkins v. Town of Shaw.29 Andrew Hawkins, a local resident, and carpenter, and his wife, Mary, and twenty other citizens sued the town for violating the 14th Amendment equal protection of the law’s clause.30 Hawkins argued that tax levies (mostly ad valorem taxes) were unevenly distributed, mostly going to the white areas of town. Public services, the plaintiffs’ argued – surface water drainage, water, sewage, street paving, street lighting – were unequal. The plaintiffs prevailed. Like Fannie Lou Hamer, the Hawkinses were courageous, and their courage had grave consequences.

27

28

29

30

US Census Bureau (2020), American Community Survey Five-Year Estimates. Retrieved from Census Reporter.org; profile page for Shaw, MS http://censusreporter.org/profiles/ 16000US2867000-shaw-ms/ Kerry Segrave, Lynching of Women in the United States: The Recorded Cases, 1851–1946 (Jefferson: McFarland and Company, 2010); Helen McLure, “Review of Segrave, Kerry, Lynchings of Women in the United States: The Recorded Cases, 1851–1946,” H-Law, HNet Reviews, January 2011. Available at networks.h.net.org, accessed January 15, 2022. 437 F. 2d 1286 (5th Cir. 1971) Represented by the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, the plaintiffs prevailed at the appeals court level, reversing the district court. The Hawkinses’ home was bombed two months after the favorable ruling. Ms. Mary Lou Hawkins, the wife of Andrew Hawkins Sr., was murdered by a Black Shaw police officer in 1972. He was acquitted of manslaughter. During the 2008 Regular Session of the Mississippi Legislature, House Resolution 103, commending and honoring the Hawkinses, was enacted by Democrats Linda Coleman and David Norquist of Mound Bayou and Cleveland – from Bolivar/Sunflower Counties. Congressman Bennie Thompson had offered a House Resolution in the Hawkins’s honor during Black History Month. Congressional Record (vol. 151, no. 17, February 16, 2005). In 1976, the United States Supreme Court constrained Shaw in Washington v. Davis 426 US 229 (1976), arguing that no discriminatory purpose was claimed, and in absence of a discriminatory purpose, there was no constitutional violation.

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RULEVILLE

For trying to register to vote, Ms. Hamer and Perry, her husband, were thrown off Marlow’s plantation, where Hamer had lived in Ruleville for eighteen years and had moved up the ladder from being a sharecropper and domestic to a timekeeper. For having organized and exhorted members of the community to rise from servitude and accommodation, and for sitting in the white section of the Continental Trailways bus en route from a voter registration workshop in South Carolina, Hamer, Annell Ponder, James West, and others were beaten. Hamer was beaten with loaded blackjacks by three men in Winona, Mississippi, in Montgomery County, where Hamer’s parents had familial roots.31

INDIANOLA

On Church and Byas streets in the modern-day county seat of Indianola, in the early 1990s, many black townspeople were idle, restless, disappointed, and appeared disconnected from the community. A half-century earlier, Church Street had been the cultural apex of black life, with B. B. King, Count Basie, and Duke Ellington bands performing. The audience would be a mixture of folks from the neighborhood and rural outposts. Black churches, grocery stores, barber and shoe shops, and eateries lined the streets. Church Street offered respite from the fields and was a gathering place for saints, tweeners, and sinners alike. One of the first blacks in Indianola to welcome Freedom Riders, Ms. Irene Magruder, lived on Byas Street. Magruder, Oscar Giles, and Didley Wilder took in not just freedom riders but embraced change and were receptive to Ms. Fannie Lou Hamer’s entreaties as well as Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) workers from the North. For their courage and tenacity, their homes and Giles’s store were bombed.32 Markers were erected to memorialize the taking of native settlers’ lands, mounds, and civil rights icons and milestones that graced the disinvested landscapes throughout Sunflower County – Church and Byas Streets, in Indianola, and sacred sites in Inverness, Shaw, Ruleville, and Drew. Monuments to Fannie Lou Hamer, historical markers such as the Birthplace of the Blues, Dockery Plantation, the Wayne and Minnie Cox 31

32

Remembering 1963: Fannie Lou Hamer Arrested and Beaten in Winona, Mississippi. Available at Equal Justice Initaitive eji.org, accessed December 10, 2021. Ms. Magruder, available at crmvet.org, accessed December 10, 2021.

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Figure 2.2 Map of Mississippi by county and county seats

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The Sunflower County Delta

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Park, William Chapel, Irene Magruder, the Treaty of Doak’s Stand, and Parchman Blues Farm are erected throughout Sunflower. These honorific historic markers signify a confluence of factors like the taking of land and lives, the dispossession of enslaved descendants, their fight and persistence as expressed in song, false starts, and partial triumphs. Today in Sunflower, however, large tracts on Church and Byas Streets show evidence of housing decline, business disinvestment, and family impoverishment. Thirty percent of the households in Indianola are married, compared to 48.3 percent in the nation. Fifty-five percent of Indianola’s residents own their own homes, compared to 63 percent of the nation. Divorce in Indianola is less common than in the nation, but the never-married rate in Indianola is 47 percent, compared to one-third in the nation. Whether married, divorced, or never married, householders or renters, Hispanics, and African Americans have greater vulnerability to poverty than their white counterparts. Never married female heads of households without a high school and/or college degree have the greatest vulnerability to poverty. Their potential earning power, not their status as single moms, appears to create a greater likelihood of poverty for the mom and her children. This is especially true if the parents are never married and if, therefore, the fathers’ attachments to their children are loosely established and material familial obligations are never legally codified. The broader macro-level shifts in economic mobility and immobility are also crucial to consider, as the share of American adults who live in middle-income households had decreased from 61 percent in 1971 to 51 percent in 2019. Sunflower and Scott Counties are microcosms of life and challenges in other rural places with large shares of blacks and the new poor. Along with Tippah County, Sunflower County is on the forefront as the county with the highest rate of diabetes and the highest rate of deaths due to diabetes.33 The economic health of counties and states is related to the physical and mental health of their citizens, especially their access to employer-based physical and mental health care. In 2020, there were 3,000 patients to every one primary care physician in Sunflower County, compared to one to every 1,900 and 1,050 persons, respectively, in Massachusetts and

33

Vanessa Short, Report on the Burden of Chronic Disease in Mississippi. Mississippi State Department of Health (September 2014); Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Health Statistics, Diabetes Mortality by State, Mississippi, March 17, 2021. Available at cdc.gov, accessed December 10, 2021.

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Washington State.34 With 1 being the absolute best, Sunflower and Scott ranked 72nd and 62nd out of 82 counties in terms of overall health outcomes.35 Unemployment is a barrier to the poor’s ability to access income, gain promotions, health insurance, and health care. The wealthiest 20 percent of households in Sunflower take home 60 percent of all income earned; the top 5 percent of wealth holders take home 25 percent of all income. Forty percent of the poorest households earn 11 percent of Sunflower’s total income. Sunflower County ranked 29th among the 100 most deeply disadvantaged places in the United States in 2019.36 Despite progress, the uneven performance of its public schools, the population’s dire health status, and the epidemic poverty rate among both children and adults are some of the vestiges of the region’s leaders’ inattention to fair investment in communities with large shares of blacks.37 The ravages of COVID-19 on families and communities of deep disadvantage are shining a light on the historic neglect and struggles of children and adults in communities predominantly occupied by blacks. According to the US Census,38 married-couple families have had the least vulnerability to poverty, with married-couple Hispanics and black families, respectively, having greater vulnerability than white married-couple families. Married-couple Hispanic families with children under 18 are one-and-ahalf times more likely to be in poverty than white married-couple families. Black married-couple families are 50 percent more likely to be in poverty than white married-couple families. Greater vulnerability to poverty, even when both parents are working, creates stress related to childcare and early education, not to mention health care and care for elderly parents. Chronic stress from unemployment, marital trauma, segregation and isolation, and illiteracy impairs coping mechanisms. Unemployment percentages throughout Sunflower County are highest in the neighborhoods highly populated by blacks and lowest in white 34

35 36 37

38

County Health Rankings, March 2020, Robert Wood Johnson, and the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute. Available at Countyhealthrankings.org, accessed September 27, 2021. Edin et al., The Index of Deep Disadvantage. For the most recent status of student performance in math, see 2021 Assessment Achievement Gap Analysis: State Math Summary by Subgroup, available at mdek12 .org. The good news is that Mississippi has goals and an implementation plan and that teachers, students, and their parents are making progress. Much remains to be done well. US Census Bureau, Historical Poverty Tables-Poverty of Income Table RDP-2 Poverty Status of Families, by Type of Family, Presence of Related Children (Poverty Thresholds Based on CPI-U-XI).

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neighborhoods. Though less segregated than in the past, segregated neighborhoods show a preponderance of whites in northern Indianola, where unemployment was 12 percent compared to areas around Drew, Moorhead, and Ruleville, black areas, where unemployment was 39 percent. The Gini coefficient, a commonly used measure of inequality, is 0.51 in Sunflower. The extent to which income distribution deviates from perfect equality, 0, would mean that every household has the same income. A score of 1 signifies complete inequality, meaning that one household has all the income. Here, the Gini coefficient means that half of the households in Sunflower have a higher income than the other half. As is true for the state and nation, white men earn more on average than white women (6,500 more) and black and brown women and men of color (10,000 more), with black men earning much less than white men, white women, and black women. The poorest households in Sunflower have seen their incomes drop by 18 percent since 1990, which is twice the decline of the wealthiest households in Sunflower. In Sunflower, child poverty is 59 percent for black children and 55 percent for Latino children, compared to 20 percent for white children. The overall child poverty rate in Sunflower is 47 percent; it is 29 percent in Scott.39 Sunflower is a county where poverty had for a century persisted alongside wealth. It is a county that has both high African American individual and household poverty (over 16 percent) and high inequality, as measured by power relations, privileges, and the wealth of whites.40 Farm ownership in Sunflower was not high among African Americans in the first decade of the twentieth century, with only 8 percent of African Americans owning farms, and 40 percent of Sunflower’s 533 white farmers were landowners. At least 2,000 tenant farmers and sharecroppers were African American. Sunflower County’s farmland was valued at 11 million dollars in the 1920 census; by 2006, it was valued at $361,362,000. According to the 2002 US Census of Agriculture, Sunflower’s farmland value was the second-highest in the state (second only to Bolivar, its neighbor); it also received the second-highest subsidies as a percent of 39 40

Available at Countyhealthrankings.org, accessed September 27, 2021. Mark Mather and Beth Jarosz, “The Demography of Inequality in the United States,” Population Reference Bureau (PRB, 2014); Mather and Jarosz, “Poverty and Inequality Pervasive in Two-Fifths of US Counties” (PRB, 2016), p. 1999. For an understanding of the structural forces that reproduce poverty and inequality in rural areas of the US and UK, please see, Ruth McAreavey and David Brown, Comparative Analysis of Rural Poverty and Inequality in the UK and the US (Humanities and Social Science Communications, October 2019).

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farmland in the state. Farm and disaster subsidies for Sunflower between 1995 and 2004 were $253,797,047.41 “Some had more support than others and those who were the most advantaged, controlled those who were the least advantaged. They who owned the land, held the [descendants of the] enslaved, and occupied the public offices.”42 Prior to March 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic arrived in the United States, job growth per person in the nation had increased by 16 percent, but only by 9 percent in Sunflower.43 Despite working more hours than the average American, the working poor in Sunflower are likely to live in poverty. In contemporary Sunflower County, 49 percent of female householders living below the poverty level are unemployed. For example, in September 2020, the unemployment rate in Sunflower was just over 9 percent. The unemployment rate for Mississippi was 6.8 percent and 7.7 percent for the nation. Of the nation’s 3,243 counties or county-equivalents, there are just over 500 rural counties in America with large shares of African Americans, most of whom have lived in or near chronic poverty for generations. Sunflower is but one.

41

42 43

Environmental Working Group Farm Subsidy Database and US Census of Agriculture (2002). Matthew Holden, Jr., Correspondence with the author, August 10, 2019. US Bureau of Economic Analysis, 2020.

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Multigenerational Injury, Insult, and Adversity

After freedom, there were many realities, scenarios, and imaginings. Mostly, there were just questions that would soon be answered. How would families like the Qualls-Harper-Payton-Colemans and the parents of the Sunflower Seven – those examined in this work – climb, and under what conditions, if any, would their subsequent generations thrive? Would the compromises made in a rural Slave Republic continue to distort the pursuit of a more egalitarian union? In the pockets of our nation where anti-slavery movements had formed, would new appeals for African Americans’ full citizenship mobilize the once enslaved and their descendants and provide moral, social, and ethical guardrails, not just political and economic ones? Six of the seven families comprising the Sunflower Seven had their ancestry washed out in the high flood waters of American slavery. It is slavery in the colonies and its most stubborn vestige – involuntary servitude – that I use as a lens for understanding what happened to those who did not climb out of twentieth-century rural poverty. The vestiges of slavery and the codification of those vestiges in Jim Crow Mississippi tightened poverty’s grip there. When freedom was won with the promulgation of the 13th Amendment and the Emancipation Proclamation signed and read, blacks had to navigate their freedom and create pathways that would lead to its exercise. What legacies of public injury fostered during the first half of the last century served as constraints on exits from poverty during the latter half of the century? Certainly, slavery had not prepared most of the enslaved for freedom. Born into slavery in 1856 in Virginia, Booker T. Washington’s observations, in his political treatise Up from Slavery, show the incongruence between aspirations and possibilities: 43

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I have never seen one (slave) who did not want to be free, or one who would return to slavery. Finally, the war closed, and the day of freedom came. . . . It was a momentous and eventful day to all upon our plantation. The wild rejoicing on the part of the coloured people lasted but for a brief period . . . Some of the slaves were seventy years or eighty years old; their best days were gone. They had no strength with which to earn a living in a strange place and among strange people, even if they had been sure where to find a new place of abode. . . . Gradually one by one, stealthily at first, the older slaves began to wander from the slave quarters back to the “big house” to have a whispered conversation with their former owners as to the future.1

The whispered conversations in the big house could have been about what was owed to the enslaved, about contesting the debt that was owed to them and attempting to wrestle some of the debt from the owners. The elderly had been robbed of their wages and their freedom to live lives of their own choosing. As their mortality beckoned, their native ability to prosper had been diminished by age and legal racism. After a long life of toil, they lacked a home “surrounded by comforts.” They were unable, through no fault of their own, to hold on to their dignity. For far too many, there was no “raft leading to a brighter shore.” For those who had hoped for “some beautiful surprise at the end of their journey,” none awaited, other than physical death itself.2 The Sunflower Seven were in 1990, at the age or nearing the age of the enslaved mentioned by Booker T. Washington. Six of them were likely the great-grandsons and granddaughters of the enslaved. Two examples give an idea of the range of relations between the formerly enslaved laborers and the owners of capital. In the early 1900s, in the neighboring county of Leflore, in Greenville, the Percys protected their laborers/field hands against the wrath of the Klan. Did they do so in part because labor held the key to preserving the cotton kingdom, and/or because they were righteously concerned about sharecroppers’ well-being?3 Even when white landowners stood up for blacks out of some sense of necessity, there was a price – that price was often obedience to the landowners’ wishes and accommodation to caste status. Elsewhere, the law of preserving capital prevailed over the laws of the nation. For example, in Sunflower County, as late as the mid-1940s, J. Todd Moye4 reported that Holbert (a black man) shot Eastland (a white relative of the late 1 2

3 4

Booker T. Washington, Up from Slavery (New York: Avon Books, 1965), 7. John O’ Donohue, For the Dying, To Bless the Space between Us: A Book of Invocations and Blessings (January 2008). Available at poemhunter.com, accessed January 16, 2022. Elizabeth Woodruff, American Congo (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003). Moye, Let the People Decide.

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Senator John Eastland) dead and was consequently brutally lynched by a mob.5 The sheriff had respect for the rule of law and tried to rescue Holbert from the mob and allow the law to take its course. However, the lynch mob prevailed. Standing up for individuals or providing for families was one response to caste relations; another response was to call into legal and moral question the constitutionality of second-class citizenship. Local labor needs, if not racism and caste allegiance themselves, often forbade the latter response from most whites, with the result that change in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries would come from contestations and agitations for freedom, black family interiority, and nudging federal intervention. Stasis would emanate from federal and state inaction and reactionary local legal racism, with states’ rights often used as an excuse for white resistance and allegiance to old southern racial norms. As we saw above, not every white fence-sitter lacked a conscience or decency. A maid from the Hills told her then middle-class daughter that her employer often talked about not wanting to die and go to hell for not speaking out against the mistreatment of blacks. Some whites felt and had close allegiances to blacks on which they acted affirmatively. An example comes from Adams County, where Allison Davis’s work has indicated that at least one-seventh of the largest black farmers received the land as gifts from white relatives, and many lesser holdings were acquired in the same way.6 Some whites and many blacks viewed blacks and even hateful whites as human beings and felt obliged to help them as the labor and social systems permitted. The following Civil War example is illustrative of the general harshness of life and the absence of relief from unrelenting toil. Kate Stone, a young white Louisiana woman who helped her mother run the plantation during the Civil War, wrote the following in her journal in May 1861: Even under the best owners it was a hard life to toil six days out of seven, week after week, month after month, year after year, as long as life lasted; to be absolutely under the control of someone until the last breathe was drawn; to win but the bare necessities of life, no hope for more, no matter how hard the work;

5 6

Ibid., 3–4. Allison Davis, Deep South: A Social Anthropological Study of Caste and Class (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1941). See an insightful analysis of Natchez in Jack E. Davis, Race against Time: Culture and Separation in Natchez since 1930 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2001).

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and to know that nothing could change your lot. Obedience, revolt, submissiveness, prayer . . . all were in vain. Waking sometimes in the night, as I grew older and thinking it all over, I would grow sick with the misery of it all. Then we never thought about it.7

Benevolence is a part of the story of poverty exits, sometimes an integral part of lessening food, housing, and income insecurity. Going to an employer for help suggested human trust and interdependence, not only labor-employer-owner relationships. For some, asking old masters or new plantation owners and overseers for help was a form of dependency. Nonetheless, in other cases, porous and closed spaces co-existed between owners and enslaved, overseers and sharecroppers and planters, domestic worker and employer, the poor and their not-so-poor kin, and neighbors. That these relationships were not in all ways between people of equal standing did not in every case mean that they were relationships based only on extraction, expediency, or co-dependency. However, during settlement time, when yearly accounts were settled and crops were divided, divergent interests became clear. The owners wanted a larger share of profits than they had earned. It was in these tense moments that frustration could spill over, and blacks who needed equal protection of the law were left to fend for themselves. But southern lawlessness ruled, and lawlessness lessened faith and trust in local labor and land practices. The American institution of slavery was not an experiment in black well-being or a laboratory of freedom and citizenship; slavery’s evolution and the violence associated with its existence and its extinguishment compelled peaceful men and women and their families to fiercely defy the status quo. The whispered conversations in the big house, the accommodations arrived at, had to be codified in legal briefs, oral arguments, and legislation; meetings to plan and mobilize to rid the nation of legal racism had to be held; the patient and diligent work of rearing families and pressing on despite insult and injury have counted, too, in undoing the vestiges of slavery and Jim Crow, its progeny. The newly freed – children, young adults, middle-aged, and elderly – sought first to achieve freedom rather than just survive it, as they had survived slavery. Making freedom required the unmaking of lawlessness, accommodation, and servitude. Preparing for freedom was a precarious enterprise that meant positioning oneself for eventual exits from 7

Reconstruction: The Second Civil War, PBS Mini Documentary; See also John Q. Anderson (ed.), Brokenburn: The Journal of Kate Stone (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1955).

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homelessness, violence, and poverty. Minimally, whispered conversations in the big house meant theoretical protection from white mob violence and lawlessness. Owners were inclined to protect their favorite black laborers, but what would become of those who wanted to start anew, to define what freedom meant – to find new and durable guardrails to safeguard their freedom? High black aspirations, the terror of the South, and the corresponding lack of equitable opportunity would propel the black movement out of the South. In addition to the millions of African Americans who fled the South, many poor whites also hit the roads leading out of Mississippi. According to James Gregory’s The Southern Diaspora, at the end of the nineteenth century, one million southern-born whites lived outside the region of their birth.8 The poor of both races understood their invisibility. They also understood that whiteness conferred privilege and even enabled poor whites the right to look down on blacks, but the right to strive and flourish was in no way assured. Among the Sunflower Seven, some of the Byrds were part of that Midwestern trek. They looked for fair opportunity and freedom from tyranny. In any case, they could return to the Sunflower land, and eventually, they would. What price would be paid by those who had stayed and their children? Jack Harper was among the white poor in Sunflower County who stayed. He was among the thousands in Sunflower County, Mississippi whose parents sharecropped for ten years and then became three-fourths mule-renters. Jack was the only one among the Sunflower Seven to move upward on the agricultural ladder and over to the political class to acquire greater prosperity. While others wrested middle-class standing through business ownership, teaching, and the ministry, Jack leapfrogged into achievement. Josie and Agnes moved out of homelessness but not poverty. Lonnie stalled. Williams, Matthews, and Clementine jumped off the agricultural ladder to land in the rural middle-class. In their children’s generation, some, those without a college degree or high school degree, crawled out of poverty; others, with professional degrees, found their way to the middle-class and beyond. Some of their contemporaries stumbled out of poverty, but still experienced income insecurity and few possibilities for wealth accrual. 8

James Gregory, The Southern Diaspora, How the Great Migration of White and Black Southerners Transformed America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005). Gregory brings together the stories of both the Great Migration and the Appalachian migrations of whites to demonstrate the legacy of the dual migrations. He argued that the Southern Diaspora changed America in ways still unfolding, especially its religious pluralism, popular culture, and its politics.

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Both wealth building and income mobility are important to examine the ups and downs of the Sunflower Seven. Jack Harper, the mule renter’s son, and Lonnie Byrd, the out-of-wedlock son to a sharecropper mother and a father who inherited 700 acres, both wanted wealth and prestige. Lonnie began life as a child whose father and paternal grandfather owned several hundred acres of Sunflower County land. Though born to unmarried parents, Lonnie had land – an economic and familial foundation on which to build. Agnes, Josie, and Williams lacked material resources and networks of power to support their early exits from poverty. Their parents were in tough economic straits as landless sharecroppers in the Mississippi Delta of Sunflower County. In what circumstances did familial pathways from rural poverty in Sunflower and Scott Counties lead to new transformative commitments to uplift dispossessed communities and families? Like the Sunflower Seven in the early twentieth century, most African American families in Mississippi entered the labor force as farm families, some on land they owned and others on land owned by their employers or relatives. Like the Sunflower Seven, some entered on the bottom occupational rungs as sharecroppers, domestics, laundresses, porters, and mule renters. Some, like Lonnie Byrd, entered as small to medium sized landowning families. What happened to families born on parallel and slightly different tracks – all on the agricultural ladder – mostly enslaved descendants – just starting out in the second and third decades of the last century? I illustrate through the lives of the families examined here that despite the traps and perils of white lawlessness, some African American families forged intergenerational work histories and resilience, but only modest economic and political upward mobility and political power. According to the late philosopher David Braybrooke,9 governing in resource-rich or chronically poor regions requires the capacity to meet certain basic source-of-life human needs (obligations) while arriving at rules and processes that address the citizens’ basic rights to equitable futures and recognize their common decency and integrity. This, I believe, is what kept Kate Stone up at night and why she grew sick with the misery of it all. She knew, upon reflection, that she had been complicit in the economic subjugation of black laborers. And she knew that her complicity had enriched her family.

9

David Braybrooke, Meeting Needs (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987).

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Braybrooke offers a standard by which candidates should be elected and the initiative-taking criteria by which they should be recruited to serve. Like Braybrooke (1987), I believe that political and legal rules and processes ought to make political and familial opportunities and choices more equitable. Desired national outcomes must be early and deliberately thrashed out, expressed, and embraced, and the pathways to achieve such desired outcomes must not be occluded, sabotaged, or fraught with violence. Pathways toward upward economic and political mobility promote an equitable future orientation and foster community and human-centered agency. The overarching claim in this work is that strengths-based family environments have fragmented over the last fifty years and that fragmentation has harmed the nation in which families reside, as much as it has harmed the families themselves. The proximate causes of the fragmentation are several: a loss of legitimacy for the family as an authoritative governing unit; too few assets, both material and human – of poor households; distracted public role-taking by the first-generation black and white middle-class (without sufficient strategic macro-economic thinking, or slack in their family lives and community); and wanton disregard for the working poor and lower-middle-class (in terms of depressed wages and inadequate access to quality education) by political elites and employers. Although formally educated, this subgroup of the middle-class was under-resourced and under-capitalized. It had a few first-generation assets to draw from (other than wages), and, within these first-generation middle-class homes, wages were taxed regressively. Frequently, siblings who had made it out of poverty and economic vulnerability had parents and other kin who had been perennially disadvantaged by the nation. They had to provide a safety net for their parents, while well-heeled members of the white middle- and upper-class benefitted from parents who were able to offer a safety raft, including a down payment on a home, a new car, and significant contributions to a trust or school loan repayments. The interplay between class status, racial identification, leadership, familial mobilization, citizenship orientation, and policy actions is an important one. First-generation middle-class parents also assessed public schools in their communities and found some wanting. Focused on their success as professionals, they reasoned that they had inadequate time to help repair public schools; many sent their second generation middle-class kids to private and parochial schools, places where the curriculum was presumed more challenging and where like-minded aspirational kids, teachers, and families resided – places where even if such schools had existed in their

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own time as children, their parents could not have afforded to send them, and segregation would have denied their entry. In this sense, first-generation middle-class black parents participated in the re-segregation of public schools by class, not just by race. I call this a disadvantaged legacy laid at the feet of the first-generation black middleclass of the post-civil rights era. This tax was heavy. Already victimized by wage disparities, their scarce resources were spread too thin in spaces such as home ownership, private and parochial education, and care for their working-class and aging parents. In fact, too few adequate public schools existed in close proximity to blacks – the rural and town poor and the black middle-class. What is clear is that each successive generation of the black and brown middle-class has strained to do more than meet basic familial and community needs. As with the working class, the black middle-class has been disproportionately constrained by institutional racism, and macro and micro aggressions.10 Throughout the generations, black families both working and middle classes have been constrained by housing and loan discrimination, inadequate finances, and financial wherewithal. They were imbued, still, with a desire to be useful, to reach and exceed parental expectations. They would still need access to great schools and job opportunities to enhance their skill levels, especially their cognitive and problemsolving skills.11 They would need early exposure to value-added teachers, apprenticeships, languages, libraries, and individuals positioned to mentor them. They would need an equitable start – a chance to generate new knowledge and accumulate wealth, not just income. Without it, a robust black middle-class would be ephemeral.12 Some in the new black middle-class have juggled the public square and the private realm of families without a cushion, without needed resources (institutional, fiscal, and social capital), while white, better capitalized 10

11

12

The black middle class, defined as 60 percent of the area in terms of medium income in any given locale, grew from 2008 to 2017, while the black upper class declined and the black working class increased. According to the Brookings Institution, “the black middle class is poised for job displacement because of disruption by automation in industries where they are populated and do not gain any employment in fields that will see job growth.” Andre Perry and Carl Romer, “The Black Middle Class Needs Political Attention, Too,” Brookings Institution, February 27, 2020. Abigail Thernstrom and Stephen Thernstrom, “Black Progress: How far we’ve come, and how far we have to go,” Brookings Institution, March 1, 1998. William Darity, Jr., Fenaba Addo, and Imari Z. Smith, “A Subaltern Middle-Class: The Case of the Missing ‘Black Bourgeoise in America’,” Contemporary Economic Policy, 39 (3) (July 2021): 494–502.

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public elites have not been similarly constrained. Recent ascendants to the black middle-class have had close historical proximity to the injuries and insults visited upon their forebears. How they interpret and internalize these injuries is informed by their political and constituency orientation and role-taking in politics and their desire and capacity to help transform political structures or show deference to the status quo. Their historical proximity to the economic and civic policies they advance is not theoretical. When the cumulative stress of institutional disadvantage converged with their private and public roles, those with the freedom to do so – freedom from constituency pressures or financial wants, political bullies, or cowardice – would challenge the status quo, preferring optimal policymaking choices to brittle incrementalism. For their part, the working-class generations that had sacrificed for their children’s middle-class reach had barely stitched together the material resources to provide safe and affordable shelter, reliable transportation, homes with indoor plumbing, a small library, nutritious meals, and sufficient clothing. Across much of rural black America, Jim Crow laws, inferior wages, and menial savings had meant too little physical and behavioral health care, dental visits, and too little early exposure to even a modicum of national affirmation and the best schools. Characterized by the Sunflower Seven, this rural working-class generation had survived legal racism and second-class citizenship with a work ethic that left them bone-tired, with marriages that held or did not, and with huge self-declared religious, educational, and civic faith. All of that mattered but was inadequate to defeat legal racism or meet financial exigencies related to retaining land ownership and achieving quality health care. Frequently, during the twentieth century, advances in health and medicine, education, fair wages, and access to land ownership did not make their way into southern agricultural communities with large black populations. Even high academic achievement would not shield blacks from high allostatic loads13 – from racism and mobilized adversity piled high. The allostatic load – “wear and tear on the body after repeated activation of the stress response”14 – speaks to the costs associated with striving in a racist 13

14

Allostatic load refers to the increasing weight of racism, chronic adversity, and stress on individuals and families. See Kiese Laymon, Heavy: An American Memoir (New York: Scribner, 2018). Liana J. Richardson, Andrea Goodwin, and Robert Hummer, “Social Status Differences in Allostatic Load among Young Adults in the United States,” SSM Population Health 15, September 2021, 100771.

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world and against internal racism. Weathering the storms of structural and internal racism builds stress, even among well-educated persons of the subordinated group.15 Net of education, black women were shown to have higher allostatic load levels than white women or black men; conversely, white women were shown to have lower allostatic load levels than white men. Black men with college degrees were shown to have the highest allostatic load levels.16 Chronically high allostatic load levels are indicia of injuries manufactured by racism and sustained in the process of navigating reactionary responses to black striving. Unabated, high allostatic load levels may indeed serve as a precursor to the onset of toxic stress, chronic disease formation, and behavioral health challenges. The chronicity of racism was manifested in a myriad of ways: from lowbirth-weight babies to greater economic mobility slipperiness, and a plethora of health maladies related to high-role (effort) coping in an intemperate society (a society aroused by racism).17 A strenuous work ethic, underpinned by multiple jobs, dual-income from marriages that held, and ingenuity, knitted together from kinship and church community, held the rural working-class family of the pre-1980s together. Frequently, their grandparents and/or a literate significant other came along to mentor their continuous schooling and nourish their growing emotional sense of self. Once upon a time, working-class folks like David Williams produced middle-class children, like his namesake, a physician. Once upon a time, black working-class parents, and working-class communities, teachers, and farmers, like the Byrds, poured their all into black children. All that investment may have resulted in a growth mindset – a future orientation – an orientation to set goals, observe their environments, expend effort, exercise self-belief, and achieve progressive goals over time. These working-class parents, who had worked unreasonably long hours their entire lives, knew that effort would pay off, inequitably.18 Their work 15

16

17

18

Arline T. Geronimus, Margaret Hicken, and John Bound, “‘Weathering’ and Allostatic Load Scores among Blacks and Whites in the United States,” American Journal of Public Health (May 2006): 96(5): 826–883. Liana Richardson, Andrea Goodwin, and Robert Hummer, op cited. Allostatic load levels were calculated by using 10 metabolic, cardiovascular, and inflammatory biomarkers, measured when respondents (11,000+) were 24–34 years old. Arline Geronimus, Margaret Hicken, Danya Keene, and John Bound, “‘Weathering’ and Age Patterns of Allostatic Load Scores among Blacks and Whites in the United States,” American Journal of Public Health, 96(5) (2006): 826–833; David Williams, “Miles to Go Before We Sleep: Racial Inequities in Health,” Journal of Social Behavior, 53(3) (2012): 279–295. Stanford University psychologist Carol Dweck originated the term “fixed and growth mindsets.” Since then, much has been done to empirically demonstrate what

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should have given the family and the children a cushion as they reached for and climbed upward. First-generation middle-class children knew the value of effort. Their parents’ work ethic had demonstrated how important it is to not give up – to value learning but also to expect an equitable pay off. A growth mindset is the message in Langston Hughes’s Mother to Son, do not give up because you find it hard. Then and now, these children would not just need more income than their parents to join and deepen their middle-class status, they would need to establish professional reputations, develop highly differentiated skills, garner promotions, stay healthy and get married, or at least have access to dual-income households. Occupation, health and self-care, and the constancy of income are considerations in closing the economic mobility and wealth gaps, as are inheritance and capital goods. Many working-class families who owned homes or were landless but very ambitious for their children viewed education as the new religion and high school and college completion as axiomatic. There were also sometimes homes where marriages were held together or benefactors stepped in to assist families when the death of one or more parents occurred during a child’s early years. There were sometimes communities where everyone from the church wanted everyone in the church to get ahead. In large ways and small, the integrated working-and middle-class community was integral to upward economic family mobility in rural Sunflower and beyond. For these children, class was mutable rather than inherited. But mobility could be both sticky and slippery. Already in the 1970s, the working-class poor had a non-working poor counterpart, smaller in size, not functionally literate, more likely struggling without marriage, spousal support, adequate shelter, and transportation, and with significant adult and child disabilities. School attendance for the working and non-working poor was about the same, but, frequently, engagement in school was not. Teachers’ expectations of children varied according to some invisible but real yearning to cultivate those who were the most vivacious or appeared to possess the greatest intelligence. Children of the non-working rural poor were often not seen by teachers as worthy of investment and mentorship. distinguishes a growth mindset from a fixed one, and the fruits of having a growth mindset. Growth mindsets may lessen the attention one pays to racism, or mute its sting, but they do not attenuate racism’s prevalence. See Dweck, “Carol Dweck Revisits the Growth Mindset,” Commentary, Education Week, September 22, 2015. See also Mei Elansary et al., “Maternal Stress and Neurodevelopment: Exploring the Protective Role of Maternal Growth Mindset,” Journal of Developmental Behavior Pediatrics, 43(2) (2022): e103–e109.

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Like their working-class counterparts, the non-working-poor lacked access to solid health care, both because of income insecurity and public health racism. The non-working poor were thus more isolated than the working black poor and less inured to church attendance than striving or working-class families. As a group, the non-working poor as well as the disabled poor, were doubly isolated from the working and small middleclass communities and the rest of the nation. Among the most disadvantaged rural poor, unemployment, disability, resignation, apathy, and disaffection increased for at least three or more generations after 1960. The non-working poor had fewer on-ramps to the middle-class. If they lacked ambition and/or a rudimentary education, they had fewer emotional guardrails and fewer community sponsors. Some children from non-working poor and working poor families were talented but invisible, while others were not. Intelligence was a gift that earned others’ approval and their lofty expectations. For some children and their families, therefore, neither homes, communities, the state capitol, nor schools were sites of shared equitable futures. How could they have been made so?

THE CLAIMS

Writing in 1937, in Caste and Class in a Southern Town, John Dollard was right when he mused that the individual life is rooted in community.19 The smaller, more tangible community as well as the larger national community, constitute living daily laboratories, from generation to generation. Dollard understood the linkage between the individual, communities, and the nation. He termed the nation the governing social order.20 Children, like Agnes and Josie, were adolescents in the community and nation when Dollard and Hortense Powdermaker examined Sunflower. They were primarily members of a family embedded in the agricultural community of an intemperate region and nation. They needed reciprocity, protection, and a meaningful fair, opportunity to be part of the integrated social contract. The rural poor were desirous of a well-ordered, fair opportunity to thrive, without unjust restraints. They and their forebears had already demonstrated their willingness to defend and protect an intemperate nation, work for a living, and even obey unjust laws. What else did they owe the nation, themselves, and others? 19

Dollard, Caste and Class in a Southern Town, 1.

20

Ibid., 2.

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When a child is born into a family and nation, the family and nation must reckon with what is owed to the child to systematically foster continuous human development. Reckoning with what Josie and Agnes were owed required reckoning with the capabilities their parents had been denied by the community, state, and nation. Despite gross denials of citizenship, black parents/families had obligations to children, to themselves, and to the intemperate nation. This is the double-sided social contract; it should structure reciprocal responsibilities and ensure state protections and rigorous and fair opportunities. Economic survival and the exercise of citizenship also required that the poor not believe their lying eyes, that they did not blame others for their plight in life. Serviceable interiority included a practice of discipline, deep learning, and thrift, a crafted and authentic presentation of self, a respectful analytical skepticism of authority, and a non-victim blaming ethos. This self-fashioning, though essential, was and remains insufficient to counter legal racism’s contemporary vestiges. I believe, therefore, that prospects for human flourishing require state acknowledgment of gross injury, full recompense, and intergenerational national and familial reckoning. I lay bare rationales for this overarching claim in four elements. THE FAMILY AS A POLITICAL (AUTHORITATIVE) INSTITUTION

Firstly, the family is an authoritative social institution. It has a valance. It makes judgments about what is desirable and undesirable, about who is valuable, seen, and invisible. It is a position-taking authoritative institution. When families engage in position-taking, they scope out pathways for their children, and sometimes these pathways are understood as familial expectations and societal cues. The family is both self- and other-interested; it cares deeply about its legitimacy and sovereignty. At its best, the family articulates and sets goals and exudes authority and legitimacy. It allocates values, though it does not in many ways determine, solely, which ones are internalized. Siblings and children without siblings experience the family in unique and differentiated ways, all while examining and sometimes retaining core values and positive valances. As will be shown below, mothers and fathers and children are not empty sheets on which to etch unvarnished experiences. They hear and are sometimes influenced by echoes from the past and cues from the present. Experiences (internal and external to the family) mediate what gets internalized and what does not across families and within

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families. Nonetheless, parents and guardians influence how and to whom values are allocated within the family. Parental and familial practices inculcate articulated and unarticulated values and practices, some of which are unconsciously internalized or shed by children and are refracted through experiences with anchor institutions such as markets, schools, temples, synagogues, and churches. Intergenerationally, in working-class families, the transmission of a strong work ethic was one unmistakable value, second only to religious belief and expression and, sometimes, education. In addition to their homes and workspaces, children frequent their bodies, imaginations, books, and their sense of met and unmet physical and emotional needs. As children grow, they learn over time to explore and see their own prospects. Familial valences, position- and proximate roletaking of parents and loved ones allow children to chart trajectories consonant with family affirmation and external cues. Early exposure to and internalization of familial and nation-state position and proximate role-taking sets the table for familial observations and adaptations. The intermediaries and anchor institutions between the family and the nation are agents, facilitators, guides, gatekeepers, and dream breakers. Over generations, family dynamics, anchor institutions, the nation, and the communities where large shares of blacks reside, create expectations, provide and compound upward economic mobility opportunities, or restrain and constrain them. In its broad outline, this familial call-and-response from markets, the community, state, and nation begins early and echoes through generations. It is connected to what children experience, what they see and learn, and how safe and free they feel in the nation, community, family, and in other observed spaces. These spaces include schools and churches, workplaces, neighborhoods, and peer groups. As a political institution, the family thus engages in position-taking; it seeks to develop the necessary tools and capabilities to navigate pathways of advantage and disadvantage and to protect and inculcate trust in its members. The family seeks to understand and convey to its members its sovereignty and legitimacy. It affirms and embraces responsibilities as a quasi-self-governing unit. It seeks to protect its offspring and interacts with the state in the pursuit of its economic and political advantage and survival. Familial teachings about masculinity, patriarchy, matriarchy and the proper governmental role, reverberate for some, across their whole lives. As intimated above, children and families discard some learning from the community, state, and nation and repurpose other learning and values as they navigate the new terrain and circumstances of their lives. Families must be protected from perennial insults and injury, especially when the

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government is complicit in sustaining familial and community injuries and is legally codifying them.

FAMILIAL CIRCUMSTANCES ARE NOT DESTINY

Perennial deprivation, both relative and absolute, affects children’s and parents’ decision-making considerations and alternatives. When children come of age in a world where the rule of law is designed to further their disadvantage, and where the reciprocity of resources, mutual high expectations, and opportunities to thrive are systematically denied by the state or the locale, families face staggering intergenerational odds. Often, they face what pediatrician Jack Shonkoff has termed “piles of adversity.”21 The second element of the argument is that families, children, nations, and municipalities are not their circumstances. The awareness of which values are being allocated and to whom is required to thrive. Familial and nation-state choices to stimulate egalitarian system orientations, irrespective of the past and present maladies, are needed. The decision to acknowledge and compensate families and children who were disadvantaged by gross and perennial national injuries and insults is one way to catalyze virtuous shared and equitable futures. As political and economic institutions, the federal, state, and local governments in a constitutional republic – in a democracy – are charged with ensuring that among its citizens and its family of citizens, there are no perennial winners and losers. Zero-sum or near-zero-sum outcomes are not acceptable – they are illegitimate and non-reciprocal. The administrative state’s role is crucial to families and to the nation’s legitimacy. The administrative state is an arm of the executive, legislative, and judicial branches at the local, state, and national levels. The interplay between the states and the national government is complicated, sometimes contentious, and loose, but not always. The courts play a role in the administrative state; we ask too infrequently who is harmed and helped by the decisions or indecisions and processes of the administrative state. Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal helped curate the modern administrative state. But, before that, the Civil War, post-Civil War, and Reconstruction apparatus helped to establish its foundations. In this sense, the administrative state has been called upon to usher in both procedural and

21

Jack Shonkoff, From Neurons to Neighborhoods (Washington, DC: The National Academy of Sciences, 2000).

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substantive change and processes. Whether it has performed this function is not debatable;22 how well it has done, on the other hand, is an open question. Through its values and rulemaking, the administrative state influences families’ prospects for sustaining respect for institutional legitimacy and reciprocity in the nation and the local community. The administrative state interacts with the poor and leans toward the status quo unless its interests are threatened, or otherwise directed or forced by court order, congressional or presidential mandate, natural disasters, or public health crises to chart a different path. Even then, the path is protracted. It may take decades to mobilize and redirect coherent egalitarian national values, programs, and policies, or it may take less time when political will is summoned. As we will see in a later section with the Social Security Act of 1935, the Farmers Home Administration, and early mothers’ pension provisions, the administrative state can diminish or bolster poor and black families’ capacities to generate, prioritize, seize, and allocate resources. As earlier intimated, the relationship between the family, employees, employers, and government is a complex one. It is made more tortuous by the norms and practices of narrow-minded elites with clear attachments to the inequitable status quo. Governments and families both have a primary shared responsibility, which is the protection of citizens/family members from systemic dehumanizing insults. The protection of the citizens’ welfare, or, minimally, as Franklin Roosevelt succinctly put it at the Democratic National Convention in 1932, to foster “the greatest good to the greatest number of our citizens,” is a basic governmental role.23 In an egalitarian society, or one striving toward that trajectory, both the private and public sectors must compel policies and practices to ensure that historically disadvantaged lives are progressively improved by public policy along with the practices and norms of privatization. Arguably, for the black and poor of all races, policies have instead diminished or left intact harmful practices. The freedom to pursue upward economic mobility is a universal good, not a mere utilitarian one. The freedom to pursue freedom was hampered intergenerationally. Where there was and is irreparable intergenerational injury, there must be intergenerational recompense.

22

23

K. Sabeel Rahman, “Reconstructing the Administrative State in an Era of Economic and Democratic Crisis,” Harvard Law Review, 131 (April 10, 2018): 1671. Jean Edward Smith, FDR (New York: Random House, 2007).

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THE LEGACIES OF ENSLAVEMENT, LEGAL SEGREGATION, AND MODERN DISCRIMINATION INTERPLAY

The third element of argument is that the concentration of blacks on the lower economic rungs is a legacy of the interactive effects of enslavement, legal segregation, and modern discrimination. By modern discrimination, I mean the era from 1965 until the present – three generations. The long life of Jim Crow was itself a campaign by an intemperate nation to minimize black life chances. Children like Clementine, who were born during the Great Depression, had to beat the intergenerational odds brought on during the near century-long (1871–1964) physically violent Jim Crow era. According to Clementine, her parents were able to stitch together fragments of chance. Still, parents and children and the communities they inhabited needed the actionable exercise of justice. Justice, meaning freedom from the regime and non-state violence, from familial economic and educational subjugation and political inequality, would be wrested by a series of incomplete victories won over many decades, even several centuries. For centuries, southern rural state legislators and southern congressmen held outsized political and economic power. They wrote the rules or helped shape them, they benefitted from them and fought against the rule change. Deals struck between planters and the Yazoo Railroad and Pine Land, for instance, were likely crooked, but markets often gave way to economic deals that benefitted the already advantaged.24 The pursuit of upward economic mobility in the early to mid-1900s meant challenging the white political, social, and economic orthodoxy of black exclusion. It meant a challenge on all fronts all the time. What did exclusion entail for black parents and their children from the early 1900s on? They had been excluded from unfettered human development – the opportunity to thrive as their talents and drive would permit. Forced to work to survive, child laborers were excluded from early exposure to quality educational opportunities. And the wages their labor should have netted were shared with the ruling class, which was compounded for the benefit of the owners generation after generation. Black children and their parents could attest that the work did not pay. Early on, for African Americans, work did not pay a fair or living wage. Wages sufficient to permit savings were uncommon for those on the lowest economic rungs, both then and now. 24

John C. Hudson, “The Yazoo-Mississippi Delta as Plantation Country,” available at Talltimbers.org, accessed September 8, 2021.

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Related to the third element is a fourth: the black poor are not poor and poorer than whites because they do not work. The notable public narrative of the happy, docile, and lazy black, or the welfare dependent-black matriarch, and the crime-ridden black man and boy and community, obscures the fact that blacks are poor because, despite their work ethic and productivity across all economic rungs, their work does not pay a self-sufficient and/or an equitable wage. As earlier intimated, self-sufficiency, a term introduced into the lexicon in the sixteenth century, means the ability to supply one’s own needs, to have autonomy and self-reliance. However, by this definition, the largest plantation owners in Sunflower were not self-sufficient. They frequently profited from federal and state patronage and benefitted disproportionately from the labor of the poorest workers, such as sharecroppers and child laborers, to whom they frequently denied sufficient wages. Wage theft cannot be dismissed as the profits from this practice resonate in this century as in the last. INSTITUTIONAL RACISM HAS PRODUCED INTERGENERATIONAL ADVERSITY AND TRAUMA

Blacks descended from the enslaved in the United States are also poor because their ancestors were intentionally harmed – physically, emotionally, economically, and politically – by the community and nation. They are poorer because they are viewed as less valuable than their white employed counterparts, up and down the economic ladder. Josie and Agnes’s rights and access to pursue a dignified legal appeal against stolen wages were blocked, whereas blacks with the same credentials as whites or higher ones were presumed to be the intellectual inferior of whites with similar or fewer credentials. White patriarchy expected more from black labor and laborers and exacted more but paid less. Multisystem disinvestment in black lives compounded the slipperiness of their individual and collective upward economic mobility. Catherine, the matriarch of the Scott family, below, would argue that black workers gave their all to make others rich. This injustice, clearly perceived by blacks, has habituated some to work harder than others. Black workers’ intolerance of those who were black and unemployed appeared to harden, making the community and labor movements in the rural South harder to mobilize and sustain. Multigenerational injuries and insults produced much suffering and deepened disinvestment in communities with large shares of enslaved descendants. These injuries and insults hollowed out fair opportunity and equitable pathways to economic striving and citizenship and thereby conditioned families’ adaptations to adversity. Lacking trusted political, familial,

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or societal resources on whom and which to draw, climbing up from poverty alone was and is thoroughly difficult in rural and inner-city America, where large shares of blacks reside. I argue that intergenerational injury and chronic adversity,25 their mitigation and prevention, are influenced by several factors, but the intergenerational injuries and insults must be redressed as systemically as they were advanced. These six factors are: (1) early and cumulative exposure to inequitable futures and resources; (2) unexamined patterns, processes, and policies of upward and downward economic mobility and wealth transmission that favor the wealthy and disadvantage the poor greatly; (3) few strategic political-institutional frameworks and appeals to systemically dismantle economic racism; (4) ill-suited elite values and their insinuation in governmental and non-governmental roles; (5) uneven capacities of families and communities to protect children and foster their cognitive assets and skills; and (6) movements and countermovements to deepen the erasure of poverty tracks and legal racism. These intertwined and multifactorial phenomena are all integral parts of intergenerational twentieth-century upward and downward economic and wealth mobility. They are among the primary guideposts for understanding the pace and quality of twenty-first-century economic mobility.

25

Jack Shonkoff, “Leveraging 21st Century Science to Reduce Toxic Stress and Build the Foundations of Resilience in Early Childhood,” AAP Symposium on Child Health, Resilience, and Toxic Stress (Washington, DC, June 17, 2014), has greatly influenced my thinking and the use of the phrase, “piles of intergenerational adversity.” Available at fatherhood.gov, accessed December 24, 2021. Also useful in my thinking about the interface between racism and chronic adversity are Jack Shonkoff, Natalie Slopen, and David R. Williams, “Early Childhood Adversity, Toxic Stress, and the Impacts of Racism on the Foundations of Health,” Annual Review of Public Health, 42(1) (2021): 115–134; Lisa Fiore, Grit, Resilience, and Motivation in Early Childhood (New York/London: Routledge/Taylor and Francis, 2021), chapters 3, 5, and 8.

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4

Patterns of Dispossession

Each age is a dream that is dying or one that is coming to birth. William Edgar O’Shaughnessy

Dispossession occurs when basic rights, needs, and opportunities to thrive are systematically, arbitrarily, and legally denied to some and granted to others. In the American national and local context, the practice of democracy has expectations that run counter to systemic denial of the right to advance and opportunities to thrive. The practice of democracy requires that basic needs are met. These needs must be intergenerationally met. These needs include freedom from regime violence, early exposure to quality education, civics, health care, capital, safe and affordable shelter, a living wage, fair opportunities to advance in the workplace and beyond, and the choice to marry, if one wishes, a consenting adult. In their broad outline, these basic needs and opportunities constitute functional familial and civic citizenship. To dispossess is to deny these human needs and the development of capabilities of citizens to learn and thrive. To dispossess is to deny basic protections to secure these needs and to block opportunities for advancement and engagement in a participatory and fair process. As the narratives of the Sunflower Seven attest, the rural poor wanted full citizenship, not a stripped-down version of it. They wanted to advance. They believed in Christianity, family, education, land and home ownership, marriage, work, and fair and political, economic, health, and social opportunities. For generations, the rural poor and their urban counterparts held a conception of the good and just; they held a dream that was dying for some and coming to life for others.

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LAND AND HOMEOWNERSHIP

As earlier stated, in addition to seeing education as a pathway out of poverty, the females among the Sunflower Seven wanted “a home of my own and a husband of my own to sit on the porch with.” Each wanted to own their porch. Each longed for the sovereignty of home. Wage theft was a barrier to home ownership. It meant income insecurity and incapacity rather than an inability to save and pay down debts. It also meant vulnerability to homelessness and susceptibility to intergenerational poverty, and a lack of even a modest inheritance from the sale of a house or passing on a home to children. Josie’s and Agnes’s value as child laborers held them back from finishing school and earning wages commensurate with homeownership. Agnes married and maintained her marriage until the passing of her husband. Though both husband and wife worked, wages were insufficient to buy land and build a home. Second-generation sharecroppers in this study became homeowners (a very modest home) thirty to forty years into their work lives, whereas their parents had cropped their whole work lives and were unable to own a home or have a legally sanctioned marriage. Work, marriage, and childrearing sentiments are tapped into a reservoir of rural familial emotions and responsibilities. Strong emotional states are supported by the availability of psychosocial and material resources to adequately meet basic needs. Intact family and homeownership were perceived as basic needs by the rural poor. These families viewed lasting marriages, homeownership, and opportunities to serve as role models for their children as aspects of their private happiness and success. They extolled aspirations for a lasting marriage, with Lonnie Byrd being the most vigorous: “I wanted to marry one-time for life.”1 Jack Harper expressed sincere gratitude to his wife Rose, stating that, “she was a great help-mate in every way.”2 As is evident in Powdermaker’s work and less so in Dollard’s, there were many black farmers in Sunflower at the time of their fieldwork. In fact, in 1920, there were as many as 15 million acres of land owned by black farmers in the United States.3 Lonnie Byrd’s father, Uncle Babe, was among them. In Powdermaker’s work, black farmers were among the informants, including a big kinship family from Alabama. There she found 1 2 3

Jack Harper, Interview in Indianola, Mississippi, June 19, 1990, July 20, 1990. Harper, interview with the author, June 19, 1990. Pete Daniels, Dispossession: Discrimination against African American Farmers in the Era of Civil Rights (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2013).

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landowners filled with thrift and determination, weariness, and the good fortune of family inheritance or the capacity to purchase modest tracts of land over time. Some years, the farmers barely broke even. She wrote the following about informant J: “When ‘J’ died in 1915, he left an estate of 1600 acres, which he divided before his death into lots of 160 acres for each of his eight children. His widow received 320 acres. The property is still in the hands of the family.”4 Here, clearly, was a black family patriarch focused on creating and leaving an equitable future opportunity for his wife and children. Medium-sized farmers such as “J” and Lonnie Byrd wanted to profit from their labor and understand subsidies, loan programs, and insider politics the same as large planters and owners. How small farm owners and tenants fared in relation to the crops was often a function of many factors: their profit margin, which was influenced by labor cost, weather, insect infestation, the health and productivity of the labor force, the quality of seeds, fiscal reserves, and access to credit and government subsidies. Already, large white farm owners were getting subsidies while Lonnie was not, even though he allied with Jack (a southern Democrat) to oppose Fannie Lou Hamer, a grass-roots leader, a former sharecropper, and then timekeeper on the Marlowe Plantation, who defied Marlowe when she attempted to register to vote and organize the poor. True, Lonnie was not poor, but legal racial discrimination had been a barrier to his ascent from relative economic security to wealth. Legal discrimination remained a barrier even when Jim Crow was defeated. In appearance, Lonnie was clearly of mixed-race heritage, but like those of darker and darkest hue, Lonnie was trapped. He was trapped not by internal caste resentment, though he mentioned that it existed, nor by too little ambition, but by starved capital networks and legal racism. He was not included in the allocation of resources needed to modernize, strengthen profit margins and diversify crops by a racial caste system of shared political and economic greed, political hubris, and dominant planter interests that held him in place. His economic membership in wealth-making was muted. Still, an essential part of how these families, both men, and women, understood success included marriage and the sovereignty of a home. In addition to the innate human capital they possessed, their high school and college-educated wives were tremendous assets. The ability of parents to read and write and the practice of religious faith gave families added strength

4

Powdermaker, After Freedom, 100.

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and value and heightened children’s imaginations and expectations at home and in the larger community. These modest homes produced some hopefulness – an imagined pathway toward intergenerational flourishing. THE POLITICS OF INCLUSIVE PUBLIC POLICY AND POLITICAL NETWORKS

What of tenant farmers like Jack Harper? Jack Harper would climb the economic and political mobility ladder to reach the top (though not the post of the governor for which he had wished). In his climb in politics, he leaned on new networks and would align himself with Lonnie Byrd to ensure that his local biracial organization controlled the federal Great Society funds entering the county. Earlier he had ingratiated himself with Governor and then Senator Theodore Bilbo, to ensure the right political and business connections. Bilbo was a populist New Dealer, with a message of racial segregation and antipathy to the wealthy white Delta planters and their dependence on black laborers. Bilbo, one of Jack’s benefactors, destabilized any prospects for interracial cooperation. And Lonnie aligned with Jack to form a local biracial organization to cast shade on Mrs. Hamer’s local grassroot efforts. Black sharecroppers like Josie and Agnes did not benefit from the agricultural provisions of the New Deal and neither did Lonnie. This was, according to Jane Adams, “class legislation, based on the proposition that farmers and landowners were synonymous. Many landowners threw tenants and sharecroppers off the land, pocketing payments from the Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA). In response, the Southern Tenants Farmers Union erected a campaign on behalf of cotton workers.”5 Those who were disadvantaged by the public policy were disadvantaged repeatedly and often, while those who were members of the white caste, who could do so, moved ahead, asking for favors and getting reciprocity. Jack Harper’s lived experience as a young adult will illustrate how much reciprocity was obtained by virtue of membership in the white caste, by his sheer audacity, and the corresponding potential to strengthen the hand of the already privileged. Minimally, for the poor, first-level ambition meant finding the means and the discipline to get to and beyond high school, to afford and complete

5

Jane Adams and D. Gorton, “This Land Ain’t My Land: The Eviction of Sharecroppers by the Farm Security Administration,” Agricultural History, 83 (2009): 323–351, 323.

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college with new networks of support. For Jack and Clementine, school attendance trumped child labor. Jack’s early found political ambition clearly focused on affordable college completion. He understood the value and price points of community colleges and applied to Sunflower Junior College, now Mississippi Delta Community College, located in Moorhead, close to where Jack was born. Jack graduated college with support provided by the Kiwanis Club. He entered Ole Miss and completed his bachelor’s degree and then attended law school at the University of Mississippi. By state law, the segregated University doors were locked when blacks attempted to enroll. Jack’s life proved the value of social networks and connections and what can happen when one is in fact free to pursue upward mobility and wealth. The American Dream was actionable for Jack – this despite his humble beginnings. Jack Harper, a southern Democrat, exited poverty and became one of the powerful; he was once perceived as a threat to the black freedom struggle in Sunflower. Sufficient wages in adult life and access to political networks compounded Jack’s economic and political rise and separated him further from the other members of the Sunflower Seven. As children, Catherine, Jack, Williams, Agnes, Josie, Matthews, and Clementine all labored. Catherine and Lonnie labored on their families’ farms. Jack’s school year was longer, and his work occurred before and after school. Catherine, Williams, Josie, Matthews, and Clementine had a four-month school term during the early years and lacked immediate access to schooling in the community beyond the 8th grade. Lonnie was able to go to boarding school to advance his education and obtain high school literacies. The Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) became the law of the land in 1938, when Clementine, the youngest person in this cohort, was five years old. The FLSA was created to protect young people (those under sixteen years old) from unsafe working conditions and mitigate work that compromised their health, well-being, and educational pursuits. Agnes and Josie did not get beyond the first six years of formal schooling. Instead, long before the FLSA in 1938 and long after its promulgation, they labored with their parents and other kin in the agricultural sector, in shanties owned by the planters.6 Labor and faith were tethered. As Powdermaker

6

Child Labor Bulletin 102, Child Labor Requirements in Agricultural Occupations Under the Fair Labor Standards Act (revised November 2016), US Department of Labor, Wage and Hours Division.

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found, many of the families she examined and all the families in my work – working black poor, landed farmers, and Jack – professed Christian faith. All were actively engaged in the church and all desired marriage. Like the sharecropping poor, the landed Byrd patriarch, the quasi-croppers, and the mule renter’s son, highly valued marriage, Christian faith, savings, and a comfortable home. For the very poor and the less poor, alike, religious faith, marriage, and thrift were considered norms needed to access upward mobility and command community respect. Often, in Sunflower and in Scott, the black poor and the non-poor shared the Sunday morning religious spaces; some sang in the same choirs and served on the usher board, not because they were members of the same caste, but because they were primarily Americans and Christians, imbued with a sense of America’s promise, not just their own. Faith and faith discourses allied them as a community, as a people with the nation. Central to African American interiority was a modicum of faith (the evidence of things not seen) in the promise of the United States as an egalitarian nation. This faith meant that, in addition to work and suffering, caste would loosen and perhaps die. In any case, faith meant that some whites in high and low places and blacks would reject caste premises and legal racism. Individual and institutional faith performance was once integral to African American intergenerational striving. They kept believing that their dispossessed status would be appreciably changed through their efforts, the efforts of their leaders and appeals to the rule of law. They did not believe in the persistence of economic inequality7 or the persistence of racism.8 Like so many other Americans, perhaps, they misperceived the scope and depth of the vestiges of enslavement and Jim Crow.9 The willingness of blacks to be used to advance white caste interests was undergirded by necessity and by expectations of gradual but not inevitable useful white Christian reciprocity.

7

8

9

R. Chetty, D. Grusky, M. Hell, N. Hendren, R. Manduca, and J. Narang, “The Fading American Dream: Trends in Absolute Income Mobility since 1940,” Science, 356(6336) (2017): 398–406; M. Hout, “Americans’ Occupational Status Reflects the Status of Both of Their Parents,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 115(38) (2018): 9527–9532. E. Bonilla-Silva, Racism without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in America, 5th ed. (Rowman and Littlefield, June 9, 2017). S. Davida and J. Walker, “Americans Misperceive Disparities in Economic Mobility,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 48(5) (May 2022): 793–806.

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THE DISPOSSESSION OF THE POOREST POOR

The perennial croppers – Agnes, Josie, and her sister, Rosie – had triple dilemmas. First, they were vulnerable to homelessness. Furthermore, if the relationship with the landowner failed, they were evicted or moved voluntarily looking for a better sharecropping arrangement. Finally, widowed for most of their lives, they had no access to support from charities or the government. Their dilemmas were representative of the largest number of blacks in Sunflower. In the fall of 1951, six years after her husband had been murdered at a commissary and eight years after her first daughter, Mary, age twelve, died of strep throat, Josie and her children stayed in motion. As shown in Chapter 7, though embattled, perennial sharecroppers showed moxie and familial unity. Josie and her sister Rosie went to the bank in December 1965 to secure a mortgage and stayed there all day, seated in chairs located just outside the bankers’ offices. According to Josie, no one acknowledged them until a former employer – a landowner – happened to walk in and told a banker to give them whatever they wanted. Had they, their children, or their parents been paid an equitable wage, their hard-intergenerational work might have earned them enough savings to secure a loan independent of their previous landlord. A strong work ethic, a living wage, religious faith and community, the stability of home and marriage, formal education, and good health mattered. Josie and Agnes – the women who sharecropped for several decades – entered marriage sooner, had babies early, moved more often, and became widowed sooner than others, be it, men or women, in this study group. Sharecroppers’ greater poverty and vulnerability to homelessness were compounded by the greater likelihood of divorce, separation, desertion, or early death of a spouse or significant other. The health of the poorest members in this study was seriously undermined by the chronic poverty that began in childhood and followed them throughout their lives – a poverty that included poor access to income, education, health care, and the safety of home. Josie, Agnes, Clementine Richardson, David Williams, and David Matthews had been bound by birth to subjugation. At different points, the coercive power of a racialized state did not merely inform pathways but ordered them so narrowly that even the ablest of them would be stifled. POLITICAL TYRANNY

The nation contrived blacks’ economic and political dispossession and/or acquiesced to it. This dispossession denied blacks an opportunity to

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acquire formal knowledge, to have prominent levels of reading comprehension and writing ability – in short, to acquire freedom in full measure. Josie, Agnes, their contemporaries, and their progeny, were also starved of an opportunity to build social networks across the racial divide and were further deprived of the fruit of their forebears’ considerable labor. Josie reiterated the point: “If they would just give me what my folks earned, I would not need nothing no more.”10 The settlement of the Delta and Mississippi as a slave country was deftly chronicled by Adam Rothman.11 He demonstrated the enslavement’s link in the Deep South to the spread of capitalism and the growth of the textile industry in both Great Britain and the northeastern United States. Both Edward Baptist (2014) and Adam Rothman have separately argued that the Deep South, especially Mississippi, was not foreordained as a slave state.12 Though the Louisiana Purchase doubled the size of the nation and was sold at four cents an acre, that purchase did not preordain enslavement’s edifice in the Deep South. That said, a tiny nation became a much larger one, with traders and merchants omnipresent, and trading items that included the enslaved. By first reported ancestry, Mississippi is populated by natives of German, Irish, English, American, and African extraction. The demand for black labor had been strengthened by the advent of the cotton gin in the late eighteenth century, as cotton was fast becoming America’s leading export. Tobacco’s preeminence as the major cash crop in the Upper South was eroding as the domestic slave trade to the Deep South ticked upward. Enslaved people from Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina were transported to the Deep South to help cultivate the new frontier. The cotton gin, a new machine, caught the cotton fibers in a mesh, separating the fibers from the seeds. This device created efficiencies and greater profit margins for large farmers and increased the demand for more acreage and thus more labor. The cotton-producing states and regions in Mississippi benefitted, as did the burgeoning textile mill industry of New England. Slavery remained the cheapest form of labor and cotton the greatest source of profit, topping tobacco as the cash crop. The total value of cotton in the United States went from 150,000 to 8 million in the

10 11

12

Josie Landfair, Interview with the author, June 18, 1990. Adam Rothman, Slave Country: American Expansion and Origins of the Deep South (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005). Edward Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 2014).

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decades from 1830 to 1840. The cotton acreage in the United States eventually dropped by 78 percent – from 43.3 million in 1929 to 9.4 million in 2012.13 Notwithstanding their Christian beliefs and church-going habits, it is for this economic reason that many white elites in the cotton- and tobaccoproducing Deep South wanted slavery’s expansion rather than its abolition. In the Delta and other lands, capitalism, religious belief, mob violence, political disfranchisement, and black impoverishment conspired to kill or stunt the dreams and lives of thousands, and perhaps millions.

THE RURAL BLACK POOR AND THEIR MODERN-DAY ELECTED REPRESENTATIVES

The purveyors of caste norms and caste-based public policies were and are still elected and appointed elites. They are mostly men, old-guard and newold-guard politicians and government actors, as well as lay citizens – clinging to white male supremacy and private interests rather than their roles as public servants striving to bring into realization an accountable public administration framework. Old-guard politicians of yore, such as Eastland, James Vardaman, and Theodore Bilbo, were avowed and non-repentant race-baiters, whereas their present local counterparts, former governor Phil Bryant (2012–2020) and current Republican governor Tate Reeves, appear to lead as stalwarts of putrid and corrupt Republican Party politics, reveling in grave indifference to the chronic diseases that ravage black families, diseases brought on in part because of malnutrition, poverty, poor health care, and intergenerational trauma and racism. Federal funds given to the states to uplift the life chances of the state’s poorest citizens, like Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF), were allegedly used to enrich Mississippi Governor Phil Bryant and his family and friends, including ex-National Football League (NFL) player, Brett Favre.14

13

14

Census of Agriculture, USDA (2012); Kelly Robson, Jennifer O’Neil Schiess, and Justin Trinidad, “Education in the American South: Historical Context, Current State, and Future Possibilities” (Bellwether Education Partners, May 2019). Congressman Bennie Thompson has called for a federal investigation into Phil Bryant’s role, if any, in the welfare scandal. Garland, Department of Justice Bryant Letter (July 15, 2022). See also Anna Wolfe, Adam Ganucheau, and Geoff Pender, “Podcast: Investigative Reporter Anna Wolfe Discusses Explosive Welfare Case Update,” Mississippi Today, July 18, 2022.

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Economic expediency and political ambition (individual and partisan) are at play in the new-old-guard Republican politics, where switching from avid downhome racism to modern indifference to the plight of the poor is more nuanced than before. A consolidated partisan Republican vote for old-guard politics is wrapped in less vitriolic symbolism. Whereas the nineteenth century was characterized by senseless and seething white racial hatred, economic exploitation, and lawlessness, three-quarters of the twentieth century was characterized by white Mississippi obstructionism and elite resistance to national judicial rulings. For black Mississippians, the last half of the twentieth century was a time of expectancy, contestation, and inconclusive triumph in electoral politics. A solid Republican majority has replaced a significant Democratic one in state legislatures in Mississippi and much of the Deep and Upper South. Across the nation, as of January 2021, there were only 13 black Republicans among the 7,500 men and women serving as state senators and representatives. Across the nation, 10 percent of the legislators are black; in Mississippi, one-quarter of the legislators are black. Their voices, alone, are insufficient to pass legislation and influence intransigent governors and many of their fellow legislators.15 What values and experiences would be helpful to change the leadership orientation of white Mississippians – Republicans and Democrats? What images, belief systems, and constituency pressures inform how they govern? The late Mississippi governor, William Forrest Winter, remembered that, as a kid, his black contemporaries had been unable to ride on his school bus. Perhaps like most white children, he saw segregation and discrimination and accepted them both as just the way they were. His leadership in the US military landed him in a black battalion and his views on racial segregation shifted. One of William Winter’s familial heroes was his father, Aylmer Winter, and another was his grandfather, William B. Winter, a celebrated Confederate soldier. Winter’s doting grandfather gave his grandson the middle name, Forrest, after his Confederate commander, Nathan Bedford Forrest.16 Reconciling family history and political culture with a sense of justice, political ambition, and the authority to right wrongs is human and civic development work like no other. Few elected officials in Mississippi

15 16

M. D. Coleman, Legislators, Law and Public Policy (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1993). Charles Bolden, William F. Winter, and the New Mississippi: A Biography (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2013), 18.

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and elsewhere have undertaken that level of noble human, not just political reckoning. Some Democrats, like the late William F. Winter, occupied the governorship in Mississippi, vowing to disrupt the embrace of perennial historical disadvantage to enslaved descendants and low expectations in education. Other state-wide elected officials have hewed to settled caste norms. Disruption of historical disadvantage meant more than dispensing with white segregationist rhetoric; it meant affirmative legislation to build citizenship guardrails, starting with children and kindergartens. William Winter’s public kindergarten movement and the bill to fund it met strong opposition in the legislature. But public sentiment was shifting toward a higher human value. Throughout the state, citizens of all classes were responsive to and signed on to the comprehensive Education Reform Act. Winter pushed Mississippi into the twenty-first century, and in doing so, he navigated what was becoming a partisan and racial divide in Democratic electoral politics. His legislative efforts, his authority, and the mobilization skills of his administration resonated with Powdermaker’s view of education as a potential lever of upward economic mobility. And men and women, ranging from young mothers, fathers, and grandmothers to teachers of both races, signed on. William F. Winter’s evolution from complacently accepting Mississippi’s status quo to establishing an education policy and thus sealing his legacy was a circuitous three-to-four-decade-long journey. As a member of the legislature in 1948, he had to navigate white male supremacy, at times distancing himself from it through abstention in legislative votes and at other times toeing the line. At crucial times in the past and present, few whites in institutional roles had a taste for position-taking that was consonant with building a just political and economic edifice in Mississippi. Some candidates of both major parties appealed to their voters’ worst racial instincts. They were hewing toward the past to achieve their political ambition and asking nothing of voters in terms of their growth mindsets and civic enlightenment. Winter finally tired of the grinding toll such incoherent accommodation required and aligned his politics more with his strong-minded character. Among aspiring politicians and incumbents, he was in the political minority, but he was not alone. Among other provisions, Governor William F. Winter secured public kindergartens in Mississippi in 1982 and reinstated compulsory school attendance through age fourteen. Leadership efforts to embed primary and secondary quality education reforms were made possible in Mississippi by two Democratic governors, Winter and Raymond Mabus. Both William and

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Ray attended and graduated from public schools in Mississippi as children. William F. Winter’s commitment to upgrade literacy in Mississippi was fortified by his staff; he excelled with the support of committed and able administrators, especially Mabus, a staffer and state auditor, and his Secretary of State, Richard Molpus, a native of Neshoba County. He was also ably assisted by House Education Committee chair, Robert Clark, the first black elected to the Mississippi legislature in the twentieth century. Transformational policy initiatives and transformational leadership usually originate from a deep well of decency, intelligence, empathy, humility, and urgency. Dick Molpus possessed a particularly deep reserve of all these virtues. While still Secretary of State, he issued a public apology to the family of the slain civil rights workers Andrew Goodwin, James Chaney, and Michael Schwerner during a religious service in Philadelphia in June 1989. He recounted the apology as one of the proudest moments of his public life.17 Molpus rose above the “fear and pressure to conform” to white caste expectations.18 Mabus and Molpus were among the so-called “Boys of Spring” who foregrounded their interests and ambitions for a New Mississippi; they had made strides consistent with those interests. These were strides that resonated with black legislators and a plurality of white legislators, the Mississippi Teachers Association, and parents, women among them, who believed in quality public schools. Education, employment, access to quality health care, and transparent and accountable government and government services are basic resources needed for counties, states, nations, and families to thrive. Winter’s four-decade journey toward the governorship challenged racial caste mores in ways both gradual and oblique. As important as virtuous leadership is, it needs citizens who can reason through their circumstances. Mississippi leaders have not used tactics and interests well enough to nudge white citizens into a more virtuous stance. Such tactics must loosen whites’ attachments to the past and foster a view of blacks and the poor as citizens rather than supplicants. Inclusive economic growth and high-wage employment opportunities, quality education, political recruitment, and campaign politics reside at the heart of those tactics.

17

18

Liz Willen, “Q&A with Dick Molpus: Anatomy of Historic Apology for Hometown’s Racist and Violent Past on Eve of Freedom Summer Anniversary,” The Hechinger Report, July 10, 2014, available at hechingerreport.org. Ibid.

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Raymond Mabus would become Mississippi’s sixtieth governor, the first to serve at a time when a second gubernatorial term was constitutionally permissible. He was thirty-nine years old and was elected by a voting coalition of blacks, well-educated and poor whites. As would happen more often in the future, in his bid for a second term, white Democrats in significant numbers pulled away from the Democratic Party. As legal counsel to Governor Winter, state auditor, and as governor, Mabus had several consequential accomplishments, including (1) increasing teachers’ pay, which temporarily brought teachers to the southeastern average; (2) the reorganization of the executive branch; (3) ridding the state of political corruption, with a focus on supervisors; and (4) helping to grow the economy. Mabus’s influence had been felt prior to his gubernatorial election; he had drafted the Winter Education Reform Act, and as the State Auditor, investigated and cleaned up corrupt financial practices in the county government, sending fifty-five supervisors to prison. But even before that, however, he had served in the Navy, and, like Winter, he would recall his military experience as being one of the most formative of his political life! In an interview with the unflappable Brian Lamb of C-SPAN, Mabus expounded at length: I was 21 years old, I reported aboard the Cruisier as a Lieutenant Junior Grade and suddenly I was responsible for about 60 guys. The surface fleet then being all men and I was their mother, their father, their preacher, their best friend . . . and their worst enemy in terms of discipline. And that’s a huge change for a 21-year-old who had come right out of school and shown up, but those years were some of the most consequential years of my life. It taught me responsibility, and the importance of making a decision. It taught me the importance of doing something bigger than myself and how you had to be part of a bigger structure.

There was more. “I am not sure what I would have done with my life if I had not been in the Navy and had not learned some of the lessons I had at a really, really early age.”19 Doing something bigger than oneself began for Mabus with seizing opportunities and events or a series of events to engage himself and others in transformative change. He nurtured conscientious political change in one election, one governing session, and one generation or more at a time. His example was consequential. In Mabus’s bid for a second term, his Republican opponent, Kirk Fordice, appealed to sentiments then congenial to a reactionary and closed

19

Ray Mabus, C-SPAN Interview, January 26, 2012.

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Deep South white majority. By appealing to white Mississippians’ pride in insularity (in the status quo), candidate Fordice pointed to Mabus’s Harvard education and asserted that he was not “one of us.” Deftly deployed, Fordice’s psychological tactic helped to dislodge just enough of the white native vote to take the election in 1991 by a margin of 2 percentage points. Politicians leaning on whites’ intergenerational class insecurities would always have a chance of defeating a progressive politician, especially if the progressive’s ground game was not heavily fortified with a sufficient percent of loyal party voters. Politicians should be held accountable for what they accomplish in the governing process, not their ineptness as campaigners. And in this sphere, William Winter, Raymond Mabus, and Richard Molpus were singularly accomplished. So, too, were their respective administrative colleagues. Together with the legislative leadership shown by House Education Chairman, Robert G. Clark, Jr., the first black man to be elected to the Mississippi legislature since Reconstruction, their accomplishments in education disrupted the legacy of backward-looking leadership and reversed citizens’ indifference to quality public education.20 Their leadership modeled possibilities for a more egalitarian and much less corrupt administrative state. Could this ethos be sustained in a place where partisan politics was fast becoming racial politics in the State House and beyond? In addition to their educational backgrounds, their military leadership had engaged them in consequential interactions with black soldiers – there, black soldiers were not all seen as “others,” but as familiar and identifiable servant citizens engaged in a collective and singular mission. By constitutional design, of the three branches of government in Mississippi, the legislature is singularly powerful. Elected for four-year terms, members of both chambers may serve for life, without term limits. While legislators are not termed limited, the offices of governor and lieutenant governor are limited to two consecutive four-year terms. What’s more, the five-member Joint Reapportionment Committee controlled reapportionment, with no veto authority from the governor. If the legislature fails to complete the process on time, the Chief Justice of the Mississippi Supreme Court leads a backup commission to finalize the plan.

20

Will D. Campbell, Robert G. Clark’s Journey to the House (Oxford: University of Mississippi Press, 2003); Library of Congress, Robert G. Clark Oral History Interview, conducted by John Dittmer, in Pickens, Mississippi (March 13, 2013). Accessed November 7, 2021.

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The dominance of the new-old-guard legislature is especially ominous because the pre-clearance provision of the Voting Rights Act was ruled unconstitutional by the United States Supreme Court in 2013, erasing the need for the Justice Department to review jurisdictions with a history of discrimination. The governor has the power to veto legislation, but the legislature can override the governor’s veto with a two-thirds vote of both houses.21 Armed with power as commander-in-chief of the Mississippi militia, and power to strategize and submit to the legislature a balanced budget proposal, the governor can and does exercise power, especially when he is able to garner a mandate from the electorate to govern; that is, if one can appeal across party lines to govern and communicate to citizens why and how initiatives will pull Mississippi off the economic bottom into a more promising new century. In terms of macro-economic development, not one governor in contemporary times has been content for Mississippi to stay on the bottom rung. That said, the efficacy of policy decisions to erase economic disadvantages has been uneven. What legislators and governors have pursued as a policy is as important as what they have not pursued.22 In 1959, Charles Lindblom argued cogently that US policymakers engage in incremental decisionmaking that hews favorably toward past norms.23 In 1963, Lindblom and Charles Braybrooke expanded that analysis. The systems maintenance perspective of governance and public administration proffered by Braybrooke and Lindblom was not accepted uncritically. Though a realistic view of US policymaking, it obscured the times when policymakers engaged in nondecisions (when they failed to decide or pass useful legislation or blocked its passage) as well as when they veered from incrementalism. When incrementalism and non-decision making (kicking the can down the road) are coupled, as they routinely are in the United States, it is critical to examine actions not taken and who is served by the muddles or the status quo.24 How any government makes the most effective use of public choices and funds is a foundational question. For example, an independent analysis of governing in Mississippi has shown that state leaders are in the 21 22

23

24

Article IV, Section 72, Mississippi Constitution. David Braybrooke and Charles Lindblom, A Strategy of Decision (Free Press of Glencoe, 1963). Charles Lindblom, “The Science of Muddling Through,” Public Administration Review, 79–88; Lindblom, “Policy Analysis,” American Economic Review, 48 (June 1958): 198–312. Yehezkel Dror, “Muddling Through: Science or Inertia,” Public Administration Review (September 1, 1964).

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middle, earning a grade of 79, a C+ from the US Public Interest Research Group for transparency in spending (2015). Any tendency to hew perennially toward the past is an approach in need of rigorous examination. Twenty-first-century white Mississippi is perceived as having some of the most politically reactionary white masses and elites.25 For example, Mississippi’s 64th Governor, Dewey Phil Bryant, mentioned earlier in this chapter, a child of the Delta, was born in Sunflower County to working-class parents. As governor, he rejected Medicaid expansion, a measure much needed to improve the health of families in poverty – some for multiple generations. Furthermore, he designated April as a Confederate Heritage month, without contextualizing the human bondage of enslavement or the need to unify Mississippi, or the nation and assure its stability. He signed into law a bill allowing businesses to discriminate against same-sex couples and another giving folks the right to carry guns in their belts and holsters without a permit. Bryant campaigned for Donald Trump in 2016, parroting the President’s claim of a rigged election. He did not make these decisions without thinking about their consequences. In his mind, these decisions were rational. Reactionary Republican reasoning invokes a kind of brain paralysis, detrimental to human progress and safety. Governing ruptures that could have precipitated economic and educational transformations have been lacking during legislative and gubernatorial Republican rule in Mississippi. In significant ways, Mississippi Republicans who have served as governors in the last four decades have hewed toward the past, unlike Mississippi Democrats. Bryant’s predecessor, Republican Haley Reeves Barbour, defeated Democratic incumbent Ronnie Musgrove in 2003. Musgrove and Barbour made policy choices consistent with both rupture and continuity. Repeated policy cycles serve certain naked political interests and deny others. Musgrove, the 63rd Governor of the State of Mississippi, was born in Tacoma, Mississippi, in Panola County. Tacoma, since the early 1950s, a ghost town, was populated by forty-two families during Musgrove’s childhood. It was once the land on which the Choctaw and Chickasaw natives lived, surrounded by a natural spring that connected the Hills to the Delta. The Musgroves were no strangers to adversity. Musgrove’s father died from pneumonia when Musgrove was seven years old. His father had been a crew employee with the Mississippi Highway Department. His mom was 25

Joseph Crespino, In Search of Another Country: Mississippi and the Conservative CounterRevolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007); Mississippi Sovereignty Commission; Silver, 1064.

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a “Fruit of the Loom” factory worker. She reared him and his four siblings on her own through to adulthood. From his own childhood experiences, Musgrove knew firsthand that education and workforce development were linked to family income security and health care. Musgrove also knew, as did Jack Harper, both children with parents of modest means, that a community college offered an accessible route to a four-year college education and prospects for income and network strengthening. Like Jack Harper and Phil Bryant, Musgrove attended two years of college at Northwest Mississippi Junior College before entering the University of Mississippi, where he later earned a JD from the University of Mississippi School of Law. Prior to Musgrove’s governorship, he had served two terms in the Mississippi Senate and as the 29th Lieutenant Governor of Mississippi, serving with Republican Governor Kirk Fordice. In the latter capacity, Musgrove developed a reputation for opposing lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender, queer or questioning and two-spirit (LBGTQIA) rights and being a fierce proponent of educational and economic advancement in Mississippi. His national star proved fleeting but considerable. He served as chair of the National Conference of Lieutenant Governors and was listed in a study conducted by Harvard University as the third most powerful lieutenant governor in the nation. The Senate rules, rather than the Mississippi Constitution, award the Lt. Governor huge authority over committee chairmanships and the Rules Committee itself. Michael Sullivan, a former state Supreme Court justice, once wrote in a dissenting opinion that the lieutenant governor is a super-senator. The 1987 case giving rise to Sullivan’s dissent challenged the authority of then Lt. Governor, Brad Dye, to exercise plenary powers – to select committee chairs and assign legislation to various committees, among other powers. First reviewed by the Circuit Court in favor of the plaintiffs, the Mississippi Supreme Court reversed the ruling, sparking a rebuke from Justice Sullivan, who concurred and dissented in part.26 What is significant is that some traditions are challenged in Mississippi. And even when they fail, such challenges signify a propensity for change and an opportunity to educate, mobilize, and offer political re-socialization of the citizenry. Put crudely, one might argue that the super-senator role enjoyed by the Lt. Governor of Mississippi allows for the hoarding of power.

26

Dye v. State Ex Rel Hale 507 So. 2d 332 (1987).

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Resistance to power hoarding can be understood as discontent fomented by those out of power, or not part of the power hoarding coalition. It is the exercise of power and the ends it seeks to advance or stall that matter, not just the means used to achieve the ends. As Lt. Governor, Democrat Musgrove enjoyed that power, it often frustrated Republican Kirk Fordice, the ill-tempered governor and antagonist. Musgrove was elected governor in one of the tightest gubernatorial elections in modern Mississippi history. He was a one-term governor who quickly established himself as a leader in human development across the workforce and educational sectors. As a state senator, he had chaired the Senate Education Committee and knew, first-hand, how much ground Mississippi teachers and students had lost since the eight years of the Winter and Mabus administrations. He raised teachers’ pay to the southeastern average and ensured that every classroom had internet-accessible computers, a first for the nation, according to the National Governors Association. His Advantage Mississippi Initiative, a jobs program, attracted new industry to Mississippi; the Nissan Motor Company production plant was one consequence of his prodigious efforts to build sustainable jobs and wages for Mississippians. Jobs like those offered by Nissan would permit workers to feed their families, secure health insurance, earn decent retirements, and serve as exemplars to their children. Musgrove leveraged his contacts in the Mississippi Senate and House of Representatives with the Southern Regional Education Board, which he had chaired, and the Southern States Energy Board, which he co-chaired, to engineer muchneeded change in two linked realms of upward economic mobility for Mississippians. In 2008, Musgrove ran for the US Senate against Roger Wicker to fill the seat vacated by Senator Thad Cochran. The Musgrove/Wicker contest provides insights into how a contemporary Mississippi Democrat and a Mississippi Republican made appeals to the electorate, at a time when Democrats were losing ground to Republicans. In the debate between Musgrove and Wicker, Wicker cast Musgrove as an Obama loyalist and the beneficiary of left-wing sponsorships. Here we see a pattern of making the Democrat inauthentic – not a true Mississippian, as someone who dares align with the nation’s first biracial President, Barack Obama. For his part, Musgrove brandished his role in job creation and education and asked the audience to consider Wicker’s fourteen years in Washington, using the same metrics. Wicker accused Musgrove of corruption. The scandal surrounding the campaign contributions made by beef plant operatives to Musgrove was raised by Wicker to change the

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subject.27 Musgrove fought back, rebutting Wicker’s claims. The debate was highly performative; it did not carry a racially or class-divisive subtext but had the odor of wrong dealings. When Musgrove was asked what he would do to buttress the damage done by Hurricane Katrina, he replied that price gouging would have been an area of focus, as would the passage of multiple peril amendment insurance, and a focus on strengthening the overall economy. Musgrove said that Wicker and the Republicans had squandered a surplus and produced a deficit. The Republicans, he argued, had ruined the economy, and had no energy plan to bring down the cost of fuel. The voters cast 683,409 votes, of which 55.0 percent were for Wicker. An overwhelming number of black Sunflower County voters gave Musgrove 67 percent of their votes, whereas Scott County voters favored Wicker with 53 percent of their ballots.28 Despite the fundraising, the Musgrove /Wicker contest (with its debate tenor and tone, campaign ads, and actual voting outcome) foregrounded the futility of a progressive of either race prevailing with a majority of Mississippi white native voters when running for statewide office. Musgrove was not a national Democrat, he was, in his own words, a Mississippi Democrat with conservative values. As Mississippi governors are concerned, he ran a campaign more in the middle. He did pose a question of some resonance for our nation: What are conservative values and what core policy preferences are more illustrative of a Mississippi Democrat than, say, a Virginia Democrat or an Arkansas Democrat? Although his career had not been the result of social-political promotion and his formative childhood life experiences had not been characterized by material excess, he had reached adulthood striving to become a member of the ruling elite in a highly reactionary state. The absence of a civically informed, interactive, and well-educated black and white middle and working class holds Mississippi down and conditions the quality of 27

28

Then-governor Musgrove received $45,000 in campaign contributions from beef plant operatives. The 40,000-square-foot plant was approved by the Mississippi legislature but never materialized. A series of failed efforts, including the use of second-hand equipment, delayed efforts and thwarted productivity. The promise had been made to hire at least 400 employees in Yalobusha County. A significant funding formula included 55 million dollars in state loan guarantees. Musgrove claimed no wrongdoing and was not found to have committed any. The plant closed in November 2004. Elected officials, Democrats, and Republicans were implicated in the failed efforts. Several corporate executives were found guilty of fraudulent behavior and served prison time. Mississippi taxpayers recovered 4 million dollars. See Kendra Ablaza, “Kemper v the Beef Power Plant,” Mississippi Today, July 5, 2017. Accessed July 4, 2021. United States Senate Special Election Official Certification, Mississippi Secretary of State.

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candidates seeking statewide office and determines who is victorious and how, and for whom they govern. After his loss to Wicker, Musgrove returned to law practice in Mississippi. Significantly, Musgrove’s post-electoral life engaged him as chair of the National Advisory Committee on Rural Health and Human Services in 2018. In that capacity, he led a 19-member team that explored Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) in rural contexts. The Committee issued four recommendations, including the establishment of a planned program of prevention; a cost-benefit evaluation of the long-term economic costs of ACEs; and benefits from their amelioration; a federal administrative designation to routinely gather ACEs data in rural and urban contexts; and that additional funding for integrated physical and behavioral telehealth be provided in school-based health centers.29 The Musgrove-led committee’s working assumptions about rural ACEs included the prevalence of homelessness, childhood poverty, intimate partner violence, opioid misuse, and suicide as social determinants of health. These challenges included three of the original ACEs – childhood poverty, expressed as hunger, intimate partner violence, and drug use. As originally defined, ACEs include (1) emotional abuse, (2) physical abuse, (3) sexual abuse, (4) emotional neglect, (5) physical neglect, (6) mothers treated violently, (7) household substance abuse, (8) household mental illness, (9) parental separation or divorce, and (10) incarcerated household members. The original ACEs study30 did not include the death of one or both parents or caregivers, poverty, community or vicarious gun violence, or historical trauma in the ACEs framework. These factors matter individually and collectively; in some instances, and for some human beings and communities, they co-occur with frequency.31 29

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Kay Belanger, National Advisory Committee on Rural Health and Human Services, “Exploring the Rural Context for Adverse Childhood Experiences,” Department of Health and Human Services, Washington, DC (2018). Vincent Felitti et al., “Relationship of Childhood Abuse and Household Dysfunction to Many Causes of Death in Adults: The Adverse Childhood Experiences Study,” American Journal of Preventive Medicine, 14(4) (1998): 245–258. Findings from a recent Essie B. and William E. Glenn Family Foundation administered ACEs survey of 759 adults in the Mississippi Delta show that 29 percent of the adults report having experienced between three and four ACEs, and one-third had experienced as many as five. In the same Delta community, only 16 percent of the respondents cited imprisonment of a family member as childhood adversity, a near majority of respondents cited parental divorce or separation (48 percent), and over a third reported not having felt supported or loved as a child (36 percent), and the incidence of family mental illness was cited by 37 percent. These findings were presented at the Glenn Family Foundation ACEs Symposia on June 17, 2021, and June 20, 2022, respectively.

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Republican, Haley Barbour served as governor from 2004 to 2012. He did much to bring federal dollars to Mississippi, but he appeared indifferent to poverty’s grip on the health of children and young adults, especially in his hometown of Yazoo.32 Facing a 709 million dollar budget deficit when he took office, Barbour slashed the deficit in half. Social services were dramatically cut (spending 130 million less on Medicaid) while educational spending was increased. Haley Barbour was a muscular advocate of highquality public education. Due to increased revenues from sales taxes under his administration, the legislature fully funded the Mississippi Adequate Education Act. He furthered Musgrove’s and Winter’s interests in advancing public education. While schools and colleges are primary sites for learning and reflection, so, too, are some museums. In addition to his support of public-school education, Haley Barbour and the Mississippi legislature expanded and deepened possibilities for more Mississippians to reflect on the not-so-distant past. In 2011, Governor Haley Barbour signed bills into law authorizing and funding a civil rights curriculum and a civil rights museum. Admittedly, Hurricane Katrina interrupted his policy agenda in 2005, and the Horizon oil spill occupied much of his leadership effort, but prior to and after Katrina and the oil spill, what else had he done to erase centuries of racial subjugation? Barbour, the former tobacco industry lobbyist, was one of the wealthiest governors ever elected to office in Mississippi. Tort reform was high on the Barbour governing agenda. His so-called tort-reform measure capped noneconomic damages at 1 million dollars. Whether this legislation is constitutional or not, is unclear.33 As a matter of practical politics, undoubtedly, trial lawyers can be found in both political parties and frequently give donations to candidates across partisan lines. In Mississippi and throughout the nation, however, trial lawyers were more predisposed to supporting Democrats than Republicans.34 This example illustrates the group whose economic interests Barbour represented in state politics and those whose economic interests his leadership minimized. Here, it would also appear 32

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Sarah Kleiner, “Forgotten and Failing: Black Students Languish as a Mississippi Town Reckons with Its Painful Past,” Center for Policy Integrity (October 18, 2018). Stephen Sugarman, “United States Tort Reform Wars,” University of New South Wales Law Journal, 51, 25(3) (2002): 849; Harry Snyder, “Serious Tort Reform Isn’t: A Critique of Professor Sugarman’s ‘Serious Tort Law Reform’”, San Diego Law Review, 24(4), Tort Reform Symposium (1987). Adam Chilton, Adam Bonica, and Maya Sen, “The Political Ideology of American Lawyers,” Journal of Legal Analysis, 277 (2016).

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there was a clear conflict of interest – an unethical and blatant desire to further corporate interests without commensurate attention to the general welfare of citizens or the viability of trial lawyers. Barbour’s reelection in 2007 precipitated several legislators’ switching from Democrat to Republican. They helped to galvanize a Republicandominated legislature in 2015, giving Republicans control over both chambers and the governor’s office. This comported with a national trend across many states from 2009–2020. Just as Republican governors’ values and policy preferences exist on a continuum of adherence to deepening basic rights – meeting source-of-life human needs and equitable futures – so, too, do the policy values expressed by Democratic governors. As evidenced by the body of work of Mississippi governors and legislators – their policy initiatives and their rhetoric – too few governors in Mississippi have had consistent and measurable egalitarian policy directives. After much dragging of feet, Barbour did consent to a cigarette tax, which produced 113 million dollars in its first year, in 2009.35 Likewise, in April 2011, after much haranguing, some might say shaming, he stepped up to not only recommend a Civil Rights Museum in the capital city but to support its 20 million funding secured from the legislature.36 Barbour’s governing legacy was mixed. Barbour would return to his work lobbying for oil and tobacco companies. It looked like he had reset the oil and tobacco companies’ tables and then rejoined them for daily dinner and cocktails.

HEALTH CHALLENGES AND HEALTH POLICY

Neither transformative nor pro-active incremental economic health policy progress has been a constant in Mississippi. According to a report conducted by the State Quality of Life Index, whether Republicans or Democrats rule in Mississippi, the quality of life of the poorest citizens has barely changed. Mississippi has ranked at or near the bottom in the last fifteen years on the Index. While the employees covered by the Fair Labor Standards Act have a federal minimum wage guarantee of $7.25, two35

36

The Associated Press, “Mississippi: Barbour Signs Cigarette Tax,” The New York Times, May 13, 2009. Kim Severson, “New Museums to Shine a Spotlight on Civil Rights Era,” The New York Times, February 19, 2012. During the 2011 Regular Session of the Mississippi legislature, Representatives P. Watson, E. Clarke, R. Clark, O. Scott, and Perkins sponsored House Bill 1463. It established a Mississippi Civil Rights Museum Commission, defined its responsibilities, and authorized the issuance of general obligation bonds. The sum of 35 million dollars of the 55 million was raised from private sources.

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thirds of the states and eighty municipalities across the nation have moved far ahead of that threshold. Mississippi offers the federal minimum, which means a worker with a forty-hour work week would earn $15,080 a year. The poverty level for families in the US is based upon the number of dependants in the family. At 100 percent of the poverty level, the poverty level for a family of one is $12,760. Moreover, an adequate income entitles the working poor to either the Affordable Care Act or Medicaid. Again, some thirty-seven states and the District of Columbia have expanded the Medicaid provision to 138 percent of the federal poverty level. As of December 2020, Mississippi was among twelve states that had not adopted Medicaid expansion. The state medical association recommended adoption in 2016, but Mississippi requested a work requirement for Medicaid-eligible recipients, many of whom already work or are disabled. With about a fifth of residents uninsured, the state has a great need to expand Medicaid to impoverished families. The Affordable Care Act, as originally conceived, called for Medicaid expansion for residents with incomes up to 133 percent of the poverty level. In 2012, the United States Supreme Court ruled that states could not be penalized for opting out. Mississippi was among fourteen states choosing not to expand Medicaid, even though the federal government pays 90 percent of the expansion cost. The absence of quality medical care for lowincome residents in Mississippi remains a barrier to exits from poverty as it disadvantages families wanting to work to earn a living but too sick to hold down a job or establish a reliable work history. Moreover, through their federal tax dollars, those who do work in non-Medicaid expansion states are subsidizing residents in Medicaid expansion states. Chronic disease prevention and mitigation require quality medical care for children and adults and health education, with a focus on nutrition, access to and use of quality health care providers and facilities. Funded through 2027, the William Clinton originated Child Health Insurance Program (CHIP) has served well the needs of children in the United States for one-quarter of a century. The Child Health Insurance Program provides vaccines, regular checkups, prescriptions, dental and vision care, and emergency care. Some states charge co-pays or premiums, but these payments cannot exceed more than 5 percent of a family’s annual income. In some states, pregnancy is covered through age nineteen under the unborn child provision. Teens in child welfare systems appear at greater risk for teen childbearing than other teens. Chronic poverty and homelessness exacerbate childhood vulnerabilities. Good health care access, both physical and behavioral, is a life-source need for the state’s and nation’s poorest as well as its wealthiest children.

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Although teenage pregnancies have declined significantly in Mississippi and throughout the United States, Mississippi’s teen pregnancy rate is the second-highest in the nation.37 Mississippi does not provide CHIP support for pregnant mothers. In the fiscal year 2020, children in families with an income of or below 300 percent of the poverty level were eligible for the CHIP, and states were encouraged to make efforts to enroll such families. In 2018, Mississippi served 90,000 children through the CHIP, and of those children, at least 94 percent secured an annual check-up.38 Low-income families earning too much to qualify for Medicaid can access the CHIP. In 2020, there were 3,000 patients to every one primary care physician in Sunflower County. Like Scott County in the Hills, Sunflower is designated as an underserved medical community. Mississippi is currently 50th in overall physician-to-population.39 Rural hospitals in the Delta withstand the worst consequences of Mississippi’s decision against Medicaid expansion. Chronically ill patients enter emergency rooms with bodies unable to withstand the historical neglect. The poorest citizens are often in the greatest need of emergency medical care, precisely because they lack insurance or are underinsured, or lack sufficient access to high-quality and attentive doctors. In January 2020, 37 percent of black Mississippians and 12 percent of white Mississippians lived below the poverty line. Of that group, 20 and 12 percent of blacks and whites, respectively, lacked medical insurance. The Medicaid expansion would help the black, brown, and white poor secure annual health care visits and screenings and give children a chance to educate themselves and modify their intake to comport with healthier hearts. Insurance coverage, medical access and use, and health education are integral to building healthy strengths-based rural communities – schools and families. Insurance coverage would be a net gain to both the working and non-working poor who lacked coverage. According to a rigorous 2014 report issued by the Mississippi Department of Health, the burden of chronic diseases falls most heavily on residents in the poorest counties.40 For example, the leading causes of death in Mississippi

37

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National Center for Health Statistics, Teen Birth, 2020; Amanda Barroso, “Fertility in the United States before the Pandemic,” Pew Research Center, May 7, 2021. Mississippi CHIP Fact Sheet, National Academy for State Health Policy, Washington, DC (2018). County Health Rankings (March 2020), Robert Wood Johnson, and the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute. Vanessa Short, Report on the Burden of Chronic Disease in Mississippi. Mississippi State Department of Health (September 2014). See also, Sherry Wang, LaShaundrea Crook, Carol Connell, and Kathy Yadrick, “Barriers to Health Promotion among Older African

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are heart disease (25 percent) and cancer (22 percent). Mississippi is a state where four out of ten adults report having high blood pressure, with black females having the highest prevalence. In Mississippi, black men in 2018 had the highest rate of death due to strokes and heart attacks.41 Geographic differences appear to correlate with the share of blacks in a population, as seven of the top ten counties with the highest rate of death due to heart disease have black majorities. Sunflower County leads Mississippi as the number one county with the highest rate of deaths due to diabetes. The economic health of counties and states is related to the health of their citizens, especially their access to employer-based health care and health care education. Unemployment is a barrier to the poor’s ability to access health insurance and health care. There are glimmers of a good economic Mississippi future peeking through its thin safety-net provisions, and its complex, violent, and centuries-long racial past. Mississippi’s work to underscore the rights and opportunities of deaf and blind children was evident in the formation and continued funding of the Mississippi School for the Deaf in 1854. Similarly, though segregated, the Mississippi Territory established Jefferson College as its first post-secondary education (prep-school) institution in 1802. The young ten-year-old Jeff Davis was a student there.42 Though Jefferson College did not survive the Civil War, it did signal the state’s commitment to white higher education, and with Elizabeth Female Academy’s formation in 1818, the state foregrounded its commitment to the education of women.43 In the health sphere, the causes of pellagra were discovered in Mississippi in 1915. The Board of Health was formed in 1877 and a program to eradicate Yellow Fever and a tuberculosis sanitarium brought the state deserved and favorable recognition. Harbingers of medical racism lurked in the late 1700s, as blacks, it was reputed, had a greater capacity to resist “Yellow Fever” because their black bodies were more able to withstand it. A prominent physician and abolitionist, Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, propagated the falsehood first raised

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American Men in the Delta,” American Journal of Men’s Health, (2) (March 11, 2017): 414–425. Lamees El-sadek, Lei Zhang, and Tanya Funchess, “Bi-Annual Health Disparities and Inequity Report, State of the State,” Mississippi Department of Health (2018). Jefferson College closed in 1863 at the start of the Civil War; it permanently closed a century later and is now under the auspices of the Mississippi Department of Archives and History. Edward Mayes, History of Education in Mississippi (1899), 38.

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by another physician, a Scotsman, John Lining, a narrative consistent with the times, that blacks’ physicality buffered them and allowed them to withstand disease and pain better.44

THE PROFESSIONS AND EDUCATIONAL OPPORTUNITY

The outsized role of black medical schools was on display not only in educating professional African Americans but in imbuing them with a high sense of service and ethics. Meharry Medical College and Howard University graduates came to or returned to Mississippi to improve the health care and citizenship of African Americans. Some led and/or joined the civil rights movement when the dangers to their practices and their families were the greatest.45 Those few who decided to stay in Mississippi gave strength to other professionals to return as well. Historically black colleges and universities offered light posts to those talented enough and brave enough to navigate legal racism and professional caste systems. Indifference to the education and health of blacks by whites fostered, in part, the growth and salience of historically black colleges and universities. The nation’s first African American land grant college was established in 1871 at Alcorn State University. Alcorn, Jackson State University (1877), Rust (1866), and Tougaloo College (1869) offered intentional pathways out of intergenerational poverty for thousands of talented and persistent black Mississippians. Historically, black colleges offered pathways toward upward mobility from the time of their inception during the last quarter of the nineteenth century through the last quarter of the twentieth century, when many black students began to enroll in white colleges in record numbers. Mississippi Valley State University (MVSU), located in the Delta, was founded in 1950. Like Alcorn, Jackson State University, and Tougaloo and Rust College, MVSU offers students access to post-secondary education and exposure to role models, new knowledge and skills, and new vistas for imagining their preferred futures. Many of these institutions face significant enrollment challenges, and most do or have faced significant leadership, revenue, and fundraising challenges.

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W. Michael Byrd and Linda A. Clayton, An American Health Dilemma: A Medical History of African Americans and the Problem of Race (New York: Routledge, 2000). Richard deSharzo, Robert Smith, and Leigh B. Skipworth, “Black Physicians and the Struggle for Civil Rights,” American Journal of Medicine, 127(10) (June 15, 2014): 920–925.

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I chronicle the protracted litigation struggle to end legal racism in higher education in Mississippi in Chapter 13. Mississippi’s historically black public and private colleges and universities helped to shape intergenerational trajectories from poverty. Seventy-seven percent of the degrees conferred at HBCUs are awarded to black graduates. Many black students attending HBCUs are first-generation college students. Most are Pelleligible; today, 10 percent of all black students attend HBCUs, whereas, eight decades ago, when Matthews, one of the Sunflower Seven and the son of a midwife, attended Morehouse and Clementine, the youngest member of this cohort and an adult college matriculant, attended Mississippi Valley State University, more than 75 percent did so. Four decades later, by the time Clementine’s kids attended college, only half of the blacks attended HBCUs. In general, HBCU endowments are one-eighth of the endowments of their white counterparts. Intelligent and strategic leadership at these institutions, world-class curricula, which prepare students for healthy citizenship and economic thriving, and highly motivated faculty and students are crucial for their continuing relevance and integrity in the new century, as in the old. As with some public elementary and secondary schools, too many colleges and universities appear to lack a compelling vision and core infrastructure, which are the prerequisites for the innovativeness of faculty and the competencies, citizenship engagement, and upward economic mobility of graduates. As will be examined in Chapter 13, intergenerational discrimination in the funding of Mississippi HBCUs has conspired to chip away at the comparative advantage of some colleges. The twelve-member Institutions of Higher Learning (IHL) Board of Trustees is tasked with ensuring that all the state’s eight four-year colleges operate as “strong institutions, with eight distinct missions.” It is further tasked with meeting “the diverse educational needs of students, emphasizing student achievement and preparing responsible citizens.”46 It cannot perform these roles well without a watchful multigenerational pro-education-proaccountability constituency, learned governors, accountable state legislators, and pro-active alumni, faculty and administrators. Board vacancies47 and inexplicable Board decisions regarding selection criteria for presidential

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IHL Board of Trustees Policies and Bylaws, Amended through May 18, 2021. Accessed November 18, 2021. Bobby Harrison, Geoff Pender, and Kate Royals, “Top Education Boards May Lack Quorums after Inaction from Governor Tate Reeves,” Mississippi Today, March 29, 2021.

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appointments and contract extensions are just a few of the concerns. For good or ill, the reputation of colleges and universities is constructed by faculty productivity, alumni outcomes, and the continuous strategic allocation and prioritization of resources, including leadership’s capacity to forge a compelling vision, institutional narrative, and trustworthiness. In terms of the outcomes of graduates, not just completion rates but the values, knowledge, practices, and skills they accrete matter for the community and nation. SUMMARY: LEADERSHIP AND FAIR OPPORTUNITY

Children of working- and middle-class families completed high school when labor needs did not trump their educational pursuits when they knew a pathway to college existed, and when they believed that they would find in those pathways and institutions mentors and academic challenges to push their ambitions and focus on their goals. By dint of their lived experiences and observations, many already possessed an enormous amount of discipline and manifested a rigorous work ethic. They needed exposure to high-quality opportunities. Notwithstanding a nation that had willfully subjugated their families and communities for generations, many children believed they could contribute to the future of the nation and their own families’ future well-being. These children needed adult leaders in public service roles to honor their aspirations and their parents’ sacrifice and quell needless suffering. Mississippi politics and leadership in white colleges and universities in Mississippi have demonstrated something quite short of proactive egalitarian governance. In neither electoral governance nor collegiate leadership has Mississippi consistently and positively distinguished itself. Its revered symbols, and the recruitment and election of a governing class, have not offered enough challenges to change mindsets. Unfortunately, both Phil Bryant and Tate Reeves chose to govern backward toward the past rather than away from it. As previously indicated, during Bryant’s governorship, he dedicated taxpayers’ funds to Heritage Day in Mississippi, without acknowledging the state’s racial past or any desire to move Mississippi beyond that gross era of white male supremacy. In contemporary politics in Mississippi, strong legislative Republican rule and inscrutable state administration of the safety net have meant corruption schemes that channeled welfare (Temporary Assistance to Needy Families) dollars to wrestlers, friends, and family of those administering the programs.48 48

Richard Fausett, “Money for Welfare Instead Funded Concerts, Lobbyists and Football Games, Audit Finds,” The New York Times, May 4, 2020.

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Mississippi leaders and citizens, new and elderly natives and residents could reflect on the individual and collective public service character and political legacies of Winter, Mabus, Molpus, Musgrove, Robert G. Clark, Fannie Lou Hamer, Vernon Dahmer, and Medgar Evers, and the strivings of poor children and working families for enlightenment. Their collective and individual striving, courage, and policy interests point to a desire to embed equitable futures in Mississippi. Among the leadership class mentioned above, their collective actions rejected the continuous embrace of an unjust and uninspiring politics that disenfranchised people who were born black and brown and then used them to gain political advantage, imprisoned them, or murdered them in the interest of maintaining black economic dispossession and white male supremacy. Engagement in child labor, multiple low-wage jobs to keep food on the table and a roof over one’s head, and now extractive tuition and other college and housing costs are strangling families’ quest to reach the middleclass and sustain their exits. The next chapter analyzes how the rural black poor navigated the peril of man-made and natural disasters in an intemperate nation. Who were their advocates? How did they fare in an intemperate nation engulfed in legal racism?

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Facing Promise and Peril Black Strivings in an Intemperate Land

The enslaved descended families featured here faced a particularly harmful man-made peril throughout their lives – legal racism. Some were more bound by caste than others, but all suffered more than what was just and necessary. Natural disasters often amplify man-made insults, including devil’s bargains baked into the constitutional edifice, non-inclusive economic jobs and corporate recoveries, market health care biases, anemic homeowning opportunities and unfair wage structures, inequitable health care and public education systems, the elite’s disregard for the rule of law, and environmental insults such as locating large shares of black residents in flood zones or near power and other processing plants. When Fannie Lou Hamer of Sunflower County, a timekeeper on the W. J. Marlowe plantation, told her minister, Reverend Tyler, that he must be a “Moses leadin’ your flock out of the chains and fetters of Egypt – takin’ them yourself to register tomorra in Indianola,” she was trying to mold new strengths-based leaders and find new local institutions in the face of rural regime economic coercion and violence – a coercion and violence she knew firsthand.1 She was attempting to “walk down” the collective troubles of the nation and the collective despair of the blacks and the poor. If she and better-healed blacks, post-mistress Minnie Cox, and physician Clinton Battle, had nothing with which to fight, how could the poor black laborers counter coercion and lawless white sheriffs and the mobs who took matters into their own hands? Fannie Lou Hamer knew, as did Martin Luther King, Jr., that she, like others in the Civil Rights Movement, would

1

As cited in Cobb, The Most Southern Place on Earth, 243.

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die a noble death. She was, like King, courageous. In her own words, “If I fall, I’ll fall five feet four inches forward in the fight for freedom. I am not backing off.”2 After attempting to register to vote in Indianola, Hamer was fired from the plantation where she had worked as a timekeeper for more than a decade. She had moved from sharecropper to cash renter over that period. The slow, grinding, and sticky ordeal of moving off the bottom rung was not theoretical for her. Hamer knew all too well that the agricultural ladder for blacks in Sunflower had not been an on-ramp to the stable middle-class and/or to the wealthy class. This woman with six years of education, knew what thousands had experienced: excruciating “time on the ladder,” its lowest rungs, without growth opportunities and a fair wage, would undermine both upward rural black mobility and intergenerational wealth trajectories in the twentieth century and beyond. Struggle and intergenerational peril had engulfed the childhood trajectories of perennial croppers Josie and Agnes and their parents before them. Their resentment was intense. They were in no way resigned, however. Black and white child laborers, Josie, Agnes, and Jack, helped to produce Sunflower’s wealth. As was true of their parents before them, and true of their parents’ parents (born immediately after 1865), their work did not and was never intended to pay a living wage. Three generations of Browns and Landfairs had lacked access to good education, the stability of a home, and political equality. African Americans such as Josie and Agnes could call on white benevolence, while the working- and middle-class whites, such as Jack Harper and the wealthy had more direct lines to education, high-wage jobs, and patronage. The mechanisms that held the whites’ economic and political power were not far beneath the surface in Sunflower. James Cobb wrote that generosity to the planters exceeded federal generosity to the safety net of the poor in the Delta. Jim Eastland enriched himself, as did other elected officials, by receiving in just one year (1967), “168,524 in price supports and acreage diversion payments and then sold the choice cotton that he did produce for an estimated 280,000.”3 Cobb continued, “22 percent of all payments in excess of fifty thousand dollars for the entire nation were made in the Delta, which accounted for 17 percent of the national total for payments above one hundred thousand dollars.”4 During the period between 1995 and 2019, 2

3

R. A. Bloomfield, “Five Feet Four Inches Forward,” The Persistent Courage of Fannie Lou Hamer, available at rightsanddissent.org, accessed July 15, 2022. 4 Ibid., 259. Ibid.

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Sunflower County received subsidies totaling $480,468,303. During this same period, its neighbor, Bolivar County, received the highest amount of subsidies of all counties in Mississippi, amounting to $619,114,718. One hundred and twenty-five years after the Civil War, the biggest problem in Sunflower County, remarked the late attorney Carver A. Randle Sr., was an unwillingness to “share enough power to make the situation fully equal.”5 He also concluded that “There are some progressive people in Indianola (the county seat), but most whites are pretending, and most blacks are not active enough.”6 Randle had graduated law school from the University of Mississippi in 1972, among the first blacks to do so. His wife, Rosie Knox Randle, faced employment discrimination in Indianola, just as he had for years prior to 1969. The Mississippi Valley State University graduate took his wife’s case to federal court, where he prevailed. Employment discrimination and an unwillingness to share political power were vestiges of regime policies and practices, as were caste schools and regime violence. Elected president of the revived NAACP in 1965 (its second revival since the first was Clinton Battle’s thwarted efforts a decade earlier), Randle focused on economic boycotts and disparities in resources between black and white schools. He indicated that Father Walter J. Smigiel inspired his public service, his activism in the civil rights movement, and his deep commitments to the poor. In Randle’s presence, Father Smigiel often recalled the bigotry Catholics faced in Indianola, especially in educational employment. Randle’s courageous leadership values nearly brought an end to blacks’ propensity to vote for white candidates in Sunflower. Randle ran for mayor in 1968 and lost by fewer than fifty votes. Randle’s legal and electoral challenges to the status quo joined earlier movements to defend the constitutional rights of blacks. For example, a half-century earlier, in neighboring Tennessee, black lawyers Noah Parden and Styles L. Hutchins, along with a white lawyer and judge, Lewis Shepherd, rallied to support the constitutional rights of a black man named Ed Johnson to a fair trial. He was accused of raping a white woman, Nevada Taylor, and when tried for rape, he was found guilty. His lawyers fought to overturn that decision, appealing to the federal district court, and losing. The Court, nevertheless, stayed his execution for ten days. His lawyers again appealed, this time to the US Supreme Court, where they had filed a request for a writ of habeas corpus, a petition filed with Associate Justice John Marshal Harlan, in which they argued that excluding blacks from the jury was unconstitutional and had constituted a

5

Carver Randle, Tulane Oral History Collection (1991).

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6

Ibid.

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denial of Ed Johnson’s constitutional rights. Associate Justice John Marshal Harlan had been the lone dissenter in the 1896 Plessy decision. In an unprecedented move, the Court granted a stay of execution and asked both sides to prepare for oral arguments. On hearing the Court’s order, a mob broke into the jail where Johnson was being held; the mob kidnapped and lynched Johnson. Under orders from the Court, the federal government responded to the lynching and held Sheriff Shipp and eight other defendants in contempt of court for willful neglect to protect Johnson in the face of mob violence.7 The Court made constitutional history. Lewis Shepherd, a former Klansman, and Confederate soldier joined black lawyers Parden and Hutchins in their defense of Ed Johnson and later defended the local white lawmen accused of not having sufficiently protected their prisoner before the Supreme Court. (Hearing a criminal case was a first for the Court.) The authors of Contempt of Court, Mark Curriden and Leroy Phillips, Jr., posited that Shepherd wanted both to regain favor with local whites and participate in the making of legal history. Meanwhile, as had happened with Minnie Cox and Clinton Battle in Indianola, Parden and Hutchins were hounded and intimidated by whites interested in mob rule to the point that they fled. As was noted in Chapter 3, the social milieu was precarious for the few Minnie Coxes of Sunflower, but not so for the Eastlands or later for Jack Harper, local Democrat and chancery clerk. And while not every white person exercised white privilege, by dint of their race, many, among them Jack Harper and the Eastlands, had the presumption of being better than African Americans. Exalting unstinting whiteness – white wealth, white rule, white power, and white celebrity, however, achieved – was a long game. Carver Randle held his ground and faced those who had discriminated against him and his wife. Unlike Cox and Battle, and Parden and Hutchins, however, he did not face the volume of physical violence and intimidation that they had a half-century earlier. As a black lawyer, Randle had the tools and the Ole Miss pedigree with which to fight. Would the law offer protections capacious enough to find employment discrimination? Would those reared in the tyrannical culture of Mississippi, those interpreting the law and facts, find his arguments and presentation of the facts convincing? Was intimidation losing its resonance as a form of coercion in the Mississippi Sunflower Delta? In the days and decades that followed Parden and Hutchins’s efforts, the Supreme Court would be called upon 7

Mark Curriden and Leroy Philipps, Contempt of Court: The Turn-of-the-Century Lynching That Launched 100 Years of Federalism (Anchor Books, 1999).

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again and again to decide between opposing parties and the legitimacy of their claims.8 The quality of lawyering, the evidentiary standards met and unmet in the legal records, interpretations of past decisions, and the quality and familial and legal background of the bench itself would set the table for twentieth-century lawyering and legal framing, sometimes in narrow and vague terms, and at other times emphatically less so. The gatekeeping function of courts in general, and the Supreme Court in particular, would frequently lengthen the suffering and dispossession of thousands of the poor and rural blacks as cases wound their way through protracted processes. For poor blacks like Josie, Agnes, and Ed Johnson to have a chance at muscular citizenship, local lawyers in Mississippi and Tennessee and elsewhere in the Deep South and beyond would have to fight through the violence and intimidation, show legal excellence, and force of character and nerve. Attorney Randle and generations before and after him would have to lodge protracted appeals to the rule of law at many turns while living in resistant white legal and economic cultures. He was honored as Indianola’s Citizen of the Year in 2011. The African American rural poor and not-so-poor would need allies, and they would benefit from the commitment of the Clinton Battles, Carver Randles, Pardins, and Hutchinses to come. As institutions, the professions, including law, medicine, and education, had as much responsibility to act and decide ethically as did the political elites or local law enforcement. In every generation, over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, bystanders and fence-sitters who observed the pernicious injuries of racism and lawlessness but benefitted from being silent would be complicit. Inertia and prejudice, clothed in authority, indifference, and pseudo-legality, weighed heavily atop the US Constitution before and after the American Civil War and well beyond the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. Blacks in Mississippi were deprived of natural legal allies before 1965 because blacks who wanted to become lawyers were not permitted to do so at the University of Mississippi, the only law school located in Mississippi until 1930; they would have to obtain a law degree outside Mississippi and return home to take the bar examination to practice. Their battles would be complex in criminal cases, and they would be lawyers in a place where local norms did not presume innocence until proven guilty. Because of the ubiquity of violence, illiteracy, and poverty, lawyers in civil cases found it difficult to find willing plaintiffs able to afford legal

8

214 US v. Shipp 386 (1909).

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counsel and willing to stay the protracted course of litigation. Violence was a real and looming prospect in Sunflower and other counties in the Deep South. According to an incident adduced by the Economic Justice Institute, “in Hernando, Mississippi, in 1935, Reverend T. A. Allen tried to start a sharecropper’s union among local impoverished and exploited black laborers. When white landowners learned that Allen was using his pulpit to preach to the black community about unionization, they formed a mob, seized him, shot him many times, and threw him into the Coldwater River.”9 Such cases reinforce in the minds of generations of black southerners a sense of lawlessness, resentment, and disrespect for local law enforcement and the judicial system.10 Eight hundred known executions occurred in Mississippi in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; of that number, 639 victims were blacks. Systemic violence, political and social subservience, and intergenerational toil characterized Sunflower. Yet, as fantastical as it may sound, it was also a place where African Americans and other Delta families could nurture the interior lives of their children, just as the Sunflower Seven, the Browns, Landfairs, Byrds, Harpers, Richardsons, Matthewses, and Williamses. In addition to regime efforts to manufacture poverty for blacks and the communities in which they lived, natural disasters complicated economic thriving, redefined the governmental role, and exposed the character and values of local and national leadership.

THE FLOOD OF 1927, SHARECROPPERS’ FATES, AND THE GOVERNMENT’S GAZE

Agnes, Josie, Williams, Matthews, and Jack – ages eighteen, thirteen, eleven, nine, and seven, all worked as child laborers with their kin to mete out a living. Their hope was to climb out of poverty and avoid Parchman Farms, itself a plantation, and to skirt violence. They all had to contend not just with manufactured insults and injuries, such as unjust imprisonment of black men, unfair labor contracts, and unappealable wage settlements, but with natural disasters, floods, fevers, and boll weevils, as well. In 1925, Mississippi had 257,000 farms on which 540,782 black people worked as day laborers and tenant farmers. During the early part of the twentieth century, right through mid-century, most crops were harvested 9

10

Economic Justice Institute, Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror (2017). Available at lynchinginamerica.eji.org. Madera Tribune, vol. LXIX, no. 134 (April 14, 1937).

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by hand.11 When the levee at Mounds Landing broke on April 21, 1927, Lonnie was a toddler, but his father and family members who owned land and farms persisted, as did his mom, a day worker on the farm. On plantations, however, black people, children, and adult sharecroppers were not allowed to seek shelter from the raging storm for fear that they would not return when the flood waters receded. It was the force of the Mississippi River and the need to protect against its natural power, and the ill-fated levees constructed by the Corps of Engineers, that altered how white Mississippians of the twentieth century understood the federal governmental role. Elites welcomed federal largess when it benefitted the planter’s interests. That same flood put more black people, those who survived its ravages, on the roads out of the Mississippi, Arkansas, and Louisiana Delta. Those who remained on plantations as sharecroppers were ravaged by hunger and vulnerable to violence. Those, like the Byrds, who owned their own farms, persisted. Charged with investigating the conditions of Delta black sharecroppers after the 1927 flood, Robert Moton, the African American protégé of Booker T. Washington, was horrified at the squalor and refugee camps inhabited by thousands of black sharecroppers. Moton received a report from the Colored Advisory Commission that conditions were deplorable, thousands of lives had been lost, and fevers were rampant. Moton indicated the uninhabitable conditions of sharecroppers and urged immediate relief. Fearing that his own prospects and ambitions for the presidency would be dashed in light of truthful headlines about the deplorable conditions poor humans inhabited, Herbert Hoover, President Calvin Coolidge’s relief czar, had asked Moton to withhold dissemination of the report; in exchange, Hoover promised that should he win the presidential election in 1928, black people would be well represented in his presidential administration and that he would give African Americans and the white poor land left by bankrupt planters. Secretary of Commerce Hoover visited the Mississippi Delta and, in his December 22, 1927 letter to Moton, he indicated that he felt that the work of the Red Cross and the advisory committee to the Red Cross was effective and was being “carried out with great justice to the colored people.”12 He requested the appointments of the local black representatives of the Red 11

12

Valerie Grim, “Black Farm Families in the Mississippi Delta: A Study of the Brooks Farm Community, 1920–1970,” Retrospective theses and dissertations 9441 (1990). Hoover’s Letter to Moton, December 22, 1927. Available at credo.library.umass.edu, accessed November 14, 2021.

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Cross and the advisory committee for the purpose of investigating claims and injuries and repairing them. On January 8, 1928, Moton subsequently sent a copy of Hoover’s letter to W. E. B. DuBois, in which he indicated that the report “had sent Hoover into a panic.”13 Despite the watered-down report released to the public, Hoover broke his promises to Moton, as had Wilson before him to Du Bois. Just as W. E. B. DuBois had earlier turned away from Woodrow Wilson, Moton also sought to better align the perceived needs of rural black people with serious presidential contenders who would more likely honor their promises. Hoover had himself been an orphan, due to the early deaths of both his parents. He moved at least three times before his eighteenth birthday, as relatives from Iowa to Oregon would be responsible for his care. He knew what it felt like to have little. He persisted. Although admitted to Stanford conditionally, young Hoover excelled there in his studies while taking on odd jobs to feed himself and pay his own way.14 As President, Hoover issued scores of executive orders to by-pass civil service wage scales to allow widows with young children to gain employment and/or to earn more money.15 These individual acts of white patronage and kindness were extended in ways that call into question meritocracy and deservedness. These two narratives would form bookends in decades-long debates and political beliefs about poor support in the United States. Often, those with access to the powerful can and do get a special federal dispensation, along with favorable national media coverage, sometimes amounting to a coverup of both racism and gross violence and incompetence. Would such consideration and generosity be shown to black people by those with the authority and power to make their economic lives bearable? Broken promises led Moton, and the few blacks enfranchised in the 1920s and 1930s (about 10 percent of the number of blacks who had been registered in 1876), to abandon the party of Lincoln in favor of Franklin 13

14

15

Tuskegee Institute Letter to W. E. B. DuBois, January 8, 1928. W. E. B. DuBois Papers (MS 312), Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Amherst, Libraries. Available at credo.library.umass.edu. For a reasonable understanding of the factors shaping Hoover as an individualist, please see Henry Everman, “Herbert Hoover and the New Deal, 1933–1940,” Dissertations and theses Digital Commons (Louisiana State University, 1971), 6. Accessed November 14, 2021. Executive Order 5591, issued on April 1, 1931, is one example. This exception was made for a widow whose husband, a pilot and a lieutenant in the army, was killed. Another exception, this one from age requirements to take the civil service examination, was EO 5604, issued on April 20, 1931. See Herbert Hoover, “Proclamations and Executive Orders,” available at quod.lib.umich.edu, accessed November 14, 2021.

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Roosevelt’s New Deal coalition. Black people needed a president who recognized and would respond to their suffering and protect them from lawlessness and economic exploitation. In the conditions of fieldworkers, there was much to be repaired even before the flood of 1927. As with boll weevils, floods, and fevers in yesteryear, contemporary floods and hurricanes are powerful disruptors of businesses, lives, and livelihoods. Such surely was the case when Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast in 2005. Katrina’s 55 feet waves killed hundreds in Mississippi and 1,800 people in total. It ruined property and businesses, and even destroyed entire small towns. Fortunately for Mississippi, the chair of the United States Senate Appropriations Committee was Thad Cochran. Cochran and Haley Barbour leveraged aid to businesses and homeowners who had suffered losses with dispatch. All these years later, however, it is unclear why billions of dollars in aid were never distributed and where bottlenecks in state oversight were obtained. The poorest and most vulnerable to homelessness would always be unable to find their way back from natural disasters such as Katrina and the Flood of 1927. Frequently, natural disasters and pandemics expose the underbelly of a churning but racist nation. This underbelly reveals stubborn poverty and pre-mature black death – the latter being a constant of black life in the United States.16 In the American context, structural racism, internalized racism, and community violence are legacies of empire, black enslavement, and Jim Crow – eras spanning four centuries. These legacies of human dispossession co-exist alongside other legacies, such as yearnings for land, racial and gender equality and equity, universal suffrage, quality public education, individual liberties, political, religious, and economic freedom, states’ rights, and the rule of law. These legacies and yearnings are inscribed in movements for expanded freedoms and national membership; some are encoded in the national Bill of Rights, implied in the Preamble to the national constitution, and found in the 19th, 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the federal constitution and in some state constitutions. Among the poorest of the Sunflower Seven, much was at stake daily. Vulnerable to hunger and homelessness, not just poverty, Josie Landfair and Agnes Brown had much to lose, as did families of higher economic and educational status. Those better positioned, like Clinton Battle and the 16

David Williams, J. Lawrence, and B. Davis, “Racism and Health: Evidence and Needed Research,” Annual Review of Public Health, (40) (April 2019): 105–125; R. W. Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007).

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Coxes raised their heads and hands to help change Sunflower. Clinton Battle, a black physician – a Meharry Medical College, Fisk graduate, and nativeborn Sunflower resident – returned to Indianola, Sunflower’s County seat, in the early 1950s, after completing medical school.17 Battle rose from poverty to become an acclaimed medical doctor who successfully separated African American conjoined twins in 1955, at age twenty-nine.18 His advanced education and the relative independence it afforded him allowed him to care for the physically and politically injured. Throughout Sunflower County and in Belzoni, Mississippi, located 26 miles away, he served his rural clients and established himself as an able physician and civil rights leader. A forerunner to Carver Randle and Fannie Lou Hamer, Clinton Battle mobilized a chapter of the NAACP in 1951, urging one hundred people to register to vote. The state NAACP conference chose Indianola as a site for its convention in 1953. As happened with the Coxes, Clinton and his family, wife, June, and children, Clinton, Jr., and Stacey, were intimidated by white lawlessness, in Clinton’s case by the White Citizens’ Council. The Council was formed in the 1950s, in response to the school desegregation decision in Brown v. Board of Education. The white segregationists who joined the Council were elected officials and bankers, among others. Though members of the Council tended to have more white than bluecollar professions, they used violence – bombs, lynching, and assassinations – to end the lives or quiet the voices and protest efforts of civil rights workers, including Medgar Evers, a World War II military veteran and state field secretary of the NAACP (June 12, 1963). During Medgar’s era, Hattie Isaac’s brother, A. C. Isaac, had helped build support for the NAACP in Mound Bayou, the nation’s first all-black prosperous town, which was founded in 1887 by former slaves. Intimidation knew few bounds in Sunflower. As Margaret Edds wrote, “As late as 1950, in Sunflower County, for instance, older Black people still talk of Dr. Clinton Battle. White plantation owners, they say, warned farm workers against patronizing Battle, the bank called in his loans, and he was forced to abandon his practice and leave town.”19 For a long time, his departure robbed rural black people and whites of a talented, well-trained black physician who cared deeply about their civic, emotional, and physical health.

17 18

19

deSharzo et al., “Black Physicians and the Struggle for Civil Rights.” L. Ray Matthews, Omar Danner, Zellie Orr, et al., 2018, “Medical Miracle in Indianola, Mississippi,” Global Journal of Medical and Clinical Case Reports, 4(1) (2017): 008–010. Margaret Edds, “Another America,” The Alicia Patterson Foundation Fellows Stories. Available at aliciapatterson.org, accessed January 16, 2022.

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Though there were some economic differentiation and social class distinctions in Sunflower, the Coxes, Clintons, the Sunflower Seven, and their progeny were entitled to the equal protection of the law, even in Mississippi. Such protection might have strangled lawlessness and helped to bury caste norms. If Battle, a physician, and native of Sunflower, was driven out by the white mob, would the receptivity of whites and black people to a new generation of black professionals, especially those in the education and legal professions, grow in the following years? What would white intimidation of black people look like during and after the civil rights movement in Sunflower? Employment discrimination can be shown in terms of both the denial of job opportunities with disparate wages and the lack of promotional opportunities.20 Carver Randle was engaged with the Indianola Development Association, advocating for more black employment in municipal jobs, better quality housing, and the removal of ineffectual educators as school leaders. His role as president of the Sunflower Branch of the NAACP in 1967 had engaged him in boycotts in all aspects of community endeavors, especially education and employment discrimination. Randle’s wife, Rosie Knox Randle, was recommended for a job in the public-school system in Sunflower but was denied on the basis that her husband was too controversial. The black law firm of Clell G. Ward and Eugene L. McLemore of McLemore and Ward, in Greenville, Mississippi, filed for the plaintiffs in federal court.21 Lacking opportunities to teach at home in Sunflower, Mr. Randle had looked and found work elsewhere; he went 85 miles away to Batesville to teach and coach for a couple of years. The lawsuit went forward, and in 1974, Rosie Knox Randle prevailed. Arguing that once the Board of Trustees had knowledge that Rosie Randle charged the Superintendent of the Schools with violating her constitutional rights in refusing to approve the principal’s recommendation because she was Carver Randle’s wife, the US District for the Northern District of Mississippi ruled that the Board had a duty to investigate that charge. One victory for one family would be helpful, but the pace of change would be unacceptably slow without black political power and the authority to influence and exercise the rule of law. Carver Randle ran for mayor of Indianola in 1968. Before that, at least one other black man, Otis Brown, had run for mayor. Both Brown and 20

21

Bureau of Labor Statistics, 1935, Richard Sterner, The Negro’s Share (1942) as cited in Myrdal, An American Dilemma, 364. 373 F. Supp. 766 (1974), March 28, 1974.

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Randle would lose in this 72-percentage black voting-age municipality. In October 2021, a half-century later, Indianola voters would elect a black challenger, Ken Featherstone, to three-term Jewish mayor, Rosenthal in October 2021. During the Jim Crow era, Minnie Cox, and Clinton Battle, all black people of accomplishment, had been hounded out. Younger ones, like Randle and his wife, Rosie, and Alsee McDaniel, a Harvard-educated lawyer and native of Sunflower County, and a failed candidate for mayor of Indianola, would not only face intimidation but job discrimination and ridicule from some whites in politics. Though Alsee McDaniel lost his 1993 mayoral race by 83 votes, his run signaled a loosening of white supremacy and white economic intimidation of black workers. Voter turnout in that race exceeded by one-third the former mayoral turnout, with 4,000 votes cast. Nowhere in Sunflower, Randle exclaimed, did the whites wish to share power. The pathways out of poverty would necessitate political transformation and the struggle to win statewide and local offices and do so boldly and without blemish. African Americans in Mississippi have not won statewide political office in one hundred thirty years. They constitute 40 percent of the voting-age population in Mississippi and 92 percent of the Democratic Party’s membership. Among other offices, African American candidates have sought statewide office for governor, the US Senate, and insurance commissioner; not one has prevailed yet. The Second Congressional District includes fifteen counties. Most of the Mississippi Delta and Hinds County is where Congressman Bennie Thompson’s hometown of Bolton and his alma maters – Tougaloo College and Jackson State University – are located. In fact, all three of Mississippi’s state-supported African American universities – Alcorn, Jackson State, and Mississippi Valley State – are in Mississippi’s Second Congressional District. The district’s poverty rate is 29 percent, among the highest in the nation. Three times since its inception in 1847, it has had a Republican Congressman. Before Bennie Thompson’s election in 1993, Congressman Mike Espy, a black Democrat, who resigned to become President William Jefferson Clinton’s Secretary of Agriculture, had held the seat for three terms. Over the last twenty-five years, the district was redrawn to build a black voting majority-proof district, just as it had been previously drawn to ensure a near majority-white votingage population. Bennie Thompson and Mike Espy both won the Second Congressional District seat from Mississippi through serial redistricting and attention to key agri-business constituents. Thompson is serving his fourteenth term in

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the US House of Representatives and chairs the House Homeland Security Committee and the January 6 Commission. Like Clementine, Matthews, and Evelyn Byrd, three Sunflower County African Americans, Congressman Thompson attended segregated public schools and colleges in Mississippi. Congressman Thompson now represents a district that includes Sunflower County in the United States Congress. The Second Congressional District is just over one-third rural, and it encompasses the riverfront counties, the delta counties, and much of Hinds County. Before Thompson and Espy’s elections to the US House of Representatives, Robert G. Clark, Jr., had been a black democratic challenger for the open seat in a district with a slight black voting-age population in 1982. He lost 49 to 51 percent to a Republican opponent named Webb Franklin. Just as Kirk Fordice had used the outsider mantra to cast shade on Ray Mabus’s bona fides as a real Mississippian during their gubernatorial contest, Franklin told voters in his campaign ads that Clark was not “one of them.” Most needed an Ole Miss pedigree and white skin to enter the highest levels of political membership in the closed society. As with the congressional black vote and votes cast in local elections, the national/presidential black vote is most inspired when a black person heads the ticket or runs against someone viewed as antithetical to black interests.22 Absent a powerful sense of political efficacy and huge identification and attachment to the candidate,23 driven by socioeconomic status alone, closely equivalent black and white voting-age populations invariably weigh in favor of higher white turnout and white electoral triumph. Redistricting efforts in one Delta district pulled in the wealthiest whites from Madison County with the poorest black people from parts of the Delta, shaping up a 53 percent majority-black district, in which the black candidate lost by about 5 percentage points. As the population losses in the Delta continue, black incumbents there are likely to desire a larger share of the black voting-age population to ensure victory.

22

23

Mary Coleman and Leslie McLemore, “Continuity and Change: The Power of Traditionalism in Biracial Politics in Mississippi’s Second Congressional District,” in M. Preston and L. Henderson, eds., The New Black Politics: The Search for Political Power, 2nd ed. (New York: Longman, 1987). Aaron Cohen, Eran Vigoda, and Aliza Samorly, “Analysis of Mediating Effect of Personal-Psychological Variables on the Relationship between Socioeconomic Status and Political Participation: A Structural Equations Framework,” Political Psychology, 22 (4) (2001).

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It is a challenge for elected officials to align their legislative interests with the views of their materially differentiated constituents. Yet Congressman Thompson has voted with the Democratic Progressive Caucus at least 90 percent of the time. He has gained significant committee chairmanships and has introduced and successfully secured consequential legislation in homeland security and other areas. The good that he has done and is doing as a national leader of the Second Congressional District will inevitably include metrics related to jobs, education, health care, and housing quality. He cannot do this work alone without the state’s US senators and the state legislature. He must gain the support of his colleagues in the United States Congress and hold together many constituencies: naysayers, a coterie of elite Republicans in the US Congress, his district of wealthy white farmers, black institutions of higher learning, and poor blacks. His plate is full and to keep it aloft is a delicate balancing act. In addition to one African American US Congressman, the Delta has fifteen black voting-age districts and nine black representatives in the Mississippi legislature. On average, the Delta constituencies are poorer when compared to the rest of the state; they have also completed fewer years of education than whites. Though black people make up 38 percent of the state’s population, there are only fifteen black senators out of fiftytwo in the Mississippi Senate. Black people constitute 31 percent of the legislators in Mississippi, the largest percentage of black elected officials in the nation. In the legislature, Republicans are the majority, and while black people have the greatest longevity, they are Democrats and cannot exert power unless they leverage their interests with those of the governor (now, also a Republican), or forge alliances with white colleagues, Democrats, and Republicans, as cross-cutting issues arise. The municipal government in Sunflower towns is a tale of two worlds, one political and the other economic. Black people have now won electoral offices in municipal and county governments. The City Board of Aldermen in Indianola is comprised of five elected officials; all but one is black. The Sunflower County Board of Supervisors has five districts; in Sunflower County, four of the supervisors are black, both the circuit and chancery clerks, tax assessor, sheriff, comptroller, circuit court judge, and justices of the peace are also black. Until October 2021, the three-term mayor of Indianola was the grandson of Ben Fried, a Lithuanian. The Frieds arrived in Indianola in 1913. Rosenthal would not be the first Jew to become mayor of a Mississippi town; Laurence E. Leyens, a fifthgeneration native of the river city of Vicksburg, was elected mayor in 2001. For all but the last fifteen years of its existence, however, Sunflower

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County, a majority-black county, was governed by the native white minority, including the position of Chancery Clerk. Positions of power were the purview of the white minority in Sunflower. Jack Harper, a local elite and a member of the Sunflower Seven, served as Chancery Clerk for forty years. Only during the period of Reconstruction, in 1875, and only for one year, had a black person served as Chancery Clerk in Sunflower. Lieutenant Governor Alexander Kelso Davis had appointed John W. Randolph to succeed W. G. Bowles after his death. Randolph also served as chairperson of the House Committee on Enrolled Bills in the Mississippi legislature. Fifty black people served in the Mississippi legislature in 1872, the largest number during the period of Reconstruction; by 1892, only two remained, George William Butler and George Washington Gayles, from Sharkey and Sunflower/Bolivar Counties, respectively. It would take more than a century to dislodge white political domination and white political patronage in the Mississippi Delta. Those who were and are outside of the ruling party, caste, or regime would fight individually and collectively to level the economic and political playing field. Black people in the NAACP, those few with federal patronage jobs, independent professionals, and sharecroppers all wanted and needed protection from violence, economic intimidation, and economic exploitation. They needed the political right to advocate for substantive change while making a living and building capabilities and opportunities to flourish. Political and economic flourishing are inextricably linked in a democracy. Political and economic resources were not shared, and the collective and individual rising of black people was anathema to ruling white authority and the masses they politicked, stirred up, and maneuvered. The capacity for strong working- and middle-class growth was then and is now central to upward and downward mobility as well as wealth creation and its sustainability. Unlike some white elected officials, black elected officials lack multigenerational familial wealth and intergenerational political status, but they have more education or advanced degrees than their white counterparts in the Mississippi Legislature. In the legislature, as in locales such as Sunflower, where black supervisors and aldermen, and mayors are now governing, would black and white officials take stances to improve employment prospects, strengthen public schools, and quality health care? Could an equitable change in governance structures and outcomes be expected from insiders – lawyers, non-lawyers, blacks, whites, Catholics, or Jews?

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6

Position-Taking in the Nation

America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms it will be because we destroyed ourselves. Abraham Lincoln

Of the states with the largest concentration of whites in the United States – Vermont, Maine, New Hampshire, West Virginia, Iowa, Idaho, Wyoming, and Minnesota – only West Virginia has a median household income below the national average. Of the wealthiest states in the nation, only one, Maryland, is in the South. Of the states in the Old Confederacy, all but three, North Carolina, Texas, and Virginia are among the ten poorest. In fact, according to the annual American Community Survey, which reaches 3.5 million participant households a year, three counties in Virginia – Loudon, Howard, and Fairfax – rank first, second, and third, respectively, among the highest-income counties in the United States. Virginia loomed large in the domestic slave trade. Several hundred years ago, Virginia led the way in crafting laws to diminish black life chances and optimize white aristocracy, and other states in the Deep South looked on and imitated Virginia. How, if at all, is its current wealth a by-product of that trade in humans, and what lessons, if any, might there be in Virginia governance and in wealthy Virginia counties for Mississippi to examine? Africans were put onto ships and taken against their will as early as the 1400s.1 Slavery had earlier existed in Africa and antiquity. Some were enslaved because they were in poverty and could not pay their debt, while others were prisoners of war.2 August 2019 marked four centuries since the first enslaved Africans arrived in colonial Jamestown, Virginia in 1619. 1

2

Michael Guacos, Slaves and Englishmen: Human Bondage in the Early Modern Atlantic World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014). Keith Hopkins, Conquerors and Slaves (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).

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The Virginia Slave Code of 1705 reduced certain men and women – Africans, mixed-race blacks, and Indians – and their unborn children to real estate. It read thus: All servants imported and brought into the Country without indenture, if said servants be Christians and of Christian parentage . . . ’till they shall become twenty-four years of age, and no longer, and above nineteen years of age, . . . who were not Christians in their native Country . . . shall be accounted and be slaves. All Negro, mulatto, and Indian slaves within this dominion . . . shall be held to be real estate. If any slave resists his master . . . correcting such slave and shall happen to be killed in such correction, the master shall be free of all punishment . . . as if such accident never happened.3

In addition to the Slave Code of 1705, the Virginia Negro Act of the same year authorized white servants to sue their masters but precluded blacks from doing so. Torture of enslaved blacks was also permitted by the Act, and if during that torture their lives were taken, the killers were presumed innocent. If colonial officials killed the black enslaved, the owners of the enslaved were paid for their loss.4 At the time of the Declaration of Independence in 1776, slavery was legal in the thirteen colonies. It would be 1775 before the new nation would form, and with its formation, enslavement would be further codified. Gerald Leonard and Saul Cornell are insightful: “In the end,” they wrote, “the delegates’ widely held attitudes against slavery were subordinated to their desire to achieve a Union that would firm up protections for property rights. So, they adopted only a modest provision that permitted a federal ban on the international slave trade in twenty years’ time.”5 The delegates thereby affirmed slaveholders’ property rights in human bondage. Even if the delegates were not themselves slave rich, they perpetuated a society where, for the next nine decades, men, women and children of African ancestry would become the property of other men, mostly white men, and their families. Historian Edward Baptist is instructive as well.

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General Assembly, William Waller Hening, ed., The Statutes at Large: Being a Collection of All the Laws of Virginia from the First Session of the Legislature, in the Year 1619, vol. 3 (Philadelphia: R. & W. & G. Bartow, 1823), 447–463. An Act concerning servants and slaves (1705) Primary Document, Encyclopedia Virginia. Available at encyclopediavirginia.org, accessed November 13, 2021. Gerald Leonard and Saul Cornell, The Partisan Republic: Democracy, Exclusion, and the Fall of the Founders’ Constitution, 1789s–1830s (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 20.

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But the Constitution was also built from the timber of another bargain. In this one, major southern and northern powerbrokers forced their more reluctant colleagues to consent to both the survival and the expansion of slavery. The first point of debate and compromise had been the issue of whether enslaved people should be counted in determining representation in the House. Representing Pennsylvania, Gouveneur Morris warned that this would encourage the slave trade from Africa, since the importing states would be rewarded with more influence in the national government. In the end, however, every northern state but one agreed that a slave could count as three-fifths of a person in allocating representation. The ThreeFifths Compromise affected not only the House. One result was the South’s dominion of the presidency over the next seventy years. Four of the first five presidents would be Virginia slaveholders. Eight of the first dozen owned people.6

At the time of the Revolutionary War, the largest enslaved populations in colonial America resided in Virginia and Maryland. After the Revolutionary War, states passed gradual and then immediate prohibitions against slavery. Thousands of blacks served on both the British and American sides of the war. Some of the enslaved were promised their freedom for wartime participation. For example, in 1775, John Murray, the Earl of Dunmore and the Royal Governor of Virginia, made such a promise to enslaved and indentured servants. Though fraught with danger, the prospect of achieving freedom through military service appealed to some enslaved Africans in this war and in the American Civil War to come. Some wartime victories, promises, and prospects for freedom were realized, others were not. The enslaved who fought with the British, the so-called Ethiopian Regiment, won the Battle at Kemps Landing but lost at the Battle of Great Bridge. Subsequently, many African warriors lost their lives to smallpox aboard the British ship headed back to Europe. The passage to the New World and the pathway back to Europe were both filled with death and disease.7 Slavery and its consequences would become a gross American landmark, one that disfigured the nation for centuries. The slave-holding states were made rich by this reprehensible institution, and the descendants of the enslaved were hugely disadvantaged by it. The United States had been an intemperate nation before the crucible of the transatlantic passage and the domestic slave trade – a regime soiled by the genocide and theft of Native Americans and Native American lands.

6 7

Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told, 9. James Corbett David, Dunmore’s New World (Charlottesville: The University of Virginia Press, 2015).

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It was and is also a nation buoyed by its independence from Britain, the formation of the constitutional republic and federalism, the reunification of the nation, the gradual evolution of near-universal citizenship, stable elections, and an enduring capacity to reinvent itself and its economy during periods of grave instability and uncertainty. The United States has been an intemperate but resilient nation. The US Constitution galvanized many interests, some of them contradictory. States’ rights and state sovereignty dance about the document. Individual liberty and due process rules are lodged there. Those who have interpreted it, those writing for the majority and minority, those who furthered and checked states’ rights, were aware that states’ rights could help usher in change or stasis. Quicker change is possible at the local than at the federal level. Virginia was the first to effect the transformation of black Africans from indentured servants to the enslaved. Furthermore, under English law, children had gained their status from their fathers rather than their mothers. The Virginia Hereditary Slavery Law of 1662 made a child of an enslaved mother a slave for life. Elite choices have had intergenerational and often dire consequences for families and communities with large shares of enslaved descendants. Virginia’s elite were also large plantation owners. Elite values and interests aligned to define and increase the volume of black economic and physical injury and pernicious intergenerational insult. The settlement of the New World, the US founding itself, and sectional and national economic growth all relied heavily on enslavement and agribusiness – sugar, tobacco, rice, hemp, and later cotton production – which depended on enslaved labor. Both transatlantic slavery and the domestic slave trade are best understood as forced and involuntary migrations of African peoples in the service of American capitalism and consolidation of the Industrial Revolution (which occurred later, at the end of the nineteenth century, in the US, rather than earlier, in the eighteenth century, in the UK). Cotton had powered the industrial revolution in Britain, New England, and Asia. It is instructive to imagine what would have happened if families of prominence throughout the South had joined the abolitionist movement. What if cousins John Marshall and Thomas Jefferson, native Virginian elites who owned slaves, had manumitted them and/or argued for their freedom in the courts of the land? Might the governing elites have found ways amid the fragility of the young Republic to end slavery in the thirteen colonies? Once enslavement was ensconced in the United States, the internal slave trade posed another violent injury to enslaved families. Virginia led the

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way in the sale of slaves, with New Orleans, Louisiana, and Natchez, Mississippi, as key stations for slave auctions. According to Leonard and Cornell, through a variety of means including court decisions, emancipation statutes, and manumission laws, the number of enslaved eventually fell in the states of Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut, then later in Pennsylvania (the focus of W. E. B. DuBois’s treatise, The Philadelphia Negro), New York, New Jersey, Virginia, Maryland, and Delaware.8 It fell in Virginia because cotton prices fell and tobacco became a major crop, requiring less intensive labor than cotton. With a surplus of slave labor, Virginia wanted to sell its property downstream in the Carolinas, Mississippi, Georgia, Alabama, and Louisiana. In 1800, the United States had an almost equal number of Free states as slave states; gradually, however, the number of Free states exceeded the number of slave states, with a preponderance of slave states being concentrated in the deep and border regions of the southern United States. Due in part to the fervor of abolitionists and the reliance of northern states on free labor, all northern states had abolished slavery by 1805. In 1808, the United States Congress prohibited the importation of slaves; however, the domestic slave trade, headquartered from Virginia, and the illegal international trade continued for several decades. In 1819, Congressman James Tallmadge, Jr., a New Yorker, proposed an amendment to Missouri’s statehood.9 The Tallmadge Amendment declared that no further slaves could be imported, and all children born after statehood would be free. The number of free and slave states was then equal. Southern congressmen wanted to maintain leverage and feared that a passage would tilt the scales away from their right to own the enslaved as property. The southern senators unified and gained the support of five northerners to defeat the measure. The measure had earlier passed the House by a vote of 87-76, with 66 southerners voting nay. Accommodating white supremacy was by then an institutional practice, no longer in need of a justification. White supremacy and the practices under it were their own justification. For several decades before the Civil War, many families, mostly white, were slave rich. In Mississippi, 47 percent of white families owned at least one slave, while, for example, 20 percent of Arkansas white families owned slaves. Slave-holding planters, and even those, like John Marshall, who were not planters, resolved the contradiction between advocating for 8 9

Leonard and Cornell, The Partisan Republic, 20. Annals of Congress, House of Representatives, 15th Congress, 2nd Session.

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equality and their dependence on slave labor. In a telling biography, Without Precedence, Chief Justice Marshall and His Times, Joel Richard Paul wrote soberly, “Slavery made it possible to regard all white males as equal, regardless of their social status. Tradesmen saw themselves as the social equals of wealthy plantation owners because they were both white. Unlike Europe, where class identity divided rich and poor and posed a constant threat to the social order, in eighteenth-century Virginia, the underclass was all black and mostly enslaved.”10 The 1832 Mississippi Constitution outlawed slave trading, but the law was ignored until 1845 when it expired. During the three decades that preceded the Civil War, Mississippi was among the wealthiest states in the United States, with the greatest wealth per capita being held in three of its eighty-two counties, including Issaquena, Madison, and Jefferson. Of these three counties, Madison, named after President James Madison, a county of 109,000 people, 57 percent of whom are white, remains among the wealthiest today. The labor of the enslaved, cotton plantations, oil wells, newspaper scions, and modern-day Nissan plants have been integral to its wealth. Fifty-five percent of the county’s enslaved population was owned by 148 slaveowners. In 1830, its slave population was 2,167, compared to 2,806 free people.11 In the nineteenth century, slave ownership was the most common route to wealth in the Upper and Lower South, Mississippi and Virginia included. From 1798–1820, over 200,000 enslaved Africans were transported by settlers or shipped by slave traders to the Mississippi Territory. The slave traders kept upwards of 600 slaves in slave pens in Natchez, Mississippi, pressed, like livestock awaiting slaughter. Mississippi was made rich and politically powerful by its slave holdings and made more tyrannical by its century-long run of anti-Emancipation political regimes, public policies, and practices. On the eve of the Civil War, more than half of Mississippi’s 800,000 population was comprised of the enslaved. Lincoln’s election as a national leader determined to restrict slavery’s spread mobilized a counter-Unionist majority. Sensing that, the Mississippi State Convention was called in 1861. Mississippi Governor John Pettus led a discussion with newly elected secessionists about whether to follow South Carolina and secede. 10

11

Joel Richard Paul, Without Precedence, Chief Justice Marshall and His Times (Riverhead Books, 2018), 46. Madison County, Mississippi Encyclopedia Staff, Mississippi Encyclopedia, available at http://mississippiencyclopedia.org/entries/madison, accessed July 16, 2022.

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Mississippi politicians went back and forth before its final secession vote, and in the early rounds, the Unionists won, led by US Senator Henry Foote. It was, however, the Kansas-Nebraska Act’s goal of limiting slavery’s expansion that angered Mississippians, as well as John Brown’s Raid in Virginia and rumors that the enslaved in Mississippi and elsewhere would protest violently, if needed, to win their freedom. Determined to maintain its slave holdings, economic supremacy, and white rule, Mississippi seceded from the Union on January 9, 1861. The governing class in Mississippi declared: “Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery – the greatest material interest of the world.”12 The 84-15 delegate vote to secede cast the dye for white male supremacy in Mississippi. The white Mississippi ruling elites and their primary governmental, economic, and educational institutions would henceforth engage in a multigenerational movement to reclaim the Old South. The Old South would not have prospered without federal deference to the Old South regime. The northern and southern economies benefitted from the taking of men, women, and children from their homes and families in Africa and then again through the disruption of their lives in the domestic slave trade that followed. Slaves in the South in 1860 were worth 69 billion dollars (in today’s currency) and 80 percent of the Gross Domestic Product. The slave-holding areas instituted a Congressional political regime to mobilize and stabilize their privileges. Intergenerational national and local regimes produced legislation to stabilize the young nation at the expense of the enslaved and their descendants. Earlier, the Three-Fifths Compromise of 1787, promulgated during the Constitutional Convention, guaranteed that the slave population would count three-fifths in the slave states, thereby bolstering the southern slave states’ political representation and their influence over the governing process for several generations. The Blacks were both property and nonsovereign people. The Missouri Compromise of 1820, a federal provision of Congress, mandated that all western territories north of Missouri’s southern border would be free soil. Maine was admitted to the Union as a free state at the same time as Missouri, thus maintaining a balance of free and slave states.13 The Missouri Compromise of 1820 had settled the question of 12

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Mississippi Secession Convention, January 9, 1861; and Confederate States of America – Mississippi Secession (2008), Yale Law School, The Avalon Project, Documents in Law, History and Diplomacy. Available at Avalon.lawyale.edu. Sixteenth Congress, Session 1, Chapter 22 (1820), p. 545.

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slavery’s extension for a time, but just as with the Louisiana Purchase, continued expansion, such as with the American-Mexican War, would raise anew the question of how states would enter the Union. Would they have the right to enter as free or slave states? As Richard Valley has shown in the context of Reconstruction, governing institutions and the rules promulgated matter (2004). Just how do democratic governments decide which rights to grant and which ones to withhold?14 Whose decision was it, whether the nation would tolerate slavery or its extension within its borders or abolish it? In 1854, the Kansas-Nebraska Act gave citizens of Kansas and Nebraska the sovereignty to decide whether to allow slavery within their borders. In effect, the Act, written by Senator Stephen A. Douglas, a Democrat from Illinois, passed the Congress and thereby divided the Whig party into a southern and northern wing. The southern Whigs eventually joined the Democratic Party, and the northern Whigs repurposed themselves into the Republican Party, where they were joined by Abraham Lincoln, some anti-slavery advocates, and some abolitionists. At six feet four inches tall, Abraham Lincoln towered over the diminutive Douglas, who stood at five feet four inches, and the contrasts between Lincoln and Douglas, his nemesis, did not end with their physical features, partisan affiliation, or their presentation of self. Both would earn the right to practice law, and each would leave that profession to enter national public life and influence the routes African Americans could legally take toward economic and political citizenship. Douglas and Lincoln’s paths crossed in part because their own journeys to stabilize their income and their careers led them away from their native states of Vermont and Kentucky, respectively, to Illinois. For decades, Americans had moved and would continue to move to find opportunities when the opportunities in their native states or family exigencies did not satisfy their ambition. The liberty to move across territories and state lines was integral to maximizing human development, familial thriving, and political ambition. For two hundred years and ten generations, liberty was denied to the enslaved and most of their descendants. Abraham Lincoln was born in 1809, a hundred years before Agnes Brown, the eldest sharecropper among the Sunflower Seven. A native Kentuckian, Lincoln was born of married but illiterate parents, whereas, his nemesis, Stephen Douglas, was the son of a physician. Like Stephen Douglas, early on, Lincoln experienced the death of one parent – his 14

Richard Valley, The Two Reconstructions: The Struggle for Black Enfranchisement (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).

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mother, a sibling, and the disappointments of his father as a small farmer in Kentucky. His father remarried. Lincoln found in his stepmom someone to support his ambitions for literacy and self-cultivation.15 Lincoln’s own marriage to Mary Todd heightened his sense of self. According to Daniel Howe, his marriage further distanced him from his family of origin. He would become the sixteenth president of the United States, whereas Agnes would labor as a sharecropper in a nation where an early educational opportunity for black children was far in the distance. Even with his complicated rise, Lincoln had become a lawyer and statesman. While lore has it that he was born poor in the frontier society in early nineteenthcentury Kentucky, his father was a farmer who, with time, owned and purchased a few hundred acres of land. It is true that land claim disputes set the family back a few times, but it is also true that many farmers had a hell of a time given the challenges of nature, especially disease, such as the Milk sickness that stole away Abraham Lincoln’s mother. The working-illiterate white farmers of the nineteenth century had a greater chance of leaving poverty behind than the Delta sharecroppers of the twentieth century. Some of the familial tracks laid by the white working-class farmer were similar to those of black farmers and the rural poor, others were starkly less so. What is clear is how significant it was in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries for the rural working-class to have exemplars; for Lincoln, it was Henry Clay16 and for Jack Harper, one of the Sunflower Seven, it was Henry Grady, and for Frederick Douglass, after he escaped to freedom, it was William Lloyd Garrison. In addition to exemplars, affirmation, a modicum of individual or familial ambition, freedom of movement and access to literacy, land, and capital, and freedom from lawlessness were and are key elements of upward familial economic and social mobility. Land, labor, and capital would always be just as crucial as parents, teachers, and pupils in the forward march of American families, communities, and the nation. Lincoln’s family moved in search of greater opportunity many times. He moved with his family to Indiana and modern-day Decatur, Illinois. As descendants of the enslaved, Agnes’s parents did not possess the freedom to move about the nation as they had wished and did not have the money to purchase land. Frederick Douglass, born one decade after Lincoln, was

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Daniel Howe, Making the American Self: Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 144. Ibid.

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moved from one master plantation to another, and unlike Lincoln’s movement, Douglass’s movement from place to place was involuntary. Unlike Lincoln, Douglass was enslaved, and had early exposure to violence, and was victimized by enslavement and barbarism. Like Lincoln, Douglass’s biological mother died when he was quite young. While Lincoln was not proud of his father, he knew him, had grown up with him, and was not violently or involuntarily separated from his biological family, as Douglass had been. Douglass lived seventy-eight years, twenty of them in bondage, nine on the run, as a fugitive from enslavement, and at forty-nine as an abolitionist, husband, father, and consequential orator.17 He escaped enslavement in 1838 and married Anna Murray in the same year. A year later, his first child, Rosetta, was born, and in that year, he became a licensed African Methodist Episcopal Zion minister. Two more kids were born, Louis Henry and Charles Remand, in 1840 and 1844, respectively. In 1845, Douglass was manumitted after a payment of $711.66 (in modern currency) and was sent to Hugh Auld, his former master, by English friends. Like Lincoln, Frederick Douglass’s pathways out of poverty led to public service and agitation for black freedom in an era fraught with racial hatred and violence. Lincoln was born free, white, and male in the early nineteenth century. He walked away from modest beginnings, while Frederick Douglass fought for his freedom and endured barbarous treatment. Lincoln, using his talents, discipline, and support from his stepmom and uncle, married well, escaped poverty, exercised his political ambition, and eventually prevailed as a consequential politician and leader of the United States, becoming its 16th Commander-in-Chief. On April 14, 1865, Lincoln was assassinated. His assassin, Marylander John Wilkes Booth, was a Confederate, proslavery, anti-Lincoln sympathizer.18 17 18

Library of Congress, Frederick Douglass Timeline. “The Murder of Mr. Lincoln,” The New York Times, April 21, 1865. Maryland, a border and slave state, did not vote to secede from the Union. White Marylanders served both in the Union and Confederate armies. Black Marylanders served in the Union army as well. The Maryland Constitution of 1864 abolished slavery; it preceded the 13th Amendment to the United States Constitution. In Maryland and elsewhere, emancipation did not mean equality of opportunity. The 1864 document contained a restrictive oath of allegiance to the Union, designed in part to keep slavery sympathizers from holding public office. Article 24 outlawed slavery. The Maryland constitution of the same period reapportioned the General Assembly based upon white inhabitants, only. In addition to Maryland, three other slave states remained in the Union: Delaware, Kentucky, and Missouri.

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Born at least five generations after Lincoln and Frederick Douglass, and one-and-a-half generations after the Civil War amendments, Josie and Agnes, African American female sharecroppers were victimized by the Mississippi Black Codes and the tyranny they codified. What is clear from a critical view of Lincoln’s life19 and the aspirations and lives of the Sunflower Seven is that each individual and family sought to develop their human potential. Lincoln did so in the pioneer society of the early nineteenth century. The Sunflower Seven attempted to do so in the early twentieth century in the racially segregated rural south. Legal racism held Agnes back, but Lincoln faced no such obstacle. He was not born, as was Franklin Delano Roosevelt, to an aristocratic lineage or into a family of patricians. As a small farmer and not a well-educated one, his father’s vulnerability to poverty was real, and the family had no cushion to buffer the fall into poverty. Abraham Lincoln was able, nonetheless, to achieve a level of economic mobility; he hitched his dreams to openings he could secure and knifed off his family. Knifing off is the process of self-cultivation in which one removes oneself from the family to advance.20 His ambitions included a desire to contribute to the commonwealth. He charted a personal plan of development, practiced his oratory, and consulted his conscience. He encountered opportunities and relationships that allowed him to push forward. Lincoln’s record suggests that he also understood that enslavement’s premise was immoral and politically untenable in a democratic nation – a unified republic. He knew that the enslaved had natural rights just as the non-enslaved did. Therefore, when enslavement threatened to grow across the nation after the 1820 Compromise, Lincoln recoiled at both the prospects for its extension and an ambiguous definition of citizen sovereignty that threatened to further divide an already fractured nation. Enslavement’s echoes had hobbled the life chances of six of the Sunflower Seven’s parents. Its continuation might have ensured that it would become a permanent, not merely long-lasting institution. Lincoln was alarmed by Stephen Douglas’s proposition of popular sovereignty, 19

20

David H. Donald, Lincoln (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995); Howe, Making the American Self. John Laub and Robert Sampson, Shared Beginnings, Divergent Lives, Delinquent Boys by Age 70 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003); Howard Brotz and Everett Wilson, “Characteristics of Military Society,” American Journal of Sociology, 51(5) (1946); Glen H. Elder, Jr., “The Life Course as Developmental Theory,” Child Development, 69(1) (February 1998): 1–12.

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known in this instance as the Kansas-Nebraska Act. He was staunchly opposed to the spread of slavery and thus opposed to the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Lincoln told a crowd in Peoria that Douglas was flatly wrong unless he assumed that the Negro was a mere hog. On October 16, 1854, Lincoln mused, “If the Negro is a man, why then my ancient faith teaches me that ‘all men are created equal;’ and that there can be no moral right in connection with one man’s making a slave of another.”21 Lincoln reentered the political fray. He was armed with a set of propositions about Congressional authority. He had clear ideas about the definition and contours of popular sovereignty. He knew intuitively what it meant to live in a free state and the impossibility of productive coexistence in a nation that is divided. More than that, he accepted the fight with the strength given to him by the American creed that “all men are created equal, and all are endowed with inalienable rights, such as life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” Facing a political adversary, Lincoln’s three-hour speech in Peoria, Illinois in 1854, put forth his own understanding of the American Creed, his religious faith, and belief in natural rights, and addressed several arguments about the humanity of southern whites and blacks and the dire consequences of extending slavery into new territories: (1) the continuation of the slave trade could easily overwhelm the populations of whites as well as increase greater demand for selling freedmen, women, and children into bondage; (2) slavery’s extension was analogous to a denial of the humanity of the Negro; and (3) most southerners knew that there was humanity in the Negro and that there were few natural-born tyrants in the population, black or white, north or south. As proof, he said, southerners had joined the North in 1820 in agreeing that those who sold free black men, women, and children into slavery should be severely punished. He expounded further in the following passage: And yet again; there are in the United States and territories, including the District of Columbia, 433,643 free blacks. At $500 per head, they are worth over two hundred million dollars. How come this vast amount of property to be running about without owners? We do not see free horses or free cattle running at large. How is this? All these free blacks are the descendants of slaves, or have been slaves themselves, and they would be slaves now, but for SOMETHING which has operated on their white owners, inducing them, at vast pecuniary sacrifices, to liberate them. What is that SOMETHING? Is there any mistaking it? In all these cases it is your sense of justice, and human sympathy, continually telling you, that

21

Lincoln’s Peoria Speech, October 16, 1854.

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the poor Negro has some natural right to himself – that those who deny it, and make mere merchandise of him, deserve kickings, contempt and death.

Lincoln’s appeal to whites’ sense of justice was foundational to the creation of political democracy in the United States and reflective of his desire to end slavery’s spread. He resuscitated his career. His yearnings would be reflected in proceedings in courts and legislatures throughout the nation. Lincoln lost his Senate contest to Stephen Douglas in 1858, one year after the Dred Scott decision, in which the Supreme Court ruled that Congress had no right to abolish slavery in the territories. White Mississippians in favor of enslavement rejoiced and were diligent in their pursuit of the state’s rights – the right to maintain enslavement and freedom from federal government interference. In addition, the Supreme Court had ruled in the 1857 Dred Scott decision that Negroes could not become citizens, no matter where they lived in the US, in free or slave states. Lincoln persisted. This ruling gave Mississippi and other slaveholding states great comfort. Native Marylander Roger Brooke Taney had replaced Chief Justice John Marshall following Marshall’s death in 1835. Appointed by Andrew Jackson, Taney was a defender of federal constitutional authority. Like most of his southern colleagues on the bench, he, too, was pro-slavery. Dred Scott signified the power of the south and mobilized northerners to fight for a different version of the United States. Taney had relinquished the slaves he had inherited prior to his service in the Supreme Court, but the tyranny of slavery gained a foothold, not in his private actions, but in his public role. As a private citizen, Taney appeared to believe in slavery as a moral blight on the nation and favored its gradual defeat, primarily by the states. What he believed in principle and when cannot be known. What is known is how consequential his decision was in Dred Scott and the perennial complexity inherent in maintaining constitutional faith and US Supreme legitimacy. Taney’s majority opinion held that the 5th Amendment protected slave owners’ rights to their property. The first Catholic to serve as Chief Justice, Taney wrote: “We think they are not, and that they are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word ‘citizens’ in the constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens of the United States.”22

22

19 Howard (1857), p. 393.

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He then added that descendants of Africans who were imported into this country “had no rights or privileges but such as those who held the power and the government might choose to grant them.”23 Dred Scott, a Virginian, was born into slavery in 1799. He would reach adulthood, as would Agnes, Josie, Williams, and Clementine’s parents, ninety-five years later, unable to read and write. A century later, trying to stay employed, Josie and Agnes moved several times. In the prior century, Dred Scott moved with his owners, the Blows and the Emersons. Perennial sharecroppers, Josie and Agnes moved about alone, in search of a favorable labor contract, safety, and the vagaries of the plantations. Agnes and Josie were born and would remain in a formerly unfree locale; the economic, political, and educational aftermath of that unfreedom was self-evident in their lifetimes. Dred Scott’s treks with his owners led him to Free states and territories and back into slave states. It was clear, though, that Dred Scott and his wife, Harriet Robinson, and their children, Eliza and Lizzie, wanted the freedom to pursue intergenerational upward economic mobility and more. The Scotts of the mid-1800s wanted to rise to the middle-class. Their legal appeal was designed to clear a pathway toward that trek, but not guarantee one. It was the freedom to pursue political and economic citizenship and security that the Scotts, as well as the Landfairs and Browns in the 1900s, wanted the government to protect. Scott eventually won his political freedom; it was a freedom given to him by his white childhood friends, the sons of Peter Blow, who was by then deceased. Scott died from tuberculosis five months after freedom. The pursuit of individual and familial political freedom and economic security required courage, chance, and intrepidness. Proponents willing to fight and others imbued with a sense of justice and fairness lined the pathways leading to black citizenship. Africans in search of American citizenship and the rights and protections of citizenship would traverse the winding and occluded legal tunnels for a century to come, sometimes losing and at other times prevailing. Sometimes the rulings would offer hope, but just as often, not so much.24 Even when hope was offered or judicial decisions were narrowly structured, delay and recalcitrance would often blight hope as judges in the lower courts practiced counter-resistance. Mississippi state judges of that

23 24

Ibid. Richard Bardolph, The Civil Rights Record: Black Americans and the Law, 1849–1970 (New York: Crowell, 1970).

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period and many federal district court judges were adherents of delay and obfuscation, committed to something other than equal justice for all.25 Lincoln scoffed at the Dred Scott decision, arguing that it was deleterious to stopping the spread of slavery. Lincoln expressed sentiments that would foreground and reenergize anti-slavery and pro-slavery advocates as well as non-extension proponents in his candidacy for the presidency in 1860. However, in his 1858 Illinois convention speech upon his acceptance of the Senate Republican nomination, he had given his keenest argument for the abolishment of slavery and against disunion; echoing the gospel of Matthews and St. Augustine, among others, Lincoln asserted that a house divided against itself cannot stand. Institutional actors, from the US Supreme Court, Congress, and the Presidency, positioned themselves for the emerging battles, and the ultimate union and enslavement contestation – the Civil War and its aftermath. Stephen Douglas believed that Dred Scott could be obviated, and states could decide for themselves whether to be free or slave states; he annoyed southern Democrats, who referred to his view as “Freeport Heresy” and responded with the passage of slave codes, splitting the Democratic Party and contributing to Stephen Douglas’s loss in the 1860 election. Years later, during the Civil War itself, Stephen Douglas eventually joined the Union cause. It was, nonetheless, clear that most southern national politicians wanted protections for slavery’s persistence. By 1860, Mississippi reported 437,000 enslaved, up considerably from 33,000, forty years earlier.26 For example, in the East Central Mississippi Hill County of Scott, by 1860, there were 2,959 enslaved and 5,188 free people, while in the lightly populated Mississippi Delta County of Sunflower, the primary site of this study, for the same period, there were 754 enslaved and 348 free people. In Sunflower, the enslaved constituted the majority, and in another, Scott, whites did. Over time, however, Sunflower’s overall population grew exponentially, with blacks in the disproportionate majority. The Dred Scott decision meant that African Americans, free or enslaved, could not be citizens within the meaning of the constitution and, therefore, 25

26

Jack Peltason, Fifty-Eight Lonely Men: Southern Federal Judges and School Desegregation (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1961); Kenneth Vines and Herbert Jacobs, Studies in Judicial Politics (New Orleans: Tulane University Press, 1962); Joel Friedman, Champion of Civil Rights: Judge John Minor Wisdom (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2009); Neal Devins and Lawrence Baum, The Company They Keep: How Partisan Divisions Came to the Supreme Court (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019). Sydnor, Slavery in Mississippi.

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could not sue in federal court and that the federal government had no power to regulate slavery in the federal territories acquired after the creation of the United States.27 Joel Richard Paul wrote cogently, “Not only did the Court uphold slavery, in this case, it struck down a federal statute as unconstitutional in order to do so. It had done so only once, in the consequential 1803 decision in Marbury v. Madison.”28 In Marbury, John Marshall and his court struck down Section 13 of the Judiciary Act of 1789. The Marshall Court established the preeminence of the judiciary in deciding whether laws repugnant to the constitution can or cannot stand. The founders who envisioned the United States Supreme Court as an independent judiciary, lodging in Article III, the affirmation that “judicial power is invested in one Supreme Court . . . enabled the Court to exercise power over the lower courts and establish the supremacy of the Contracts Clause.”29 Marbury’s legacy and Article III have been incalculably important in the centuries-long march to rid the nation of enslavement’s legacies and vestiges. The Court, though, has been Janus-faced, sometimes narrowly interpreting a statute or a constitutional provision in keeping with an egalitarian commonwealth and at other times joining in the nation’s legal racism (as in Dred Scott). As intimated earlier, the face of the federal judiciary during this period was white and male. African American judges have been appointed in greater numbers to the federal judiciary since the Jimmy Carter administration, but their decisions are reversed more frequently than non-minority federal district court judges.30 The national legislative and executive branches would be needed to push through the enforcement of judicial decisions, especially when governing elites and other like-minded communities resisted the decisions. In times of racial stress and tension, as well as partisan fracture, the legitimacy of the highest court in the nation – the US Supreme Court – and the rest of the judiciary remains, as it always has been, in question. In his testimony before a Congressional Committee in 1970, the late Julian Bond summed the situation up nicely when he remarked, “Blacks have never had friends on the Court, but they always felt there was justice

27

28 30

Paul, Without Precedence; See also Paul Finkelman, Supreme Injustice: Slavery in the Nation’s Highest Court (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018). According to Finkelman, Marshall owned at least 150 slaves. 29 Paul, Without Precedence, 258. Leonard and Cornell, The Partisan Republic, 23. Maya Sen, “Is Justice Really Blind,” Journal of Legal Studies, 44 (January 2015): 187–229.

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and decency on those courts.”31 Bond was referencing mostly the Fifth Circuit, one of thirteen federal courts of appeal in the United States, in which Mississippi has a southern and northern wing. The Fifth Circuit has seventeen active judges and ten senior judges; of that number, eight were appointed by presidents William Clinton (3), Barack Obama (3), and Jimmy Carter (2). Ronald Reagan, George Herbert Walker Bush, George W. Bush, and Donald Trump appointed nineteen others. As of this writing, there are six Trump appointees on the Fifth Circuit. The Fifth Circuit was formed in 1891, just as Mississippi white rule was being reconsolidated. It was a crucial deliberative body during the late 1950s and mid-1960s, when four out of the five judges, led ably by Chief Judge Elbert Tuttle, authored rulings that advanced the Civil Rights Movement. Judge John Minor Wisdom, for whom the Fifth Circuit Court building in Louisiana is named, John Brown, and Richard Rives completed the “Fifth Circuit Four.”32 Joel William Friedman demonstrated how judge, jurist, and legal scholar Wisdom, born a child of privilege in segregated and highly stratified New Orleans, championed the citizenship of African Americans. The Eisenhower appointee ordered the desegregation of the University of Mississippi, clearing the way for blacks to serve on juries, vote, and run for elected office in single-member districts.33 Some judges, risking their lives and judicial advancement, exercised judicial decency on the trial bench as well. As the United States Supreme Court Associate Justice William Brennan wrote, in recalling Judge Skelly Wright’s achievements on the federal bench, “constitutions, statutes, and precedents rarely speak unambiguously.”34 Wright was a Kennedy appointee to the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia (1962–1986), and a Truman appointee to the US District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana (1949–1962). He intertwined consumer rights and protections using contract laws and supported tenant rights. He ordered the desegregation of New Orleans parish public schools. In 1967, in Hobson v. Hansen, he ordered an end to de facto segregation in the DC schools.35

31 32

33

34

35

Julian Bond, Senate Select Committee on Equal Educational Opportunity, 1970. Jack Bass, Unlikely Heroes (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1990); Friedman, Champion of Civil Rights. Joel Friedman, Champion of Civil Rights: Judge John Minor Wisdom (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2013). William J. Brennan, Patricia Wald, Richard Parker, and Bill Monroe, “In Memoriam: J. Skelly Wright,” Harvard Law Review, 102(2) (1988): 361. Hobson v. Hansen 269 F. Supp. 401 (DDC. 1967).

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Wright paid a price for the decency and courage of his jurisprudence. The Citizens’ Council and the US Louisiana senators rebuked him. Wright also authored judicial decisions in Hohri v. United States, a lawsuit by Japanese Americans seeking reparations for World War II internment,36 and Bundy v. Jackson, a Title VII claim for sexual harassment. He did not win or convince most of his brethren in all instances. For example, he dissented from an injunction that a three-judge panel issued to stop the publication of the Pentagon Papers. His dissent was later vindicated by the United States Supreme Court. But a century before the rulings of the Fifth Circuit Four and other trial court judges such as Skelly Wright, deference to states in the matter of dispossession of black men, women, and children was obtained. Many judicial decisions had meant black persons could be held as the property of other humans and could therefore not be equally protected. Without equal protection and due process, black adults and their children, and those Japanese internees and their descendants, could be treated like “the mules of the world.”37 Given the long shadow of their involuntary servitude, most of the formerly enslaved must have wondered if the Reconstruction’s promise (between 1863 and 1877) would stall. Some, like the Byrds from Alabama and Ebb Harper from Scott County, imagined the great promise of the Delta frontier. Others ruminated about the perils and legacies of enslavement. What would be next and how would they fight for full citizenship opportunities? From Negro Hill in Boston, BedfordStuyvesant, and Harlem in New York City to the Mississippi Delta, where at least one-third of all blacks in Mississippi lived by 1890, blacks were searching for an actionable political, cultural, and economic freedom.38

36

37

38

Hohri v. United States 782 F.2d 227 (1986). The plaintiffs were nineteen former Japanese internees and their descendants. They sought declaratory relief and compensation for their injuries. The “Takings” clause of the 5th Amendment provides that no person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law, nor shall private property be taken for public use without just compensation. Which court, the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, or the district court, had original jurisdiction and which exceptions (in this case to claims made, in whole or in part, under the Tucker Act or the Federal Tort Claims Act), would prevail? Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (Philadelphia: J. P. Lippincott, 1937). Edward Pessen, “How Different from Each Other Were the Antebellum North and South?” The American Historical Review, 85 (December 1980): 1131–1134; Gavin Wright, The Political Economy of the Cotton South (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978), 25–26, 38–39; Lee Soltow, Men and Wealth in the United States, 1850–1870 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975).

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As a wartime leader, President Lincoln was imbued with a sense of national purpose, some latent racism, great urgency, and dexterous political instincts. He served with a group of Republicans who had labored hard to unmake the Slave Republic, some because they abhorred slavery and others because slavery held down the whites as well as the black poor. These players set in motion the legal and political infrastructure and mechanisms to press toward the erasure of slavery in some, if not all, of its guises. Although he abhorred slavery, it was national unification that Lincoln most wanted. In August 1862, he famously wrote to the New York Tribune: “If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that.”39 Just two generations later, Agnes’s childhood exposure to limited political and economic mobility would be tied in part to the sizeable post-war policy decisions – both made and not made – of the governing elites in the north and south, at the local, state, and federal levels. Centuries-long national and state legislation and judicial decisions prolonged the legacy of enslavement in the rural agricultural Mississippi Delta. Horace Greeley wrote an open letter to President Lincoln, which appeared in the New York Tribune on August 20, 1862. He opened his letter by referring to Lincoln as the first servant of the Republic. In it, he implored Lincoln to execute the laws and cease deference to Rebel Slavery, and to enforce the Confiscation Act – the seizure of Rebel property and the freeing of all slaves who fought with or worked for the Confederate military services had further obligations to their masters. In The New York Times, Lincoln responded to Greeley’s unambiguous claim that he was dithering and indecisive. At the time Lincoln was composing his reply to Greeley, the Emancipation Proclamation had been drafted. Lincoln, on the advice of his closest counsel, withheld it, waiting instead for the propitious moment of a battle victory in Antietam to release it. Just thirty days after his reply to Greeley, Lincoln announced the military provision, the Emancipation Proclamation, which freed thousands of slaves in Confederate territories. Freeing the enslaved was subordinate to winning the war and unifying the nation. Moreover, Lincoln knew that the scope of the Emancipation Proclamation was not broad enough to unmake the Slave Republic and

39

Lincoln’s Letter to Horace Greeley, August 22, 1862.

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unify the nation. For one, it only pertained to the rebellious states (the eleven, then at war against the Union and portions of those states not already under Union authority). And for another, it was not congressional legislation. Proclamations are highly symbolic documents; the Declaration of Independence and the Emancipation Proclamation were as potent as religious faith itself. Freedom from unwanted aggression was the demand. Considering this only applied to states that had seceded from the Union and exempted parts of the Confederacy that had already come under Northern control, the Emancipation Proclamation’s freedom promise was tethered to a Union victory. At least 200,000 blacks joined the Union army, as hundreds of their forebears had joined the Revolutionary War to free the colonies from Britain almost nine decades earlier. Two centuries of black men’s and their families’ participation in wars to secure their own freedom and the nation’s autonomy and wellbeing foretold the service black men would render as patriots in the future. The Proclamation enjoined the freed to abstain from violence, unless in self-defense, and recommended that in cases where free labor was allowed, the newly freed “labor faithfully for reasonable wages.” None of the Sunflower Seven were born then, but fifty years later, as child laborers, their toil would characterize their time on earth as it had characterized the toil of their earlier freed forebears, deprived of the promise of “reasonable wages.” Proclamations, congressional statutes, and constitutional amendments are not self-enforcing. The Emancipation Proclamation was issued to help secure a Union victory. It was a call to military action. Africans in America responded to the call. Substantive emancipation, however, would require affirmative legislative action in Congress and fair judicial interpretation and enforcement throughout the federal and state judicial system and the regulatory and legislative administrative state. Eighteen sixty-four was an election year and members of the Congress, the House of Representatives, refused to support an amendment banning slavery, whereas the Senate passed it by the two-thirds required. The war effort was going well, and with Lincoln’s re-election more assured, Lincoln threw himself into the legislative fray, leaned into his insights and immense power as President, and eventually won the support needed to pass the 13th Amendment in the House of Representatives.40

40

Eric Foner, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery (New York: Basic Books, 2010).

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At the national level, the Radical Republicans served in Congress between 1854 and 1877, and chief among them were Benjamin Wade Davis (who had entered the US Senate as a Whig), Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania, Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, John Fremont of California, and their ally, Ulysses Grant. The Radical Republicans led the Reconstruction efforts and fought valiantly to sustain them. They were called radicals because they believed in the complete eradication of slavery, and many also believed in women’s suffrage. They quarreled with and fought against moderate Republicans, including Abraham Lincoln, antiabolitionists, and anti-Reconstructionists, including the Democratic Party and southern members of Congress. The Radical Republicans held sway. They secured victories for the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments of the Constitution. In less than 24 hours, Lincoln approved a Joint Resolution of Congress, submitting it to the states for ratification. Lincoln was assassinated eight months before the necessary number of states ratified the amendment in December 1865. It was the 13th Amendment rather than the Emancipation Proclamation that abolished slavery and involuntary servitude (except as a punishment for a crime). The amendment did not extend protections to convicted criminals. In places like Mississippi, this opening ushered in the Black Codes of 1865–1866, criminalizing beggars, jugglers, drunkards, night walkers, and idle and disorderly people. The Black Codes coincided with southern state conventions, the first held after the Civil War. President Andrew Johnson, a pro-southern sympathizer, only permitted whites to vote for state convention delegates. A year later, when Johnson was impeached and nearly convicted, Reconstruction began with a cessation of the Black Codes. Mississippi would not ratify the 13th Amendment because state lawmakers wanted the federal government to compensate Mississippi for the value of its freed persons. For reasons inexplicable, it was 1993 before Mississippi ratified the 13th Amendment. To permit representation in the federal government, Congress used its enforcement power, promulgated in Section 2 of the 13th Amendment, to require Confederate states to ratify the 13th and 14th Amendments. The institution of slavery itself had to be knocked off from its institutional anchors. A new edifice – the structural engineering of a substantive departure from legal racial subjugation – was needed. White governing elites in Mississippi were not willing to dismantle white male supremacy, however. That was not the work to which the nation was committed. In 1861, three years before Reconstruction and four years after Dred Scott, Mississippi was the second state to secede from the Union and,

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in 1870, seven years before Reconstruction’s end, it was among the last to return. Placed under military control, Mississippi wrote a new constitution in 1869, which granted African Americans the right to vote. At the national level, the Radical Republicans fought fearlessly against Lincoln’s vice-president and successor, Andrew Johnson, coming within one vote of impeaching him for vetoing several congressional acts designed to favor the newly enslaved. Although Johnson required secessionists to uphold the abolition of slavery, swear loyalty to the Union, and repay their war debt, the 1866 Civil Rights Act was passed only over Johnson’s veto. This act established citizenship without regard to race, color, or previous condition of servitude; permitted newly freed blacks the right to enforce contracts, sue and be sued, provide evidence in court, inherit, purchase or sell property; provided that persons who denied these rights to former slaves would be fined not more than a thousand dollars or imprisoned for one year, or both; and issued the authority to prosecute cases to US district attorneys, marshals and deputy marshals, and the Supreme Court. The 1866 law sought to define citizenship but, in doing so, did not include the right to vote.41 In effect, the 1866 Civil Rights Act sought to protect the newly freed and thereby nullify the Black Codes – economic provisions put in place to restore white rule and black economic dependency in the states of the Confederacy. According to Randall Kennedy, Johnson characterized the Act of 1866 as illicitly race-sensitive as it contained, in his view, a “distinction of race . . . made to operate in favor of the colored and against the white race.”42 President Andrew Johnson’s decision to restore lands confiscated by the Union to their pre-war Confederate owners reduced prospects for improving the quality and pace of economic progress, especially black land ownership. The Fourteenth Amendment established citizenship, overturning the Dred Scott decision. The Fifteenth Amendment established voting rights for the once-enslaved. These legal protections offered guardrails but did not stabilize the legal and political pathways that blacks would pursue toward economic freedom. For the newly freed, Johnson’s maneuvering and the inability of the Radical Republicans to seize the presidency was a kind of whiplash, foregrounding the nation’s ambivalence toward the opportunities afforded to African Americans by full citizenship. 41

42

Civil Rights Act of 1866, Chapter XXXI – An act to protect all persons in the United States in their Civil Rights and furnish the Means of their Vindication. Randall Kennedy, For Discrimination: Race, Affirmative Action and the Law (New York: Pantheon, 2013), 23.

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In addition to organized and sometimes state-sanctioned violence, the election of 1877, between Rutherford B. Hayes and Samuel Tilden, abandoned African American citizenship in a deal cut between Democrats and Republicans.43 The states of Louisiana and South Carolina were patrolled by federal troops –what some have termed a federal occupation to protect African Americans. These same two states, along with Florida, were sites of electoral confusion. This confusion meant that the US could not declare the presidency to one or the other candidate, though Tilden from New York had won the popular vote by over 250,000. The fifteen-member electoral commission established to settle the dispute contained five members of the United States Supreme Court. On a party-line vote, the Commission voted to seat Hayes in exchange for stopping the federal presence in Louisiana and South Carolina and conceding home rule to the States of the Confederacy. These two consequential concessions doomed prospects for African American economic mobility and citizenship in the nineteenth century and stopped dead an extension of Reconstruction or shared governance and the possibility of multi-racial prosperity. There was more to come that would counter the Emancipation Proclamation and the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, both in national and local contexts. Hayes, the candidate for whom thousands of black men in the South voted, turned backward to mollify Louisiana and South Carolina and cast blacks back under the tyranny of the white minority in Mississippi, freeing the Klan and mob violence to erase Reconstruction and disrupt the Civil War amendments. Reconstruction had two phases and lasted almost twelve years, from 1865 to 1877, before the Hayes-Tilden Compromise was reached. During Reconstruction in Mississippi, at least 220 African Americans won elected offices, including two US senators. White male supremacy had been wounded, but it was not dead after the Civil War. In fact, the federal pursuit of substantive African American citizenship galvanized the poor and wealthy whites and gave rise to organized mob violence and the Ku Klux Klan as an extra-governmental force to beat back African American male citizenship. African American men in Mississippi were pummeled for making speeches and attempting to sue whites for “not knowing their stations

43

Michael Holt, By One Vote: The Disputed Presidential Election of 1876 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2009); Comer Vann Woodward, Reunion and Reaction: The Compromise of 1877 and the End of Reconstruction (New York: Doubleday, 2002).

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and places.” In places, across the state from Meridian in the east to Vicksburg in the west, and Aberdeen on the northeast border, next to Alabama, the state was awash in white mob violence. Amid this scourge, John Roy Lynch concluded that the Civil War had been fought in vain.44 Lynch, a member of the Mississippi legislature, became Speaker of the House at twenty-four and won a seat in the 43rd and 44th US Congresses. African Americans’ striving for citizenship constituted a bridge too far for their white local counterparts. Sadly, when requested to do so by the embattled Mississippi-Yankee Governor, Adelbert Ames, President Ulysses S. Grant refused to send troops to restore order and reinstate durable pathways toward economic and political mobility. Lynch pleaded with US House members to help African Americans secure the ballot. His Democratic Party colleagues in the 46th Congress eventually succeeded in redrawing his district and squeezing out as many Republican voters as possible. He campaigned fearlessly but lost in the next election. In 1880, Lynch presided over the Republican Convention. As a national legislator, he convinced his colleagues to invest in banks where blacks had deposits that fell into hard times during the war; he advocated for the restoration of orphanages and schools and to educate the poor. During the Reconstruction era, pathways toward economic mobility led up and steeply down. In the face of violence and political tyranny, African Americans’ faith in the American Creed did not wane. Black Mississippians voted in large numbers for free black men and mulattos; progressive and moderate whites, including a few former slave owners, formed a coalition of carpetbaggers, scalawags, and Republicans. Their actions, and the economic progress of black farming families like the Byrds of Sunflower, pointed to the possibility of a biracial political society, or at the very least, farmers able to eke out a living, if not make a profit from the land. African Americans held on to their individual and collective resilience and the hope that a robust, egalitarian society could outlast local lawlessness, recalcitrance, and delay. The 1865–1877 Reconstruction era was created by the federal government to restore the South just after the Civil War and Lincoln’s assassination. Now, enabled by federal legislation, African Americans mobilized their votes and their voices to exercise political citizenship, educate themselves, pursue political ambition and substantive, not merely symbolic,

44

John Roy Lynch, The Facts of Reconstruction (New York: Neale, 1913).

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representation, propose policies, run and win seats in local, state, and national legislatures. During the early Reconstruction period, Andrew Johnson was a foe to their efforts, but Northerners joined to rebuff Johnson’s efforts to reinstate white political supremacy. A Congress then occupied by Republicans gave new life to Reconstruction’s promise. The majority African American population did not defer to the white male supremacy planters during the Reconstruction period. Often, they sought a biracial coalition to push forward their legal, political, economic, and social agendas. Non-native Mississippians and white native Republicans sometimes joined them to pursue common goals. The Equal Rights and Union Leagues were organized throughout the region.45 The short-lived existence of some leagues had in part to do with the extension of the franchise to black males, a move that diluted the collective agency of blacks, sometimes along gendered lines. There was also the question of whether to keep the leagues solidly black or permit white influence, membership, and leadership. The Equal Rights and Union Leagues were precursors to the NAACP. In fact, DuBois had argued strenuously for a biracial league. League leaders did not advance DuBois’s interests. Meanwhile, notwithstanding the Radical Republicans and the “better whites” who knew that enslavement had been wrong, the storied economic and political interests of those who had ruled African Americans for a century continued. The Freedman’s Bureau was established to help restore the devastated southern economy and to help provide basic food and literacy security (public schools) for the poor of both races. Located in the War Department, the Bureau faced sizeable resistance, especially from the white planters, who wanted to restore African American economic and political servitude – a state of economic dependency and political powerlessness. Mississippians elected blacks to state legislative and congressional offices during Reconstruction. In addition to John Roy Lynch, Mississippi elected two other black US Congressmen, Hiram Revels and Blanche K. Bruce, and scores of local and state legislative officials. Revels and Bruce were highly educated when compared to the majority of African Americans in the 1860s and 1870s. In 1870, 20 percent of the American adult population was

45

Janette Thomas Greenwood, Bittersweet Legacy: The Black and White Better Classes in Charlotte, 1850–1910 (Raleigh: The University of North Carolina Press, 2000); Phillip Foner and George Walker, eds., Proceedings of the Black National and State Conventions, 1865–1900 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986). W. E. B. DuBois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880 (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1935).

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illiterate, and 80 percent of blacks were illiterate.46 By 1880, 30 percent of blacks were enrolled in school; that rate remained unchanged for the next twenty years. Revels attended a school run by a free black woman in North Carolina and later enrolled in seminaries in Indiana and Ohio.47 Blanche K. Bruce was the only formerly enslaved person to serve in the United States Senate. He had been born into slavery in Virginia. He learned to read and write from his white stepbrother, William Perkinson, and later attended Oberlin College, in Ohio, for three years before dropping out. And it was during Reconstruction that several public colleges were founded in Mississippi. Four black private educational colleges were established from 1877–1887; these colleges had as their mission, the upliftment of blacks through advanced educational opportunities. They would serve an instrumental role in lifting black rural families from poverty. The scale and quality of their offerings would matter in helping to sustain quality pathways to less joblessness and adequate wages. As private schools, they were not financially sound. At least the public schools that existed had theoretical legal protection by and from the state. A century later, these colleges and others that followed, would face extinction as the winnowing of colleges, black, Catholic, and single-gendered, would have to answer tough questions, mostly about the value proposition and whether the investment in college would pay off. Whether states value the quality of public education is itself hugely important. Edwards Mayes’s seminal History of Education in Mississippi, written in 1899, reported that for the school year 1888–1889, 15,000 fewer white school children were enrolled in free schools than were eligible to enroll, and 62,000 fewer black children were enrolled than should have been for the period. More startling, however, was that while white children in the first grade had 2,469 teachers, black children only had 254. Not only were more blacks not enrolled, a sizeable number of them were not attending, but of those in the critical first grade, the teacher-student ratio was alarmingly high. The average teacher-student ratio in the early 1900s was 1:37; for black students, it was at least twice that number.48 As many as 488 private schools were in existence in Mississippi in 1889, and of that 46

47

48

Thomas D. Snyder, ed., 120 Years of American Education: A Statistical Portrait (Washington, DC: US Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, 1993). Julius Thompson, “Hiram Rhodes Revels, 1827–1901: A Biography,” PhD Dissertation (Princeton University, 1973), 36–37; Julius Thompson, “A Reappraisal,” The Journal of Negro History, 79 (Summer 1994): 294. Snyder, 120 Years of American Education.

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number, 80 of them were black.49 The use of 16th section leases50 helped in the management of building new schools, and the poll tax was useful in that regard as well. The 1890 Mississippi Constitution contained education in Article VIII. It was similar to the education provision of 1868, except that the 1890 document included a provision for the separation of the races in public education and an increased role for state government in the financing of public schools. As stated previously, it did not contain a right to quality public education, nor did it include a basis for revenue to support public education, other than property and poll taxes. The contrivance of separate education by race destined some to better educational starts than others. Eighty years later, when testifying before the Senate Select Committee on the provision of equal educational opportunity, Julian Bond of Georgia cited the absence of the same for what he termed an “integrated quality education,” a lacuna that hobbled any prospect of growing the human capacities of the poor of all races, ethnic groups, and religions.51 Bond had urged a national statement of commitment to quality-integrated education and signaled that courts, students, their parents, and organizations that believed in public education would fight vigorously and aggressively to achieve this goal. Julian Bond’s father had filed a lawsuit to desegregate schools in Pennsylvania and to erase the deficiencies of compensatory education in 1946, when Julian was six years old. His father, Horace Mann Bond, a University of Chicago PhD, was president at Lincoln University, a historically black university in Lincoln, Pennsylvania. As with Horace Mann Bond, another two generations would be born as segregated and unequal educational opportunities persisted, especially in the Deep South. As a Georgia state legislator in 1970, one year after the Supreme Court ended “all deliberate speed,” Julian Bond argued before the Senate Select Committee, chaired by Walter Mondale, that presidential leadership was

49

50

51

Edward Mayes, The History of Education in Mississippi (Historical Association of Mississippi, Washington DC, and Government Printing Office). Available at quod.lib .umich.edu, accessed December 25, 2021. Mississippi owns 640,000 acres of trust lands over which the Mississippi Secretary of State serves as supervising trustee. These lands were originally established for the use and benefit of public schools. These lands are advertised and bids are taken for the leases. Any number of uses can be approved, including recreation, agriculture, residential, and industrial. Bond, Senate Select Committee on Equal Educational Opportunity, 930–940.

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needed. “If this is not Richard Nixon’s goal – then it cannot be the country’s goal; if it is not the country’s goal, it will never be done.”52 He knew that public education had to be in the sightline of the national government for equitably shared futures to take hold. Bond framed the goal as the fight for quality integrated education, a battle that his father had waged for him three decades earlier. And a century earlier, in 1840, little Sarah Roberts’s father, Benjamin, had filed a lawsuit to desegregate public schools in Boston, arguing that his daughter was attending an underfunded common all-black school, far from her home, while there was a white school much closer. Statute 1845, c. 214 provided that “any child, unlawfully excluded from public school instruction in this commonwealth, shall recover damages therefore against the city or town by which such public instruction is supported.” Charles Sumner and Robert Morris, a black attorney, argued that in addition to the distance from her home, Sarah suffered trauma from being required to go to a substandard school. They did not prevail. The Massachusetts Supreme Court decided against Roberts and for Boston, ruling that the law mandating segregation was constitutional. Undaunted, with Sumner’s help, Sarah’s father took the matter to the state legislature, where the Commonwealth banned segregated schools in 1855. But there, as in Mississippi, for generations to come, black children’s access to quality public education would require seismic rethinking and revision. National and state elites for a century denied black children access to early exposure to quality education. Bond was there in 1970 to tell the Nixon administration to do better and to do so urgently. The Civil Rights Act of 1964, Title VI, discontinued funds to force compliance, formalizing a federal governmental retreat. Recalcitrant districts with large shares of black students were given leniency even as such districts exercised “insufficient dispatch” towards desegregation and formed private academies in considerable numbers. Mississippi taxpayer funds were used to support segregation academies. Bolden reports that by 1970 Mississippi had over 200 private academies, 183 more than had existed just one year before, prior to Alexander v. Holmes.53

52 53

Ibid., 961–962. 396 US 19’ and Alexander v. Holmes ended all deliberate speed, an edict of Brown II. No further delay was acceptable, including “freedom of choice,” a measure the United States District Court for the Southern District of Mississippi continued to support in 1969. Under “freedom of choice” parents could decide which school their children attended.

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By 1970, over 10,000 mostly white private schools had filed for an Internal Revenue Service (IRS) exemption; thirteen were in the Mississippi Delta. The IRS reasoned that these schools could not receive an exemption if they operated on a segregated basis. Claims were filed against this reasoning, and Green v. Kentucky (1970) made such exemptions unconstitutional. At least eleven of the thirteen private schools in the Delta were implicated in this ruling. Still, the Nixon Justice Department argued that recognizing academies was an “act of benevolent neutrality.” Bond evinced too much optimism when he concluded that “the process of putting an end to what formerly were deliberately segregated schools has been long and difficult. The job is largely done, but not yet completed.” Many of the public schools with large shares of blacks in Mississippi are failing spectacularly in educating impoverished children.54 In 1890, the African American population stood at 7,488,676 and 90 percent lived in the rural, violent, illiterate, and white terror-filled south. Four factors led to greater levels of poverty and a delayed multigenerational rise toward political, economic, and social mobility: (1) the deskilling of African Americans after slavery, (2) their greater vulnerability to mob violence, (3) disenfranchisement schemes and (4) federal abandonment of their protection. All these factors are intertwined. In 1890, 1891, and 1892, there were respectively, 85, 113, and 161 African Americans lynched in the United States, mostly in the rural south. Where blacks were concentrated, mass violence was accompanied by disenfranchisement and tensions regarding labor relations and upward economic mobility. Black voter disenfranchisement was rampant. In 1890, the Mississippi Plan was enacted and included literacy and understanding tests to disenfranchise African Americans. Throughout the decade and beyond, several states, including South Carolina (1895), Louisiana (1898), North Carolina (1900), Alabama (1901), Virginia (1901), Georgia (1908), and Oklahoma (1910), followed suit. These provisions resulted in a 92 percent decrease in African American voter registration across the states of the Confederacy. South Carolina crowned its disenfranchisement provision by electing populist Benjamin Tillman, a self-avowed white supremacist, in 1890.55 It is against these terror-filled social, political, and economic movements 54

55

Sarah Kleiner, “Mississippi Education Department Takes over Yazoo City Schools,” The Center for Public Integrity, April 13, 2019. The Center’s October 2018 report found that none of Mississippi public schools with 75 percent or more black students were ranked “A” or “B” on the state’s accountability scale, while none of the districts with 75 percent or more white students were ranked below a “C.” Library of Congress, Digital Collection (1850–1925).

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built to reconstruct legal racism that African American and white rural poor families in Mississippi have had to navigate and negotiate familial and occupational pathways toward progress. As shown in Chapter 2, the convict leasing system worked in harmony to constrain the 13th Amendment to the US Constitution. Some of the “convicts” had committed serious crimes such as murder and grand and felony larceny; however, many had not. Most were in prison for petty offenses. These violations included punishment for renting land in rural areas, rather than in cities and towns; for gathering in public places in large numbers with freedmen or whites. Blacks found guilty of vagrancy were hired out by the sheriff or were arrested. The second coming of the Black Codes allowed the probate courts to take custody of children – to apprentice them to their old masters if their parents could not support them.56 Freedom was withheld. After freedom, since most had little income security or valuable material social networks, their choices were restricted – they could work in place and take a chance on an ethical employer, suffer labor exploitation and indignities, and remain vulnerable to homelessness and malnourishment, or leave for more opportunity. Though landowners could not force freedmen, freedwomen, and children to work, they, the landowners, notwithstanding their burdens as producers had the upper hand. Even plantation owners often had to borrow money to make the crop and pay the laborers; boll weevils, fevers, floods, and recessions wreaked havoc on more than 30 percent of owners. Reconstruction began after a four-year Civil War in which at least 80,000 white men from Mississippi served in the Confederate Army, and at least 15,000 died, and thousands more were wounded. The wealth, Mississippi and the Mississippi Delta held in human property was eliminated by the outcome of the war. After the war, Mississippi lost its status as a wealthy state and became one of the poorest. The state of Mississippi sought vengeance for the defeat of the South in the Civil War.57 The subsequent post-Emancipation labor exploitation of Mississippi sharecroppers and domestics was extractive and resulted in ill-gotten capital. Sharecropping contracts, the Black Codes, the 1890 constitution, and mob violence were all arrayed against

56

57

Christopher Waldrep, “Substituting Law for the Lash: Emancipation and the Legal Formalism, in a Mississippi County Court,” The Journal of American History, 82(4) (March 1996). Accessed August 11, 2021. David Goldfield, Still Fighting the Civil War: The American South and Southern History (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2002).

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them in their march toward upward economic mobility and greater intergenerational economic security. Freedom exposed a national government that had turned away in exhaustion or expediency or both from those it had once enslaved especially the descendants who stayed in place in the Deep South. Phillip Leigh framed it thus: A century after the war in 1960, eight of the ten states with the lowest per capita income were former Confederate states. Similarly, 150 years after the war started only one Southern state, Virginia, ranked within the top ten in per capita adjusted gross income as reported to the Internal Revenue Service whereas five of the bottom ten in 2011 were Confederate states. The classic example is Mississippi, which ranked number one in 1860 per capita wealth, but was dead last at fiftieth in 2011 per capita income. The depths of post-Civil War Southern poverty and its duration were far greater, longer, and more multiracial than is commonly realized. It took eighty-five years for the South’s per capita income to regain its below average 1860 percentile ranking.58

Immediately after enslavement, the failure to divest the nation of separate and unequal public education, racial lawlessness, and discrimination built deeper tracks of intergenerational poverty. The period after the Civil War was one that could have moved the South toward a multiracial vision of itself rather than resuming a white racial or racially blind vision of itself. There was an emergency: the federal government wanted desperately to hold the fragile post-Civil War Union together. For African Americans, there was yet another exigency, with absent federal protection, African Americans, recently freed, with and without land, were terrorized in Mississippi. Where would they find protection from state and non-state lawlessness? Reconstruction halted in 1877 when Rutherford B. Hayes withdrew federal troops from the South. Mob violence and official state and national actions had compelled obedience to the tyrannical white southern rule. The Mississippi Constitution of 1868 abolished slavery and restored Mississippi to the Union on February 23, 1870. Among its provisions, it established a “uniform system of free schools”59 as well as an elected state 58

59

Phillip Leigh, Lee’s Lost Dispatch and Other Civil War Controversies (Pennsylvania: Westholme Publishing, 2015); Leigh, “The Politics and Economics of Reconstruction.” Available at Discerning History.com. Whether or not Mississippi is operating a uniform system of free schools is the subject of a lawsuit, which the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled on forward. The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) is spearheading the 2017-initiated litigation. For a timeline of the filing and the events giving rise to it, available at splcenter.org, see Mississippi’s Broken

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superintendent of schools with a four-year term and a board of education composed of a secretary of state, attorney general, and the superintendent of education. Each county would have a superintendent of schools appointed by the state board with senate approval, but the legislature could make this local officer elective. A common school fund was established, which consisted of a levy, the poll tax. The Mississippi legislature was also authorized to take advantage of an offer of land by Congress for agricultural colleges. Originally excluded from the land grant provisions of the Morrill Act of 1862, black colleges and universities were integral to the second land grant Act, which was issued by Congress on August 30, 1890. However, neither the state nor federal government codified quality education as a constitutional provision. The 1868 Mississippi Constitution provided an expanded Bill of Rights. Property rights for women, married, widowed, or single were provided. A franchise provision (for all male inhabitants at least twenty-one years of age, residents of the state for six months, and of the county for one month) was created. Despite this new constitution and its provisions, after the Civil War, at least four decades of state violence and state-produced labor exploitation lay in wait for the enslaved descendant. The limitations of the constitutional amendments notwithstanding, the Radical Republicans gave generations of enslaved descendants something with which to fight the edifice of slavery, legal segregation, and modern discrimination. The 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the US Constitution were not perfect, but they provided some spine and gave some virtue to a constitutional document that spineless men had interpreted to uphold white supremacy. The Mississippi Constitution of 1890, in contrast, facilitated the persistence of the Old South. It constituted white Mississippi’s counter roadmap to Emancipation, the Civil War amendments, and Reconstruction itself. I call the 1890 document the “Erasure Constitution.” The constitutional convention was historic, but the document issuing therefrom propelled a seven-decades-long movement to design and enforce a stillborn African

Education Promise – A Timeline. The education provision for Mississippi is found in Article 8, Sections 201 and 206 of the constitution. See also Robert Moses, Ernesto Cortes, Jr., Theresa Perry, and Lisa Delpit, Quality Education Is a Constitutional Right: Creating a Grassroots Movement to Transform Schools (Boston: Beacon Press, 2008); see also Sanford Levinson, Constitutional Faith (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011) for a critique of the limitations and perils of constitutional faith as a civic religion. It is useful to ask when and how the US Supreme Court and other appellate courts undermine the life chances of the “outsiders” and when they will leave a space for their economic, political, and educational inclusion, if not their progressive advancement as citizens.

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American political, economic, and social freedom. It ushered in the erasure of black empowerment from the history of Mississippi and sought to deny future black empowerment; in other words, its goal was to ensure white political supremacy rather than the birth of an egalitarian society. As discussed above, the goals were many, but a special focus was placed on limiting black voter participation through the literacy test (Section 244) and the poll tax (Section 243). Section 207 provided for separate public schools for “white” and “colored” children. The annual poll tax was an economic disadvantage for the impoverished masses of blacks. The poll tax had to be paid two years prior to the election.60 The literacy test required that the barely literate to illiterate people, black and white, had to read and interpret a section of the Mississippi Constitution to the registrar (the county clerk who, alone, determined the correctness of the interpretation). For good measure, the Grandfather Clause was erected to permit anyone whose grandfather was eligible to vote in Mississippi prior to the Civil War to do so. These legal constructs and mob violence disenfranchised black men and stymied the aspirations of black families. The 1890 Constitution signaled the continuation of the pre-Emancipation South. Only one delegate to the Constitutional Convention, Isaiah T. Montgomery, the founder of an all-black Delta region town, Mound Bayou, was African American. In addition to focusing on limiting black voter participation through the literacy test (Section 244) and the poll tax (Section 243), the document partially funded the common school fund for at least four months annually. Section 207 provided for separate public schools for “white” and “colored” children. It also gave the legislature the right to separate black and white convicts. Significantly, the document forbade whites and African Americans from intermarriage. As had the federal Civil Rights Act of 1866, the 1890 Mississippi constitution formally prohibited both slavery and involuntary servitude, except for punishment of crime. Article III declared citizens of the United States who were residents in Mississippi to be citizens of the state. Contrary to the Black Codes, the 1890 Constitution outlawed debt imprisonment. The document protected the property rights of married women, extended the governor’s term from two to four years, and based future apportionment of the legislature on qualified voters. Just a decade later, fewer than 2 percent of African Americans in Mississippi were registered to vote. In addition, intimidation, violence, 60

The 24th Amendment to the United States Constitution ended the payment of poll taxes in federal elections.

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and racial discrimination resulted in the loss of the ballot for African American men. At times, state constitutional provisions intersected with national judicial rulings, signaling again that the nation, not just Mississippi, was not a land open to fair opportunity and virtuous African American citizenship. Undeterred, lawyers and litigants would press onward to achieve basic citizenship rights, basic protections, and freedoms. There were 715 black attorneys in the United States in the early 1900s; Mississippi had twentytwo, and three of them included Willis Mollison, Cornelius Jones, and John Roy Lynch.61 Cornelius Jones Jr., was known for advancing claims against the 1890 Mississippi Constitution and actions arising from the 1890 Constitution. Jones was the lone lawyer for Henry Williams in a case arising from Sunflower’s neighboring Washington County, Mississippi. Williams had been indicted for murder by an all-white jury, convicted by an all-white petit jury, and sentenced to be hanged. Jones argued before the US Supreme Court; he did not prevail.62 Another legacy of the 1890 Constitution is Article V, Sections 140, 141, and 143. For over a century, Article V permitted the winner in statewide races to be decided by both a majority of the popular votes cast and a majority of votes cast (with a plurality) in the House of Representatives. In this two-step process, members of the House of Representatives could vote their conscience or whatever else motivated them, and could counter, if they wished, the votes cast by voters in their district. This law made winning statewide office more arduous than it needed to be. Its formulation in the 1890 Constitution certainly meant a steeper hill for black candidates to climb in winning the state office. Undermining the edifice of the 1890 document has meant lawsuits, public referenda, and legislative action – all needed. So far, it has not meant calling for a fifth constitutional 61

62

1900 Census Special Reports: Occupations in the Twelfth Census States and Territories (Table 41). Volney Riser, Defying Disenfranchisement, Black Voting Rights Activism in the Jim Crow South, 1890–1908 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2010). Cornelius Jones, Jr., also assisted Callie Guy House, an early reparations pioneer, and laundress who coorganized with Isaiah Dickerson the National Ex-Slave Mutual Relief, Bounty and Pension Association. Local chapters were established and funded through dues. The dues were used to pay for funeral costs and to provide relief for the ill and disabled. Mostly, the organization advocated for congressional legislation in favor of reparations. See Mary Frances Berry, “Taking the United States to Court: Callie House and the 1915 Cotton Tax Reparations Litigation,” The Journal of African American History, 103(1–2) (Winter/ Spring 2018). See also Ashley D. Farmer, “The Black Woman Who Launched the Modern Fight for Reparations,” Washington Post, June 24, 2019.

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convention. Under the current arrangement, the Old South regime resonates even though its voice is slowly cracking.63 Unlike others, African Americans had to make perfect choices, stay out of the way of lawlessness and legal racism, and protect their children and their children’s future. If they faltered, they would pay dearly as they lived in a nation and certainly in a region where the laws were made to imprison them to reinstate their bondage. Tension and terror build. The violence took the poor and the not-so-poor. All were vulnerable. Even if a few whites participated in mob violence, the masses condoned it. Mass condemnation of mob violence would arise only when such violence could be deterred by severe and public punishment. After Reconstruction, political paradox and physical terror combined to re-establish Mississippi as a segregated and unequal society, where governing elites and their constituents were determined to hold the life chances of blacks in abeyance. Established in Tennessee in 1866, Klansmen, some local white officials among them, soon organized in Mississippi and engaged in murder campaigns against African Americans. Streets of peaceful protest in Meridian, Mississippi, near Scott County, became sites for “blood baths.”64 From Mississippi to South Carolina, lawyers fighting with a sense of justice and for full black citizenship rights and opportunities (cause lawyers), blacks and whites, southerners and non-southerners, agitated for change and fought valiantly. As Riser has vividly shown, they mounted cases against the disfranchisement constitutions and their provisions, including the poll tax, literacy clause, the Grandfather Clause, and juror exclusion, to bring down the southern regime’s counter to the 15th Amendment to the US Constitution.65 In 1870, when the 15th Amendment passed Congress, blacks newly enfranchised had very few black grandfathers that had been able to vote; certainly Josie and Agnes had none. In 1890, the Mississippi Constitution invoked the Grandfather Clause, effectively disfranchising most blacks, whereas the poll tax hit hardest both poor blacks and whites.

63

64

65

On November 3, 2020, the Mississippi election Section 140 – election of the governor – was amended. It now reads that the person receiving a majority of votes cast shall be elected. If no person receives a majority, then a run-off election shall be held under procedures consistent with the general laws of the legislature. Nicholas Lemann, Redemption, The Last Battle of the Civil War (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2007); Jason Phillips, Reconstruction, Mississippi Encyclopedia. Accessed September 26, 2021. Volney Riser, Defying Disfranchisement: Black Voting Rights Activism in the Jim Crow South, 1890–1908 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2010).

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Citizenship was exclusive. To become a juror, one had to be a registered voter. Unable to prove that certain provisions of the Constitution were discriminatory, in fact – in theory – lawyer Cornelius Jones did not prevail in his argument that the Washington County jury that convicted his client, Henry Williams, was constituted under the discriminatory provisions of the 1890 Constitution in violation of the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment. Associate Justice Joseph McKenna, writing for a unanimous Supreme Court – on which John Marshall Harlan, the lone dissenter in the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision, sat and wrote in part: “The constitution of Mississippi and its statutes do not on their face discriminate between the races, and it has not been shown that their actual administration was evil; only that evil was possible under them.”66 A law that gives the option to administrators to discriminate (to show systemic bias against blacks) is not in violation of the 14th Amendment, the 1898 Supreme Court deduced, inscrutably. A landmark US Supreme Court decision, Plessy v. Ferguson, had been rendered in 1896. Homer Plessy challenged the law allowing for segregated railroad cars. The Plessy decision held that separate but equal was constitutional.67 In what Harvey Fireside has called one of the earliest “sit-ins”68 in United States history, Homer Plessy, shortly after he was seated, told the railroad conductor that he was a “colored man.” A detective was called to the railroad car and Homer Plessy was booked and arraigned.69 Plessy’s case would not be the first or last test case to reach the courts. Homer Adolph Plessy sought the privileges and immunities of citizenship, which is the right to travel freely on a train within the state of Louisiana without regard to his “race.” Black women attending to white children had a right to sit in the white cars but otherwise, blacks were barred from doing so. Were so-called equal but separate cars, or unequal and separate schools, constitutional? Ex-slaveholder, Associate Justice Harlan dissented with the decision of the majority, writing, “Such legislation as that here in question, is inconsistent not only with that equality of rights which pertains to

66 68

69

67 US 213 (1898). Plessy v. Ferguson 163 US 537 (1896). In Harvey Fireside, Plessy v Ferguson: Separate but Equal? (New Jersey: Enslow, 1977), 7, Fireside reports that the Citizens’ Committee was to test the constitutionality of the Separate Car Law organized on September 1, 1891, in New Orleans. The Committee consisted of mostly Creoles who are mixed-race descendants whose parents had been brought as slaves from Africa and later legally freed by their white captors and given a good education, usually in France. Plessy was believed to have been a Creole. “The issue with testing was whether or a state could legally impose segregation. Did such a law violate the basic human rights guaranteed in the US Constitution?” (p. 12). Ibid.

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citizenship, National and State, but with the personal liberty enjoyed by everyone within the United States.”70 He continued, “I am of the opinion that the statute of Louisiana is inconsistent with the personal liberty of citizens, black and white, in that State, and hostile to both the spirit and letter of the Constitution of the United States.” Throughout US history, elites have voted and rendered decisions both contrary to and sometimes consistent with an egalitarian trajectory. The federal constitution is capacious enough to lean in both directions at any moment in time. Constitutional edicts such as Henry Williams v. Mississippi71 – in which the United States Supreme Court upheld the poll tax, literacy tests, the Grandfather Clause, and the presidential promises of Woodrow Wilson and the Spanish American War (1898) – were all in play as the twentieth century opened. What this morass meant for the black family, for children born in the early part of the new century, was ominous. The years between 1870 and 1910 had been some of the toughest in terms of regime violence, black impoverishment and the rise and fall of black political empowerment, or biracial politics. At the national level, there had been also a comparable rise and fall of the Radical Republicans and the emergence of the southern Democrats and their efforts to counter Reconstruction and the 15th Amendment. When Agnes and Josie were born in 1909 and 1914, respectively, white Mississippi Democrats were maneuvering to keep the electorate as white and as small as possible. The various newspapers across the state were in apparent alliance with that cause, including their hometown EnterpriseTocsin. If more local newspapermen and women had mobilized to serve as independent checks on mischievous political institutions, as did Ida B. Wells, an investigative journalist, activist, native Mississippian, and anti-lynching crusader in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as did the editors of the Vicksburg Post in early twentieth-century Mississippi, the Chicago Defender throughout the twentieth century, and as did Hazel Brannon Smith72 in Holmes County, Mississippi in the 1960s, then tension with an intemperate state regime and national government might have grown healthier and been more civil. Newspapers and the media could 70 72

71 Plessy v. Ferguson 163 US 537 (1896). 170 US 213 (1898). Smith won a Pulitzer in 1964 for her editorials in her newspaper, the Lexington Advertiser. Although she initially opposed racial integration, she stood firm against the White Citizens’ Council in Holmes County, Mississippi, eventually collaborating well with African American leaders to bring down the Sovereignty Commission and the Council. See John Whalen, Maverick among the Magnolias: Hazel Brannon Smith Story (Philadelphia: Xlibris Corporation, 2000).

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then have served more broadly, as a laboratory of reason, argumentation, and debate. Then those who cared about public opinion would have had less free rein to discard the rule of law for tyrannical governance, the lash, and the lynch law. All the legal organizations formed to give substance to Josie’s and Agnes’s citizenship were up against great odds. Going for it alone was not possible against a landlord, a vitriolic sheriff, the mob, the courts, or the administrative state. Mollison demonstrated the efficacy of forming alliances as he fought to make the judges and justices independent arbiters rather than endorsers of the status quo. The newly formed NAACP’s mission was to agitate for the legal rights of black people who were then three generations removed from slavery, but who, like Josie and Agnes, were unfree citizens. Agnes would tell her son, Andrew, decades later, to be obedient, because he had nothing with which to fight. Frequently enough in American political life, black voters would not be afforded candidates who evinced a sense of justice. In this circumstance, choosing from among equally unsuitable candidates or unsuitable policy proposals was an illusory strategic exercise, a lullaby, to quote Abraham Lincoln. For example, as the second decade of the twentieth century opened, the presidential election of 1912 offered four choices – symbolic and substantive ones – among them the Democratic, Bull Moose, Socialist, and the Republican (party of Lincoln) – as candidates. The Socialist Democratic Party believed that working-class interests would always be preempted by the major two-party system. The Socialist Democratic Party counted 113,000 dues-paying members in 1912. Mississippians counted 146 among that membership, in contrast to Alabama residents at 377 and Louisiana at 550.73 In the presidential elections of 1912, 1920, and 1940, 1,719, 1,566, and 186 votes were cast, respectively, in Mississippi for the Socialist Party. The great majority of those votes in each of the three years were from the Mississippi Hills, in East Central Mississippi, with Leake County casting 102 votes in 1912, rather than in majority-black counties such as Sunflower, where, for example, 3 votes were cast for Socialist Eugene Debs in 1912. Those candidates most preferred by large shares of blacks had no chance of winning, and those black communities from the Hills to 73

James Gregory, Socialist Party Votes by Counties and States, 1904–1948. Civil Rights and Labor History Consortium, University of Washington, Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research, United States Historical Election Returns (1824–1968), Ann Arbor, Michigan.

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the Mississippi Delta to the Piney Woods, and beyond, wishing to vote in large numbers were restricted from doing so. Native southerner Woodrow Wilson unseated William Howard Taft and defeated Theodore Roosevelt, who had run on the Bull Moose ticket (Progressive Party ticket). Debs, the Democratic Socialist, won not a single electoral vote but captured 6 percent of the national popular vote. Wilson won the support of the NAACP leader and scholar, W. E. B. DuBois. He also won 42 percent of the popular vote and carried 40 of the nation’s 48 states. Taft, a Lincoln Republican, was persona non grata for the white voting majority in Mississippi. Still, though largely disenfranchised in Mississippi, blacks persisted. They abhorred regime and lawlessness and they knew that low-income workers needed protection from state interests. They exited Mississippi, they staged protests, and those who could vote did so, in their interests, casting 5 percent of the ballots in Mississippi in 1912 for Eugene Debs and Theodore Roosevelt rather than Wilson and Taft. The late political scientist Jean Smith, writing deftly about Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s rise to national politics, wrote in relation to the election of 1912, that while Wilson had campaigned on the new freedom banner, “the new freedom was for whites only.”74 As President at Princeton, Wilson had denied blacks’ admission, as President of the United States, he had segregated the federal workforce, “told Sambo jokes in Cabinet” and determined that his actions “were in the Negro’s interests and had moreover been divinely ordained.”75 This had not been the first nor would it be the last time that white national and state leaders instantiated religion as a rationale for the maltreatment of African Americans and created and engaged caricatures meant to dehumanize African Americans. His accomplishments in domestic policy were worthy ones, his failures to lead, however, on anti-lynching and for a desegregated federal workforce, was a bloody stain on his leadership, the nation, and the locales following his example. During the first two decades of the twentieth century, neither the state of Mississippi nor presidents of the United States or Congressional leaders marched with diligence toward the fulfillment of Negro equality and full citizenship. The Republican Party was in shambles and, though the national Democratic Party wanted black votes, those Congressional southerners who had worked before and since Reconstruction to disenfranchise blacks ruled. At home in Mississippi, poor whites were fed a diet of racial

74

Smith, FDR, 99.

75

Ibid., 100.

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hatred and class animosity as white supremacist politicians, such as James Vardaman, Sr. and Theodore Bilbo (who managed Vardaman’s US Senate campaign, in which he was elected by popular rather than legislative vote; the first after the passage of the 17th Amendment), eclipsed patricians such as Pat Harrison (who died in office in June 1941), and opportunistic Delta planters such as Leroy Percy. According to the late political scientist, Jean Smith, “The Mississippi Democratic party was really two parties, one patrician, the other redneck, and Harrison and Bilbo represented opposing factions.”76 When terror was at its zenith, at the turn of the nineteenth century, a socalled race war erupted in the Hill County of Scott in 1898 and lasted for two days, killing at least nine black men who fought to protect another black man who had an argument with a white employer and allegedly killed a sheriff.77 The Scott murders are more fully contextualized in Chapter 12. African Americans wanted wages that paid and freedom from mob violence. They wanted the exercise of the rule of law. Lacking that, many voted with their feet. They left Mississippi to escape illiteracy, mob violence, and wage theft. In the early twentieth century, particularly during the Great Migration periods between 1910–1930 and 1941–1970, six million African Americans left the tyrannical southern United States in search of greater political, economic, and social mobility – going north, east, and west, toward lands, mostly cities, of promise. They left in waves going to places where freedom was a possibility, not merely a dream. African Americans left for Milwaukee, Chicago, Gary, Indiana, New York City, Philadelphia, and Kansas. Hattie Isaac-Byrd and Isaac Byrd, Sr. both left, separately, their Delta hometowns of Mound Bayou and Springhill, headed to Gary and Chicago, respectively, looking for substantive freedom. Others, like Lonnie Byrd, David Matthews, and Jack Harper enlisted and served in the Korean War. The local rural table was set for the post-war lives of the Sunflower Seven. Sharecropping, the crop-lien system, and subsistence farming developed as central threads in the lives of the poor and aspiring agrarians, enduring even after slavery had ended. Campaigns were waged to hobble the emancipation of freedmen, freedwomen, and their children, to restore as much of the status quo as possible to the pre-Civil War Deep South.

76

Ibid., 392.

77

Los Angeles Herald, October 25, 1898.

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Matthew Holden, the former President of the American Political Science Association and a native of Bolivar County, Mississippi, left the Delta with his family and headed for Chicago when he was eight years old, as the third decade of the twentieth century waned. He opined recently, “No one will ever know the United States without trying to study the history of its racial and economic politics. No one will achieve that without studying Mississippi.”78 He continued, “The culture of Bolivar County (next door to Sunflower) was defined by the belief that slavery was a positive good. Settlers, often with claims of upper class Eastern and even English aristocratic connections, exercised control.” Holden remarked in subsequent conversations that his grandparents and parents, Estelle and Matthew Holden Sr., wanted the “chillum” to get a good education and know complete freedom; freedom meant having access to the rule of law, finding work and identifying prospects for and gaining access to better schooling, income security, and housing. More than anything else, it meant the ability to protect one’s family from poverty and death at the hands of the mob and/or the local/state regime. The Holdens, Halester, Mamma Rose, John and Catherine’s siblings, and 74,000 blacks left Mississippi between 1910 and 1950. In places such as Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Indianapolis, Indiana, and Chicago, Illinois, they and their children looked for a living wage, homeownership, and decent quality schools for their children’s children. Those who stayed and those who left looked for and some found the safety of home and the freedom to distance themselves from the tyranny they all had known. They wanted to create a new future; that work began at home in their interactions with their children and in their children’s capacities to exercise freedom unburdened by the past. In the decades to come, Milwaukee would deteriorate as a land of promise, with school and housing desegregation, unemployment, and community violence as barriers to intergenerational economic mobility.79 The Great Migration, in which all of Catherine and most of John Coleman’s siblings participated, was both an individual family/kinship journey and a collective protest movement in the pursuit of citizenship unburdened by economic and political tyranny. For those who stayed

78 79

Correspondence from Matthew Holden, Jr. to Mary Coleman, January 30, 2019. Marc Levine, “The State of Black Milwaukee in National Perspective: Racial Inequality in the Nation’s 50 Largest Metropolitan Areas in 65 Charts and Tables,” Center for Economic Development Publications, 56 (2020). Available at the UW-Milwaukee Digital Commons, accessed January 23, 2022.

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home in Mississippi, an outward accommodation to caste did not mean inward acceptance of its premises. African American accommodation to caste norms was a collective and individual performance meant to reduce the ubiquity of regime violence and increase employment, any kind of employment. Material impoverishment had existed in the first half of the twentieth century in the United States because federal and state policies, corporate, market, local and international forces, and academic institutions did not jointly and aggressively address its amelioration. In the latter half of the century, voting rights, access to a high-quality education, equal pay for comparable work, and access to quality health care would be urgently needed to combat the inequalities and inequities grounded in two centuries before enslavement and legal segregation. In families without healthy states of well-being, proportionate community investments, a living wage system, and the rule of law, rural children would be born into inordinate disadvantage. High parental distress and community neglect would mount, sometimes intergenerationally across the Mississippi Delta, the rural south, and all other places where large shares of blacks exist. High resiliency families (rural and urban working and middle-class) and pro-black citizenship institutions and communities would strive to also find their way through the thicket of the tyrannical past, serving as arsenals in the pathways lined with remnants of both white supremacy and a sense of justice.

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PART II

FAMILY INTERIORITY AND ECONOMIC MOBILITY PATHWAYS

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Perennial Sharecroppers

As long as the incomes of the various classes of contemporary society remain beyond the reach of scientific inquiry, there can be no hope of producing a useful economic and social history. Thomas Piketty

Of the fifty-nine siblings of the Sunflower Seven, thirty-four lived on plantations with their parents and worked in the cotton fields, as did their parents. In all cases, these families looked for better opportunities as their movement within the county (to and from different plantations) and to cities outside the South, as their work ethic attested, and their struggles to complete high school were made evident. Those who stayed home in Sunflower wanted enduring familial love and political, social, economic, and educational opportunities for themselves and their children. Not all sharecropping families showed public courage, but as shown below, in the private realm of family, tenacity was abundant. The sharecropping family of Matthew and Mae Bertha Carter of Drew, Mississippi, and their thirteen children, met intimidation instead. The children were the first to desegregate the white schools in Drew and experience the hardships attendant upon being the first to voluntarily attend the formerly all-white schools. The Carters’ crop was plowed over by the overseer on the T. E. Pemble Plantation, and wages earned were withheld. Their home was riddled with bullets. The children were humiliated by their teachers and fellow students at their new school. They graduated and excelled, especially in mathematics. Seven of the eight pioneer Carter children earned college degrees from the University of Mississippi. Under threat of losing federal funds, resistant white school districts in Mississippi offered “freedom of choice” opportunities. Freedom of choice meant that parents could voluntarily send their children to desegregated schools if they wished to do so. 151

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Mae Berta had completed six grades in a plantation church school, and Matthew had finished three. The Carter children signed on largely because they wanted to attend school full-time and not lose ground in the splitsession offered to black child sharecroppers. Silver Rights beautifully chronicles the Carters’ journey.1 Like Josie and Agnes, Mae Carter’s contemporaries, Mae Carter was a woman of deep faith. Like Fannie Lou Hamer, she was also a profoundly courageous woman, pushed along by eight little children who wanted a better education than their five older siblings and parents had attained. The Carters persisted through the public hell of it all. The Browns and Landfairs, whose lives are chronicled below, witnessed their own private hells and more.

PERENNIAL SHARECROPPER FAMILIES God Kept Me in Good Health Long Enough to Pay for this House and See my Children Grown

Though their identities extend beyond this designation, sharecropper families are defined as families in which the children and their parents lived on plantations and worked for a share of the wages they and their parents earned. Agnes and Josie were mothers and wives, churchgoers, and seekers of housing stability. As croppers, they did not own several homes they lived in or on the lands they worked. Their economic precariousness is what defined them in the history of the Delta; however, what defines them in this examination is their fullness as human beings – their experiences and desires, successes and failures as wives, parents, workers, and members of the community. It is nonetheless true that their familial experiences and desires cannot be understood except in the context of racial history, mass violence, and economic exploitation. This constellation of the Sunflower Seven permits three vistas from which to gather economic mobility knowledge – from those of perennial croppers, quasi-croppers, and their better-positioned birth peers, Harper, and Byrd. I reasoned that their biographies, their interior lives, public choices, voices, and intertwined journeys in Sunflower offer useful insights about how intergenerational poverty exits and upward/downward mobility takes form and is sustained. Scholars, families, and policymakers could learn something useful about the pace of intergenerational poverty exits and the circumstances influencing ascent, descent, and stalled economic 1

Curry, Silver Rights.

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mobility pathways at such a critical time in the nation’s racial and economic history. In turn, that learning could inform contemporary poverty exits in a time of narrow affluence and rampant economic unfairness for those on the lower rungs. Unlike their kin, who moved to cities outside the South in search of lands of promise, the Sunflower Seven family members stayed behind or moved away and returned in the 1950s. They were members of an oppressed group living in an unprincipled place with despicable ruling state and local elites. Here, among the Sunflower Seven, were ordinary people who knew that racial discrimination, racial segregation, violence, and prejudice were wrong. Some whites across time and place also knew that racial discrimination and segregation were wrong. Benevolence was a response to white guilt, white empathy, and the dictates of Christianity. Benevolence was shown by David Williams’s employer at Modern Line Products on Industrial Drive in Indianola, and Josie Landfair’s old boss, Nolan Bass, from the plantation. In this instance, Bass was not a bystander, speaking up for the Landfair sisters as they sought a loan to build a home, and David Williams’s boss vouched for him to secure a loan as well. Agnes Brown and Josephine Landfair were born in 1909 and 1914, respectively. Agnes’s seven siblings, four sisters, and three brothers were born between 1909 and 1920 on the Sludge plantation. Agnes, the eldest born, came of age along with the newly formed NAACP and the National Bar Association in 1909. The NAACP’s Legal Defense and Education Fund, founded in 1940, would set a course to gradually undo the Counter Emancipation – the tyranny of violence, political disfranchisement, illiteracy, segregated education, and economic exploitation. Crucial to that undoing had to be access to quality schooling, fair wage contracts, protection from lynching and other forms of state-sanctioned and random violence, and freedom to vote and run for public office. For many members of the National Bar Association, the NAACP, and the Legal Defense Fund, their perennial mission, both symbolic and substantive, was to fight for the full legal/political emancipation of enslaved descendants. The NAACP and members of the Black Bar were frequently some of the same actors. Some of their biracial efforts intersected with World War I, a conflict that brought much of the world, and some plantations, into the modern, industrial, scientific, and technological era. The deliberate pace of mechanization of the Mississippi Delta prolonged the sharecropping era. Invention and tradition coexisted, with the language of international politics running apace of progress in black and white relations.

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At home, the war slowed both cotton and timber markets, creating nervousness and anxiety for planters and exporters. Immigration to the United States was at a trickle from 1914 to 1917. Northern industrialists needed workers and began to recruit blacks from the rural South in record numbers. The war between nations, the destruction of empires and imperialism, “national self-determinism,” the language of the warring parties and allies, and their mobilization meant the transformation of much of the world – including the possibility that rural un-emancipated African American peasants, including those who were aging but still working in the fields, might someday live their citizenship in the fullness of American life. Agnes remembered her parents in these terms: “Daddy was a yard worker in Natchez Place and my Mamma hustled a living by chopping cotton and working on the white folks farm.”2 She continued, “I learned to work hard, to be honest and if you didn’t have, do without.”3 As for school, “I attended St. Trillion School until the 8th grade; my husband completed the 10th.” The school was under-resourced, and work interfered with what little schooling she achieved. “I went to a one room school with 1 teacher; and I picked cotton after school. I couldn’t go no farther. I wanted to go to college, but I stayed so far out that I didn’t know nothing about college and my mother needed us at the house.” She ruminated, “I picked cotton and baby sat when I was 11. Mamma drew the money. Soon after I stopped school; I married and moved to Garrard Plantation where [my] eldest child, Andrew, now principal at Gentry High, was born.” Often, at settlement, the owner said, “You do fine, you did not earn nothing.”

ANDREW BROWN I Am Responsible for My Successes and Failures

Like his mother before him, Andrew Brown attended a one-room school on the plantation where he was born in 1948. When we first met, he was the principal at Gentry High School, the high school from which he had graduated in 1959. The one-room school he attended as a child bested his mother’s school, as it had “four or five grades, two teachers and a coal heater.”4 After 2nd grade, Brown went to Baptist School for two years, then to Indianola Colored School, and later to an all-African American Gentry 2 4

Agnes Brown, Interview with the author, Indianola, Mississippi, July 15, 1990. Andrew Brown, Interview with the author, July 22, 1992.

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3

Ibid.

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High. While his mom picked cotton until the season ended, Andrew and his sibling, Adrian, picked cotton a day out of a week. The school year for Andrew began in October, after the cotton-picking season. As we sat in his office at Gentry High School, he remembered his childhood. “At home I had heard Ma and Dad talk about things . . . we heard them talk about money, about the church and about the family.” He gained respect for the family, especially for its capacity to shelter children. He watched for signs from his parents: “From my parents I learned that the family is a unit that we had to respect. We couldn’t spend the night out at anyone’s house. We couldn’t eat out. We always said grace – if someone missed dinner their food was left. I went clean; I wasn’t hungry. I didn’t always have money. My parents wanted us to have an education – undoubtedly it penetrated – we’re all church workers – we all finished college, no prisons for us. The family is important; thrift and self-respect are important.” When Andrew was a boy growing up in Indianola in the early and mid1950s, there were a few black restaurants, if any, where one could dine out, and white restaurants that did exist forbade blacks from dining in and sitting at the table. Long before the sit-ins, African American families had to anticipate where they would eat and the treatment their children would receive in public establishments. The Greensboro, North Carolina, and Jackson, Mississippi sit-ins occurred in 1960 and 1963, respectively. Public accommodations in Mississippi remained segregated until the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act in July 1964.5 The safety of children and their access to public accommodation were major considerations. These restrictions on children’s and parents’ personal liberties might explain why Andrew’s mother taught him that, “Blacks would never measure up to whites . . . so be obedient and humble, because you ain’t got nothing to fight with.” A redefinition of African American status was not that far off, but as a child, days and nights felt hopeless at times. Ms. Brown, Andrew’s mom, had grown up in a time when the master-servant-dominant-subordinate group relationship was the norm and racial prejudice was not in retreat. Although young Andrew was constrained by legal racism, he was not powerless. Jim Crow’s victimization included segregated schools, elementary and secondary schools as well as colleges and universities. 5

Bernard Grofman (ed.), Legacies of the 1964 Civil Rights Act (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2000); Mary Coleman, “Legacies of the Civil Rights Act: A Book Review,” American Political Science Review, 95(30) (September 2001): 731–733.

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A segregated education would give Andrew a fighting chance to measure up – to achieve relative if not absolute upward economic mobility. If he could complete high school and college and if modest changes could be made in the administration of justice, in policing, in the destruction of lynching, and if the activity of the NAACP picked up, change might come for Andrew and his brother Adrian. Andrew earned his Bachelor of Arts in Social Studies at Mississippi Valley State College, a historically black institution, and subsequently earned his master’s degree from a white regional institution, Delta State College. As parents, Andrew and his wife “stressed education as the key to success – we tell the children that the only other way is luck. Everybody cannot survive on luck – so put your best foot forward and keep trying to reach goals and be mindful to create options – but don’t be obsessive.” Wage theft and homelessness were experienced by his mom and were barriers to upward economic mobility. It stole her trust and confidence in the body politic and mobilized resignation; it sowed seeds of frustration and hardship in the home and community. The perennial croppers experienced forty years of economic precariousness and decades of tyranny by the white Delta minority. Andrew had to wonder if high school and college completion would pay off for his children as it had for him. Would there be fair opportunities – a fair return on investment? Not only was education a cornerstone of measuring up with Andrew’s values, but a stable marriage and being a good role model for his children were also equally important. “My wife and I have not considered divorce because all people want the same thing: respect. And everyone has to give up something.” Education, a stable marriage, respect for self and others, and faith in God rounded out the worldview of Andrew Brown. “We trust in God and stay active in the church. We also talk things over – the way my parents did. Life is better for me now than it was 25 years ago – there is more respect within and across races. Respect is based on ability. There is still prejudice, not as overt, but life is what you make it now. Know who you are and then you will be successful. I am responsible for my successes and failures.”6 Like most adults in this work, Andrew Brown believed that being a grown-up meant taking full responsibility for all of life’s outcomes. Andrew Brown admitted no failures, no prisons, had college completion, faith in God, and commitment to family. Yet he said that his mom taught

6

Andrew Brown, Interview with the author, July 22, 1992.

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him that he would never measure up to whites – so be obedient and humble because he had nothing with which to fight. This refrain originated in the well of segregation, and it was etched in survival and political powerlessness. Like his peers, he could have gone higher if legal racism and the lack of opportunity to build businesses, own property, and become well educated in wealth-building professions had not held his and his parents’ generation down. Even so, Andrew did not tell his children born in the late 1960s and 1970s what his mom had told him in the 1940s and 1950s. Rightly understood, each generation of blacks saw their possibilities in the context of time, place, and possibilities. Here, it would appear that the Browns respected family life and Christian living more than anything else. Andrew Brown married an educated woman who was a teacher at a local school. Together, they reared their children, and both continued the legacy of Christianity being passed down inter-generationally, but discontinued the generational familial discourse of fear, accommodation, and inferiority.7 Could Andrew Brown’s children say, as had Andrew Brown, that they were responsible for their successes and failures in the 1990s and beyond? Would they, as had their father, understand respect as originating from the wellspring of accomplishment?

JOSEPHINE LANDFAIR AND FAMILY INTERIORITY We Had No Job Worth Nothing, the Lord Has Brought Us from a Mighty Long Way

Josephine Landfair (Interview, July 23, 1992), the second member of this cohort with the longest history of poverty, was one of two African American daughters born to Mason and Lillie Ellis in rural Sunflower County, in 1914.8 Josie began her life narrative with these words: “My parents stayed on Lake Henry, out from Itta Bena. The boss man was named, N. L. Cockle. My parents never had their own land. They grew up on the plantation; that is all they ever did. He loaned them money for Christmas grocery. I can’t say much about that.”

7

8

Lester Salomon, “Fear, Apathy, and Discrimination, Three Explanations of Political Participation,” American Political Science Review, 67(4) (1973): 1288–1306; Salomon, “Leadership and Political Modernization, the Emerging Black Political Elite in the American South,” Journal of Politics, 35(4) (August 1973): 615–646. Josephine Landfair, Interview, Indianola, Mississippi, July 23, 1992.

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“My parents carried us to the field, picked cotton, and grew chicken, turkeys, cows, and hogs. They made sausage, grew peaches in the orchard, picked berries, and canned berries for the winter. My parents were just poor black folks working for what the white man needed. If they gave me what my parents earned, I wouldn’t need nothing no more.” Josie is clearly signaling that she and her parents (two generations) were wronged and injured by wage theft. “My childhood dream was to be able to take care of myself. I went to school, played ball . . . ever since I was old enough to remember, they called us niggers . . . I quit school in the 6th grade (in 1928).” She reported that she married in 1928 with just a sixth-grade education. “Me and my husband stayed with Mamma until 1931, the year my first child, Mary, was born.” “We moved to Quiver and farmed there until the fall of 1932. We moved to Dewey Ware out from Itta Bena. Us stayed there 6 years; moved to Sunflower on Mr. Percy Ray’s (Woodman) plantation, ’til the fall of 1943, when Mary died of strep throat.” “I was going to the cotton field with 5 children. We moved to a colored man’s place, Joe Williams, and we rented land. My husband died the Christmas of 1945 from 14 gunshot wounds in a drive-by shooting at a commissary store.” Her husband’s brutal murder (never solved) and daughter Mary’s death from strep throat were tragedies, yet they did not derail her faith. The young widow, a single mom, and dedicated sister to Rosie persisted in her despair and resolve. Several years later, she had her middle son, Edward, out of wedlock. In the fall of 1951, she and her children and sister moved to Ethel Howell, then Palmer, and lived there from 1951 until 1953, when the house burned. “Us moved into town to Nolan Bass’s house and stayed there for 13 years. I and my sister had this house built in December 1965. We had no job worth nothing. My Sis was a janitor at Bell Grove Church where she made $45.00 a month.” In 1965, on her 51st birthday, she and her sister, Rosie, had a home built. “We went to the loan company and could not borrow no money. Finally, we ran up on a man from the bank. He wanted to know if us was married . . . he went back in his office and stayed there an hour. Later, Mr. Nolan Bass (her landlord) came in and the loan officer came out. Mr. Nolan said, ‘You see those two women, anything they want, let them have it.’9 The loan officer

9

Ibid.

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wrote a check for $5,800.00. Greenville Lumber Company built the house. We paid $55.43 for 15 years ($9,975.00).” They secured a loan, established credit, and repaid their loan on time. “I got the job working as a custodian at Carver Elementary School. I worked there for 13 years, until I was 65. Before that, for 47 years, since I was a child, I just picked the cotton.” “The Lord brought us from a mighty long way . . . working in the cotton field since 5 years old . . . trying to go to school. March comes and us have to quit school to chop cotton, drop corn in holes.”10 Josie professed a working religion that bridged her life from sharecropper to public citizen. She stated, proudly, “We are Christians.” Being a Christian meant living her religion, not just mouthing its tenets. “I brought the children up working in the church. I’ve been on the usher board for 40 years and I have been President of the Pastor’s Aid Club for 30 years. I kept my children together (me and sis) and I thank God for my children.” Religion was a palliative and a sustainer of hope in the lives of women and men in this study. They did not consider Christianity as the white man’s religion. They hewed to Christianity because it kept them human and expectant. Agnes and Josie were loyal churchgoers. As Powdermaker had intimated ninety years ago, and as historian Evelyn Higginbotham demonstrated in Righteous Discontent, religion and the networks of the church in Sunflower would lift their humanity, leadership acumen, and their familial aspirations higher.11 There, they visited with others who sharecropped and those who did not and had not. They understood, because their religion taught it, that they were not their circumstances. They believed that if they kept trying, they could find emancipation from circumstances, not of their own choosing, or that faith in God would still their despair and their anger. Of her four living children, all finished high school, and two completed college. “I don’t have much education, but I have supported my children. Well, today, I don’t have any savings. I don’t have any money. I am sick. I have sugar, high blood, and fluid buildup . . . and first one thang and another. I feel pretty good some days. My youngest son stays with me . . . he got hurt in the Vietnam War. My daughter looks after me every day.” She continued, “My sister died in 1975. My life has been a good success. I’d pass the people who had a house and I’d want one. God kept me in good 10 11

Ibid. Evelyn Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).

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health long enough to pay for this house and to see my children grown.” She insisted: “My children finished high school and one is a teacher. He finished from Mississippi State University (MSU).12 God has been my healer; my strength and I thank him.”13 Josie Landfair personified an unshakeable and practical faith. Mississippi is one of the most religious states in the United States. Religiously imbued lawyers and agnostic ones alike often fought together and sometimes alone to remake the state, because they knew, as did moms, dads, grandparents, aunts, and uncles, that circumstances can be changed by human effort. The disposition toward Judeo-Christian belief as understood and practiced in Mississippi permeates, to a considerable degree, both black and white populations and helps explain cross-racial views of Mississippians on abortion and same-sex marriages. But in ways both large and small, the Judeo-Christian nation showed low regard for the general welfare of the black poor, working and non-working. The shadow cast by deep religious belief has been troubling Mississippi for two centuries. Often enough, Christian faith has been the elixir, the therapy upon which African Americans and whites of all classes could draw in times of angst, despair, and joy. What’s more important here is that the sensation of Christianity meant different things to many whites and most blacks. For the elderly women and men featured in this study, faith in God was unequivocal. Would it be so for their children, or would its appeal lessen?

EDDIE LANDFAIR AND FAMILY INTERIORITY I Have Worked Hard all My Life – I Did Not Have High Ambition

Josephine Landfair’s son, Edward, was born on November 2, 1949, in Indianola, Mississippi. “I never had a father in my life; I only had Ma and her sister – Aunt Rosie. I knew him. He lived in South Bend and owned a laundry in Indianola. But I felt emotionally secure even though times were 12

13

The doors to Mississippi State University, a historically white college in Starkville, Mississippi, had been closed to blacks for nearly nine decades. Its first black graduate, Richard Holmes, had transferred from Wiley College to MSU in July 1965. Holmes earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from MSU in 1969 and 1973, respectively. He graduated from medical school at Michigan State University in 1977 and became an emergency room physician. Twenty-three percent of Mississippi State University’s students are black (20 percent), Hispanic (2 percent), and Asian (1 percent). Josephine Landfair, Interview with the author, July 23, 1992.

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tough, especially in the early 1960s.” He mused, “Being a black kid in my time was hard – didn’t look like you had a future. I was a mother’s child – the knee baby – I had allergies – I could not adjust to dust and spray.”14 “My childhood dream was to be an entertainer. For a while I did announcing for discos and some disc jockey work on the WNLA Gospel radio station in Indianola. I lost interest in entertainment. I didn’t have high ambition. I liked the way I looked. I did some things well: I played sports. I made sling shots and used China berries. In addition to my mother and Aunt, I felt a kinship to the Friedmans and the Matthewses. I finished high school, went to Coahoma Junior College, and spent a half year at Mississippi Valley State University (MVSU).”15 In the sweltering summer of 1992, at the fire station where he worked, he talked about his family. “We have two children: Shonda, 23, and Alexis, 18. Shonda is studying nursing at MVSU, and Alexis is a pre-law major at Texas Clarendon College. I have always been there for my children, though my wife and I are now divorced. We were married for 11 years and now we have been separated for 9 years. We are thinking about trying again. In any case, I teach my kids what Mamma taught me: work hard, demand respect, don’t take a back seat, be yourself, and believe in God.”16 He pondered about hard work. “I have been working hard all my life. I shined shoes for 2 years after school every day. On Saturdays I’d shine and charge 15 cents for a shoe and 25 cents for a boot. I used to be a sales representative. I sold carpets, managed rental properties, and now I own my own clean carpet business. I am also a fireman here in Indianola. My brother-in-law got me this job when Robert Kent was a city alderman. I bring home about $1,700.00 a month. I have a savings account. I haven’t been a failure. Things I used to do, I don’t do no more. I used to be out there. Now I have gone back to what Mamma taught me.” He described his community: “I live in a town where blacks are well educated. Our leadership is both good and bad. There are big problems with the police Department. I worry about my children. This generation seems lost. I ask my children to look around for themselves. I don’t teach them about racism. I teach them to go as far as their abilities and efforts will take them. I don’t know. We have more now, more food, clothing, and money, but back then I felt safer in my community. I depend on God. I used to listen to Ma say that she had been born again. I didn’t understand.

14

Eddie Landfair, Interview, Indianola, Mississippi, July 24, 1992.

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15

Ibid.

16

Ibid.

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Now I do.”17 “At 43 my life has changed.” Like Andrew Brown, Eddie Landfair did not see himself as a failure, yet he acknowledged that he did not have enough ambition. These two male children of perennial croppers have not blamed the white man or the system for their limited opportunities. Each son, Edward, and Andrew conveyed to their children, especially their daughters, the importance of building capabilities, expending effort, and showing and demanding respect. Edward’s mother, Josie, who sharecropped for just over forty years, taught him “to work hard, demand respect, do not take a back seat, be yourself and believe in God.” He passed on these five approaches to his children to get ahead in life: faith in God, authenticity, self- and other respect, effort, consistently applied, and aspiration. When Powdermaker observed black women engaged in faith work in Sunflower in the early twentieth century, she saw faith work as a lever and a buffer. In the lives of Josie and Eddie, we sense its presence, if not always its power. We sense a call out and back to religion as a sustaining source of the self for Landfair. He did not stop there; he asked that his girls demand respect and go as far as their abilities would take them. Through his faith and his mother’s teachings, and his own life experience, he pushed and nudged them and himself forward, comfortably embracing the coexistence of the sacred and the secular with gender equality, with high expectations top of mind. Josie and Agnes stayed in Sunflower. They moved six times from plantation to plantation, looking for a toehold, the security of a home, and a fair wage. Some landowners and planters who cheated sharecroppers out of their earned wages appeared to have been committed to making the lives of poor folk as hellish as possible. To paraphrase British economic historian Robert Henry Tawney, “A society which reverences the attainment of riches as the supreme felicity will naturally be disposed to regard the poor as damned in the next world, if only to justify itself for making their life a hell in this.”18 Josie and her toddlers did not settle into that hell; they kept moving through the stretch of Sunflower County, hoping to secure a fair wage and a safe home as a place of refuge. Staying in the Mississippi Delta had not meant staying in place; it meant looking for opportunities, working, worshipping, and both praying and hoping for the best. The hunt for mobility was a trek that led them across a 17 18

Ibid. Robert Henry Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1926), 222.

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radius of 71 miles during a half-century. As intimated earlier, Sunflower is the longest county in Mississippi, and the Landfairs trekked every mile to escape homelessness and vulnerability to homelessness. Agnes and Josie had to perform as ably as possible in the world into which they had been born. Their births, it cannot be repeated too often, coincided with the birth of the NAACP, a biracial organization formed to break the legal spine of racism, and by 1914 Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League (UNIA). The formation of the NAACP in 1909 and the US’s entry into World War I in 1917 are watershed moments for both children of this era and Agnes and Josephine. African Americans had their own musings about the war. What did “making the world safe for democracy” mean when at home there were only two Negro militias or National Guard units, one in Illinois and the other in New York? Distracted by the prospect of American intervention in the war, Wilson turned away from his promise to blacks. James Vardaman and John Williams, the US Senators from Mississippi, held opposing ideas about the war and represented different economic interests in Mississippi. The Mississippi Democratic Party, to which they both belonged, had differing and divisive Bourbon and agrarian loyalties but shared a paternalistic view of African Americans. Both believed that economic and political dependency and inferiority characterized blacks. In fiscal matters, Bourbons, like Williams, wanted lower taxes and lower state spending on services, including education. Vardaman was a populist. He extolled populist ideas for whites only. Opposing landowner interests, Vardaman preferred the end of giant corporations and restrictions on child labor. He used his agrarian stance to rile poor whites against blacks and against his Bourbon opponents. A proponent of war, Williams galvanized the newspaper journalists, arguing that only cowards would oppose war; three of his sons served in the military, voluntarily. Recalling the Civil War as a “rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight,” Vardaman cast one of six Senate votes against a declaration of war.19 Vardaman opposed participation in the First World War for Josie’s and Agnes’s brothers and others similarly situated. He rightly sensed that the

19

A book bearing this title was written by historian David Williams. In it, he argued that the people of the River Valley of Georgia and Alabama exploited blacks and poor whites, riled class conflict, and decreased support for Confederate authority during the Civil War. David Williams, Rich Man’s War: Class, Caste, and Confederate Defeat in the Lower Chattahoochee Valley (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1999).

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military service would mobilize black male citizenship interest and put a lie to black inferiority and white supremacy. In 1918, Vardaman lost the argument and his re-election bid. In Mississippi, blacks (81,548) and whites (75,977) were registered for the military.20 Mostly poor, rural Mississippians were required to serve, while wealthier families gained deferments. By law, rural agricultural workers were expendable. Nineteen thousand whites and 24,000 black Mississippians served. Race and labor relations, including the desire for cheap labor and the politics of race at home and abroad influenced the new century as much as the old. The news of the war against Germany and racial violence at home kept families on high alert – on pins and needles – across the south and elsewhere. The so-called race riot in Houston, Texas (August 1917), resulted from a confrontation between black servicemen from the 3rd Battalion, 24th Infantry, and white law enforcement. Fifteen people lost their lives that day, including several law enforcement officers and civilians. The army court-marshaled the troops, and nineteen were executed for mutiny.21 The army had ordered the 3rd Battalion to guard the construction site of a military installation at Camp Logan. When they arrived in the community just a few miles northwest of Houston, they encountered racial epithets from lay citizens and local law enforcement. As servicemen, they expected better treatment and a modicum of respect. They expressed their disappointment. A black soldier allegedly interfered with the police arrest of a black woman and was subsequently jailed. Another black soldier inquired about the arrest. Words were exchanged and the policeman hit the “model soldier” who had made the inquiry. The model soldier was fired upon three times by the police officer but was uninjured. He was also arrested. The 3rd Battalion heard about the arrest and staged a two-hour march to the police station to secure his release. Lives were lost in the mutiny, and 110 enlisted men were found guilty. Somewhere between forty-one and sixty-three received life sentences, and nineteen were hanged.22 There was also one 20

21

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Far fewer served, but blacks received fewer jobs and family deferments, and most served in non-combatant roles. The over-drafting of blacks occurred throughout the war. See, for example, Jennifer Keene, “A Comparative Study of White and Black American Soldiers during the First World War,” Annals of Demography History, 103(1) (2002): 71–90. “Sixteen Dead-22 Injured from Riot,” The Houston Press, August 24, 1917. Available at tshonline.org, accessed December 26, 2021. Fred Borch, “‘The Largest Murder Trial in the History of the United States’: The Houston Riots Court-Martial of 1917,” The Army Lawyer (February 2011): 1–3; Greg Andrews, Thyra J. Edwards: Black Activist in the Global Freedom Struggle (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2011).

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death by suicide. There was trouble across the nation and those who had migrated and their kin who had stayed in Mississippi knew they were powerless to fight back. President Woodrow Wilson granted clemency to ten soldiers awarding them life in prison rather than death sentences.23 Earlier that year, a race riot had broken out in East St. Louis, when just over 460 black workers were hired to replace whites who were striking at Aluminum Ore Company – a company holding government contracts. Blacks and whites were killed, and blacks’ homes were destroyed. It was clear that federal jobs could help reduce black poverty but could enrage whites who felt most entitled to them. It was a perilous time as blacks tried to gain a toehold in the urban economies to which they had migrated during the first two decades of the twentieth century. The perceived taking of jobs wanted and needed by working-class whites was cause for concern. Racial and war tensions flared, and an already intemperate nation reasserted white supremacy. Wilson temporarily halted the drafting of black conscripts. But Tulsa, Chicago, and numerous homegrown lynchings in Sunflower and neighboring counties were yet to come. Black men and women desperately wanted to be respected, especially as soldiers and workers. They needed employment and the rule of just law. In uniform or out, black men had few guardrails offered by the state and nation. Though less than ubiquitous, disputes related to employement discrimination and refusal to pay wages earned were frequent, especially in the Delta and in white counties throughout Mississippi and the South. According to Lee Alston and Kyle Kauffman, the percentage of croppers in Mississippi in 1930 was the highest in the Deep South, near 100,000, and that’s around 60 percent of the labor force.24 As shown in Chapter 1, most black men in 1900 were engaged in farming and farm labor as were more than a third of black women; this is in significant contrast to white women. Historian Jodi Vandenberg-Daves states that women’s participation in the labor force grew from 18 to 25 percent between 1890 and 1940.25 According to David Goldfield, “Southern poor whites were replacing blacks in trades and excluding them from new categories of jobs, such as 23

24

25

“President Saves Rioters; Commutes Sentences of Half a Score of Negro Soldiers Convicted of Murder,” The New York Times, September 5, 1918, p. 10. Lee Alston and Kyle Kauffman, “Competition and Compensation of Sharecroppers by Race: A View from Plantations in the Early Twentieth Century,” Explorations in Economic History, 38 (2001): 181–194. Jodi Vandenberg-Daves, Modern Motherhood: An American History (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2014), 106.

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plumbing and electrical work.”26 He continued, “Trade unions, composed primarily of craft workers, excluded African Americans. Blacks found themselves increasingly in low or unskilled positions in railroad construction, lumber camps and agricultural labor.”27 Goldfield indicated that, “the new generation of blacks in the 1890s experienced a general ‘deskilling’ or loss of skills, compared to their fathers.”28 Their grand fathers had been among the last generation of children born in slavery or the first born just after slavery. Thus, the direct and later descendants of the enslaved, like the Sunflower residents, the late David Williams, Josie Landfair, and Agnes Brown, fared worse in skill acquisition than had their grandparents. Agnes and Josie began their toil as child laborers in the fields with their illiterate parents and persisted as sharecroppers through and well beyond their fifth decade. According to Charles Bolton, “both tenant farmers and sharecroppers were farmers without farms. A tenant farmer typically paid a landowner for the right to grow crops on a certain piece of property. Tenant farmers, in addition to having some cash to pay rent, also generally owned some livestock and tools needed for successful farming.”29 He continued, “Sharecroppers, on the other hand, were even more impoverished than tenant farmers. With few resources and little or no cash, sharecroppers agreed to farm a certain plot of land in exchange for a share of the crops they raised. The exact amount of crops the sharecropper gave over to the landowner depended on the agreement with the landowner.”30 Seeing few pathways out of sharecropping, Agnes’s movement out of poverty was restricted. As early as 1780, right through the early twentieth century, organizations and conventions rallying to shorten Black Americans’ dispossession existed. The Convention of Freedman was formed in 1830 and attempted to build a legal rights organization – a forerunner to the NAACP. John Brown,31 born into slavery in 1830 in Southampton, Virginia, Frederick Douglass, W. C. Pennington, Richard Allen, and Hezekiah Grice were activists during the forty-year period from the mid-nineteenth century to the early twentieth century. Preceding those organizational starts was the 1832 antislavery convention held in Philadelphia, which required the reading of the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution, signaling an internalized refrain and a belief in the nation’s capacity to erase the edifice of enslavement. 26 29 31

27 28 Goldfield, Still Fighting the Civil War, 202. Ibid., 201. Ibid., 203. 30 Charles Bolton, Mississippi History Now (2004), p. 1. Ibid., 2. Daniel W. Crofts, Old Southampton: Politics in a Virginia County, 1834–1865 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1992).

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Working in Agnes’s and Josie’s favor, at least in favor of their unborn children, were the post-Civil War organizations arising from the Reconstruction era, especially the fever for state-funded public schools and other institutions. Negro churches and colleges would hold promise for the two girls as well, as they were socialized in the Christian faith and learned to read the Bible and sign their names. Late in the nineteenth century and early decades of the twentieth century, there was thus a line, if not a chorus of organizations, including the Knights of Pythias, the National Women’s Christian Temperance Movement, the Afro-American Protective League, the American Association of Educators of Colored Youth, the Colored Press, the Tuskegee Conference, and the National Press Association, among dozens of others, pressing levers and harnessing momentum for change. Throughout the rural Deep South, black organizing was perceived as aggression by whites. Aggressiveness on the part of those wanting to organize workers was punished, often as swiftly as allegations of black men raping white women. As in the Midwest, in Mississippi’s first decade of the twentieth century, laborers – sharecroppers and small farm owners (men and women) – also organized and fought valiantly to maintain the land and for a living wage. In the Deep South, they were protesting in the face of tyrannical rule – especially legal racism and mob violence. For Agnes and Josie and their children, the early twentieth-century black church was theoretically one of a few places where blacks – sharecroppers and professionals, alike – could be led by a black man. Reverend T. A. Allen, of Hernando, Mississippi, who tried to start a sharecropper’s union among local black laborers, was seized and shot by white landowners. The messenger and the message were policed. No matter, for Josie and Agnes and their children, the church offered solace and engagement; as a member or leader of the usher board, a participant in Sunday School, or even as a custodian cleaning the sacred space for the next gathering, meant belonging and inclusion. At church, neither female nor male sharecroppers were on the bottom rung; they mattered as members of the community. There was great surprise and disappointment or discontent about wages earned or stolen throughout the congregation. Pain and suffering from a week of toil could be unloaded. Resolve could be stored up for the next onslaught. Families could dress up their children and walk to church. They did so in their Sunday best and in large numbers. They endured. They would pass by plantations and see in their church trek the fields that their bodies had traversed in the weeks, months, and decades past. When the plate was passed from ushers like Agnes, from pew to pew, the

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croppers would give some part of their daily pittance to support church work. They counted. They melded their voices in harmony with others on the mourning bench. Afterward, they held their heads high. Home from the church, they removed their homemade dresses and underwear, and illfitting shoes, and prepared a Sunday meal, mostly from the garden or from canned goods, chicken coops, fresh catch from a nearby pond or river, or the remains from hog-killing time. They watched their kids grow out of their one shiny suit or worn dress, not knowing what tomorrow would bring. Still, they had both faith and grace. Many had courage and audacity. They had worked many of the same fields, but Josie and Agnes each taught their children markedly different things. Josie had the audacity, verve, and Rosie, her sister, with whom to share her troubles and their goals of homeownership. Agnes’s expressions hewed closer to caste norms and warned Andrew that he had better stay in his place. As fathers, Eddie and Andrew updated their parents’ teachings, with a focus on respect, effort, and self-reliance. Those who exited from the farm and sharecropping after only a few years attended the same church as Agnes and Josie. Did those who were born less than a decade or so after Josie and Agnes have new opportunities, join the same congregations, recite, and live similar religious and work values? Did their marriages take hold and last? Was homeownership within reach? Did their opportunities and those of their children expand, remain the same, and/or contract?

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SHARECROPPING WAS NOT PAYING

Federal intervention in Mississippi was disdained, especially if it interfered with prevailing white, elite Mississippi mindsets. To be clear, federal intervention would be labeled as federal interference when it engaged local elites in the allocation of resources for the African American poor. States’ rights would be invoked if the status quo favored whites’ interests. The governmental role has been and remains a core element of American federalism, American progress, and American stasis. The first four decades of the twentieth century were war-filled, lawless and violent, economically challenging, and plagued by natural disasters and disease. The natural and man-made catastrophes demanded inspired presidential leadership and a thoughtful set of responses from the federal administrative state, Congress, the courts, and nascent organizations working on behalf of the blacks, the poor, the not-so-poor, and the suffering. During fevers and floods, but not just during disasters, blacks in Mississippi would wonder if prospects for upward economic mobility in the Delta had disappeared along with the Promised Land Plantation, which had been located 2.5 miles north of Drew, Mississippi in Sunflower County. Except for the plantation itself, the Promised Land in Sunflower had long since become a ghost town, retaining only a post office. But post offices mattered as they were the closest symbol of federal presence in local rural places. Still, quasi-croppers needed a Promised Land in-person and up-close. They were slightly better positioned than perennial croppers to make a promised land. David Matthews remarked of this time, during his early adolescence, that, “It looked like black men and boys did not have a chance.” He continued, “We

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were subjected to a lot of cruelty.”1 The future did not look promising. Sharecropping was not paying, and children, not far from toddlerhood themselves, were forced into the role of breadwinners – child soldiers without guns – scavenging for resources. School held promise. The agricultural ladder, with its cotton fields and unfair employers, did not. Their parents owned no land, no housing, no income security, and were ill-educated. Even when quasi-croppers left the fields, it was difficult to escape unfair employers. Matthews, David Williams, and Clementine Richardson were quasicroppers; they spent time on the agricultural ladder but stepped off after fewer than five years, very aware that the ladder had led nowhere for their parents. Slightly younger than Agnes and Josie, Matthews, Williams, and Clementine sought and acquired educational opportunities that changed their life paths and lessened their vulnerability to poverty. All three were married at least once. Williams and Matthews each adopted a child. Matthews enlisted in the military and eventually enrolled in Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia, where he excelled. Clementine similarly graduated from a historically black college (HBCU), Mississippi Valley State, which was founded in 1950; it is the youngest public HBCU in the nation. Mississippi Valley State is located 19 miles from Indianola. Given its proximity to home, Clementine was able to work, take care of her family, and complete college at the same time. The two black college graduates among the Sunflower Seven, Clementine, and Matthews were both married well. Clementine married a soldier with a singular commitment to his wife, and Matthews married a college-educated schoolteacher with a high sense of her own worth. At the moment of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s ascendancy to the White House, in 1932, the youngest member of the Sunflower Seven, Clementine Richardson, was an infant in Stephenville, Mississippi, six miles north of Indianola. Clementine was born to parents who sharecropped and had done so their entire working lives. She was also a child laborer. What’s more, her parents’ labor, even if sufficiently compensated, carried no Social Security benefits for them or for thousands of others who had labored in agriculture or domesticity. The vulnerability to poverty for agricultural workers and domestics would exist in youth and in old age, even when the rules changed to include their occupations for Social Security purposes, as nothing in the rule change required recompense for the government’s role in depriving them of benefits for decades.

1

David Matthews, Interview with the author, Indianola, Mississippi, August 10, 1992.

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The harm caused by the 1935 Social Security Act’s2 exclusions and restrictions was a loss to the poorest of the poor and was just expected to be absorbed as yet another intergenerational insult that they had to withstand without appeal. According to William J. Nelson Jr.,3 in the 1950s, gradual extensions were granted for agricultural workers who had received cash payments from at least one employer of at least $100 a calendar year. In 1956, the cash-pay requirement increased to $150 in a calendar year if the employee worked at least twenty days a year for one employer and was paid on a timely basis. It was said these occupations posed administrative difficulties in the documentation of wage reporting. This is even though, for the poorest of the working poor, barring good fortune, Social Security would be the only old-age retirement benefit – a mere pittance in an affluent nation.

DAVID WILLIAMS AND FAMILY INTERIORITY We Stayed Together Because of the Kids

Williams dreamed of becoming a physician, but too little early schooling, bad eyesight, and pernicious early childhood poverty held him back. He studied, passed his GED requirements, and found a job at Modern Lines Products, a producer and seller of conveyor belts located on Industrial Drive in Indianola. Williams divorced and remarried; he was able to secure a loan and eventually purchased a barber shop and ran successfully for local office. He engaged in a legal fight to adopt a deceased relative’s child – his namesake – a child who is now a medical doctor. He won the support of his first employer when seeking to acquire a loan and build good credit. All three of the quasi-croppers – Matthews, Williams, and Clementine – escaped poverty and joined the working and middle classes. Community 2

3

The Social Security Act authorized a pension fund for retired persons in some sectors but not others. Domestics and agricultural workers were originally excluded. It also offered an unemployment insurance system and a public assistance program for dependent mothers, children, and the disabled. The Fair Labor Standards Act banned child labor, set the minimum wage at 0.25 an hour, and established forty-four hours as a workweek. The National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933 made the Fair Labor Standards Act provisions palatable. Anti-trust laws were suspended, and industries were able to enforce fair-trade codes with less competition and better wages. The Cotton Textile Code later established a forty-hour workweek, abolished child labor, and set a minimum weekly wage of thirteen and twelve dollars in the North and South, respectively. William J. Nelson, Jr., “Employment Covered under the Social Security Program, 1935–84,” Social Security Bulletin, 48(4) (1985).

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leader/minister/teacher (Matthews) teacher (Clementine) businessman/ elected leader (Williams). How did they do it, and are the pathways they traversed available to today’s rural residents who were born on similar, if not parallel tracks? Three years into Woodrow Wilson’s presidency, in 1916, David Williams, Sr., the eldest African American man in this cohort, was born on April 5, in Indianola, Mississippi.4 His dad, a sharecropper, and farmer, was born in 1894. David’s Mom died when he was eight years old. David remembered his parents and their plight. “My step-ma reared me and my two brothers and sisters. My Daddy quit sharecropping early because there was not any money in it. He went to the boss man for grocery; he went to him to get an order for a pair of shoes. At the end, we had no money. I have never been used to a lot of money.” David Williams believed in marriage. “I am married now for the third time. I worked several jobs to take care of all my children. My last marriage began in 1956. My wife was born in 1934. I have 6 children: one by a woman other than my wife. I did serve as President of the Parent Teacher Association for 3 years. All the children are employed: Jeannette has a decorator shop and is a part-time beautician; Grace is a substitute teacher in Junior High; Roberta is a manager; Devon is in the Army; Otis is a minister and David is a medical doctor. He attended Tougaloo College, Jackson State University, and the University of Pittsburgh.” David explained how he made it out of poverty. “My first job was toting water to the cotton choppers; I earned 35 cents a day. Now I earn $50.00 a day, sometimes $200.00 a day. I went to beauty school to earn a license in cosmetology. I own the barbershop; I drove a school bus for 17 years. I worked at Modern Line Products (MLP) on the night shift for 20 years. I took care of my children.” His work history and work relationships were pivotal. “The first loan I ever got a white man who was an electrician in Greenwood, Mississippi [in the neighboring Washington County], co-signed for it. His wife was a bookkeeper at MLP where I worked. I drove an 18-wheeler. In 1966, I got a Farmers Home Administration (FHA) loan. Quite a few blacks got a mortgage loan if they had worked continuously on a job for two years. So, we own our home, and we have a savings program, health insurance, and a little retirement from MLP.” Modern Line offered a decent wage as

4

David Williams, Interview, Indianola, Mississippi, July 26, 1992.

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well as health and retirement benefits. Before that, he had worked for the public schools (state government) as a bus driver. David Williams felt loved and affirmed. He explained, “I was loved; a lot of people loved me. They felt that I was different and smart. I was always an old man; my father talked, and I listened. I felt safe in my community.” “My parents taught me to stay out of trouble with whites. If I got in to trouble with whites, they could not do anything about it.” Here are echoes of perennial cropper Agnes Brown’s advice to her son, Andrew. David Williams internalized his mother’s advice. He reflected on his adaptation to his family’s powerlessness to protect him if he got in trouble. “Maybe I stayed too far away from whites; I don’t have to talk to them long to know what they are made of.” David’s statements suggested that he was constantly on high alert around whites. One might say that he was discerning and aware of racism’s sound and its various countenances. A white family had helped him, so he knew that whites were not universally racist; it is nonetheless true that he had met with racism everywhere. Despite the subordination of blacks and his skepticism about the goodness of white folks, young David Williams also dreamed. “As a little boy my childhood dream was to become a medical doctor.” David Williams remembered how he stopped well short of his dream to finish high school: “I lived out in the country where we used oil lamps. My eyes were ruined, and I lost some of my sight. They took me out of school for 2 years. So, I learned to cut wood and tote water to the cotton pickers. I never could get back into school; I tried, but I had lost interest. I took and passed the GED when I was 58 years old. I wanted to go to college in Mound Bayou.” If there were no constraints on dreaming, there would be real checks on actual exits from poverty. For David, there was no schooling accessible to him that was not trumped by work; in addition, there was no electricity in the house, and the oil lamps were insufficient for reading purposes. It is not clear that his parents had access to an ophthalmologist or an optometrist to diagnose the child’s eye troubles. The values of plantation life were themselves constraints on personal health and exits from poverty. Those values favored black children’s exploitation as laborers; the cotton had to be planted, harvested, and picked. Landowners needed workers – adults and children. Many parents needed their children’s labor to lessen their income and housing insecurity. Some children, a generation younger than David, like those of Matthew and Berta Mae Carter of neighboring Drew, Mississippi, attended school and did their share in the fields, waking early

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in the morning and returning after school to work in the cotton fields.5 Mae Bertha and Matthew Carter were David’s contemporaries in neighboring Drew, and like David’s children, their children would have more opportunities, but it would take public courage to bring the legal curtain down on segregated schools, and sustained action was needed to unlock pathways toward upward economic mobility. For many generations after slavery, each of the family’s descendants had to build their own routes out of poverty; some families had more resources or greater access to resources; some even had more ingenuity and some luck. Few had access to the rule of law. Williams sought elective office and won. He became a city alderman after many years of owning a barbershop. One of his children, his adopted son David Christian Williams, Jr., realized his father’s dream and gained access to higher education at Tougaloo College, Jackson State University, and the University of Pittsburgh, where he completed his medical residency. David is a Chief Medical Officer at Optum and is a board-certified internist in Jackson, Mississippi, where he has several hospital affiliations. For Junior, familial affirmation and security from violence made believing in himself more possible. Even in a highly imperfect society, such as Mississippi’s, familial affirmation and self-belief are crucial instruments in the toolkit needed to exit poverty and enter full citizenship. If a little black boy who carried water to the cotton pickers could want to become a physician and transmit that dream to his child, intergenerational values must in some way tether themselves to become examples of work, belief, and sacrifice and thence to children’s imaginings. For Josephine and Agnes, and even for David Williams, Sr., given the short length of time the family spent sharecropping, being in poverty meant not having sufficient assets to sustain health and opportunity – early literacy, eyesight, and wage security. Religion was a lever in the household of the senior David Williams, as he explained: “As I said earlier, my wife and I carried our children to church, and we worked hard to get the family fed and clothed. We told the children how hard it was out there. My wife and I had hard rounds, but we made an extra effort to stay together because of the kids. So, we were committed to staying there, working, and instructing them. Like my father, I was always ready to talk. At church I taught Bible class; at home we prayed. The Lord has been 5

Constance Curry, Silver Rights: The Story of the Carter Family’s Brave Decision to Send Their Children to an All-White School and Their Claims to Civil Rights (New York: Harcourt Books, 1966).

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dealing with one of my sons. He said the Lord has told him to go before all the world and preach the gospel.” David Williams, Sr., died in 2005. He was eighty-nine years old. Intergenerational religious values inculcated by David, Sr., followed the children, including the physician son, through a small religious college and two other universities, one African American and the other decidedly white. These children were taught not what Christianity meant but how to practice Christianity. Christianity was for the Sunflower Seven, and many of their children, a living religion; it informed choices, provided rules, and offered possibilities and constraints. Even when children embraced civic faith or summoned their free will and garnered access to material well-being, as David Williams’s namesake physician, David Williams, Jr., was able to do, David, Sr., told his children that life was hard. He gave them his example of hard work, religious faithfulness, and prayers they could savor and interpret for themselves. They knew their father’s life. They saw him win elected office, divorce a spouse, have a baby out of matrimony, remarry, work two jobs for twenty years, and start and maintain a hair-cutting business (a skill he learned in the fields).

MATTHEWS AND FAMILY INTERIORITY I Learned Self-Discipline and to Trust in the Lord

David Matthews was born on January 29, 1920, to Albert and Bertha Henderson Matthews. Bertha Matthews was a midwife. She helped Albert in the fields, and they sharecropped together. His stepbrother, William, a mechanic, grew up with him in Drew. The elder Matthewses cropped for thirty years. Young Matthews’s childhood dream was to go to school to become a minister. “I wanted comforts; a peaceful home and family,” stated Matthews. Ms. Matthews wanted to go to college, and marry a man who was decent (preferably not a minister and not a run-around). “I wanted four children, a good family and lots of love.”6 The sixty-four-year-old marriage was solid and sustaining. Matthews recalled: “I went to school short term in the early stages; I finished 8th grade and went to Indianola Colored High (now Carver Elementary School). Most students boarded during the school year; some did not. I was pretty good in high school. I liked to go to school; I enjoyed 6

David and Lillian Matthews, Interview with the author, July 26, 1992.

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sports. We usually made our own equipment – rubber balls and mitt. They rode yellow buses, we walked; sometimes the buses would knock water on you. They went nine months and had public transportation. We went four to five months the best way we could. The plantation owners would object. Some parents would even pay teachers to stay a little longer. Even then, little black boys and later black men were subjected to a lot of cruelty. As a black man there were few privileges and even fewer opportunities. Well, despite the obstacles, I learned self-discipline and to trust in the Lord.” Despite his mother’s midwifery skills, the family rented, unable to purchase a home until well after young David left for Morehouse College, then to seminary to establish himself as a minister. His faithful actions as a black male seeking opportunity also mattered. The Matthews’ familial striving was for greater substance rather than sheer symbolism. Matthews, the son, and his mom, stepmom, and dad struggled without access to white privilege, but with the presumption of his own worth and possibility. Three years before his birth, the Selective Service Act of 1917 would permit the grown David to join the army, and, in the decades to follow, the GI Bill of the New Deal would provide funds for a first home and postsecondary education. In 1948, Truman integrated the armed services. Matthews, Lonnie Byrd, Jack Harper, and Clementine Richardson’s husband, Elmira, joined the segregated army during World War II and the desegregated army during the Korean War. Using his GI Bill, Matthews would exit poverty and become a homeowner. He completed high school and college, married a well-educated woman, invested his savings, and used veterans’ benefits to purchase a home and complete college. Matthews’s wife, Lillian, explained how hard she worked to help her family. “You have to set standards and commit yourself to high values. Working together as a family and community helped to instill values of love, discipline and ladyhood. As a child I cleaned and chopped as much as a man. I never had the desire to do a man’s work, but I did it as a child. I learned to shoot a gun when I was a child. I cooked and farmed and when my older brother went to the army, I plowed with my sisters. We had to carry on. The families all helped one another. As in our marriage, my mother was much younger than Dad; she helped a lot and she worked hard on the farm.” Matthews explained his material exits from poverty. “I went to the service in 1942 and stayed until 1945. I had one more year of high school left so I came back and in 1946 finished my last year. I left for Morehouse College where I majored in religion and minored in education. I also took

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lots of work in economics and finished in 1950. (Morehouse College is an all-black male private college in Atlanta, Georgia.) I later attended Atlanta University (also a historically black university), and the Reformed Theological Seminary in Jackson, Mississippi. I achieved my educational goals, as did my wife, who was among the first four-year college graduates of Mississippi Valley State University – the youngest Historically Black College (HBCU) in Mississippi.” Just forty years after enslavement, most blacks were barely literate. Today, at least 4,579,000 blacks hold a college degree or higher, and of that number, 58 percent are held by black women. Ms. Matthews majored in general science and graduated in 1953. Both are retired teachers. According to Rev. Matthews, he “began teaching in 1950 and pastoring in 1952. My first paycheck from teaching was $182.00 a month. Ms. Matthews began teaching in 1954. She earned $300.00 per month.”7 After 1954, their combined monthly income from teaching and preaching was just over a thousand dollars a month, about four hundred dollars more than the average monthly income in Sunflower County. He and Lillian Matthews both realized their dreams even when fieldwork trumped school and elementary school was itself no more than second-rate. Ms. Matthews had also attended Delta State University, where, until 1973, an all-white faculty had taught mostly white students. Located next door to Sunflower County in Bolivar, Delta State is now comprised of 40 percent African American students. Historically black colleges were for many decades the only route out of poverty for African Americans lucky enough to complete secondary school. Historically black colleges in the 1940s and 1950s educated 80 percent of black college graduates, whereas today 10 percent of black college graduates attend historically black colleges and universities. Historically black colleges were once crucial portals from rural poverty for first- and many second-generation African American college attendees. Black colleges in Mississippi opened their doors to white faculty in the mid1960s, and by the mid-1970s, their first white matriculants were admitted.8 Matthews carved out a remarkable career as an ordained minister, occupying a leadership post in the National Baptist Convention in 1946. He pastored churches in Mississippi for over sixty-five years, beginning in 1951, including Strangers Home and Bell Grove, where he had the longest ministry. The Rev. David Matthews was a good teacher of the gospel. He was neither a fire and brimstone preacher nor a public position-taking civil 7 8

Matthews, Interview with the author, August 10, 1992. Thomas Carey, “Desegregation of Public Colleges and Universities,” Mississippi Encyclopedia. Available at www.mississippiencyclopedia.org/entries, accessed July 3, 2021.

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rights man. Indianola had no male religious leader that one could liken to Fred Shuttleworth of Montgomery, Alabama.9 When the dangers were greatest, Shuttleworth took a stand against Bull Connor, the Klan, and other segregationists. He used his pulpit to mobilize awareness and teach about what justice should look like on earth, in Birmingham. David Matthews was nevertheless active in civic life. He served as Sunflower’s first black election commissioner, the first black deputy chancery clerk, and a member of the biracial committee formed by Jack Harper during the civil rights movement. Located on B. B. King Drive in Indianola, Bell Grove Missionary Baptist Church has a mixed working- and middle-class congregation among its 200 members. Reverend Matthews was much esteemed by the community and was able to grow the membership and the church building fund for many decades. I found a seat in the crowded congregation that third Sunday morning in August 1992 to attend the church service at Bell Grove. The mothers of the church were all dressed in white, and the deacon board and church trustees, all men, were dressed in dark suits and looked middle-aged. Several pastors joined Rev. Matthews in the pulpit. Behind them was a thirty-five-member church choir, and to their side were a pianist and organist. The congregation joined in the singing of Amazing Grace. Afterward, Rev. Matthews stood to give the scriptures for his text; they were John 3:16–21. Those with Bibles found the passage and read along. Then he preached for twelve minutes to a composed congregation, where a few “Amens” and “say it” were uttered. At Strangers Home, out from Shaw, where Rev. Matthews had pastored a decade earlier, I joined the Byrds three to four times annually for worship 9

Fred Shuttleworth and David Matthews were contemporaries, both were ordained ministers, both lived long lives, a step-parent significantly influenced both, and both were born in the segregated Deep South, and the similarities stopped here. Shuttleworth was the Membership Chairman of the Alabama state chapter of the NAACP in 1956. He and Ed Gardner established the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights, a forerunner to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, founded in 1957. He vowed, “to kill segregation or to be killed by it.” See Andrew Manis, A Fire You Cannot Put Out: The Civil Rights Life of Birmingham’s Fred Shuttleworth (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1999). Some of Shuttleworth’s activism did annoy some members of his Bethel Baptist Church, which he pastored from 1953 to 1961. Those who were annoyed wanted Shuttleworth to be available to perform ministerial duties such as weddings, visiting the sick and shut-in, and presiding at funerals. He left Bethel and moved to Cincinnati, Ohio, where he pastored at Revelation Baptist Church. He remained active in the movement and returned to Alabama numerous times to plan sit-ins and inform lawsuits. He was also active in other civil rights activities, especially in St. Augustine, Florida. President William Jefferson Clinton presented him with the Presidential Citizens Medal on January 8, 2001.

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services for a decade. For the first several years, Rev. M. Cherry, older than Matthews, held forth and was an able and admired teacher-preacher. He riled the congregation and attendees of all ages and engaged them in call and response. I was called to sing a solo in the sparsely populated church and did so. Bell Grove, where Rev. Matthews pastored for six decades, has a 500-capacity sanctuary; it is a modern red-brick building financed in 2005 by a local bank in neighboring Bolivar County. The mortgage was paid in full fifteen years later.10 Founded in 1868, during Reconstruction, 150 years later, it was the site of the late B. B. King’s homecoming on May 30, 2015. Like the blues great King, Matthews was born dirt poor. Like King, Matthews lost his mom early in life. And like King, Matthews built a legacy. His legacy is in church leadership, as an able teacher at Gentry High, and as a loving and loyal husband and father. He offered the community resonant symbols – the survival of a church and a people’s continuing faith in Christianity. Bell Grove and Rev. David and Lillian Matthews stand as memorials and promises – of a wedded couple, two resolute public school teachers, and of Bell Grove as a sacred space for atonement and grass-roots revival. Rev. David Matthews served as a teacher and department chairman of the social sciences at Gentry High School in Indianola from 1958 to 1983. He was a moderator of the Sunflower Baptist Association for sixty years, Vice President General of the Mississippi Baptist Convention (1971–1994), and a delegate to the National Council of Churches. Dr. Rev. David Matthews died on April 15, 2015. He was ninety-five years old. His nephew, Melvin Matthews, a Gentry High School graduate, US Air Force pilot, and returnee from Georgia to Indianola in 2009, was installed as minister of Bell Grove (May 22, 2021).11

CLEMENTINE RICHARDSON AND FAMILIAL INTERIORITY College Would Pay Off.

The nation’s 1929 stock market crash, the Flood of 1927, and the Great Depression all marked Clementine Richardson and an entire generation and a region. The Flood of 1927 was huge in magnitude. It killed 1,000 10 11

“Bell Grove Reaches Milestone,” Enterprise-Tocsin, December 28, 2020. Honoring Melvin Matthews, Congressional Record, May 24, 2017, vol. 163, no. 90, Honorable Bennie G. Thompson of Mississippi.

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people and left 900,000 people homeless and near starvation. Rural black agricultural workers who could do so bolted from the submerged fields and deluged levees; others were stopped at gunpoint and forced to use their bodies as human shields to hold back the teeming waters of the mighty Mississippi.12 The Flood of 1927 had its origins in the 1870s, when during an economic depression, and Reconstruction’s violent disintegration, engineers fretted over how to construct secure levees, capable of shouldering the rage, depth, and longitude of the Mississippi River. Both the 1873 depression and the 1930s depression took a toll on the nation – north and south, outer south, and Deep South, cities, and rural places. The 1873 depression era had shattered the shaky will of Congress to push for substantive political rights and rule of law practices for African Americans. Whites and blacks left the South; those who left were on average better educated than those who stayed behind13 and were more likely to live in southern cities than in rural towns. The Mississippi Delta lost population during the 1920s and many farms went into foreclosure. Jack and Hattie’s parents and Lonnie’s father held on to their land during this period. Agnes and Josie managed their misery. David Williams stopped out of school and found work with fringe benefits. Matthews stayed in school and helped his parents in the fields, before eventually heading to the military. If Agnes and Josephine’s births were punctuated by the founding work of the NAACP and by growing anti-immigration sentiments in US policy, then Clementine Richardson’s birth year was ominous. Clementine was born in the Stephenville Community on Britts Plantation in the year of the Great Depression in 1932. Her mother, Ms. Matilda Richardson, received a 6th-grade education; her father, Peter Richardson, could neither read nor write. Twelve children were in the Richardson household, and two were from previous unions. The average household African American income in 1935 was $330 a year, while for whites it was $1,220. According to the Consumer Purchases Study, while 17 percent of African Americans had incomes under $250 a year, none were on relief.14 Clementine’s parents sharecropped, as did she and her siblings. “I remember that my childhood was like a ball – a close relationship. They saw to it that we worked in the field. We went to Sunday School. And 12

13 14

John M. Barry, Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997). See Gregory, The Southern Diaspora, 30–31. Consumer Purchases Study (1941, p. 92).

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there was real family. We grew our food, fed the cows, cut the wood, chopped, and picked cotton. I felt a sense of kinship to everyone in the community. The neighborhood was one big family and that continues in a way even though many have left home.”15 Still, even if Clementine’s parents created a sense of kinship and community, according to the emergency budget estimated by the Works Progress Administration for 1935, to meet minimum health standards, the average family needed about $900 per year. Most families in the community lived on sub-standard incomes, making them vulnerable to health and housing challenges. As meager as these incomes were, findings from the Consumer Purchases Study indicated that poor blacks managed their incomes better than their white counterparts. As Myrdal found in 1944, “Negroes almost always were more careful budgeters.”16 As with many African American mothers, there was more work to do at home, baking, gardening, sewing, and cleaning, in addition to their work outside their homes. Clementine and her ten siblings witnessed the work ethic of their parents and their commitment to their familial union. Of the Richardson siblings, seven (including Clementine) stayed in Mississippi and the others relocated to cities, including Memphis, Tennessee. The seven who remained in Mississippi finished high school and college and found jobs, mostly in the teaching profession. All the siblings’ children finished college except one. Clementine Richardson explained her exit from material deprivation: “At Mississippi Valley State College, I majored in Business Education and became a secretary at Gentry High School in 1957, and later I entered the classroom. I went from $5,000 in 1957 to $24,000 by the time of my retirement, in 1992.”17 Mississippi ranked 49th in average teacher salaries that year. The average salary for high school teachers in Mississippi in 1992 was $24,367, lower than only one state, South Dakota, at $24,291 (American Federation of Teachers Survey, 1993). In that same year, the nationwide average teacher’s pay was $35,104. Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves signed a bill that raised teacher pay by $1,500. In 2014 and 2015, teachers in Mississippi were awarded a $2,500 salary increase. Despite a 2019 campaign promise by Governor Tate Reeves to raise teachers’ pay by $4,300, Reeves has not yet delivered. Whether 37th or 21st in the nation, teachers in Mississippi 15

16 17

Clementine Richardson-Williams, Interview with the author, Indianola, Mississippi, July 22, 1992. Myrdal, An American Dilemma, 368. Richardson-Williams, Interview with the author, July 22, 1992.

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still earn below the national average.18 Both teachers’ low pay and students’ lower performance will follow them through to retirement. When Clementine was sixteen years old, in 1948, a Mississippi lawsuit challenging disparities in teacher pay by race was spearheaded by Gladys Noel Bates, a black woman from McComb, Mississippi. As had been true for Minnie Cox, Clinton Battle, and black lawyers Parden and Hutchins, Gladys Noel Bates and her husband, John, lost their livelihood and were blacklisted. Gunshots riddled their home, and a fire burned it to the ground. However, legal battles and courageous role-taking would clear some hurdles or signal an opening of pathways for those positioned to benefit from the removal of discrimination. Bates did not prevail, but the NAACP-Legal Defense Fund-inspired case made its way to the federal court, where it failed because, following precedent in Cook v. Davis,19 the plaintiff had not exhausted administrative remedies, starting with the local school board, the county board of education, and the state.20 In standing up to discrimination and organizing communities to fight legal racism, some native Mississippians and allies fought to improve their own life chances and to protect blacks newly entering the teaching profession. Over the course of the litigation, gradual steps were taken to make black and white teacher salaries more equal in Mississippi. So, when Clementine joined the teaching profession in the mid-1960s, the courage of others had assured an economic boon to her life chances. Throughout the state and nation, over the centuries since enslavement and emancipation and beyond, individual acts of courage guided by tactical organizational efforts especially ensured eventual progress even amid setbacks. Doing well for the family was necessary but always insufficient. One had to be useful beyond the confines of family. Bates’s father, Andrew Noel, was born during the era of the parents of the Sunflower Seven – the period between 1880 and 1900. Andrew sold his land inheritance to pay for his college education, while Glady’s mom, Hallie Davis Noel, intelligent and ambitious, also valued a college education. She graduated from the University of Chicago. As for Clementine, “I married a few months after graduation. My husband, Elmira, who is now deceased, was a laborer at Indianola Supply

18

19

20

“Reeves Promises Teacher Pay Raises in Neshoba Stump Speech,” Mississippi Today, July 29, 2021. Cook v. Davis, United States Court of Appeals, Fifth Circuit, February 6, 1950, 178 F 2d 595. Mississippi Department of Archives and History, Smith Robertson Museum.

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and Gin Company. He finished 12 grades and subsequently fought in the Korean War. First, we rented a house in 1962 but in 1967 we purchased a home through the Veterans Administration.”21 Veteran’s benefits well spent meant a head start in home ownership. Clementine Richardson mused that her childhood dream “was to finish high school, go to college, and become a teacher. My principal, Mr. Brown, believed in me. I earned good grades, I was a good athlete and I loved literature.” In addition to Principal Brown, one of her teachers noticed her work ethic and her talents and conferred with the principal about Clementine. “Mr. Brown came to visit my home and he talked with my parents about me. He got a scholarship for me from a white merchant, Mr. Hough. Mr. Brown told me that if I did well in college, he would see to it that I got a job after graduation.” “Seven of the eleven siblings have college degrees. All but the eldest two finished high school. My family was exceptional compared to other sharecropping families of this time. My Daddy saw to it that we went to school on time.” Marriage and family life were mainstays – central to the aspirations of girls and boys of this era. There was no ambivalence about it; everyone who could, wanted to finish high school and college; certainly, many wanted to “marry one time for life.” Elmira and Clementine Richardson’s four girls, Candace, Bridget, Tammy, and Catrina finished college. Three attended Jackson State University, in central Mississippi, in the state capital, and the other one stayed in the Delta and graduated from Mississippi Valley State University. The youngest daughter died in 1992 from complications with diabetes. At the time of the interview, Catrina held down two jobs to support her family, which included sending her children to private school. Clementine Richardson mused: “My husband and I taught our children, Catrina, Bridgett, Candace, and Tamara, to make an honest living, to save their money and to keep their families together.” She continued, “Some nights I’d get the Bible and we’d have Bible class and talk about life in general. I’ve told them to study men and feel out what’s on the inside . . . weighing them out. They knew that their father and I were going to make it – no matter what – we believed in ourselves and in God’s goodness. I told them early in their lives that education provides opportunities for different life outcomes. Education creates options and, what’s more, it provides a better life trajectory than life without an education.”

21

Richardson-Williams, Interview with the author, July 23, 1992.

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Education was a touchstone for Clementine. She explained, “In my family – among the siblings – when one got an education, he or she reached back and helped the others until the last was educated. Then we moved to the nieces and nephews.” Family loyalty never wavered. She continued to compliment her siblings. “Back in 1981, my sister was diagnosed with cancer. We went back and forth to Detroit to see her. One would go – the other would stay – until she died. I had used up all of my sick leave days, so my brothers and sisters paid me the $700.00 that the school had taken out.” Inward-looking intragenerational cohesion held the family close and gave it a shared power beyond any one sibling’s responsibility. It lessened the familial load; a burden, economic and emotional, was shouldered by all siblings rather than falling to one or another. As in nations, when disaster is met with a shared sense of responsibility and sacrifice, reckoning with loss, and accepting atonement are both more possible. Often, caretakers lose their economic, physical and mental health when the responsibility is not shared. Reciprocity calls on us to reckon with what families need and deserve, what they are owed. Black families have been alone in caring for their families and in shouldering the load, a load made more oppressive by legal racism. What we owe others and ourselves is linked in some way to perceptions of justice. Events conspire to shape position-taking, both in families and in the nation. Clementine noted her consternation with the new generation. She observed, with a sigh, “Our young people seem so irresponsible, and this generation of parents is also irresponsible.” She offered a stinging rebuke of two generations. Were these the musings of a teacher who had noticed some diminution of student and parental effort over her teaching profession? If so, was she blaming the black family? Was she “searching for common memories to meet present times”?22 I cannot know for sure what underpinned her worry about intergenerational decline. What I do know is that even if adulthood has not been delayed, those important rites of passage into adulthood – college-going, college completion, marriage, home ownership, childbearing – have been delayed, and divorce and separation have grown. Clementine answered her own question about the rise of irresponsibility in her next utterances: “My successes in life are linked to my parents, my family and Mr. Brown. I did what I was supposed to do, and I had a little luck.” But luck is not a 22

David Thelen, “Memory and American History,” Journal of American History, 75 (March 1989): 1119–1121.

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constant. It is not a familial guardrail. What she had, in addition to luck and her own intelligence and discipline, and her siblings’ fidelity to each other, was a pathway to higher teacher pay made more likely by the sacrifice of others, such as Gladys Noel Bates, Richard Jess Brown, and countless others.23 Clementine had a blueprint she was supposed to follow to change her economic trajectory. She had mentors, who had given her a checklist and a helping hand. The scholarship from a benefactor made her plans for college completion actionable. As is true of children the world over, in Clementine’s telling, children often rise to meet significant adults’ expectations. Clementine believed that her efforts would pay off. In fact, she had been told that if she completed her studies, she would have a teaching job waiting for her. “No failures,” she said. I applied myself, she might have said. I could see the future I envisioned; she might have intoned. When adults and children can envision a future, they are motivated to achieve it. When they can assemble and sustain the material and emotional resources needed to clear pathways toward that achievement, the table is set for progress. Clementine Richardson Williams died peacefully at home on February 2, 2018. She was eighty-six years old. Clementine saw a future that she could navigate and that would pay off. She had a well-placed mentor with resources and the willingness to advocate for her educational interests. Her children watched as their mom pursued higher education, labored at school as a secretary, kept food on the table, and maintained a solid marriage. They were socialized into a cohesive extended family where loyalty and responsibility were evident. What would black children born to working-class parents in the 1960s and 1970s face that their Great Depression-era parents in rural America had not?

23

R. Jess Brown became the lead plaintiff in the teacher equalization suit after Bates and her husband had been fired as teachers. Brown was then a teacher of automotive science and technology at Lanier, a Jackson public school. See “R. Jess Brown, 77, Civil Rights Lawyer in Mississippi Cases,” The New York Times, January 3, 1990. Available at nytimes.com, accessed December 28, 2021.

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9

The Mule-Renter’s Son

I Still Remember Not Having Anything.

Jack Harper, Jr., the lone white person among the Sunflower Seven, was one of three children; he was born in 1918, during World War I, “The Great War.” His father began as a cropper and then became a tenant farmer. This son of a tenant sharecropper, his two sisters, and his Ma helped his dad, Jack Sr., work in the field. His dad sharecropped for ten years. After the 1927 flood, the family became mule renters. The family provided its own labor. Jack Jr. stayed out of school the first three weeks of every school year to pick enough cotton to earn money to order school clothes from Sears, Roebuck and Company. Jack stated, “My ma had a tenth-grade education and my father an 8th or 9th grade education.”1 Jack’s father, a three-fourths mule-renter, paid 75 percent of his crop in rent. His family provided the mule. Tenant farmers, even mule renters, had more independence from the landowner than sharecroppers did. In this way, both the tenant and the planter had fewer risks. Too poor to afford a mule, the Harpers rented one, even though at times, the planter and sharecropper debt was quite high and, “some were slowly abandoning the business altogether and renting to tenants and paying no part of the expense.”2 Jack was born two generations after the Civil War had ended, and it is likely that his parents and grandparents had very truly little. The Depression of 1873 occurred just a few months after the end of the war; the poor got even poorer, and even the wealthy lost money. Jack was only ten years old when the stock market crashed. By then, he was old enough

1 2

Jack Harper, Interview with the author, Indianola, Mississippi, July 29, 1992. Cobb, The Most Southern Place on Earth, 71.

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to understand and feel the downturns in the local economy. Jack reminisced, “I still remember not having anything. I never ever wanted to return to that feeling.” Poverty and the awareness of being poor did not deter Jack but instead motivated him. “My childhood dream,” he said, “was to become governor of the state of Mississippi. I wanted to relate to public issues of the day.”3 Jack Harper enjoyed and benefitted from the privilege of whiteness, but he was also a self-made person who rose from both obscurity and poverty. Like all self-made men, Harper found the Delta, and by extension, America, “to be a place where people could make themselves,”4 but not all by themselves. As is true of all self-made individuals, at critical junctures, doors closed to others similarly situated opened wide for him; he imagined and initiated door openings, as well. Jack grew up watching closely, if not admiring, the bigoted, colorful, and often outrageous Governor Theodore Bilbo and, later, US Senator Bilbo. Harper’s views of Mississippi politics would be framed in part by what he witnessed. For starters, said Jack, “I made A’s and B’s, nothing less than that. I was on the debate team in high school and in college. I was mindful of everything around me. I learned through oration. Henry Grady’s New South was one of my favorites.” In 1886, three decades before Jack Harper’s birth, The Atlanta Constitution’s publisher, Henry Grady, author of The Old South and the New, told his audience that the South had solved the Negro question. Grady asked rhetorically, “Have we solved the problem he presents or progressed in honor and equity toward a solution?”5 He then answered his own question. “Let the record speak to the point. No section shows a more prosperous laboring population than the Negroes of the South; none in fuller sympathy with the employing and land-owning class. He shares our school fund, has the fullest protection of our laws and the friendship of our people. Self-interest as well as honor demands that he should have this. Our future, our very existence, depends upon working out this problem in full and exact justice.”6 He then ended his talk before the New England Society in New York in 1886 with the view that the Civil War, the Confederate defeat, emancipated the South and that emancipation was

3 4 5

6

Harper, Interview with the author, July 29, 1992. Howe, Making the American Self, 141. Henry Grady, The Old South and the New in The World’s Famous Orations. America: III (1861–1905), vol. X. Available at www.bartleby.com268/10/17.html. Ibid.

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“in the inscrutable wisdom of God.” Whether the region itself or the men who would rise to power had been emancipated is still in doubt. The New White South needed moderate public intellectuals – folks to interpret what Union victory, Reconstruction, and its erasure had meant and could mean. Struggling to find his own success and Atlanta’s, Grady’s speeches, given in New England and at home in Georgia, offered a vision of a biracial world and harmony not then in existence. Grady, the son of a Confederate father, killed during the Civil War, was complicated, as was Harper. Unlike Harper, Grady publicly extolled white supremacy and black inferiority while he created an imaginary South, with blacks and whites singing from the same hymnal. More than anything, however, Grady imagined a new industrial South, and its realization needed the embrace of the North. His exhortations appealed to Harper. But there were other speeches circling Harper, those of Senator Theodore Bilbo, and Bilbo’s fiery rhetoric and racial animus, which made it clear forty years on that destroying the Confederacy was different from repudiating it. Grady’s vision of blacks and whites together was premature. Jack’s belief that most blacks and whites in Sunflower were in the middle of the political road was also a fairy tale. In Jack’s everyday real world, his parents’ expectations and Christian faith propelled his determination. He elaborated, “They got me up, fed me, rain, sleet or snow. I attended Junior College at Moorhead, I received military training through the Mississippi National Guard, and I spent a year in Korea. I went to law school at Ole Miss on a Masonic Lodge Scholarship for a year. I also got a scholarship through the Yazoo-MS Delta Insurance Association. I entered a National Youth Administration Summer program at $.35 an hour and earned money to supplement the scholarship.” Access to formal college education at the state’s only public law school aided him. “When I got to Ole Miss, I got a job for $8.00 a month sweeping the building. I was thrilled to death to get it.” He continued, “I knew who the political figures in the State were . . . I wrote Senator Theodore Bilbo and told him that I hoped he would use his influence to get me a job for $12.00 or $13.00. A couple of weeks later, I received a note to see Mr. Kennon. ‘Senator Bilbo requested that I give you a situation where you can make more money – there is work in the law library for $24.00 a month.’”7

7

Harper, Interview with the author, July 29, 1992.

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The University of Mississippi is known for its love of athletics, Greek parties, and fidelity to the Old South. It is also known for its resistance to desegregation. Its Corinthian columns, the oaks that shade the Grove, its exigent donors, and the southern belles who once embellished the Old South image, obscure the institution’s profound impact on southern history, medicine, literature, and political and business leadership. Many of its law and business school graduates have been and are shapers of the Mississippi judiciary, the legislature, and governorship. Its graduates from medical school have played outsized roles as leaders in the Mississippi health profession. As with all colleges and universities, states, and nations, Ole Miss, Sunflower County and the eighty-one other counties in Mississippi have been burdened by their racial traditions, by their indifference to multigenerational poverty. Jack knew that it was urgent to arrest familial poverty. He knew that to do so meant asking for help, imagining a new world for himself, and guiding the Sunflower blacks’ majority access to that imagined world. The pathways from tenancy led from high school completion to community college and finally to the University of Mississippi. His networks were substantive. “Well, as I said, I graduated from law school and went to war; when I got back Senator Bilbo was in the middle of a re-election campaign. By then I was practicing law with Mr. Cooper for $150.00 a month. Then I got married and was given a $100.00 raise.” A marriage increase, how rare and wonderful. Jack and Rose, his college-educated wife, have four children – today they are a physician, lawyer, teacher, and one other, who at the time of my interviews with Jack suffered from mental illness. Jack’s political networks were mutually reinforcing. As an actively engaged Democrat, he drove Senator Eastland and later William Winter around Mississippi. He recalls, “A. B. Friend, Senator Bilbo’s 1940 and 1944 campaign manager from Sardis, Mississippi, called and asked me to introduce Senator Bilbo in Indianola. I made a big splash. This was my first in-person political introduction to Theodore Bilbo. He carried the county. I had carried out my obligation.”8 He fondly recalled how he had leveraged his money. He bought acreage cheap and sold it high. “I have been able to save and make wise investments. We sent the kids to college. In 19 years, I purchased 200 acres of land, and paid for the house. I have a deferred compensation plan, which is the equivalent of savings of right around $135,000. I have about $25,000 cash 8

Harper, Interview with the author, July 29, 1992. See also The Clarion-Ledger, August 30, 1953.

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flow. I bought up 120 acres of land at 250.00 an acre. I had saved $5,000.00, but I went to the banker for financing, and I got it. I sold off 80 acres to residential developers at $700.00 an acre. So, I have had some luck.”9 The Harpers’ four children, Jack III, Semonne, William, and Robert Harris, began on parallel tracks with a college-educated mom and a dad striving to achieve both economic and political power. Jack recounted his children’s achievements and the parental guidance he and his wife, Rose, offered them. He mused: “All of our children got a chance to improve themselves. The oldest is the brightest but he was a victim of the 1970s drug culture. He got caught up.” Like thousands of young people in the United States, Jack Harper, III, continues to require mental and emotional support from his family and his community.10 Jack’s eyes looked tired but determined. He continued, “My wife and I have been active in their lives. We were between home and the little league field. We got them up and off to school. In terms of schoolwork, there was a routine for everything; we encouraged them, carried them to church. I was a little league coach for 12 years.” Not only did three of the children reach adulthood with more hope than angst, but they also landed in professions likely to sustain their middleclass standing. Jack was effusive, “Robert is a lawyer who has practiced in East Asia. Robert’s wife is a Memphian who has a Harvard MBA. Semonne is a music teacher, a graduate of Mississippi University for Women. We told our daughter to become an individual not dependent on a man. For a birthday present, she framed a copy of her first paycheck and gave it to me. William is a medical doctor. William called home one day and started complaining about how hard medical school was. My wife said, ‘Well, Bill, if you are tired of medical school, they just built a fish plant here. Come on, home; we’ll expect you.’” He continued to talk about the Christian foundations and the work ethic he and his wife had established. “Well, during their first years we tried to show them that we loved each other, and we loved them. Religious values and personal habits justified our position in church.” As for the children’s religious faith and their origins, Jack remarked, “We christened our children at an early age, but they joined the church when they wanted to find their own salvation. We tried to raise them in love. We taught them that everything is out there for you to claim it – work hard and persevere.”11 9 10 11

Harper, Interview with the author, July 29, 1992. Clarksdale Press Register, September 29, 1983. Harper, Interview with the author, July 21, 1992.

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A strong husband and wife bond, Jack’s dreams and political ambition, Jack and Rose’s commitments to their children, and the reciprocity of his networks were crucial to paving pathways from poverty to the political class. Jack made several points bluntly, “At no time have my wife and I considered separation or divorce. My wife is a lovely, talented person with high morals. Her children were her life. She taught school then quit to raise the children. For four or five years she had regular help. My wife didn’t have it as hard as I did because of her family’s position. She has a good education; a Murray State and University of Tennessee – Morton graduate. Rose appreciates the need to save, to wear clothes out, and to be frugal. She has been a lot of help to me in every way – a good help mate.”12 Jack bounced forward out of poverty. Hard work was his mantra, as it was for black parents like Agnes, Josie, Clementine, Williams, and Matthews. Jack explained, “My outlook on life has not changed. I still believe that the most important thing is to learn how to trade our talents for a paycheck. If all you want is a welfare check, sit down and do nothing. It will come at the first of the month. Everything else you have got to get up and go get.” In mid-life, Jack Harper enjoyed financial stability. Luck matters, goals matter, and being white mattered; it is not possible to know, however, just how much Jack’s view of himself as above his economic and political origins mattered. His race was not a hindrance; it propelled his sense of belonging and hastened his entry into the governing class. He asked for support, which he obtained and on which he built higher wages and thus attained greater access to continuous opportunity. He leveraged white audacity and access to local political power–assets no other person in this cohort possessed. Jack leapfrogged the mule-renter rung, eventually becoming a farm owner. Many steps led to business and political success. He attended Moorhead Community College, joined the military, earned a law degree from the University of Mississippi, and engaged local, state, and national politicians on his way toward establishing himself in local party politics. He was made a Captain in the US military, serving in Korea. His 1969 service as chairperson of the Indianola Chamber of Commerce foregrounded his skills in politics and fiscal management. Jack’s advantage began with his keen observations of Mississippi elites. He learned who the influential were and he reached out to them, expecting,

12

Ibid.

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but not being assured of reciprocity. He remembered his father’s struggle with tenancy and felt the sting of scarcity or income insecurity firsthand. Jumping on the agricultural ladder as a mule-renter rather than a sharecropper signified a tad more mobility than Agnes, Josie, Williams, Matthews, and Clementine had as child laborers and families. Where one enters the economic mobility story, which rungs, which race, which gender, which mindset, which opportunities, and with what politics – all matter. In 1916, two years before Jack’s birth, Bilbo had served his first term as governor of Mississippi. Later, at the time of Jack’s adolescence and late teenage years, Bilbo would again serve as governor, from 1928 to 1932. Bilbo would run for the US Senate and win. He served from 1935–1947, just as Jack was reaching young adulthood and preparing to attend college and law school. Jack had long observed the movers and shakers and vowed to become one. One wonders if Jack really believed that one needed only to work hard and persevere in Sunflower County to get ahead. He had tremendous luck to complement his audacity and work ethic. He never spoke about racism, unlivable wages, and his role in the War on Poverty, his role in the White Citizens’ Council, or in spearheading private academies. On that consequential record, he was silent. I invited him to appear as a lecturer in the Fannie Lou Hamer Lecture Series. He told the packed audience in the H. T. Sampson Library Auditorium at Jackson State University that October evening that he relished the role he had played and was proud of the biracial coalition he had formed as a community action agency. Jack sought to control, not merely influence, the terms of public engagement and decision-making in Sunflower County. He did not run for governor of Mississippi. However, for four decades, he exerted both local power and influence as Chancery Clerk and prominent Democrat. Speaking with Keith Richburg, a reporter for the Washington Post, in April 1986, Jack commented on his role in the fight to hire a black superintendent of education. He quipped, “I think we are in transition, and neither the Ku Klux Klan, nor anti-blacks or the antiwhites, are going to get control of it. It is awfully lonely out here in the middle sometimes, but I believe in the end that’s where the hearts and minds of most of the people really are.”13 Soon after his retirement in 2000, House Concurrent Resolution 31, co-sponsored by at least thirty-two members of the Mississippi House,

13

Keith Richburg, The Washington Post, April 21, 1986.

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including thirteen blacks, extolled his forty years of public service, his educational and military accomplishments, and his devotion to his wife and four children. Did his dominance in local politics ever lead to meaningful reciprocity of shared governance by blacks and whites? “No,” lamented the late Carver Randle, longtime Indianola resident, attorney, and son of a domestic chef and gardener, in 1991.14 The unwillingness to share power would not relent significantly until the 1970s, and by then black economic dependency on whites would prove a challenge to the movement to elect blacks to key municipal offices in majority-black counties. Jack Harper was determined to manage the transition from white power to shared biracial politics. He opposed black empowerment as personified in Ms. Fannie Lou Hamer, but believed in the symbolism of black and white progressive politics. Jack E. Harper, Jr., died January 1, 2004, at eighty-five years of age. His wife, Rose Semonne Oliver Harper, died on April 4, 2015.

14

Carver Randle, Oral History Interview, Tulane University Digital Archives, October 22, 1991.

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10

The Byrd Farmers

As a Child I Remember Having a Sense of Security. Lonnie Byrd

The decade of the 1890s was pivotal in laying the foundation for the trajectory – the next sixty years – of African American families and community economic mobility in Mississippi and the nation. In 1890, the Mississippi re-segregation constitution became the governing instrument of legal racism. In that same year, of the nine million African Americans in the United States, seven million lived in the south. From 1888 through the 1890s, the Yazoo and Mississippi Valley Railroad was selling land in Sunflower County at 5 dollars an acre, on installment plans. The opportunity for wealth-based farming and land ownership brought the Byrds, from Sumter County in Alabama, itself a settlement originated by Seminole Indians, to Sunflower County, Mississippi, some 205 miles away. The challenges they left behind included an outbreak of Yellow Fever, and the ones they encountered entailed densely wooded marshlands prone to flooding and hordes of mosquitos.1 The Byrds purchased land when it was cheap and cleared it themselves over many years. They were literate and landed, living 16 miles outside Indianola in a kinship outpost. Lonnie Byrd’s relatives left Alabama, stopped for a brief time in the Hills before heading to the land of the Mississippi Delta. Robust health, cheap land, and doggedness led to the purchase of thousands of acres of land by the family from 1898 through the 1930s. They had a chance for upward economic mobility and a responsibility to hold on to the land and prosper as farmers and citizens. William “Kingfish” Byrd, purchased 700 acres of marshlands, “which he cleared with his bare hands, 1

Huffard, “Infected Rails.”

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until saving enough money to buy a tractor, in cash, for $25,000.”2 Byrd’s farm was three times the size of an average farm in Mississippi, but far from the 5,000-acre plantation which Senator James Eastland had inherited (in part) from his dad.3 Foregoing profit-sharing or sharecropping plans, the Byrds were enterprising men and women ready to clear the wilderness with their own hands. Time on the Ladder, the title of a trenchant essay on agricultural dynamics in Jefferson County, Arkansas, by Lee Alston and Joseph Ferrie,4 posited that economic mobility for black farmers of that period (1890–1935) depended upon inheritance and chance, not just hard work. Farming was a regulated industry in the United States from the country’s founding. An 1890 federal law prohibited farming operations from having more than 12,500 acres. Another federal measure, the Government Control program, limited market surplus in the early depression days, but dollars in federal subsidies gave the largest farmers the biggest breaks. For example, Delta and Pineland, the nation’s largest plantation at 37,000 acres, located next door to Sunflower in Bolivar County, received 1.2 million dollars in federal aid in 1957. With its federally supported profits and the profitability of the land, Delta and Pineland diversified and found success in breeding cotton seeds. Both crop yields and textiles benefitted from the seed technology of this British-owned company, which would later be sold in a leveraged buyout to Southwide Inc., an American company in Memphis, Tennessee. A farmer like William Byrd had to contend with local, federal, and transnational maneuvers but was not informed enough and capitalized well enough to do so. In addition to paying taxes on the 700 acres and wages to day laborers, seeds – good seeds – had to be purchased, crop irrigation and anti-insect infestation had to be seen to, and crops harvested. Farm loan discrimination, challenging climatic conditions, insect infestation, variable worldwide cotton consumption, mega-business mergers, and lucrative patents converged with mechanization to diminish the small black farmer. The contexts for building a farming dynasty were arrayed against the black farmer, including the Byrds of Sunflower. For a time, Oscar Johnston, the manager of Delta and Pineland, was also the Finance Director of the Agricultural Adjustment Administration and manager of the federal cotton pool, a clear conflict of interest. 2 3 4

Congressional Record, January 9, 2014. Eastland Collection and Archives, University of Mississippi, Biographical Note. Alston and Ferrie, “Time on the Ladder.”

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“I was born August 7, 1922. I have no whole sisters or brothers.”5 Lonnie Byrd was born in Springhill, a farmland outpost on Highway 442. Depending on how fast one takes the winding highway from Indianola, Springhill is reachable in 16 to 20 minutes. The only clue on the map to this outpost is a reference to Springhill Cemetery. Lonnie was the Byrd family patriarch. Lonnie’s wife, Evelyn, a schoolteacher from Monticello, Mississippi in Lawrence County, was able to provide a modest but steady non-farm income for much of their fiftyyear marriage. She was also an exemplar – a United Negro College Fund (UNCF) college graduate and an exceptional teacher in the community. She made a living away from the farm, at Gentry High School, even as her husband, Lonnie, wrestled with making his inheritance profitable. Lonnie was born to a well-to-do farming paternal family and to an unwed mother who worked on the Byrd farm. In 1922, when Lonnie Byrd was born, 9 percent of the births to black women were out of wedlock. “My mother (Momma Shorty) was born in Scooba, Mississippi and Dad (Uncle Baby) was born in Sumter County, Alabama.” Scooba, a small town in Kemper County – the birthplace of US Senator John C. Stennis – is a place of fewer than 650 people. According to the New York Times of December 26, 1906, Scooba was the site of a racial encounter in which a dozen blacks were killed by whites. The small village is adjacent to a highway and railroad about 35 miles north of the Meridian. Scooba is also the site of East Central Community College – a college that Lonnie’s parents would not have been able to attend in the late 1800s, and that Lonnie would not have been able to attend in 1940, though he had finished high school, while his parents had not. Through constitutional edict, Mississippi’s segregated school systems barred blacks and whites from attending the same schools, from lower school through college, for all of the nineteenth century and roughly six decades into the twentieth. Lonnie’s mom, Momma Shorty, had not been able to finish high school and attend college. Lonnie explained: “My parents were not well-educated people, but they had an intense sense of land ownership.” Lonnie and Evelyn would take care of Momma Shorty for twenty-five years, until her death in 1986. Shepard Byrd, the landowner, was Lonnie’s granddad. Shepard Byrd divided his land (1,600 acres) among all the children. Uncle Baby, Lonnie’s father, ended up with 700 acres. Lonnie recalled, “My grandfather came

5

Lonnie Byrd, Interview with the author, Springhill, Mississippi, July 27–28, 1992.

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from the Hills. He worked hard and took advantage of opportunities and became a big landowner.”6 In that same year, land-owning blacks with more than 100 acres in Sunflower constituted less than 10 percent of the population. He recalled his childhood in this way: “As a youngster, I would rise early, get about my daily occupation, bring in the water, feed the livestock, and chop the night wood. I finished 12th grade. We had 4 months of schooling. I went to pay schools . . . to Shaw High School.” This conflicts with his obituary, which indicated that he attended a school in Clarksdale. He added: “My Ma Dear, my first cousin’s mother, and my Father taught us that racism existed. We were not subjected to it by employment; we didn’t do day work . . . we were taught to love, irrespective of color.” Lonnie’s land inheritance from his dad would place his net worth well above most blacks in the state and nation. Lonnie continued: “As a child, I remember having a sense of security, I was dedicated to hard work, honesty, religious values, and love for the community.”7 What did Lonnie hope for as a child? “My childhood dream was to farm, be wealthy, and self-employed, and to have a family. These are the only things I have ever wanted to do. I wanted to learn how to farm, to market products intelligently, to look at the land, estimate acreage and soil, marry, and have a family. I only wanted one wife; just to marry one time for life.”8 Lonnie Byrd examined his journey: “I went to War on December 7, 1942. In World War II, I learned chemical warfare from defensive to offensive. I worked at a gasoline supply company on Honshu Island, Japan. I stayed in the Army until February 19, 1946. I made Sergeant.”9 He recounts his return to the States: “I returned to Mississippi and fell in love with a girl who nearly broke my heart. I wanted to marry her; she was my first lover. I was so bitter. I always knew that I could not live a good life single. There was a void in my life. I later met and married Evelyn. I was in my early 30’s when I got married. My bride was 26. I have never considered separation or divorce.” Evelyn remembered that it was the mother of Rod Paige, George W. Bush’s Secretary of Education, a woman who was an alumna of Tougaloo College, a small historically black and private college in Jackson, Mississippi, who had been her first-grade teacher. Evelyn laid out the educational journey: “I was the youngest of 11 children and both my teachers and church members encouraged me to go to Tougaloo. My

6

Ibid.

7

Ibid.

8

Ibid.

9

Ibid.

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Dad did not have much education, but he worked hard. He worked in the sawmill in the fall and in the cotton gin during the spring. We existed. I do not know much about being hungry, but we did not have much there in Monticello, Mississippi. I finished college and years later I met and married Lonnie. He protected me and helped me with my teaching career. I taught for 38 years. I had a college degree, but he had the money. My degree never bothered him.”10 Lonnie continued, “Now I am semi-retired at age 70. Yes, I have savings and investments. I have good health insurance. So, no, I do not worry anymore about the future. I still farm, still own a grocery store. I have lost a lot farming. Small farmers never had equal access to capital. No tax breaks for small farmers. It is too late for the small farm. Small wholesales have gone out of business. In this business, knowledge is power. Insiders in Washington keep the haves informed; no one keeps the small black farmer informed. Plus, black farmers did not modernize. No marketing, contracts, opinions, rollovers.”11 Lonnie tended to gently guide me forward as he talked. “You know,” he said, “Another point is that too many blacks believe in jobs, not ownership. There has always been this resentment, a sense of jealousy against blacks who had a little more than other blacks. So, no, black landowners were not the leadership base in this county.”12 He continued, “Blacks in the rural area were better off because they made a better living if their parents were aggressive. But black farmers did well just to hold on.”13 Always, in his ears, he heard his father’s admonishment, “Hold on to the land. Never sell the farm.”14 Lonnie died at home in Springhill, Mississippi on December 18, 1999. He was seventy-seven years old. Hattie Isaac, the Byrd kinship family matriarch, lived next door to Lonnie and Evelyn. She was born on September 10, 1917, in Scott, Mississippi, in rural Bolivar County, to a married couple, the Rev. John and Leona Preston Isaac. In that year, there was southern resistance to the military draft in the rural south. This resistance, as Jeanette Keith’s immense work lays bare, was about politics, race, and class. The war mobilization efforts of the Wilson administration were seen in the rural south as ways to frame who would and would not be exempted from conscription. One plan proposed to exempt those whose work contributed 10 11 12 14

Evelyn Byrd, Telephone interview with the author, March 2, 2006. Lonnie Byrd, Interview with the author, July 20, 1992. 13 Lonnie Byrd, Interview with the author, July 28, 1992. Ibid. Congressional Record, 160(5) (January 9, 2014): 37–38.

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the least to the economy (estimated at one dollar or less a day); another would exempt unmarried men; yet another, married men without children. In addition to class issues, many felt that blacks should not serve because they could not be relied on to do so. DuBois, among other race advocates, felt that African American service would improve the citizenship and economic opportunities of the race. In examining documents from the Justice Bureau of Investigation, Keith found that many poor whites and blacks believed they were being used to fight a war that neither concerned them nor advanced their interests. A conscription policy designed to protect the industry had unequal impacts in the South, where agriculture and poverty coexisted. One of the poorest regions in the country was asked to bear the largest burden. Keith added, “Many ordinary white southerners opposed United States entry into the so-called Great War. They thought that the war was being fought for economic interests not their own, and they struggled against being forced to serve in it. Their counterparts across the color line, black farmers and laborers, agreed mostly with this critique and added to it a disinclination to serve a country that denied them full citizenship.”15 Nearly one year after Hattie’s birth, in August 1918, with 350,000 African Americans serving (mostly in non-combat roles) in the US war with Germany, Wilson finally spoke out against lynching and mob violence, emphasizing that it played into the hands of German propagandists. The President of the whole nation, who had promised absolute fair dealing, did not mention the African American, nor did he push for federal legislation against lynching. During Hattie’s formative interwar years in historic Mound Bayou, Mississippi, founded by former slaves as an independent black community, Hattie’s dad established a church and her mom became a full-time housewife. The Rev. John Isaac eventually preached at three churches; one of his three churches was in Gilfield, in rural Sunflower County, on Senator James Eastland’s plantation.16 Every third Sunday, Eastland brought a donation to the church. According to the Southern Advocate, the Mound Bayou newspaper, on September 28, 1940, Rev J. C. Isaac, pastor of Jerusalem M. B. Church, was an active citizen in a town that served as a model of black self-help and independence. 15

16

Jeanette Keith, “The Politics of Southern Draft Resistance, 1917–1918: Class, Race, and Conscription in the Rural South,” The Journal of American History, 87(4) (2001): 3. Congressional Record, April 8, 2017.

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Penniless, the young Reverend J. C. Isaac borrowed money from a relative to buy a plot of land and a home. Hattie’s grandma, Elisa Preston, was the relative who lent the money. Ms. Preston had earlier received funds from a life insurance policy at the time of her husband’s death. She had saved this money and used the savings as bridge funds for her family in grim times. The family farmed on a 10-acre plot. Three children – Everette, James, and Audrey – and a separation later, Hattie’s father, Rev. John Isaac, died. Hattie returned home to take care of her ailing mother. Hattie and her second husband, Isaac, Sr., closed ranks to rear and shelter a family of eight. Rural isolation and a large farming family meant thick interdependence, leaning on each other, sharing chores, enjoying wagon rides, and reading books older children discarded as they moved on to higher grades. Three generations of Byrds lived in a tightly knit landed kinship community. Over the twentieth century, Hattie and her siblings showed civic audacity and daring. It was, however, Hattie, who lived 100 years, whose audacity, thoughtful giving and maternal pride, and habit of explicit candor proved an overarching multigenerational force. As a stay-at-home mother, Hattie Isaac visited the children’s schools almost every day. She remembered, “I’d go to the classrooms; my kids would be embarrassed but I did not care. I was involved in their lives every step of the way. After school, my kids had chores; after chores they had dinner and then homework. No television or goofing off was allowed. All of the children finished 12th grade, and all had a chance to complete college.”17 Three were valedictorians of their high school classes. Of the eight children, one is a medical doctor, one is an elected official in the Delta, one is an attorney, another a high school teacher (now retired), one was a legal administrator, another was a para-legal and is now deceased, two are supervisors, one at the Chicago Transportation Association, and Larry Farmer, the last child (a nephew) reared by Hattie and Isaac, worked in Jackson, Mississippi, as a train line operator at Sperry Vickers. There are just over a dozen grandchildren. Hattie summed up her life in this way: “I have done a lot of good for a lot of people. I am mamma and aunt sister to a lot of people. Two of the children live within 5 miles of my home and they visit and/or call me daily. I am still active in the church, and I have a car so I can get where I need to go [at 88] as long as I have good health [after a colon cancer scare and

17

Hattie Isaac, Interview with the author, Springhill, Mississippi, July 25, 1992.

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successful surgery in 2004]. One of the children pays my health insurance. So, I have that.”18 In 1934, Hattie Isaac formed a union with James McBride and left Mound Bayou (in neighboring Bolivar County), the plantation south, and her parent’s small farm. She found work in a detonation war factory in La Porte, Indiana. Her husband found work in the nation’s largest oil refinery, Whiting Oil. Whiting, like other refineries, processed more than 36,000 barrels of crude oil per day during the second and third decades of the twentieth century. Increased production was attempted at Whiting by cracking the crude oil at higher temperatures and higher pressures. Millions of dollars in royalties were made as this innovation was successful. The minimum wage at the factory and at the refinery far exceeded that of plantation work and domestic labor in Mississippi. However, employees wanted, and many needed, a greater share in their companies’ successes. After World War II, labor shortages were evident, and many women were hired to work in the refineries and the detonation war factories. In the Midwest, unions formed. Strikes intended to help workers were staged. After President Harry Truman seized some plants and labor became involved in the dispute, many refineries and war-based laborers received as much as 18 percent increases in their wages. Hattie was instructive: “I made much more in La Porte than I could have earned in Mississippi, much more. All women did. I worked there for two years, got pregnant with my second child; I quit my job to become a full-time mother and housewife.”19 Working in Mound Bayou away from the small farm put Hattie’s brother, A. C., in contact with race men who practiced self-help and challenged the status quo. Upon her return to Mississippi, Hattie found that A. C. was employed by the African American Magnolia Mutual Life Insurance Company of Mound Bayou, Mississippi. Medgar Evers also worked for the company. Together, A. C. and Medgar Evers, the first director of the Mississippi NAACP, rebuilt a fledgling local NAACP in Mound Bayou and began to form a branch in neighboring Cleveland, Mississippi. Hattie reflected: “A. C. was inspired by Daddy’s hardship. He saw Daddy swallow his pride many times when dealing with white people and segregation.”20 A. C. had peers and friends who were imbued with race pride and not fearful of the Klan or white authority. Dr. Theodore Roosevelt 18 19 20

Hattie Isaac-Byrd, Interview with the author, July 24, 1992. Hattie Isaac-Byrd, Telephone interview with the author, March 1, 2006. Hattie Byrd, Telephone interview with the author, February 28, 2006.

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Mason Howard, the owner of the Bolivar County Insurance Company (next door to Sunflower), physician, and civil rights spokesman, found himself repeatedly at risk and threatened. He persisted with bodyguards and an armored vehicle as he fought to protect himself and erect the rule of law as a counter to the white regime and mob violence.21 Mutual aid organizations, such as the one Howard led, inspired an emerging civil rights cadre of leaders and offered support to the poorest Delta residents. He would extend his protection to witnesses of the Emmett Till murder and to Till’s mother, Mamie Carthan Till Mobley. After their testimony, Hattie’s brother, A. C., Medgar Evers, and Howard helped the black witnesses evade the local mob. Young Hattie Isaac finished 11th grade and later, after the kids were grown, continued her education. “I took and passed the GED. I graduated from Coahoma Junior College in 1977. I had wanted to attend Delta State, but my husband got sick; I wanted to work in elementary education.” Hattie Isaac had a profound sense of her own worth. “My parents told us that even though we were black, we were important, we had value, to respect ourselves and never stand back.” Mound Bayou – her childhood home – was a pride-filled community. It was a place where black power (to build schools and hospitals, to take care of the black community) was on display before the summer of 1966, when Stokely Carmichael first uttered the words “black power” as the SNCC volunteers were finishing James Meredith’s March (after he was shot on his way to Oxford, Mississippi). Her Mound Bayou pride was resonant. Little Hattie Isaac and A. C. had great familial and racial pride. What Hattie’s life had in great quantity as a child, wife, and mother was a belief in motherhood, an unquenchable desire to shelter and nurture her children and nephews with familial affirmation and discipline. Farm life in a kinship community magnified those values and placed her children and her nephews, Larry and John, on a pathway toward achievement, service, and mastery. Hattie and her siblings (at least four of them, two brothers and two sisters) had entered the world black and relatively poor, but not dirt poor. They had their own land, a modest home, and parents who could read and write. Contrary to Hattie’s parents, much more than subsistence land had been inherited by Lonnie, Isaac, Sr., and Thomas Byrd. Lonnie was invested in making the land profitable; his first cousins, Thomas and Isaac, were less so. Lonnie sold all but 60 acres of his property two years before his death in 2001. Never once did he discuss the sale of the land with his wife, Evelyn. 21

David T. Beito, Black Maverick: T. R. M. Howard’s Fight for Civil Rights and Economic Power (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009).

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He became ill at just the time when black farmers were suing the government for failing to forgive their farm debts, while they forgave the debts of white farmers. Evelyn tried to pull together the paperwork to complete the application, but when she met with attorney Willie Griffin, it was too late. Evelyn insisted, “If he had filed the lawsuit, he would have kept the land and not sold it to pay his debts. He got too sick, and I did not know enough about the business to pull it all together, plus he did not want to tell me anything that would worry me.”22 She continued, “Lonnie got tired and sick. He could not go on. He was very secretive about the farm business, even with me.”23 The pressures of manhood and wealth-building were enormous and the burdens great. The expectations for those born with something were higher. Lonnie wanted to thrive. He had attempted to do so without a network of support and an equal playing field for small farmers. The world these children entered and in which they reached adulthood was a rapidly changing one. It had spanned several crucial historical moments, both intellectually and politically. As already illustrated, the economic depressions of 1913 and 1914, World War I, the 1927 Flood, and the Great Depression were defining times in the histories of families’ work lives and in the economic and political history of the nation. In their local world, a sharecropping system, condoned by the federal government, offered unfair advantages to elites and devastating economic wage and labor conditions to the impoverished. Both despair and hope resided in the spirit and minds of those with significant land ownership and those who earned only a few cents a day, missed school, and had little to no access to quality health care or an open and fair opportunity structure. Despite these odds, Hattie’s youngest son and Lonnie’s second cousin, Isaac Byrd, Jr., said, “Everything in my world affirmed me.”24 Isaac, Jr. would become an attorney. And while the family, teachers, and faith in himself offered affirmation, his world included the intemperate nation into which he was born, his native state of Mississippi, and entrenched black poverty. It also included, amongst his peers in the Mississippi Bar, some who had shown no willingness to share power or recognize Isaac’s humanity and talent, and no inclination to welcome him to help build an egalitarian community. Isaac Byrd Jr. was born in a tiny shack back in the field from Ma Dear’s, in his grandmother’s house. When Ma Dear died in 1958, Byrd was six years old. His family (Hattie and Isaac and their children) moved to Ma Dear’s, a house with six rooms. Isaac’s paternal grandfather, his dad, and 22 24

Evelyn Byrd, Telephone interview, March 2, 2006. Isaac Byrd, Jr., July 19, 1992.

23

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Ibid.

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two of his relatives, Lonnie and Thomas Byrd, constituted both a tight and a loosely knit kinship clan. They were tightly knit by blood but loosely tethered by enterprise and politics. Isaac, the young 4-H Club winner of the regional Pig and National speaking contest, at 14 and 16 respectively, took immense pride in all endeavors, large and small. His competitive spirit, discipline, and arduous work catapulted him to graduate first in his high school class at Gentry High in Indianola. One sibling/first cousin preceded him in that honor, and another would follow on his heels. His intact family remained rooted on the same land for a century and more. In 1969, when landowner and farmer Lonnie Byrd’s young second cousins, Isaac, Michelle, and Larry, were in 10th and 11th grade, they moved from the country school in Shaw to Gentry High, where Isaac II had one white classmate. (In 1968, during the “Freedom of Choice” year, the Sunflower School District had 4,200 black students and 1,000 white students.) Isaac gained admission to Northwestern University School of Law in 1974; in that same year, he completed a Bachelor of Arts with honors in Political Science and graduated from Tougaloo College. Tougaloo College, nestled in the once heavily forested woods between Jackson, Mississippi, and Ridgeland, Mississippi, had an enviable record of educating many who would be among the region’s finest physicians and lawyers. Schools and value-added teachers had mattered, but so had familial exposure to those who had completed high school and were college-bound. By the 1970s, white schools and professional schools, especially law and medical schools, had opened their doors to educate a critical mass of first-generation working- and middle-class blacks. Attorney Isaac Byrd, Jr. reported that when his cousin Lonnie’s wife, Evelyn, earned a college degree from Tougaloo, and later his older cousin, John Farmer, he knew his pathway to college was possible. He had absorbed everything he could to prepare for it. He reminisced: “I mastered what I had before me, but there was so much to which I had not been exposed.” John, his older first cousin, brought books home from Tougaloo College. “I would read them, but I was a kid. I worked on the farm, and I just did my thing. I was different. I respected old men wearing caches pants and listened to black women wearing worn dresses.”25 He elaborated, “Everything I did gave me pride. I stuffed my brains with everything I would hear and read. I was praised a lot.” Despite the

25

Isaac Byrd, Jr., Interview with the author, Springhill, Mississippi, July 4, 1992.

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farmland, Isaac Jr., and his siblings were born land rich but income insecure. They were nonetheless psychologically and economically free to work for themselves. Young Byrd was a competitive child with a little insecurity about living in a rural area rather than in town. He weathered his insecurity by out-achieving others when the county and town schools were consolidated. Young Byrd left Springhill for Tougaloo College. He was the fourth child among his siblings to attend. Zelois, had attended Tougaloo and, as indicated above, so had Evelyn Byrd. John, also a Tougaloo graduate, one of the older brothers/first cousins, attended Tufts Medical School and was a successful family physician in Chicago, where he practiced for twenty years before returning to Mississippi, where he is still a practicing physician. Gwendolyn and Michelle, an older and younger sister to Isaac, also finished high school, college, and graduate school. Like Isaac and John, Michelle was her class valedictorian. Also, like Evelyn, John, and Isaac, she graduated from Tougaloo College. She earned a MA degree in Biology and considered becoming a physician. Young Isaac Byrd, though, “was just a child and had no dreams beyond gettin’ through the field and taking a bath in a Number 3 tub. I did not have the exposure to dream. But I had discipline. I worked every second of the day. I fed the hogs, tied the cows, carried sacks for seeds to plant, cut cockleburs out of soybeans, chopped cotton, fixed up, and picked berries. When the workday ended, we had to study. I played in the cotton field, went to town on Saturday night, to church on Sunday. We had long trips to school in the wagon, an over-protective mother, everything influenced me. My world was positive, joyful. It still is . . .”26 A Northwestern law school graduate, Byrd was a successful personal injury lawyer in Jackson, Mississippi. Before graduation from Northwestern, Byrd had worked on the unionized Illinois railroad, laying pipes and lines for one summer. He served as in-house counsel for the Railroad the next summer. Immediately after graduation from Northwestern, in 1976–1978, Byrd worked in Chicago at Esmark, of which Swift was a subsidiary. He earned $25,000 a year. In 1976, Swift, a meat packing company, was the largest in the world. Its sales exceeded 5 billion dollars, and it was among the fiftieth largest industrial corporations in the nation. In that same year, Esmark, the parent company, had profits of 79.9 million dollars. The average salary for a firstyear associate in 1976, one year after the 1975 recession, was twice the salary Byrd had been offered.

26

Ibid.

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He applied to about fifteen firms in Mississippi before leaving Chicago. Eventually, he landed at Anderson, Banks, Nichols, and Stewart, a black civil rights law firm. The only other offer he had received was from Legal Services, where he was offered $14,000 a year, two thousand more than he accepted at Anderson, Banks, Nichols, and Stewart. He lamented, “The big firms hired few blacks during that time. Today 10 percent of law firm partners in the United States are people of color while 25 percentage of law associates are people of color.”27 The slate was void of black partners in firms larger than five in Mississippi. In 1979, there were two black lawyers in Jackson’s largest firms. “I had a raggedy car; a house note of $200.00 a month. I did not need much. I stayed there with Anderson, Banks, Nichols, and Stewart for four years, and in 1982, I co-founded a firm. Bob Owens, my law partner, came with legal services contracts; I came with contacts gained during my civil rights days at the old firm, and new ones acquired while volunteering in William Winter’s campaign. I had no fear.”28 Byrd, a divorcee with two children, established himself as a philanthropist, a political activist, and a loyal Tougaloo alumnus. Ever attentive to the family homestead, he stewarded the care of the family farm in Springhill and purchased and paid for a home of his own. An intact family, a protective, dignified, and feisty mother, a habit of arduous work, excellent collegiate and post-collegiate schooling, a little bit of luck, and a lot of audacity assured familial esteem and personal empowerment. Mourning his father’s death and later beset with financial burdens, compounded in part by his generous nature and a stranglehold placed on phenomenally successful trial lawyers by tort reform, Byrd downsized his firm and experienced financial losses. “The overhead just got to be too much. Most people with money reduce size to ensure savings and profit. I learned the hard way. I tried to bring people along with me. Instead, I got hurt financially. I’ll recover in 2007. I’ll kick ass.” He continued, “I did not come back to Mississippi to join the magic circle of insiders; I came back to make a difference in the lives of poor and dispossessed people. If I did not want to make a difference, I would have stayed in Chicago.”29 For three decades, he lifted others as he climbed, from the farmlands of Sunflower to the halls of justice as an influential, annoying, hardworking, and generous trial lawyer and influential citizen. He stepped down only 27 28 29

American Bar Association, ABA Profile of the Legal Profession 2020, pp. 37–38. Isaac Byrd, Jr., Interview with the author, July 4, 1992. Isaac Byrd, Jr., interview with the author, Jackson, Mississippi, January 12, 2006.

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recently from the College Board at Tougaloo, his alma mater. He climbed the economic mobility ladder, reaching the top 5 percent with an income of over $2,598,400, generating wealth for several years, even a full decade. Sustaining wealth proved more elusive. During most of the twentieth century, black lawyers in Mississippi frequently invested in clients who could not afford to pay, except on a contingency fee basis. That meant that the law firms had to have “a good reputation,” client pre-investment accounts or reserves to move cases along, do investigative work, prepare briefs, and prepare litigants. Like farming, “Cause” lawyering requires protracted fiscal and intellectual outlays and the risk of marginal or no return on investments.30 “Cause” lawyers had clients with cases that could take years to prepare well. Notwithstanding the Byrds’ land inheritance of hundreds of acres, the agricultural rungs leading to greater economic mobility were sticky, and when not sticky, slippery. Young Isaac, an ambitious trial lawyer, had climbed a different ladder, but the rungs were equally tricky; one could get stuck or slip, or, as Byrd had done, climb for a time. Isaac’s avuncular elder cousin, Lonnie, had ambitions to make the farmland profitable in the complicated system where legal racism prevailed. Lonnie Byrd had never been food insecure, had never been without the sovereignty of home, and was literate, unlike Josie and Agnes. Josie and Agnes had been exploited and their wages tiny, or stolen, and they were often told, ‘you did fine, you did not earn nothing.’ They moved from plantation to plantation (six times over their five decades) looking for an honest employer, landowner, and safe and stable housing. Still, in different ways and for several reasons, economic vulnerability, the insults of politicians, and legal racism took up large spaces in all six of these families – including the Byrds. Since neither the mother nor the father worked off the farm until the mid-1960s, where did they get income support when money was scarce? Small loans were secured with the land as collateral. Isaac’s Dad applied for a loan from the Farmer’s Association and was turned down in the mid1980s; in early 2000, Pigford, a class-action suit filed on behalf of black and small farmers, bore fruit, and though Mr. Isaac Byrd, Sr., was by then deceased, his widow, Hattie Isaac Byrd, received some compensation for her family farm losses.

30

Herbert Kritzer, Risks, Reputations, and Rewards: Contingency Fee Legal Practice in the United States (Stanford: Stanford Law and Politics, 2004), 252.

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The kinship family created an actionable pathway to greater educational advantage and upward income mobility for the children. Lonnie’s first cousin, Isaac Senior’s wife, Hattie, was noble, feisty, and committed to the family thriving. What was unmistakable, however, was the example of high regard consistently shown by Hattie. Her children, who lived next door to Lonnie, completed college and competed favorably in graduate and professional schools – in teaching, electoral politics, and in the practice of medicine and law. And they raised their children to persist. Like her cousin by marriage, Evelyn, Gwen would become a teacher, fulfilling a dream her mom Hattie had once imagined for herself. The hopes and dreams of one generation would sometimes become manifested in the next, making the locus of control for these children external and internal. They would not be content to succeed individually or to enjoy their success without expressing gratitude and giving back to the community. Lonnie, the family patriarch, was quite bitter that after fifty to sixty years of effort, inroads into expanded wealth had not been and would not be possible largely because of government-sanctioned loan discrimination, denial of equitable subsidies, delay, and racism. Still, Lonnie, the political and sometimes paranoid patriarch of the kinship clan, struggled mightily to gain a toehold in the Republican or Democratic Party, dismissing the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and Freedom Movement in hopes of furthering his farm interests. His land holdings and those of his first cousin, Isaac Byrd, Sr., were no match for separate and unequal legal segregation, discriminatory New Deal policies, and federal subsidies to planters and politicians. As intimated by Evelyn, Lonnie grew quite depressed, aloof, and private, holding his fears and his farm business dealings quite close. Blacks’ economic mobility treks were inter-and intra-generational. Some treks, like those of Josie and Agnes, led from plantation to plantation. Lonnie’s birth into a landowning black family led from inheritance to economic mobility stickiness. Others’ pathways led from field to school and on to college, as for Clementine and Williams. Jack Harper’s tracks from obscurity to local political prominence were profitable. Once their children and relatives’ children were out in the world, away from home and hearth, sustaining strengths-based environments required fair macro-economic and political opportunity and heroic fortitude. When first-generation talented middle-class kids showed up in non-black public spaces to compete with whites from two- and three-generation middleclass and wealthy homes, what reception would they get? Isaac Jr. spent an exchange semester at Brown University, a Tougaloo College sister

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institution, where he performed well and was exposed to wealthy white families, including an associate at Random House. Hattie raised a generation of eight middle-class kids, all helped along by a tight kinship bond and held together by sacred family soil and cohesion. Young Isaac wanted to reprise his father’s slow walk toward wealth by making wealth integral to his own professional legal journey. He did not want wealth just for himself; he wanted his family, friends, and the black community to have a second or third chance to achieve wealth. As a trial lawyer, he held that aspiration, contributing large sums to his alma mater and investing in his firm and members of his staff. For Isaac, the pressures were great. The effort was immense. The rewards were uneven. And the unintended consequences of spreading the wealth before it had been preserved and invested were dire. Not everything went according to plan for him or his contemporaries. If economic mobility is measured in terms of how much one has accrued over a lifetime, or how much of that one will leave to children, or by how much good we do with our accruals, young Isaac succeeded in two domains. He earned several million dollars, and with it, he paid his staff of seven, purchased properties, contributed to his family and friends, to educational and journalistic institutions, and to community organizations. Firstgeneration wealth also produced stressors. More than others, young Isaac felt that the demands of new wealth must include empathy for others and a sense of grandness. When tort reform reduced the size of awards consumers could accrue, the channel of his wealth was siphoned off, even as costs mounted to prepare cases for trial on a contingency fee basis. New wealth was not preserved. Nor was it, in Isaac’s case, wisely invested to compound it. Had this been the case, then, margins from compounding and investing may have been prudently used for many purposes, including community upliftment for future generations. His example of generosity and brashness echoes throughout Mississippi, where there are 2.3 lawyers per 1,000 residents, in contrast to 4.4 in Louisiana and 9.5 in New York today.31 In the stories of these parents, as in the stories proffered by their children, we have heard three themes: Agnes and Josie’s pathways toward 31

American Bar Association, Profile of the Legal Profession, 2020. Most Mississippi lawyers are clustered around Hinds, Forrest, Lafayette, Madison, and Rankin Counties. There are legal deserts in many rural places. According to the American Bar Association (ABA), Scott County has sixteen lawyers, while Sunflower has twenty-one. Lawyers of color hold 14 percent of the ABA’s membership. Non-Hispanic Whites comprise 60 percent of the nation but constitute 86 percent of the ABA. Five percent of all lawyers in the United States are African Americans.

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upward economic mobility were blocked. The longer they stayed on the lowest rung, the greater their entrapment. Matthews, Williams, and Richardson’s pathways toward upward economic mobility off the agricultural ladder were enabled by high school completion, mentors, black colleges, dedication to family, marriages that held, and benevolence. Jack’s pathways upward were accelerated by rules that favored whites; thrift, marriage, education, the favor of elites, and sheer audacity. In contrast, Lonnie’s trek toward wealth-making was stalled by economic and political forces arrayed against black farmers. He was overwhelmed by markets and discriminated against by federal agencies and largess that diluted his access to capital and his relationships with the powerful. He was frozen out.

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11

Contemporaries of the Second Sunflower Generation

I Failed When I Moved Back to Mississippi. Rebecca Smith

Sunflower natives and siblings, Michelle and Isaac Byrd II were valedictorians of their respective classes at Gentry High in Indianola, where they were in the company of dozens of high-achieving students. Alsee McDaniel was among them. He graduated from Tuskegee College in 1975 and Harvard School of Law in 1978 and was admitted to the Mississippi Bar in that same year. When Alsee McDaniel was born on the sixth day of 1953, there were seven siblings and a married mother and father awaiting his birth. He was born in the town on Byas Street, the fourth son of Frankie Dovan McDaniel and Johnnie McDaniel. The McDaniels owned a four-room house that they rented out; they purchased a second property on Adair Street around 1963. “Ma was a domestic for the most part. [She worked for the Abbots, the town newspaper publisher.] Dad did various jobs; he was a serviceman at a gasoline station, and he worked at a local car dealership.”1 “My parents worked hard. They took care of us. We did not have much. They were not openly affectionate, but we always knew that we were loved. They were loving, so we never felt poor. They were not strict but firm.” Like John, Isaac, Michelle, and Gwen Byrd, McDaniel applied himself. He was disciplined and intelligent. Did young McDaniel have dreams about his future? “I do not know that I had any childhood dreams. As a little boy I went to school, and I played; never thought about a profession or occupation until college. I just know that I never felt inferior to anyone. I was secure in myself. The ‘folks’ reinforced that, and the community and teachers were supportive.” 1

Alsee McDaniel, Interview with the author, Indianola, Mississippi, January 23, 1993.

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“At home I did not have chores; I did some house cleaning on my own; no real assignments. I chopped cotton and worked as a stock boy in one of the local grocery markets. I played freely and ran along the Bayou side. Church was mandatory. I had a happy experience. My Dad always wanted us to be independent, to earn our own way. I wanted to achieve my best because they had not had educational opportunities. My parents created a keen sense of family and their strong moral and familial values and their faith in God were transmitted to the children.”2 “At school, I was very active in basketball and football. In the Student Government Association, as President, in 1971, I introduced computerized dating.” He forgot to mention that he, like his sister, Barbara, graduated first in his class, earning only one “B” in three years. McDaniel’s heart was set on playing collegiate and professional football. “I had planned to go to Alcorn State University on a football scholarship before my knee injury. A mother of one of my childhood friends, Katherine Taylor, encouraged me to go to Tuskegee Institute. There I had my football scholarship converted to an academic scholarship. I had always enjoyed and done well in math, government and English, so I had choices of a major; I settled on government.”3 “After a visit to Howard University during my sophomore year, I started to think about law, as it provided options and alternatives. There at Tuskegee, Ms. Reed, one of my professors, in whose class I had done a paper on the National School Lunch Program, encouraged me to apply to Harvard Law. Otherwise, I would not have applied to any of the big schools. Ms. Reed saw my potential and stayed with me in much the same way that teachers at Gentry had done. They were real educators; if they saw potential, they nourished it. Anyway, included in my application to Harvard Law was a copy of my published work on the National School Lunch program. I am sure that is in part why I gained admission.”4 McDaniel moved back home to Indianola shortly after he graduated from Harvard Law School. In 1981, he ran and lost his first bid for mayor. He continued his work in public interest law, renewed his relationship with a young woman whom he had earlier met at Tuskegee, and they married. The couple lived in Atlanta, Georgia until 1986, when, after their divorce, McDaniel moved to Greenville, Mississippi, also in the Mississippi Delta, to take a job in a firm with Victor McTeer, a prominent civil rights and corporate attorney. Alsee McDaniel maintained an interest in government

2

Ibid.

3

Ibid.

4

Ibid.

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studies and combined law practice with community involvement. In 1991, he moved back to Indianola. Shortly thereafter, his dad underwent surgery and later died from prostate cancer. Alsee McDaniel maintained a law office with the late Carver Randall on Second Street, about a half-mile from his parents’ home. He also served as a Sunflower County public defender. McDaniel had worked for a time in the Mississippi Department of Health and Human Services in the Division of Child Services as the municipal judge of Indianola. In the latter capacity, he filed an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) claim and a lawsuit against the city for unlawful employment termination and defamation. His claims were denied by the US District for the Northern District of Mississippi in March 2017.5 REBECCA SMITH AND EVE ADAMS

The ambit of Church and Byas streets and Club Ebony symbolize havens for those who have been left behind – those experiencing the perennial blues. John Dollard said his Depression-era informants referred to this side of the tracks as “Negro town.” During the decades and summers of 1990–2000, an idle, hostile, and sad underclass resided in the confines of Church and Byas streets. They included all demographic groups – old, young, middle-aged, men, and women. Those with whom I spoke had in common unemployment, high school incompletion, and early family disruption – the very factors that their contemporaries who had made it out of poverty had not experienced. Two women heads of households, Rebecca and Eve, lived alone in their anguish. Like many swallowed up in depression, they found temporary comfort in alcohol, food, and whatever affection they could find and savor. Rebecca Smith sat with a friend on a rundown porch on Church Street in Indianola, remembering her life story and telling it in a resounding contralto voice that matched her abundant frame. Her disappointment with herself and those “in charge in town” was profound. Smith, then at the age of thirty-seven or thirty-eight, was born in 1955, one year after Brown v. the Board of Education of Topeka (Brown 1).6 Smith 5 6

Alsee McDaniel v. City of Indianola et al., No. 4; 2017cv 00099-Document 36 (2017). Brown 1 refers to the 1954 decision of the US Supreme Court in which Chief Justice Warren delivered a unanimous decision, finding that segregation in public education has a detrimental effect on children, ruling that the doctrine of separate but equal facilities was no longer permissible. In May 1955, the Court issued an enforcement decree, which called on local school boards and courts to implement actions consistent with the principles in

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and her four siblings were reared by their mother, a woman who painted houses and did domestic work to eke out a living. “My Daddy was never there. I knew who he was. I saw him one day and asked him for some money. He called me a ‘snotty nosed bitch.’ Ma did it by herself, while my dad was off doing his thang.”7 According to Rebecca, she picked cotton at ten; chopped weeds growing in the rows, and thinned out excess plants at fourteen when her arms were long enough to use a hoe; worked as a domestic at fifteen; married at sixteen; divorced; remarried at eighteen; and divorced at thirty-one. “The average woman in Indianola is like me,” Rebecca said. “It takes two in a recession, and I have been in a recession for most of my life.”8 As a little girl, she served as a mother to younger siblings and had primary responsibility for the house. “I always wanted to be in charge of my life – just to get grown – to stop getting whippings – this was my childhood dream.” Rebecca’s three children, Ollie, Sharon, and Robert who, in 1992, were nineteen, sixteen, and twelve years of age, respectively, had intermittent relationships with their fathers. Ollie finished from Gentry High School and went to Job Corps for a while, before suffering from poor mental health. Ollie moved to Chicago to live with her Aunt Sharon. Her sister’s namesake, little Sharon, an 11th grader, planned to enlist in the Army after high school. Robert Jr., the child of the last union, was in 7th grade. How did Rebecca cope with her circumstances? She indicated that she “sits at home and wants to make a living. I get bigger because I am depressed. I have asthma, so I cannot work in the catfish factories. I get child support for Robert whenever his Daddy can pay. I get welfare. If I can’t do no better, it’s fine.”9 She had started to believe that she was her circumstances. Rebecca had finished 11th grade before getting pregnant with her first child. After the baby’s birth and at her mother’s urging, she took and passed the GED. Like Jack Harper and Hattie Byrd, who had both entered community college two decades earlier, she entered Coahoma Junior College. She did so, however, at a time when a two-year degree was virtually worthless unless students had mentors and had gained skills to enhance employment opportunities and wanted to continue to complete a four-year degree program. There were too few informal contacts in the

7 8

Brown and to do so promptly and with all deliberate speed. The 1955 decision is often referred to as Brown 11. Rebecca Smith, Interview with the author, Indianola, Mississippi, June 12, 1992. 9 Ibid. Ibid.

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community and state available to assist her in finding employment. Her underlying health condition was also a barrier, as was poverty.10 She found all employment doors closed in the local community and moved to Chicago, Illinois, where she enrolled in the Taylor Institute and, later, in Columbia Broadcasting School. She landed a job as a secretary at Kentile Floors in Chicago, where she worked for several years. By then, in her second marriage, and with another baby, she and her husband had purchased a car, a van, and a home. All this she and her children left behind after her abusive husband beat her and became indignant when she would not turn over her wages to him. “I fought back; he beat me – over and over. I left everything and returned to this place.” Domestic violence had visited and revisited Rebecca, both as child and wife. The domestic violence of childhood and young adulthood affected her, traumatized her, and imperiled her capacity to get and stay ahead. She returned to the subject of work. “I want the job I want. I am qualified to be a secretary. My experience and education don’t matter here. I am big and I speak my mind; that hurts me here. I keep a smile, but smiles don’t help. I failed when I moved back here. But I don’t feel no prejudice toward whites.”11 The “piles of adversity” mounted in Rebecca’s life as it had in Lonnie’s, Agnes’s, Josie’s, and young Isaac’s. In Rebecca’s life, parental disregard, early pregnancies, an absent father, sporadic child support payments, domestic violence, and intermittent employment occurred concurrently. These toxic early and cumulative experiences pulled at her, saddened her, and had in some ways triumphed. The skills needed to keep functioning had been frayed in her human development from childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood. Evidence from neuroscience and psychology are clear: the chronicity of adverse childhood and adult experiences may increase the brain’s allostatic load and diminish self-regulation and planful goal setting.12 Poverty and early and continuous exposure to trauma and 10

11 12

Asthma is a chronic disease and in Sunflower its prevalence remains a serious barrier to steady employment opportunities, especially in unsafe factories with compressors. Ten percent of children aged between five and eleven in Mississippi live with asthma. Its prevalence is highest among black children, and the rate of death associated with asthma is higher among blacks than whites. See, for example, msdh.ms.gov, Childhood Asthma Fact Sheet 2020. Substandard housing and both indoor and outdoor pollutants predispose poor families to asthma. This includes exposure to pesticides, tobacco smoke, and vaping. Unhealthy environmental spaces give rise to negative health consequences. Rebecca Smith, Interview with the author, June 12, 1992. Geronimus et al., “‘Weathering’ and Age Patterns”; Cristina Fernandez, Eric B. Loucks, Kristopher Arheart, DeMarc A. Hickson, Robert Kohn, Stephen L. Buka, and Annie

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racism can rob individuals, families, and communities of the bandwidth needed to seize opportunities. The cumulative burdens of life events (especially the physical and material absence of a father) and the non-responsive functioning of multiple systems (school mental health counselors, an ofteninept community college mental health counseling system, punitive rather than proactive life-affirming safety-net programs, and extractive agricultural wages and environmental pollutants) had worn Rebecca down. A recent Glenn Family Foundation survey of ACEs (Adverse Childhood Experiences) in Sunflower/Bolivar County, with a focus on Drew, Mississippi, showed that the ACEs most experienced by 769 adults included living in a family with divorced or separated parents (47 percent), experiencing childhoods where emotional neglect was common (38 percent), and living with a family member with mental health challenges (37 percent). Rebecca had experienced two of these adversities as a child and as an adult. Nineteen percent or 51 of rural respondents cited as many as five ACEs, while 51 percent cited only 1 or fewer ACEs.13 Not among the original ACEs, chronic income insecurity and unsafe and unaffordable housing are at the heart of childhood and adult adversity in rural America. Not only was Church Street not a viable space for Rebecca, but Sunflower County was also not a strengths-based environment for her, with 34.7 percent of its people living below the poverty level in 1992, the year we met. Like Rebecca and Eve, female heads of households had to cope with even greater poverty. Fifty percent of female householder families in the state and 72.5 percent of female householder families with related children under five years were in poverty in 1992. When I met Rebecca, her children were not under the age of five, but they had been. As with Rebecca, environments can build children and families up or tear them down over time. Whether up or down, their fates are not sealed. Though female householders in the nation are five times more likely to be in poverty than their male counterparts; circumstances are not destiny. Rebecca knew that she was not in poverty alone, and she intimated that above when she said, “The average woman in Indianola is like me.” Black female householder families with children under five years old are not only more likely to be in poverty, but the number of years of education

13

Gjelsvik, “Evaluating the Effects of Coping Style on Allostatic Load, by Sex: The Jackson Heart Study, 2000–2004,” Preventing Chronic Disease, 12(10) (2015). Mary Coleman and Clyde Glenn, “The Prevalence of ACEs in a Southern Town,” presented at the Second Annual Essie B and William Earl Glenn Family Foundation for Better Living and ACEs Awareness Foundation, June 21, 2022. Drs. Lisa Fiore and Helen Glenn Beady gathered and/or analyzed data for this presentation.

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completed by the householder is lower on average, between one to three years of high school. The average size of a black family below poverty consists of five persons. Of those female householder families living below the poverty level in the nation, 23.4 percent did not work in 1994. In contemporary Sunflower County, 49 percent of female householders living below the poverty level are unemployed. This is when, in September 2020, the unemployment rate in the non-Delta County of Scott was 4.5 percent, and just over twice that percentage in Sunflower. The unemployment rate for Mississippi was 6.8 percent and 7.7 percent for the nation. For many seasons of Rebecca’s life – early childhood, young adulthood, and in her third decade – adversity had compounded and threatened her humanity and had compromised her ability to cope. She needed concrete housing support as well as income and employment sufficient enough to meet the nutritional and physical health needs of her fractured family. Without these, Rebecca had experienced deep despair. Was there no way through the thicket of racial, sexist, marriage, and unemployment adversity for non-high school completers, the contemporaries of high school and college completers like Andrew, Alsee, Isaac, Gwen, Michelle, James, and Larry, Rebecca needed but did not have the sustained familial support to avert or fill in and heal the broken places of her childhood. She needed just safety from domestic violence, trusting mentors, employment, skill, and income aligned opportunities, and a sight line toward the future. EVELYN ADAMS

At thirty-seven, Ms. Eve Adams had neither finished high school nor been married – two rites of passage for her generation. She, too, lived on Church Street, where she spent most of her sizzling summer days on the porch, wishing for a cool breeze and looking for a way out of her despair. She was unemployed. Reared by her grandma and grandpa, Eve was born to a mother who ran a night spot and a stepdad who worked for Lewis Groceries, a wholesale grocery company with 1,000 employees. We talked in early summer as the smell of urine, the sight of graffiti, and the specter of dilapidated homes affronted one’s sense of justice. This was home to Ms. Eve Adams. Her roots are in the 1908 soil where her grandparents owned the land that her great uncle and aunt now own. Eve’s dwelling was a rented space with barely any signs of a healthy existence. The house is poorly furnished, there is no indoor plumbing, the porch is falling in, and Ms. Adams is looking back over her three decades and seven.

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“I grew up calling grandma ‘ma’ up until my 10th birthday when grandma died. Until then, I was happy. My inspiration died when she did. I stayed in school for several more years, but I got pregnant, and I was embarrassed so I quit school.”14 Why did she have unprotected sex at such a young age? “I was wild . . . I did everything a woman could do to survive. I planned the baby because I thought it would make me grown; instead, it complicated my life. My teachers were supportive of me going back to school. But I had lost interest. I had gone from a B to a C student in just one semester, so I just did not return.” Eve was not a woman when she became pregnant. She was a pregnant child – a teenager. She had signaled that she had adult roles and experiences before she was emotionally ready to assume them. Again, she returned to her grandma’s death. “I went to my ma’s after grandma died. My mother was a big sister, not really a mother to me. She could not control me. I openly disrespected her. She disciplined me. But it was not child abuse.”15 Ms. Adams has four children of her own: Marva, Terrance, Sharon, and Darren. Her first child had two children. Terrance was a senior at allAfrican American Gentry High School. Terrance was interested in electronics and had signed up for the Marines; Darren, a fifteen-year-old, had high hopes for a career in professional football and mathematics. He planned to go to Tennessee, where his dad lived, and to attend the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. Ms. Adams had parental responsibility for Darren. The other children – Marva, Terrance, and Sharon – had decided to live with their great aunt and uncle across town. “I have not been able to keep my family together.” She began to cry. “The Lord up above keeps us in one place in my heart . . . that is the hardest part . . . that’s the God knows truth; only one lives here with me.” Her labor force participation had been sporadic: chopping cotton, cooking in a cafe, desk clerking in a hotel, working at Delta Pride, the catfish factory. “I never made more than the minimum wage. How can I take care of a family of 5 on minimum wage? What am I qualified to do? I once participated in a training program for unwed mothers but there were no jobs for me. So, I left and went to Chicago. I worked in a hotel for 18 months then I came back here. So, I draw unemployment, the twins get SSI, and one child’s father gives child support whenever he can. I have a seasonal job at the Compress where I bail the cotton.”

14

Interview with Adams, Evelyn, Indianola, Mississippi, July 21, 1992.

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Ibid.

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She summed up her life in this way. “Somewhere along the line I messed up. I should have done more for myself . . . to help myself. The system is bad; the black people are worse than the whites when they get authority. It’s no good.” As for her children, “I hope and pray that things are better for my children . . . that they will look up and respect themselves no matter what they have experienced . . . don’t get down . . . work hard. All along people cared about me; I just did not care enough about myself. I should have gone back to school and put on big tops [to hide her pregnancy] like Mr. Scott told me.” “My grandma always told me to ‘know my place.’ Well, I do not teach Darren that; I teach him to be careful but to set goals and reach them . . . to stay out of trouble.”16 Ms. Adams was on to something crucial: set goals and stay out of trouble. One could argue that early pregnancies meant trouble, the kind that was self-made. But the trouble of the kind that Eve and Rebecca faced was not of their own making. Grandmas and grandpas die. Fathers and mothers are not always responsible, and even when they are, opportunity does not always exist for advancement. Children, no matter their mistakes and missteps, are not adults. They need parents and a loving embrace of unconditional guidance, support, care, and nurture. Otherwise, disappointment and rage can set in and fester. How might Rebecca and Eve find a healthy way out of despair – the despair of homelessness, unemployment, family disintegration, and disappointment with themelves, and others in the community? How might rural children face down chronic adversity and emerge in triumph, individually and as a class? The two women’s life paths suggest what is needed. Effective coaches or counselors to help them navigate their circumstances as children would have been helpful. Quality high school completion with community college dual enrollment and financial and career goal setting would have been beneficial. Eve and Rebecca had not benefitted from that. Intentional and unintentional teen-aged pregnancies would have to cease. Responsible (non-violent and engaged) fathers with employment prospects would have benefitted both mother and child(ren). Jobs with upward advancement and a living wage would need to exist, and a fair opportunity to compete for them would be needed. As intimated above, domestic violence would need to cease, and continuous mental and physical health care would be needed to care for the whole child and the whole adult.

16

Ibid.

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In some cases, intergenerational renewal would be required. Help to overcome mal-adaptations to despair and poverty would be required as well. Eve and Rebecca needed to beat longer odds than most of their contemporaries. New, affirming, and stable guardrails were urgently required. None had been available. When children from income-insecure rural families made it out of poverty, sufficient familial, social, and/or political networks/ institutions were nearby. Aside from their families, Sunflower County and the state of Mississippi failed these women as children. Historically black colleges awaited high school graduates with high ambition, discipline, talent, and the guidance of just one affirming adult. Despite all the rot of racism, even amid Jim Crow and beyond, when even a partial family apparatus was mobilized to help children set goals and achieve them, modest progress was possible, though not always probable or sustainable. Second-generation children considered here have included Andrew Brown, the son of Agnes Brown; Eddie Landfair, the son of Josie Landfair; and Isaac Byrd, the son of Hattie and Isaac Byrd, Sr. Like Andrew, Eddie did not see himself as a failure; yet he acknowledged that he did not have enough ambition. So far, not one male or female adult in this cohort has blamed the white man for his or her limited opportunities, let alone any failures. Edward’s mom taught him to work hard, demand respect, not to take a back seat, to be himself, and to believe in God. He passed these words and values on to his children. The sharecropper’s mother seemed to have known better than Andrew Brown, the high school principal, that respect was owed to each human being and should not be premised on ability. Irrespective of credentials or aptitude, this kind of decency is owed every human being. Devaluing others because of their limited ability or lack of opportunity is not just evidence of a lack of empathy, it is also an invitation to see people as less worthy of investment and support. Eddie taught his girls to “Go as far as your abilities will take you and on your journey demand respect.”17 Those African American fathers in the late 1960s and 1970s might have transmitted slightly different messages to their sons than to their daughters. Or, more plausibly, each father could have understood that respecting oneself and commanding others’ respect are both critical to leaving poverty and entering a fuller humanity. Each father might have been implying that both intrinsic and extrinsic motivation mattered in securing exits from poverty. 17

Eddie Landfair, Interview with the author, Indianola Mississippi, Fire Station, July 24, 1992.

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Alsee had the continuous love and respect of a functional family and the benefit of housing security. He had a high self-concept, which his teachers nurtured, and his creativity and intelligence propelled. That said, Alsee grew up in a materially resource-poor family so had no buffer to rely on to start a law practice and few, if any, networks on which to call in times of distress. What I cannot know is whether Alsee had mentors at Harvard Law School and examples to draw on as a professional. Whatever he experienced as an adult beyond Indianola and in Indianola as both child and attorney, his return there to challenge traditions inhospitable to black empowerment and black economic and political vulnerability was not greeted with enthusiasm. It is important to examine the factors at play across generations as well as within generations. Stable housing, familial pride and function, native intelligence, early mentors, access to quality education, and self-confidence matter, but they are not solely determinative of the outcomes of first-generation middle-class strivers in Sunflower. In the next chapter, I examine my own exits from poverty, exits conditioned by an aspirational working-class family in a county where blacks constituted a smaller share of the population than in Sunflower.

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INTRODUCTION

Just how, if at all, my family defied dispossession is glimpsed here in the case study of the Payton-Coleman-Harpers. In this section, I reflect on their upward mobility treks, which often stalled and then frayed, giving rise to the family’s uneven pathways toward economic progress. I reflect also on the place of Scott itself, with attention to the whites who had access to opportunity and the allocation of political resources, including the rule of law in labor relations and education. I came of age in the late 1960s; I turned eighteen in June 1972. My mom, Catherine, was born in 1929, and John, my father, was born seventeen years earlier, in 1912. Unlike most of their siblings, who moved north, and west, Mom and Dad stayed home. They survived the perils of a highly racialized state and community, at some cost, still unfolding. They lived it and survived it. Over five generations, the Harper-Colemans navigated pathways from enslavement, Reconstruction, the Black Codes, legal segregation, and modern discrimination; as descendants, they suffered from a lack of full-bodied citizenship – with income insecurity, ill-education, and ill-health being prominent injuries. During the fifty years between 1880 and 1930, the Qualls-Harpers, my maternal black great grandparents, owned eighty acres of land and a family farm, which offered shelter to two generations of children. The Hughes/ Colemans (my paternal family) had nine children, including my father, John. Seven of his siblings moved to the Midwest and West, as did Catherine’s three siblings; John, Catherine, and Bell (Catherine’s sister-inlaw) stayed home in the rural South, as did most of the Sunflower Seven. The Hughes/Colemans grew up on a plot of land near Lone Pilgrim in Hillsboro,

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where through marriage to the Burkes, the Coleman/Burkes kinship clan eventually bought three acres of land. Scott County, Mississippi is located within an equal distance between Jackson, the state capital, and Meridian, Mississippi. Towns in Scott include Forest, Morton, Lake, Homewood, Pulaski, and Hillsboro. Scott, in the Central Mississippi Hills, where two generations of Eastlands homesteaded along with five generations of Coleman/Harpers, is, like Sunflower, among the most disadvantaged counties in the nation. Forest, the county seat of Scott, was once a decidedly majority-white town, with 25 percent African Americans and a few hundred Native Americans–Choctaws. One-fifth of the homes in Scott have multiple generations living in them, while less than one-eighth of the homes in Sunflower are multigenerational. Whites make up 53 percent of the population in Scott, while blacks and Hispanics comprise 47 percent. In terms of the white majority and black minority, Scott resembles the state’s population characteristics more than Sunflower, with its centuries-long larger share of blacks. Scott resembles more the coastal counties in terms of its population share of non-whites and non-blacks. In terms of poverty, however, Scott and Sunflower counties are indistinguishable. The median household income in Scott is $33,295, while the average household income is $51,401. By contrast, the median household income in Sunflower is $32,944 and the average household income is $50,601. The per capita income in Scott is $18,770 and $17,561 in Sunflower. The average home value in Scott is $111,000, and in Sunflower it is $109,000. The differences in population size, average income, and home values between the two locales are minimal. Scott is a county of 28,263 people, slightly more than Sunflower, whose population is 27,255. Largely because of the size of the Hispanic population in Forest and Morton, areas where poultry processing plants draw the new poor, Scott County had among the highest diversity indexes in the state, 100 in 2020; Sunflower’s diversity index was 44 in 2020. Both Scott and Sunflower are experiencing net population decreases, even as median household and per capita income is growing slowly in both locales, where both whites and blacks have been exiting for two generations. Some families have laid down deep intergenerational roots in neighborhoods with diverse socioeconomic standing. The Lees are the best-known family in Scott, largely because of their judicial dynasty and their multigenerational upper-class status as physicians and lawyers. The white men in this kinship family excelled. The late Mississippi Chief Justice Roy Noble Lee was born on October 19,

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1915, in Madison County, but lived in Forest. His father, Percy Mercer Lee, was also a Mississippi Chief Justice. Roy’s brother, Tom, served as the Senior Judge of the United States District Court for the Southern District. These Scott County residents had distinguished legal and medical careers and multigenerational economic mobility and political status. Not one black family in all of Mississippi has had multigenerational political status and unencumbered upward economic mobility comparable to the Eastlands or Lees. When the dangers were greatest, none of the white lawyers in Scott, including the Eastlands, helped the blacks to achieve full citizenship. The whites who governed for a century and more often dispossessed blacks. But, as did the Coleman/ Harpers in Scott, some of the working-class poor in Sunflower and Scott persisted. Another Lee, John, has been Catherine Coleman’s primary care physician for five decades. The Lees co-owned the town’s largest car dealership, where the late John Coleman, my father, and J. C. Watkins, the father of Patricia Watkins Bennet, my senior classmate at E. T. Hawkins and Forest High, and the current dean of the Mississippi College School of Law, worked dutifully for decades. Our fathers were employed there, and our mothers worked as domestics to help secure our middle-class status. Pat Watkins Bennet and many of her contemporaries were highly intelligent children from working-class homes. They went on to college and law school, where they excelled. The county was also the residence of Erle Johnston, the newspaperman, and director of the Sovereignty Commission, a spy agency for the state of Mississippi. The Sovereignty Commission, founded in Scott County, portrayed that county, especially Forest, its county seat, as a model of racial moderation.1 Forest had neither a Fannie Lou Hamer2 nor Vernon Dahmer (of Hattiesburg, in Forrest County)3 nor a Winson Hudson

1

2 3

The Sovereignty Commission agency director was Erle Johnson, Jr., a newspaper publisher from Scott County, who served as director until 1968. He ran and won mayoral office in Forest in 1980 and served a one-four-year term. Governor Bill Waller refused to fund the Commission in 1973. It did not run after 1977. The Mississippi legislature voted to seal the files of the Commission until 2027. The files are stored at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History. The ACLU filed a lawsuit demanding public access to the files. The files were ordered to be opened by the federal court in 1989. They were unsealed for public use in March 1998. Mills, This Little Light of Mine; Moye, Let the People Decide. Patricia Michelle Boyett, Right to Revolt: The Crusade for Racial Justice in Mississippi’s Central Piney Woods (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2015).

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(of Harmony, in neighboring Leake County)4 in the 1960s. Black activists – those who publicly engaged in the movement for civil rights, especially when the dangers were greatest – were absent. Nor did it have Winifred Green, a white native Jacksonian willing to fight with blacks to achieve educational equality.5 Sunflower’s majority black population, its earlier and therefore longer history of native protestations against racism,6 its black population’s partial embrace of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and its more differentiated but tiny and active black professional class are also distinguishing characteristics. Sidney Carr Mize, who was born in 1888 and died in 1965, was Chief Judge of the United States District Court for the Southern District (1961–1962) and also from Forest. The Franklin Roosevelt appointee served as a judge in the Southern District for twenty-eight years. He attended Mississippi College School of Law for his AB degree and Ole Miss for his LL.B. As a federal district judge in Meredith v. Fair (1962), Mize denied that the University of Mississippi had discriminated against James Meredith based upon his race and denied that Ole Miss was a racially segregated institution.7 Marching with 500 deputies sent by President John Kennedy, Meredith, after his third attempt to get past the armed state troopers sent by Governor Ross Barnett, was finally admitted, to become, in October 1962, the first African American to enroll at the University of Mississippi. Meredith graduated in August 1963 with a degree in political science, a degree not then offered at a Historically Black Jackson State University, where Meredith had studied prior to attending the University of Mississippi. After graduating from Ole Miss, Meredith earned a law degree from Columbia.8 Scott County produced its share of white lawyers and medical doctors during the period from 1857 to the 1950s but did not have black lawyers until the 1970s. After Meredith’s success at entering Ole Miss, two E. T. Hawkins High School graduates in the Forest Municipal School District applied to the Ole Miss School of Law, and one, Constance Slaughter-Harvey, was the first 4

5

6 7 8

Winson Hudson and Constance Curry, Mississippi Harmony, Memoirs of a Freedom Fighter (New York: Palgrave, St. Martin’s Press, 2002). Marion Wright Edelman, “Winifred Green: An Unsung Warrior for Racial and Economic Justice,” Huffington Post.com, December 6, 2017. Mills, This Little Light of Mine; Moye, Let the People Decide. This decision was soon overturned (298 F2d 696; Fifth Circuit, 1962). James Meredith, Three Years in Mississippi (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1966).

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African American woman to graduate from the law school in 1970. Her parents, W. L. Slaughter and Olivia Kelly Slaughter were college-educated and landowners. Mr. Slaughter, a World War II veteran, and alderman was a school principal at North Scott Attendance Center, and Ms. Olivia Kelley Slaughter was a journalist. The other black and native-born Forest resident, Willie Lovelady, a firstyear law student at Ole Miss in 1970, drowned mysteriously in the swimming pool at Ole Miss. Success at integrating Ole Miss came thirty years after white women first entered the law school there; Zelda Siegal, the first white woman to practice law in Sunflower County, graduated from Ole Miss School of Law in 1937, thirty years before blacks were admitted to the law school.9

A PAST THAT IS NOT DEAD

By the time James Eastland had graduated from the segregated public Forest High School in 1922, his family had political influence spanning from Forest, where his father was a district attorney, to Sunflower, Meridian, and Vicksburg, where one uncle had been a practicing physician and another had served as a Colonel in the US army. Three generations of the Eastlands had access to political, income, and wealth opportunities that the descendants of the enslaved had been denied. Five years after Eastland graduated from Forest High, he attended the universities of Mississippi, Vanderbilt, and Alabama, but did not graduate, dropping out after passing the bar examination in his senior year at Alabama. He ran successfully for the Mississippi legislature from Scott County in 1927. His will to strive and, indeed, to rule was eased and enhanced by his family, the state, and the nation. In the decades that followed, James Eastland became one of the most powerful politicians in the United States, serving as the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee and President pro tempore of the Senate. James’s father, Woods, served as a district attorney in Scott and moved from Sunflower to Scott one year after the Eastlands incited a gruesome double lynching in Sunflower when Jim Eastland was just a year old. In Sunflower and Scott, the wealthy and the poor white alike could take the law into their own hands. White lynch law was ubiquitous in counties with large and smaller shares of blacks. 9

Sunflower County, Works Progress Administration Papers (WPA), 1937.

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Young James Eastland tried to appeal to both planters and poor whites in his incessant focus on communism and civil rights – repudiating both. He used his power variously, and in some cases, even judiciously, but he enriched himself while blocking black access to equal rights in terms of education, voting, and otherwise.10 His intergenerational leadership and defiance of desegregation delayed equitable access to high-quality public education just as much as his denial of agricultural subsidies to black farmers hindered their strivings for economic mobility. In his public roles, he helped produce black income and educational inequality across the South.

Violence and Terror in Scott In Scott County, there were nine recorded deaths by lynching between 1877 and 1950; by contrast, in the Mississippi Delta County of Sunflower for the same period, there were twelve murders by lynching.11 Between 1877 and 1950, estimates are that between 3,900 and 4,084 lynching deaths occurred in the South; 510 of them occurred throughout Mississippi, in mostly majority-white counties such as Scott, rather than in black ones such as Sunflower.12 Sunflower was atypical in having more lynchings, but during this time its share of blacks in the population was the most concentrated in Mississippi. When terror was at its zenith, at the turn of the last century, a so-called race war erupted in Scott in 1898 and lasted for two days, killing at least nine black men who fought to protect a black man who had an argument with a white employer and allegedly killed a sheriff.13 African Americans wanted wages that paid and freedom from mob violence. They wanted the temperate and judicious exercise of the rule of law. They needed lawyers who would contest unfair wages and the taking of black lives with impunity. They also needed access to quality education. The black public school in Forest, E. T. Hawkins, which Catherine and her children attended, began as Scott County Training School in 1921; Catherine’s eldest daughter, 10

11 12

13

Cobb, The Most Southern Place on Earth; Chris Asch, The Senator and the Sharecropper: The Freedom Struggle of James O. Eastland and Fannie Lou Hamer (Raleigh: The University of North Carolina Press, 2011). Equal Justice Initiative 2nd (ed.) (2015). Julius Thompson, Lynchings in Mississippi: A History, 1865–1965, (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company, 2006); See also Lynching in America, the Equal Justice Initiative, 2017, Available at eji.org. Los Angeles Herald, October 25, 1898.

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Linda, was in its last graduating class in 1970. Jimmy, Catherine’s firstborn, graduated from Piney Woods Country Life School, a boarding school in rural Rankin County, about thirty miles from Scott County. As in Piney Woods, the teachers at E. T. Hawkins High School were black, and the students were as well. Public school desegregation was supposed to change all that and more. In Holmes v. Alexander, the Court ended the all deliberate speed policy and required the immediate desegregation of schools. In response, forty segregation academies were founded in Mississippi between 1957 and 1970, most in 1970, just after the 1969 Holmes v. Alexander decision. Three were founded in Sunflower: Indianola Academy, North Sunflower, and Central Delta Academy. Gentry High School, the public school in Indianola, graduated only one white student in the class of 1971. White administrators at Forest High, the alma mater of two of Catherine’s daughters, Mary and Carolyn, and of the Eastlands and the Lees as well, obeyed Alexander without public complaint.14 In 1965, two black children in Forest enrolled, one in elementary school and another in high school. The children of Bishop Scott Thompson and Lois-Grubbs Thompson, Linda Ruth Thompson and her sister Bathshema Thompson, desegregated the white school. And did so without public racial animus. In 1960, the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission film on Scott County depicted educated black school leaders from Scott County as accommodating and satisfied with race relations.15 That message resonated as hollow, or at least as incomplete, given the commitment of black educators and families in Scott County was to educate black children and 14

15

Prior to desegregation, there had been a public political feud between James Eastland and then-Attorney General J. P. Coleman over nullification, segregation, and integration. In part, the jealousy between the rivals spilled out during the years between 1954 and 1960. The goal, it was then said, was to weaken Eastland’s role as the champion of segregation. In an editorial in the Scott County Times, Earl Johnston indicated that each camp, both segregationist, one practical, the other vitriolic, was hoping to convince the mostly white Mississippi electorate which side had the strongest segregation shoulders (Scott County Times, December 22, 1955). Coleman became governor in 1956 and served until 1960. He called himself not a moderate but a successful segregationist. President Lyndon Johnson appointed Coleman to the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. Johnson and Coleman had served as southern congressional staffers. They became life-long friends. As Governor Johnson approved the funding for the spy agency, the Sovereign Commission, and in 1958, when Clennon King sought to desegregate Ole Miss, Johnson went there to block his admission. Associated Press (June 30, 1959).Clarion-Ledger, Jackson, Mississippi. Yasuhiro Katagiri, The Mississippi Sovereignty Commission: Civil Rights and States’ Rights (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2002).

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foster their ambition and resilience. That said, as already suggested, Scott County was not a seedbed of contested race relations. Race men and women were not filing lawsuits or marching in the public square in the 1950s and 1960s, but they were in E. T. Hawkins High School, inspiring talented students and challenging them to achieve beyond expectations. And many did so. What I did not see at E. T. Hawkins or Forest High was the intellectual encouragement of children whose intelligence was not immediately evident to their teachers. If they were talented in other ways, in sports and music, they were visible in some spaces and invisible in others. Even as a child, I wanted this to change. Sometimes I had the sense that I needed to shrink so that others might have a chance to shine. My teachers, both black and white, took an interest in me, they inspired and challenged me. That would also be the case at Jackson State University, where my political science teachers were first-in-class, with graduate degrees earned from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, Howard, Syracuse, Iowa, Northwestern, and American University. The black Mississippi natives among them had gone elsewhere to earn graduate degrees, as none was offered to blacks in Mississippi at that time. Segregated dual primary and secondary public-school systems were supported by inequitable state expenditures by race, a shortened average number of weeks in school, a substandard curriculum, low-wage job designations, and inferior pay systems. The schools in this minoritymajority Separate School District – contemporary Forest High, Forest Elementary, and Hawkins Middle School – spent $7, 563 per pupil, under the state average of $8,900.16 Rural outposts such as Sunflower and Scott had black exemplars, among them the many put generous in front of working-class and a handful of middle-class families with talented children able to contribute to community and nation. Black children from the farmland of Shaw and Hillsboro, and in towns from Forest and Indianola, were completing high school in the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, some heading to college, but many not. Those who did would dust off their skirts, trousers, and shoes and first enter college classrooms at Howard, Tougaloo, University of Southern Mississippi, Ole Miss, Morehouse, Rust, Tuskegee, Jackson State, Mississippi State, Alcorn State, Texas Southern, Mississippi Valley State, and, later, Meharry, Harvard, Northwestern, Wisconsin, and the University of Mississippi. The

16

Mississippi Department of Education, from msrc.mdek12.org.

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next generation of the rural black middle-class and the political class was formed by the institutions of family, school, church, college, and university. The military would lessen as a significant pathway toward the middle-class for my contemporaries. In addition to the military, the white poor who sought college credentials – white strivers, just up the agricultural rungs from sharecropper – would find guardrails against the persistence of intergenerational poverty in community colleges and political networks in the statehouse and at Ole Miss. Some Mississippians who began life near to poverty – two governors, Democrat Ronnie Musgrove and Republican Phil Bryant – would govern differently, as differently as Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Johnson, and Lyndon Johnson, consequential men living in consequential times, born to families close to poverty. Places and events help shape people’s outlooks, appeals, and strivings.

Terrain Sunflower and Scott were and are places of promise and peril, places where people of faith and those distant from faith live on a land of winding onelane highways, dotted by magnolia and pecan trees and bayous, fed by rivers. The towns of Scott County are Forest, Lake, Morton, and Hillsboro. These are places where blues and Negro gospel (in Sunflower) and country and southern gospel (in Scott) filled the airways. These are lands where difficult access to literacy, unemployment and low wages, and chronic disease were probable if one was black. It was 1863 before the first train ran from Vicksburg, through Forest to Meridian. In Scott County, the railroad, built by slaves, and highways 80 and 35 are landmarks. Passable roads are a necessity for farm families, and highways 80 and 35 were major passageways for the horse-pulled wagons that roamed Forest and Hillsboro in the early days after the Civil War and for the timber-laden trucks that ply them now. Running from coast to coast, highway 80 is one of the longest highways in the United States. It was highway 35, from Hillsboro to Forest, which enabled John Coleman to learn of Catherine Harper Payton’s existence. And it was the trek from Pulaski, 11 miles north to Forest, to live with her stepmom and dad, Momma Rose and Albert, that enabled Catherine to go to high school in Forest and later be introduced to John Coleman. Left behind in Pulaski were springs, buggies, blackberries, a soon-to-be sickly mom who had been deserted by Albert, and a widowed grandma who survived breast cancer and a stroke. Great Grandma Matilda would live to be eighty-nine. Her

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daughter, Roberta, would die at forty-five from ovarian cancer. Catherine would eventually take care of and bury them both. At fifteen years of age, Catherine would carry to her new family and her new high school peers a knowledge of how to sew beautiful garments, can, preserve, and pickle fruits and vegetables, how to bake, clean, grow Dorothy Perkins rose climbers, peony, iris, gladiolus, and dahlias. She also carried with her a love of pecan and pear trees and a stunning work ethic, as well as scorn for the able-bodied unemployed. She finished all the grades offered at the church school where she had learned to read, write, and pray. In addition to a ferocious work ethic, Catherine was an avid Bible reader, a prankster, and a good basketball player, with a desire to finish high school, marry, and have children. She would go to the colored school in Forest, across the tracks from Forest High School, Jim Eastland’s alma mater. During the latter third of the nineteenth century and the first third of the twentieth century, Scott County had a handful of both black and white leaders of prominence. But few were in the public march for black economic and civic freedom and equality. Some of these leaders were members of the Leagues and the Freedmen’s Bureau; others were National Republicans, Whigs, and Radicals, alike. Henry Grissom was appointed the first black postmaster in Scott County, a position he relinquished the first day on the job when a coffin placed in the lobby was draped in black and was announced as his ultimate destination. Anderson Jennings, both black and literate, was a successful farmer and controlled all-Republican federal patronage from 1870 until the presidential election in 1928. He was the Republican committeeman for Scott County. Others, such as Henry Garrett, a county supervisor, was said to be a white Negro after Reconstruction. E. T. Hawkins, a teacher, musician, athletic coach, and high school principal, cared deeply about the black community and strong student learning outcomes; he maintained cordial relations rather than cordial hatred with whites. Mark Thomas, a college graduate, minister, operator of a sawmill, and mortuary owner, and Carrie Brody Moore, a teacher for fifteen years, had distinguished careers and enjoyed cordial race relations with blacks and whites. Among the college-educated in Forest during the 1930s, most had attended Jackson State or Alcorn College. In the 1930s, by state law, all teachers had to have at least two years of college. These men and women and their families constituted the small black middle-class during the pre-war and interwar years. There was not many black economic elites in the industries and manufacturing sectors in the county. There were several black farmers, including

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the Bradfords of Hillsboro and Stowers of Midway. Until the late 1960s, farmers would come from all around to the Scott County Cooperative to bring their produce for marketing to wholesalers and retailers. Major private industries included a paint and varnish factory in Lake; an intergenerational Wicker Wholesale Grocery in Forest; gasoline plants, Loreco, Shell, and Standard; the Jamesway Hatchery; the J. R. Rogers Ice Plant; the Central Chevrolet Company, owned by multiple white stockholders; and the Postal Telegraph Company. Scott County had no Chamber of Commerce during the first four decades of the twentieth century but utilized the Lions and Rotary Clubs to introduce newcomers to business opportunities. In 1936, there were 1,200 sharecroppers and 200 black farm owners in a population of 12,213 whites, 8,661 blacks, and 134 Native Americans. There were 2,950 farm owners and tenants in 1930. The Depression left a wake of land foreclosures and desperation across the nation, including Scott County. The average black farm was 60 acres in 1936. During the Great Depression, ten stores were owned and operated by blacks in the county, as well as several barber shops, beauty parlors, pressing companies, and funeral homes. The Harpers, Qualls, Hughes, and Colemans are here together because they, John Hughes Coleman, and Catherine Harper Payton formed matrimonial bonds, merging Pulaski, Hillsboro, Forest, and Lone Pilgrim in a kinship nexus of land ownership and landlessness, literacy, and illiteracy, disease, and a mind to work, thrive, and face racial trauma head-on. Agricultural work kept 94 percent of the county occupied in 1936. The Harper-Qualls worked their own land; the Coleman-Hughes worked the lands of others. Fertile soils and long growing seasons favored the state. Some farmlands were divided up; others were rented out to both black and white farmers and tenants. Extension services and soil conservation projects were commonplace during this time. The farmers had to learn new ways to preserve the topsoil and new ways to survive without black labor. Cover and rotation crops were planted, fertilizers were repurposed, and new drainage and irrigation systems were integral to their survival. Well into the 1960s, cotton and corn remained the staple crops in Scott County. The Harpers and Qualls formed the union from which Matilda gave birth to Roberta, Ebb, Brown, and WT. Daughter Roberta married Albert Payton; granddaughter Catherine married three times, to Governor Nolan, John Coleman, and Halester Myers. Matilda’s beautiful mother, Julia Qualls, with Native American phenotype and genotype, was placed into

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American slavery at birth in 1860. She came of age during a period of fluid political and economic expectancy: the Emancipation Proclamation (1863), the Civil War (1861–1865), the abolishment of slavery (in 1865), Reconstruction (1863–1877), and the immediate post-Reconstruction era, an era of both possibility and sheer tyranny – economic, physical, and political. Dollard wrote in 1937 that “Reconstruction put the bottom rail on top and the Klan reset the rail.”17 In Scott, the bottom rail was assisted for a time by the federal government’s Freedmen’s Bureau and by the Leagues that were formed to advance black economic progress. Blacks and whites, mostly whites from the North, formed a coalition to control the distribution of patronage and the black vote. As far as the Klan, there remains much uncertainty about the prevalence of the Klan in Scott County. It certainly was there, and it seemed to have formed as early as the 1870s; it was in existence in some form at least through the 1960s, making an appearance in a parade in Forest, the county Seat. One of Catherine’s children recalled the white starched gowns and head veils as well as a burnt cross. Still, to this child’s eyes, the Klan gathering seemed more festive than foreboding, something akin to the sights at the October Scott County fair. The Klan paper, Known Robinson, enjoyed tremendous readership, and multiple editors of the Forest Register were active contributors to it. A passage cited as an outstanding editorial in the Forest Register on November 5, 1870, read thusly: “Oh, the happy days, when the men of Scott go again to the polls. We’ll recollect it all. We’ll see whether everything the poor man has earned will be set aside for Radical jaws. We’ll crush the hydra in one day. Friends, possess your souls in peace. The day cometh: you have been in the thick darkness, but light is ahead. Scott County is a white county, and her men believe, yes, know, that the office holders under Alcorn are, nine in ten, radicals and black as the ace of spade.”18 The Qualls-Harper family from Scott County and six of the seven Sunflower families were caught in the nation’s legacy of intemperate local citizens, many of whom would write, speak, and otherwise behave as tyrants. White supremacy and black oppression would feel perennial to the oldest Sunflower Seven members, those who were sharecroppers. It might have felt different to Matilda and Brown Harper, born a generation 17 18

Dollard, Caste and Class in a Southern Town, 207. As cited in WPA Papers, Assignments 15 and 21, Local Newspapers, p. 18, Outstanding Editorials, available at mic.lib.ms.us – Private, accessed November 27, 2021.

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or two before 1900 to a landed kinship family in Mount Mariah. Through their efforts, Mount Mariah gardens were filled with okra, tomatoes, lima beans, corn, string beans, mustards, collards, and watermelons. Farm livestock ranged from pigs to horses to cows. Everyone there, including the women, men, boys, and girls, were to bring in the corn and cotton and harvest and learn to can fruit and make preserves. At Mount Mariah, there was a small colored school organized in 1884, with John Preston as the first teacher. In this sparsely populated black community, twenty students were enrolled. Initially, five and subsequently eight grades were taught by two teachers, D. C. Lee and Arville Page, principal and assistant principal, respectively. In total, there were thirtyseven public schools in Scott County in the 1930s. Five were Rosenwald schools. Both Rosenwald and the Anna T. Jeanes Fund contributed to the betterment of black school buildings and better-quality teachers.19 Bettye Mae Jack, Catherine’s neighbor, who lived in the Quarters, was a Jeanes teacher, who had been appointed by County Superintendent Walter Beeland. Ms. Jack was the supervisor of the county schools and was charged with visiting rural schools, reviewing curricula, and cooperatively troubleshooting school and teacher issues. In the first third of the twentieth century, black teachers earned on average $20.00 per month, and only half had finished high school, while 12 percent had completed college. Grandma Queen, Catherine’s mother-in-law, had attended school in Lone Pilgrim for five grades. Her son, John, however, went without formal schooling, and after his father’s early death, the widow, being poor, soon hired John out to a white man in Hillsboro. John’s younger brothers, Brasco and Quitman, graduated high school: Brasco went to college and graduate school, earning a PhD from Vanderbilt, and his baby brother, Quitman, joined the military. Both Brasco and Quitman and their nine siblings left Mississippi for California, Illinois, and Indiana. John and Catherine would travel to Chicago and Indianapolis every summer to see seven of them, with their children in tow. The slog from the Hills of Mississippi (where Scott County is located) to the Delta (where Sunflower County is located) was common enough. Ebb, Matilda’s and Brown’s eldest child, left Forest (Scott County) in 1935 for 19

The Rosenwald Fund and the Anna T. Jeanes Foundation funded rural black schools. The Jeanes Foundation was endowed by a Philadelphia Quaker for one million dollars in 1907. The focus of the Jeanes Foundation was on enriching teacher training. The original Board of Trustees included President William Howard Taft. The Jeanes Foundation eventually merged with the Slater and Southern Education Fund. See Will T. Alexander, The Slater and Jeanes Fund (1934).

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Shelby (Bolivar County, next door to Sunflower), in the Mississippi Delta, carrying with him the hope of economic thriving. He had left behind his parents’ inoperable T-Model Ford, a working wagon, a garden patch of tomatoes, greens, peanuts, potatoes, and corn, a water well, and eighty acres of land. Ebb was looking for income security and wealth, not more than 160 miles from his native Pulaski. He died from pleurisy eighteen months later in Shelby; his father, Brown, who had stayed in Scott, would die similarly just five years later, in 1940. Both had an undiagnosed bacterial or viral lung disease that had shortened their lives. Poor health affected blacks in Scott County, not just those in majority-black counties in Mississippi. East Central Mississippi was timber country, and some – black, white, Chinese, and Jews – believed for a time that cotton and uncultivated lands in the Mississippi Delta held more promise for intergenerational familial flourishing than the Mississippi Hills. Forest was a place of promising multigenerational starts for several pioneering families, mostly whites. The pioneering families included two black families, the Burkes and the Jennings; the other twenty-one families in this group were whites and included the McCraveys, Bishops, Tripletts, Townsends, Lathams, Gaddises, and the Tadlocks, among others. They were owners of economic enterprises. Their names are still associated with business operations in Forest a century later. Matilda Qualls-Harper and Brown Harper, Ebb’s parents, were born, respectively, in 1880 and 1881, in rural Scott County, in Pulaski, Mississippi. The Harpers had lived in Pulaski, the Red Clay Hills, a heavily forested area near Bienville National Park in Forest, Mississippi, for sixty years. Their birth years coincided with the reign of organized terror and white rule by Mississippi and federal constitutional edict. The Qualls-Harpers began with 80 acres of prime timber and a fourbedroom home with a guest annex, which was slowly incorporated into a larger but modest house in 1940. Grandfather Brown’s death and a breast cancer scare for Grandma Matilda both marked 1941. Grandma Matilda required a mastectomy that wiped out much of their savings. According to her granddaughter Catherine, “Slowly at first, and then more quickly over the next decade, without widow’s pension, Matilda sold land for pennies” and grew lots of food to ease the family’s food insecurity.20

20

Catherine Payton Coleman Myers, Interview with the author, Jackson, Mississippi, February 9, 2020.

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Brown and Great Grandma Matilda’s children, Ebb, Roberta, Brown, and W T., and their grandchildren, Rudolph, Catherine, Lillie, Houston, and James, grew up working on the farm, raising crops, cutting timber, feeding cattle, securing water from the frog-ridden well, picking berries, riding horses, and going to the rural church-school nearby. As earlier intimated, Catherine spent the first thirteen years of her life on the Harper farm and much of her adulthood taking care of Grandma Matilda. Catherine recalled: “Grandma never worked anywhere that I know of. Grandma was just on the farm. They had cotton, mules, horses, chicken. We could holler to one another’s house.”

Fragments of Chance The Harper home sheltered Roberta’s children until 8th grade, when Catherine left Pulaski and walked to Forest, some 10 miles away, in search of a high school education. Mount Moriah Church School, which she and her siblings had attended year-round, ended in the 8th grade. She moved in with Grandpa Albert’s second wife, her stepmom, Momma Rose Gary, and there she completed grades 9 to 12, becoming a basketball and academic standout. She got pregnant in her 12th-grade year with her son, Jimmy.

Catherine’s Strivings Catherine married Governor Nolan one year later, in 1948. When Jimmy was less than a year, Nolan died. Catherine was a stay-at-home mom for the first seven years of her second marriage until her four kids were ages 3, 5, 7, and 12. She eventually joined the labor force as a maid and laundress rather than a sharecropper, like Josie and Agnes. Both maids and sharecroppers would be omitted from Social Security provisions for decades, so Josie, Agnes, and Catherine would work well beyond their reproductive years, long after they had been widowed. The material payoff from work would be slim, but Catherine found great dignity in work and expressed annoyance regarding “sorry Niggers” to those who did not work. Catherine did domestic work between 1959 and 1966. She recounted those years: “I worked a little during those years between 1953 and 1955. I worked at the boarding house, at the Reds, at the café and at Maude McKenzie’s on Saturday. I did laundry for the Bishops, cleaned up the construction site office on Friday evening. Later in the 1960s, I went to the

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poultry plant. I worked. I do not believe in Niggers with their hands stuck out.”21 In March 1967, Catherine left fifteen years of domestic work and no Social Security to earn $1.60 an hour at Poultry Packers, a chicken processing plant. She stood on her feet five days a week, eight hours a day, in vinyl knee boots for over two decades. She earned employee of the month for perfect attendance, line productivity, and her refusal to join the strikes. She supplemented her income by taking in two families’ laundry and working as a maid on Saturdays. Like most in their religious generation, Catherine, Josie, Agnes, Clementine, and Hattie prayed for a home, children, and loving and productive husbands,22 someone “to sit on the porch with.” None of these women or men were interested in staying in loveless marriages; Catherine and John did stay in a very broken marriage, however, until their children turned 18. Catherine talked about raising her girls: “The girls spent a year or two in kindergarten at Ms. Sheppard’s before they were old enough to go to first grade. I went to PTA meetings, to church, was active in Home Mission, Baptist Training Union (BTU), and attended children’s school activities. Ms. Willie Ford and I took the kids everywhere that was related to church. I remember my first weekly check from the chicken plant; it was $62.00. AB’s wife told me that I could do it. My hands were so sore I could barely open them. The oil bags (the chicken’s bottom) required that I hold the knife a certain way. I cut the oil bag from the tail of the chicken. I worked there about 27 years and retired.”23 Catherine was able to stitch together multiple jobs over forty years and hold on to marriage as an institution to secure her children’s middle-class launch. She had a place to call home, which she owned: she and her children lived at 527 Old Morton Road until the kids left, at 17 and 18, when they graduated from high school and went to college. Leading to 527 Old Morton Road was one of four watch towers near the Hwy 35 bridge overpass. The watchtower overlooked a small Confederate gravesite with burial stones and markers of newborn or still-born next to the gravestones of seven Confederate soldiers. Loss and triumph, victory and defeat, life and death, wealth and suffering, and all things in between formed a community continuum in Scott and shaped a past, still unfolding. 21 22

23

Ibid. Robert Lerman, Joseph Price, and W. Bradford Wilcox, “Family Structure and Economic Success across the Life Course,” Marriage and Family Review, 53(8) (2017): 744–758. Catherine Payton Coleman Myers, Interview with the author, July 12, 2020.

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Catherine would eventually purchase a lot on 16 Section Land, where churchmen helped build a modest two-bedroom home. All her children would grow up there on the Hill on Old Morton Road, a road about one mile in length, where the AME church, the Colemans, Guyses, Supples, Harpers, and two elderly sisters all once resided as homeowners. Write the two sisters lived in the deep woods and deeded their one-acre land holdings to whites. Another neighbor was a bow-legged black bachelor – a culinary genius – who ran a motel/restaurant in his home for white male elites with appetites discordant with their matrimonial status. Catherine’s home, tethered wages from multiple jobs and her husband’s salary made the family as financially and emotionally whole as possible. She purchased musical instruments, ordered books, and phonics sets, and sent her children to church camp and to visit relatives in the Midwest in the summer. She sewed beautiful dresses and cooked wholesome meals and kept up appearances by buying a new car every three years, building an indoor privy, and being active in church and the missionary society. Like Josie and Agnes, she looked well-kept but was income insecure. Unlike Josie and Agnes, she was literate, married several times over, and well connected to a resourceful kinship family up North. Like Josie and Agnes, she had a network of friends and neighbors at home, and a few well-placed white contacts, due to her work as a maid and laundress to the Reds, Bishops, and Tripletts. She offered social capital to families with less and was extended social capital by neighbors who watched her children as closely as she and her husband did. Catherine’s mother, Roberta, had died from ovarian cancer at the age of forty-three, on Christmas day 1953. By that time, Catherine had added a baby girl to the family and was pregnant with her third child, Mary. Catherine’s stepmom, Rose Gary, left Mississippi for Milwaukee, Wisconsin in 1947. Soon, Momma Rose found employment at Jack Winter, an apparel manufacturer, and was promoted to head seamstress.24 She remarried, purchased a home, and built a life for the Gary clan at 2228 Keefe Avenue in Milwaukee. As a stepmom, grandmother, and great-grand mom, preceding family write blended family ties held for eight decades. Success up North was felt back home in material and psychological ways. Mamma Rose had left her dad and his 200-acre farm in Morton, Mississippi, but she continued to pay his land taxes until her death in 2012.

24

James W. Trotter, Jr., Black Milwaukee: The Making of an Industrial Proletariat, 1915–1945 (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1985).

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In the early 1950s, Great Grandma Matilda sold all the land in Pulaski and moved to Forest, where she had built a new home, a more modest one, on a five-acre plot that she shared with her surviving sons, Brown, Jr., and W T. Matilda suffered a stroke in 1955. Across the last two decades of the nineteenth century and during the first half of the twentieth century, the health trajectories of the black poor were much less favorable than for whites.25 Chronic health challenges such as stroke, diabetes, breast cancer, and heart disease visited the Harper family one generation after the next; still, living to be eighty-eight and ninety years old was as common as dying at 43 and 49 in the Qualls-Harper clan. The precariousness of black life and death mirrored the mortality disadvantages of black life in the United States, especially in the US rural Deep South.26 Great Grandpa Brown died from pleurisy, an infectious respiratory disease that affected many during the first four decades of the twentieth century. His daughter Roberta’s death at forty-five, from ovarian cancer, would rile the family. Cancer, mostly breast cancer, visited three consecutive generations of the Harpers, including Catherine. In 1990, Catherine’s breast cancer was found early and arrested. The onset of diabetes was diagnosed as she wed her third husband, Halester Meyers, a returnee and a retiree to Mississippi from Milwaukee. His medical insurance allowed both the care needed to manage his wife’s diabetes and his congestive heart failure. For the less fortunate working class, even now, poor rural health care persists as a barrier to economic mobility. “Behind the black-white differences in life expectancy are not only disparate mortality rates between black and white Americans but also disparate prevalence and incidence of chronic diseases, functional limitations, and disabilities that generate very different health profiles for the black and white populations.”27 Catherine’s second husband, John Coleman, and his eight siblings were born in a three-room shanty next door to a brigadier general’s plantation in Hillsboro, Mississippi. Hillsboro had been a bustling town center prior to the Civil War. At its founding in 1833, Scott County, Mississippi,

25

26

27

Elizabeth D. Carlson and Robert Chamberlain, “The Black-White Perception Gap and Health Disparities Research,” Public Health Nursing, 21(4) (2004): 372–379. Dan Black, Seth Sanders, Evan Taylor, and Lowell Taylor, “The Impact of the Great Migration on Mortality of African Americans: Evidence from the Deep South,” American Economic Review, 105(2) (2015): 477–503. Ryan K. Masters, Robert Hummer, Daniel Powers, Audrey Beck, Shih-Fan Lin, and Brian Finch, “Long-Term Trends in Adult Mortality for U.S. Blacks and Whites: An Examination of Period-and Cohort-Based Changes,” Demography, 51(6) (December 2014): 2047–2073.

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contained 200 families, and each family owned an average of two slaves. As its population grew, during the first three decades, European immigrants dominated, especially Jews. Cotton was the primary crop, but most farmers grew their own food crops, and many speculated on timber. Horse races, land and chance ventures, and speculations of various kinds were part of the county’s social and economic fabric. Much to Catherine’s chagrin, John was both an immense worker and an excessive gambler. She would manage well her resources—her wages from multiple jobs, John’s salary, his infrequent gambling winnings, and Momma Rose’s non-monetary contributions. John’s parents were Queen Hughes Coleman McBeth and Joe Coleman. His mother could read and write. The Lone Pilgrim School, where she learned to read, was created in 1874 on land donated by a prominent black man, Luke Smith. Smith’s master, Captain Dick Smith, gave him the land. The first teacher, Allen Smith, was quite industrious and intelligent. Lone Pilgrim School was among the five Scott County schools to receive Rosenwald funds, and with them, was able to repair the building, increase the number of teachers from one to three and build teacher cottages. Lone Pilgrim was lauded as one of the best schools in Scott County.28 John’s Mom had attended that school for five grades. She was a leader in the Order of the Eastern Star, a freemasonry organization that had formed in 1873. She was also an active member of Lone Pilgrim Missionary Baptist Church, where her children first learned about the fire and brimstone spewed by the highly emotional ministers and punctuated by the twentyfour-member gospel choir. Blessed with melodic singing voices, the Colemans reveled in choral music. John’s oldest daughter, Linda, would earn three degrees in music. Sponsored by their Daddy’s first cousin, Annie Jackson, all three of the girls would be featured on the local radio station in Forest on Sunday mornings. There, they filled homes with their sweet voices. Linda also performed ably at the local, and at that time, segregated Forest Golf and Country Club. Married and widowed thrice, Catherine gave life her best fight. Every dress for the girls was sewn with enduring love. Every meal was impeccably nutritious and beautiful. Her vegetable and flower gardens were the envy of the neighborhood. She excelled as a mom, daughter, grandmother, church superintendent, housewife, and loyal employee. She loved gardening and 28

WPA Assignment Ten, Race and Nationalities in Scott County, Part 3, Negroes, “What Have They Done Educationally,” Ruth Shuttleworth and Wyatt Gatewood (eds.), December 11, 1936. Available at mic.lob.ms.us – Private, accessed November 27, 2021.

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was devoted to church work. She admonished her children to reach for the stars, apply themselves and gain economic independence. She was a teenage mom to Jimmy, who was born in 1947, and an adult mom to the girls, who were born in 1952, 1954, and 1956. Jimmy would reach adolescence in a home with a stepdad who resented him. Jim’s stepdad, John, had grown up illiterate without a father but had found a kind stepdad in Mr. Bud. The girls persevered, watchful of family dynamics but determined to keep their eyes on the future their parents, teachers and church goers imagined for them. John Coleman’s mom, Queen, was stricken by diabetes and lived to be seventy-two years old, dying in March 1963. Not much is known about his father, Joe Coleman, from the Bible records or oral history. The 1930 Census shows that Queen and Joe Coleman lived with eight children in Hillsboro. Joe’s name does not appear in the 1940 Census. When his father, Joe Coleman, died in 1931, John dropped out of elementary school and went to work in the fields with other child laborers, picking cotton. Later, a handyman, in the 1950s, he was hired with Social Security benefits and life insurance at Lee-Gray Chevrolet Company. Though he had attended primary school only a short time and could neither read nor write, John earned more than Catherine. As an adult, his wife would give him an allotment from his earnings on Fridays for his leisure. On most Fridays, he brought his check home to her. In Chicago, John’s brother Brasco made a life for himself as a Chicago State University professor of education. He welcomed his nieces to visit him and his male partner every summer; two of the nieces did so annually as part of their six-week trek to visit Mamma Rose, first cousins, and other maternal and paternal aunts and uncles in Indianapolis and Milwaukee. Back home in the Mississippi Hills, in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, most black men of John’s generation worked in the timber mills, as loggers, hauling wood, as yardmen, or as custodians in banks and white churches. There were black ministers, teachers, high school principals; barbershops, and blacks-owned dry cleaning businesses. A few injured military veterans did not work at all and neither did their wives or so it appeared. For the working poor like John and Catherine, it was work that was first and last. For Mommy Catherine and all the Sunflower Seven, the most important aspects of upward economic mobility were her faith, investing in her children’s education and spiritual development, marriage, deepening her own education, multiple jobs/demanding work, savings, and homeownership. These familial values are deeply entrenched.

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Together, John and Catherine grew up in and eventually out of poverty’s shadow. The shadow poverty cast on John was longer than the one it cast on Catherine. Their assets were material – land ownership, a home, employment (with and without benefits); dispositional – a huge work ethic and an ability to manage finances; and situational – employer benevolence, support from church members and neighbors, Mamma Rose’s contributions, a food garden, hunting and fishing, and fragments of knowledge gleaned from their environments, especially from reading, which Mommy Catherine did a lot of. One of Catherine’s daughters recalls her mom’s access to Bill McCrery at the Bank of Forest. When the family needed a loan to purchase more property and build an indoor privy, Mommy Catherine went to the Bank of Forest. McCrery had been a frequent dinner guest at the Reds’ home, where Catherine had worked as a maid. John’s weekend releases notwithstanding – fishing and hunting, drinking, and gambling to excess – Catherine and John pooled their resources and made the most of their combined wages, if not their fraught marriage. In the late 1940s, Catherine’s only brother, Rudolph Payton, left Mississippi with his cousins James and Houston, just ahead of the police after Rudy had overnighted in the privy on Catherine’s land. He was dating the same woman as the white police officer. Rumor had it that a black man who was a suitor to the same woman as another white police officer had been tied to the railroad tracks in Forest – the same railroad, the Alabama, and Vicksburg Railroad, which had been completed entirely with slave labor in 1858. More than a dozen years after his flight from Forest, in December 1953, Rudy would return to Mississippi to attend his mother’s funeral and family reunion. In 1990, he returned for his father’s funeral. Uncle Rudy was childless and by then a widower of many years. While in Indianapolis, he had lived on his earned income as a truck driver, some bootlegging, and the proceeds from the sale of his home during the gentrification of the 2800 block of the North New Jersey neighborhood. In late April 2007, one of Catherine’s daughters drove her mom and stepdad to Indianapolis for the last time to bring Uncle Rudy to Scott. He came home to live and eventually to die. Uncle Rudy was just shy of his eighty-sixth birthday on the rainy Thursday morning in early summer 2013 when he died, shortly after having arrived for dialysis. The $40,000 savings/pension and life insurance he owned from truck driving was willed to Catherine, his sister/caregiver.

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An asset of this size was the largest the family had ever received at one time. Catherine had also benefited from her son’s inheritance (an insurance policy of $25,000) to her, as he, like Uncle Rudy, was childless and unmarried at the time of his death at age 59. The chance inheritances Catherine received helped to supplement her life in old age and lessened her income insecurity. They did not compensate, however, for multiple generations of poor schooling opportunities and familial income insecurity associated with labor discrimination. Catherine abhorred welfare for the poor and did not understand welfare for corporations – the kind Senator Eastland gave himself when he received subsidies and support for water drainage for his plantation in Doddsville. What she clearly had internalized is a robust work ethic and the dignity of work. She instilled that in the girls, but Jimmy was not buying the idea that arduous work would pay off. He had seen otherwise, as his young mom worked incessantly at low-wage jobs. He believed that white tyranny had stacked the deck too high for black labor to pay off. He was cynical. His sisters, Linda, Mary, and Sue were less so, much less so. Dependency was not valued in the Coleman household, but independence and familial effort were highly esteemed by the girl children. Catherine stayed married in part to ensure that her family could survive without government assistance, even meager assistance. The failure to protect lowskilled and low-wage women’s work – urban and rural – would become a constant in American public policy at the state, county, and federal levels. Still, shining through, despite inequity and terror, was their capacity to shelter their children and sponsor their ambitions. Although members of the rural working poor, Catherine and John had more stability and status than some families. In addition to organizing summer holidays and planning church-centered and school-focused weekday tasks, the couple would send their kids to historically black colleges, from which the three girls would graduate with honors in music, political science, and mass communication, respectively. Their dad, John, drowned in a boating accident in March 1975, just three months before their second daughter, Mary, would graduate from Jackson State University in political science. At that time, Catherine had one daughter in graduate school in Illinois, one about to graduate from college, and another entering her second year of college. By then, Catherine had welcomed two sons-in-law, Joe Laymon and Tommye Lee Wash, and an affectionate grandson, Kiese. Although Catherine’s husband, John, had been fired from Lee-Gray Chevrolet months prior to his death, his life insurance policy was still in effect and the accident provision would give Catherine a modest sum. The

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attending white physician wrote that John had a heart attack before he drowned. One daughter argued with him, and after wrangling for an hour, he listed accidental drowning as the cause of death. Catherine was widowed at age forty-five. She looked forward to the college and university graduations of her children; she also welcomed her son, then with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), home from Vietnam. She reports that those years between 1975 and 1990 were the loneliest of her life. Her health waxed and waned as diabetes, breast cancer, and arthritis struck her. Notwithstanding her health issues, she stayed active in church, serving on the usher board, the Home Missionary Society, and as superintendent of Sunday School. She babysat her first grandchild – an inquisitive baby boy – on weekends and for a few weeks each summer. She taught him to pray and gave him the affirmation he needed and deserved – more at times than his first-generation middle-class mom, Mary. His mom was then a divorcee and a professional working woman with a doctorate from a first-rate graduate school. Whereas Catherine’s kids had attended public schools, Catherine’s grandson attended Catholic school for all but a few of his primary grades and through high school. A considerable number of middle-class black families jettisoned public schools for their children in favor of parochial or private schools. This break with public schools and state colleges in the fifth generation of the family felt ominous. It certainly had been intentional – a way of shielding kids from the vagaries of a stratified school community at a time when the professional role was demanding for Catherine’s daughter, Mary, and single parenthood was oppressively so. Meanwhile, breast cancer took Lily, Catherine’s younger sister, but, as previously stated, early detection through a biopsy, access to and tolerance of Tamoxifen, regular checkups, a healthy diet, exercise, and faith aided Catherine’s breast cancer recovery. Catherine survived the disease, as had her grandma Matilda (with a partial mastectomy) five decades earlier. Mary made a dental appointment for her mom – the first in her life at fifty-five. Her gums were cleaned, surgery was performed, and x-rays and imprints for dentures were taken. By then, years of inattention to oral health had predisposed her to diabetes. She began taking insulin and remained active in church affairs and went on mile-long daily walks until arthritis gradually overpowered her. She remained widowed until the summer of her 65th birthday, when she wed Halester, one of her high school sweethearts. Halester had lived in Milwaukee, Wisconsin for forty years and had been employed at Parks and Recreations for thirty of those years. As a young

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man, he had moved from Scott County to Jones County and then joined the army. He suffered a nervous breakdown during basic training and was honorably discharged in 1948, the year President Truman, by Executive Order 9981, ended segregation in the armed forces. Like thousands of others, Halester fled Mississippi in the late 1940s, looking for a new economic opportunity. Forty years later, he had returned to Forest, a widower, and a retiree, and found Catherine. Catherine, the mother, and grandmother of college graduates wore a white wedding gown in her third and final marriage. Together, Catherine and Halester built a modern home on the property she and her second husband, John, had maintained together (though she had originally purchased the lot during her first childless marriage to Governor Nolan). Halester and Catherine would stay married until his death twenty-five years later, on April 1, 2019. Catherine would receive Halester’s Social Security of $1,300 per month; despite her forty years of labor, her own earned Social Security benefit was only $430.00. Despite Catherine’s work history, without marriage to Halester, in old age, she would have experienced both income and health insecurity. Catherine had done right and well by her children and her community but had been failed and irreparably insulted by her government and labor relations. Her four children and two grandchildren would all finish high school and attend college, and three of the four kids would graduate college and earn graduate degrees, as did Catherine’s two grandchildren, both of whom are homeowners or could become homeowners if they chose. Linda, Catherine’s eldest daughter, voted outstanding teacher of the year in the nation’s fourth-largest public school, Clark County School District in Nevada (CCSD), would join the teachers’ union and lock in a satisfying career and good retirement. Linda’s fourth husband, Ray, would leave his veteran and work retirement benefits to her following his death in 2016. Catherine’s grandson, Kiese, would become a writer and an endowed professor of English and Creative Writing at Rice University and the University of Mississippi, an institution, in 2020, with a black student enrollment of 17 percent. Her last born, Carolyn, would bring Catherine to her home in Jackson to take care of her as she turned ninety years old, months after Halester’s death. Like Mary, Carolyn and Nechole, Carolyn’s daughter, would earn doctorate degrees and make their way as the primary providers of their families. They would persist, but with a buffer for a safe landing if they needed support. Theirs would be the first generation to reach the middle-class, whereas, among the Sunflower Seven, it was Jack who achieved that status and joined

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the political class. His legacy, like Catherine’s, included arduous work and persistence. Despite Catherine’s inheritance and fine money management, she would need her children’s financial support in old age. It was Catherine’s persistence as a member of the working class, her commitment to her children’s middle-class ascendancy, and her talents as a homemaker, gardener, and manager of scarce resources that enabled her to nurture her children and grandchildren. It was also, significantly, her commitment to marriage as an institution, after being successively widowed, that gave her access to her third husband’s Social Security benefits and his pension during their marriage. Catherine was the lone beneficiary of both her son’s and her brother’s life insurance and retirement benefits. She was also the beneficiary of her second husband’s accidental death insurance. Finally, in old age, she would be able to rely on her children and grandchildren to help support her care, especially to provide caregivers to supplement the provisions of her private insurance and Medicare. In her estate, she would leave two homes valued at just over $300,000 and her savings of just over $54,000. Her mother, Roberta, had left nothing behind, and her grandma, Matilda, had left modest landholdings. Catherine reached her ninth decade in her hometown of Forest, a community now inhabited by neighbors for whom Spanish, rather than English is the first language. The four black neighborhoods dotting the landscape in Forest have declined in homeownership, road maintenance, and housing stock. The Keen End, the Bottom, the Hills, and the Quarters have been hollowed out, with the Keen End alone having spotty evidence of moderate maintenance. Even there, however, unkempt trailer parks, street litter, used cars, and dilapidated housing line streets once occupied by married homeowners. Their children have gone off to college and careers and left Forest behind. The Hills neighborhood, along Old Morton Road, is especially unrecognizable. Broken-down trailer homes are scattered along the street, where now random white business enterprises are also visible. Abutting the one brick home that remains on the street are vacated businesses – ones that should never have been approved for the neighborhood. No white neighborhood in Forest looks disrespected and forlorn. In the vicinity of the trailer park on Old Morton Road are Tyson Foods, a poultry processing company, and Unipress, a maker of automotive parts. Likewise, Koch and Forest Packing, also poultry processing plants, are in black neighborhoods.

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Taxpayers’ dollars are clearly being spent to upkeep white neighborhoods, even though blacks are now and have been in the county and municipal government for some time. The white female mayor of Forest, Nancy Chambers, a former schoolteacher, does little to secure the dignity of black neighborhoods; instead, the city approves permits for poor housing stock to diminish the once-thriving black neighborhoods. Quality education at the lower grades is presumed to be lower now in Scott and Sunflower than two generations ago. Cocaine has layered yet another challenge on Scott. It has infested the neighborhoods of this rural county, and it likely claimed Catherine’s son Jimmy’s life in 2007. There was not a single month in 2020 without drug arrests and the confiscation of drugs in Scott County. The faces of those arrested were black. The Mississippi Bureau of Narcotics, the US Drug Administration, and Homeland Security are keenly aware of drug trafficking in Scott. And, as is true for the nation, homicide rates in Scott County are increasing. Violent crime in the United States is 22.7, compared to 26.1 in Scott County. Prior to 2017, those accused of a crime were detained for a year without legal counsel and without formally being charged. A lawsuit was brought by the ACLU on behalf of a detainee who was never charged. Obtaining indictments in rural places may take up to a year. Her new neighbors on the Hill replaced Mom and others on the poultry processing lines and in neighborhoods like the Hill, which was once dominated by black homeowners. New neighbors’ churches and restaurants dot the towns of Forest and Morton. They populate Walmart as patrons and cashiers most days of the week; they have settled in, some still in trailer parks, others in rented homes, and still others as homeowners. In fact, Catherine was until quite recently a landlord to one such family. Like the first-generation immigrants of yore, most of these new neighbors try to learn English and persist through their labor exploitation. They revel in new possibilities in a land of promise. Just as the blacks before them, they want their niñas and niños to get a good start, including better education, a middle-class income, stable housing, and a happy marriage. They hope to access full citizenship while struggling to adjust to the deportation and labor policies of various presidencies and communities. They push against steep odds – as noted in Chapter 2, 20 percent of children under age six live in poor families. Many of these children lack health insurance and have parents with low levels of educational attainment. Black married-couple families are 50 percent more likely to be in poverty than white married-couple families, while married-couple

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Hispanic families with children under 18 are one-and-a-half times more likely to be in poverty than white married-couple families. Catherine’s new neighbors departed from their homes thousands of miles away to gain a new foothold in the United States and send remittances back home. In 1935, Dollard had termed newly-arrived immigrants to the United States as “temporary Negroes.”29 Their pathways to upward economic, social, and political mobility is an important one to examine in contrast to the old black rural poor – those whose enslaved forebears were originally brought to Scott and Sunflower involuntarily. The Old Morton Road they now call home once had 90 percent black married homeowners. The enslaved descendants who inhabited Old Morton Road were diverse: some were injured veterans, common laborers, churchgoers, agnostics, teetotalers, coffee and soap-opera enthusiasts, an alcoholic, a gambler, those who worked several jobs to make ends meet, and many committed parents, a creative entrepreneur, and tax-paying landowners. The declines in housing and schooling are at least two generations in the making; the decline began before drug trafficking was pronounced in the 1990s. Reversing these maladies will require cross-generational and crosssector investment in low-income families and schools. It will require a strong black middle-class and an invested white middle- and white business-class to do so. Children who were the first to experience desegregation and survive it, black and white, are called upon to look back to a time when our promise as one community was felt more deeply than it is today. Even if one chooses not to return to Scott County, investment in the revitalization of black and now brown racially mixed neighborhoods, ensures that all the county looks and feels whole. This minority-majority community, like our nation itself, is worth regeneration. The new poor should not have to work as hard as Catherine did to survive poverty or as hard as their children did to sustain life in the middle-class. If they do, however, they should be paid a living wage and their children should have access to leadership with equitable values, safe and affordable housing, safe and good schools, and communities free of indifference, illicit drugs, firearms and violence. Progress is no stranger to struggle. Forest native Attorney Constance Slaughter-Harvey gave the 2019 Commencement address to the 107 law school graduates at Ole Miss School of Law; she was joined by the Dean of

29

Dollard, Caste and Class in a Southern Town, 93.

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Mississippi College School of Law and President of the Mississippi Bar Association, Patricia Watkins Bennett, also an African American Forest native and fellow high school classmate. The next generation of lawyers produced by Scott will no doubt have Hispanic and Latino heritage. More will become home and landowners, join the professions and win elections. Those left behind will need good legal representation and some good fortune. They will need to build coalitions across race, gender, class, and ethnicity to achieve that. Against great odds, the good people of Scott County must do more and demand more to restore the common good. One family’s challenges and good fortune could easily represent an outlier in terms of college-going and completion rates, modest inheritances, good health status, and all the rest. One community’s production of families of children able to leapfrog from the working poor to the middleclass in one generation could also be anomalous, peculiar to those families and that time and place, especially to a place without a majority share of enslaved descendants. The experience of those landing in historically black colleges in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s counters the trend of broader macro-level shifts in economic mobility and immobility. The share of American adults who live in middle-income households had decreased from 61 percent in 1971 to 51 percent in 2019. Catherine worked her entire adult life, from age eighteen through age sixty-five, her exit from poverty occurred when she was sixty-five years old, married for the third time to a man who had gone to the Midwest for forty years and returned home to find his high school sweetheart. It was his retirement pension and his employer-based insurance that lessened her vulnerability to poverty in old age. It was her good credit and his monthly income that enabled them to build a modern home on the land she had purchased forty years earlier. And it was the convergence of small inheritances from her childless son and brother that positioned her to leave income insecurity behind. All by itself, luck is rarely sufficient. Among other things, the new neighbors – the Latino and the Hispanic poor – deserve decent elected leaders, as do the grandchildren of the Sunflower Seven and their contemporaries across the United States. The same gateways out of poverty for generations of yore – access to the rule of law, quality health and education, mentorship, and high parental and community investment – are perennially embattled. Knowing that it is necessary but insufficient by itself, I turn now to an interrogation of education as a pathway toward sustaining rural poverty exits.

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PART III

PATHWAYS TOWARD UPWARD ECONOMIC MOBILITY

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Beyond Caste in Higher Education The Ayers/Fordice Case and Its Impact

Early education and post-secondary education are hallmarks of the American promise. It is the absence of early exposure and continuous access to quality education that challenges individual, familial, and community outcomes. The chapter outlines both inequitable resources and the struggles to correct past and contemporary discriminatory actions. Children and institutions imprisoned by educational servitude have fought throughout history to erase structural disadvantages. The amount each state and local government invests in public K-12 education varies, from $24,040 per pupil in New York to $8,935 in Mississippi, a Mississippi increase of $1,100 since 2018. The strivings of the Sunflower Seven and the Harper Colemans of Scott are indicative of how desirous rural families were for progress in early twentieth-century Mississippi. The rural poor – teachers, sharecroppers, maids, and tenants alike – valued education as a public good. Their efforts and desires for quality education would often be thwarted. For a century, agricultural child laborers in rural Mississippi often grew up sideways, with their backs bent over someone else’s cotton and timber fields, working for low wages and in a condition of economic, judicial, and political tyranny – lacking citizenship and citizenship advocates and enforcers. A century after the Emancipation Proclamation and the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments, Julian Bond observed in the 1970s that what passes for public education in the South has been a distressing and dehumanizing process for black children. Despite this indisputable fact, like their tiny middle-class counterparts, the black working rural poor, who cleaned the toilets, picked the cotton, logged the timber, cared for whites’ children, and cooked the meals of the white leisurely class, believed in educating their children. However, segregated public schools, even good ones with valueadded teachers, were built sideways – to affirm the present rather than 253

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confront public dispossession. Still, they were, for many, places of heterogeneity, populated by blacks of all classes, aspirations, and hues, environments where Lonnie, Matthews, Clementine, and Williams and their children were poised to learn. Schoolmates whose parents were part of the tiny middle-class, those whose parents were among the ambitious working class, and the teachers who believed in and challenged them – as best they were able – oriented children’s imaginations toward the future. Some individuals and organizations worked to support these aspirations. Beginning in 1912 as the Macon County Project in Georgia, the Sears and Roebuck philanthropist Julius Rosenwald and Tuskegee Institute President Booker T. Washington teamed up to build 5,300 Rosenwald schools to educate African American children throughout the rural South. As already shown, in both Sunflower and Scott counties, Rosenwald schools were built. Mississippi had 533 Rosenwald buildings – schools, teachers’ homes, and shop buildings. Two Rosenwald school buildings in Sunflower, located in Drew and Moorhead, still stand today. For some of those involved in the project, the purpose was to expand the school year for children who had been able to attend school only four months a year. Absent electricity in many rural places, including rural Sunflower County, where David Williams, Sr., grew up without proper lighting in his plantation shanty, the Rosenwald schools were built as open spaces with natural lighting. The advent of the schools spurred local communities to join in their construction and upkeep and served as an impetus for an expanded tax base for public education. Then and now, some privatepublic partnerships could advance not simply better buildings but valueadded teachers, more engaged parents, and stronger curricula. Josie, Agnes, and John Coleman were of school age during the Rosenwald/Booker T. Washington years. Though there were Rosenwald schools in Sunflower and Scott counties, neither Josie, Agnes, nor John managed to gain more than six years of education. Each one, along with their siblings, worked in the cotton fields with their parents. John’s younger siblings, especially Brasco, broke this tradition and finished high school, college, and graduate school. Matthews, Jack, and Clementine Richardson broke the cycle of high school incompletion and, therefore, black economic dependency. It was, however, the families themselves, especially those with just one literate relative or one ambitious and not-so-literate relative, that fed the children’s aspirations and built home environments where reading, writing, and school assignments and activities were a priority. The families found resources to buy the Encyclopedia Britannica and to update them periodically. Families nourished their imaginations and set rules and

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expectations for personal comportment, governance, and learning. Prior to desegregation and beyond, many public black schoolteachers worked in tandem with families to foster children’s ambitions, while many homes and communities were without literate parents or human capital networks with future orientations. Historian James Anderson has written that “In 1940, roughly half of all Black common schools in Mississippi still met in tenant cabins, lodges, churches, and stores – privately-owned structures that under state law could not be improved with public funds.”1 In 1940, when Clementine was eight years old, she attended a church school on the plantation. The implied and intentional educational constraints notwithstanding, at least 70 percent of the Sunflower Seven – Clementine, David, Matthews, and Jack, Lonnie, and Hattie – finished high school (or completed the General Education Development Test) and as many as 40 percent attended or graduated from two- and four-year colleges, Jack, Clementine, and Matthews among them. College-educated women in this study had longer marriages than their less well-formally educated counterparts, and like their husbands, they were in the workforce, breadwinners contributing to the family’s economic well-being. And while schools and colleges themselves cannot eradicate poverty or ensure upward economic mobility, they can foster imagination and creativity, harness discipline and imbue new knowledge and skills essential for regeneration and constructive nationstate familial thriving, and offer strengths-based environments for lowincome and first-generation students. For first-generation college-goers, historically black colleges opened their doors when other college and university doors in Mississippi were shut. Poor parents could pool their resources to help with tuition and other expenses and, with college grants, loans, and work-study programs help cover essential costs. Because of the stubborn vestiges of segregation and racism, these educational institutions lagged behind white colleges and universities from the very start in terms of their quality and type of programs, technology, and maintenance. In the decades prior to the Sunflower Seven, Sunflower postmistress Minnie Cox and Sunflower physician Clinton Battle had graduated from Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee. Morehouse, Tougaloo, and Tuskegee – private black colleges – were chosen by Matthews, Evelyn, John, Isaac, Michelle, and Alsee. Sunflower residents Clementine and 1

James Anderson, “The Historical Context for Understanding the Test Score Gap,” 2007, p. 4. Available at Researchgate.net, accessed January 16, 2022.

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Gwendolyn Byrd chose public regional colleges such as Mississippi Valley State University and later Delta State University. Jack Harper attended Moorhead (Mississippi Delta Community College), as did one of his sons, and from there he was admitted to the University of Mississippi, where he also finished law school, as did his son. There were four law school finishers in this study: Jack, Jack’s son Robert Harris, Lonnie Byrd’s cousin Isaac, and Isaac’s contemporary, Alsee McDaniel. Isaac and Alsee graduated from Northwestern University and Harvard University School of Law, respectively. Isaac Byrd’s cousin, John Mickey Farmer, finished his education at Tougaloo College and entered Tufts Medical School, becoming a physician at Michael Reese Hospital in Chicago. In 1946, Leonidas Harris Berry had been the first black physician at Michael Reese Hospital; he earned an attending position in 1963. David Williams’s son, David Jr., also graduated from Tougaloo College and Jackson State University and went to the University of Pittsburgh for medical school. Dr. David Williams is the executive vice president and chief medical officer at CareSource, where he oversees a continuum of clinical care organizations serving complex populations. Black physicians comprise 4 percent of physicians in the United States. Hattie, Isaac’s mom, and Mickey’s “aunt sister” completed the GED in her middle age and studied at Coahoma Junior College. College-going students in the 1970s from Sunflower had varying levels of skills for college, as evidenced by Alsee’s “correctness of expression” score of 93, his confidence in his mathematics, government, and English skills. Isaac’s insatiable reading habits and self-belief propelled him. For those who jumped to the middle-class in one generation, sometimes public collisions were avoided, even when private ones lurked. In the previous section, I asked not what moved these young adults to aspire beyond post-secondary school to law school in Evanston, Illinois, and Cambridge, Massachusetts, but what environmental factors influenced their pathways. Teachers were instrumental influencers, along with most parents. Of significance is the fact that, at the first level of aspiration, historically black colleges existed for blacks – just as community colleges existed for the white son and grandson of a tenant farmer and son of a sharecropper and, Hattie, a small farmer’s daughter. High school non-finishers who struggled across two generations were unable to attend school due to split-school sessions. Josie and Agnes quit school to help their families drop corn in holes, and pick and chop cotton. A generation later, others dropped out of school due to nonmarital and

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early pregnancies. They endured training programs for jobs that did not exist. They endured welfare to work, lost ground, and had no jobs worth anything to make ends meet. Perennial sharecroppers’ children had uneven college experiences, with some graduating college, such as Andrew Brown, and others not, such as Eddie Landfair. Still, given the circumstances, perennial sharecroppers’ children found ways to exit poverty; ways that included some college, working multiple jobs and marrying once for life. A young Isaac Byrd, Jr., from the farm-owning kinship family, picked up his first cousin Mickey’s books from Tougaloo College and read them. His thirst for knowledge was limitless. The failure to offer quality segregated or desegregated public schools in the poorest places in the land – a task left to the states and not as a provision of the federal constitution – can be seen in high school and college completion rates by race. Contemporary African American college completion in Mississippi is 14 percent, and white completion is 25 percent. In 2005, public school integration in Sunflower was abysmal. For example, of the 425 students attending Carver Upper Elementary School, all were black; the same was true at Carver Lower Elementary. Today, Carver Elementary School is ranked unacceptably low at 323 out of 431 Mississippi elementary schools. In reading proficiency, it is 421 and in math, it is 356. Generations of children have been harmed by early and continuous exposure to educational deficits. In Indianola today, of the 629 students at Gentry High, Isaac, Michelle, and Larry’s alma mater, in the county seat, all but 4 were black; only in Lockard Elementary School, in Indianola, where there were 452 students, was a substantial number, 151, non-black. In Drew High School, of 272 students, only 15 were white. The public schools are as segregated as the academies. Indianola Academy reported 17 other race students (non-white students) out of a population of 465 students in 2005. Even at the height of desegregation in Sunflower County, in 1971, only one white student was in the Gentry High senior class. So, what does this mean, one might ask. Frequently, public school revenue allocation favors schools with the largest number of whites and the best property values. Public school expenditures per pupil thus vary across and within the county and state, with children attending in the Drew School District receiving $5,955, Indianola receiving $4,550, and Ruleville receiving $4,973. The state’s average perpupil expenditure is currently just over $5,100.00. The student-teacher ratios in the schools in Sunflower County vary from 10.94:1 at Indianola Academy to 16.5:1 at Gentry High School. More than two-thirds of Gentry’s

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629 students were free lunch eligible. Assuming equally competent teachers and teaching materials, the disparity in the student-teacher ratios is alarming, given the material poverty (as evidenced in part by free lunch eligible numbers) of students attending Gentry. Empirical research shows, for example, that high inequality and low mobility influence the decision-making of socio-economically disadvantaged youth. Kearny and Levine are emphatic: “When inequality is high many youths do not persist through to high school.” They expand on this finding: “The data are consistent with this prediction: low-income youth are more likely to drop out of school if they live in a place with a greater gap between the bottom and middle of the income distribution.”2 Early exposure to a sound primary and secondary school education can set students up for good citizenship and success in the world of work and college.

STRENGTHENING EXITS TOWARD UPWARD MOBILITY: HISTORICALLY BLACK COLLEGES AND UNIVERSITIES

For more than a century, Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) had served well as a route to the middle-class. Public HBCUs, like Jackson State University, which Catherine’s children attended, held promise only if the high schools had done their part. The blacks among the Sunflower Seven who reached college attended at least one HBCU. Many of their children and first cousins had as well. While the parental ability to read and write was not a ticket out of poverty for children, such assets were part of the pathway that led to functional families, personal and communal dignity, and future orientation. There are at least 110 HBCUs. Though the number of graduates from HBCUs has declined over the last forty years, HBCUs have awarded undergraduate degrees to three-fourths of black doctorate holders in the nation and four-fifths of all black federal judges.3 Ninety HBCUs are in fifteen southern states. In Mississippi alone, four black private educational colleges were established from 1877–1887. The nation’s first black statesupported liberal arts college, North Carolina Central, was another forty 2

3

Melissa Kearney and Phillip Levine, “Income Inequality, Social Mobility and the Decision to Drop Out of High School,” Brookings Papers of Economic Activity (March 10, 2016). See also “Making Tomorrow Better Together, Report of the Two-Generation Outcomes Working Group,” Aspen Institute (Washington, DC, 2016). National Center for Education Statistics, United States Department of Education.

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years in the future. As early as 1837, a full two generations prior to the Emancipation Proclamation, Cheyney University of Pennsylvania was founded. In 1854, 1856, 1857, and 1862, Lincoln, Wilberforce, HarrisStowe, and LeMoyne-Owen colleges were established. Of the states in the South, it was North Carolina in 1867 that led the way in the creation of four colleges to educate African Americans. After Reconstruction, Fisk and Hampton opened colleges primarily for children whose parents had some access to power or the powerful. Tuskegee University was founded by Booker T. Washington in 1881 after he left Hampton. College completion was indispensable as a pathway up from poverty, but not always out of poverty. Morehouse, Mississippi Valley State, and Tougaloo were HBCUs chosen by three of the Sunflower Seven. There is a relationship between unemployment and degree completion: the failure to finish high school and/or college increases unemployment prospects and produces a wage pay gap that is insurmountable.4 It is in environments with competent and caring teachers, an engaging curriculum and able, challenging mentorship that socio-economically disadvantaged students have reason to believe that high school and college completion are worth their efforts. For students from non-college going families or communities, a committed mentor or coach and engaging coaching tools could be integral to college completion. At a time when college costs are prohibitive and the faculty reward structures do not value more faculty/student contact hours, students are stopping out and many are dropping out. Post-secondary education practices that mistake counseling and advising programs for mentorship and coaching deny students an opportunity to contribute effectively to their own individual human capacity building – the coaching work with students strengthens students’ attitudes toward persistence and engages them in self-belief, decision-making, resilience, and talent cultivation. As with a solid secondary and post-secondary education, mentorship for upward mobility fosters knowledge about human capacity and skill accretion. It both increases and incentivizes the probability of familial economic mobility. Engagement with low-income mothers, for example, has been shown to have positive family and peer “contagion” effects that both supplement and complement the value proposition of colleges and universities as well as the return on educational investment. “Only 28% of single mother learners earn a degree or credential within 6 years, but 4

Pew Research Center, “The Rising Cost of Not Going to College” (Washington, DC, February 2014). Available at www.pewsocialtrends.org/2014/02/11/the-rising-cost-ofnot-going-to-college.

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each additional level of education they complete decreases their chances of living in poverty by 32%.” Retrieved from Education Design [email protected] 10/15/22 Research has indicated that slashing high school and college stop-out rates and improving the quality of degree completion are both necessary steps in sustaining upward mobility. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, “The employment rates for college completers in both 2014 and 2010 were lower than the rate in 2008, when the recession began. In addition to the employment rate being higher for those with higher levels of educational attainment, employment rates were generally higher for males than females at each level of educational attainment.”5 The overall employment rate for young males twenty to twenty-four years old was higher than the rate for young females twenty to twenty-four years old (72.4 vs. 66.3 percent). It was also higher for young males with some college education than for young females with the same level of educational attainment (78.6 vs. 71.6 percent).6 According to Kathryn Edin and Luke Shaefer, over 1.5 million households of mostly disconnected single moms live in the “perilous world of low-wage work.”7 Low-income mothers and their children must become better positioned to excel in high school, college, and in life. Homelessness and individual income insecurity are often linked directly to larger systemic challenges in the education and political spheres.8 If Sunflower’s majority-black public schools are or can become places of consistent achievement, low-income students and their families will have a chance to break deep disadvantages. Hoxby and Avery’s The Missing One-Offs: The Hidden Supply of High Achieving Low Income Students, demonstrates that high achieving low-income students who do come from schools where they are a critical mass of the student body apply to selective institutions and get admitted and graduate at high rates. 5

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National Center for Education Statistics, Report on the Condition of Education 2022, Washington, DC. The employment rate for 25-34 year olds was higher for those with greater levels of educational attainment. Variations by race included 53% for those who had not completed high school; 68% for high school graduates; 75% for those with some college, but no degree; and 86% for those with a bachelor’s degree or higher. The median earnings gap between a high school only complete and a Bachelor's degree completer was 30,000. US Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics. (2015). The Condition of Education 2015 (NCES 2015-144), Employment Rates and Unemployment Rates by Educational Attainment. Katherine Edin and Luke Shaefer, $2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America, (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 2010), 45. Edin and Shaefer, $2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America, 198.

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Inversely, low-income students who do not constitute a critical mass in their schools and communities are unlikely to encounter teachers or counselors who attended or graduated from a selective college and cannot thus present that as an option for their students.9 Seeking to unravel the outcomes of low-income students, Bowen, Chingos, and McPherson’s Crossing the Finish Line found that “minority students and students from poor families have markedly lower graduation rates – and take longer to complete degrees – even when other variables are taken into account.”10 As was true for Hattie, Jack, and Catherine, parental involvement in their children’s school and family life strengthened children’s expectations and efforts, and their performance in school. When goals are set and opportunities to achieve them are evident, human motivation is mobilized. Literature has long shown what successful students have experienced: other than academic readiness and familial resources, the most influential factor in student persistence and retention is the student’s self-efficacy and the intrinsic and extrinsic motivation to persist when selfefficacy is challenged or undermined.11 As students encounter college, they face new challenges – they meet faculty who stretch and challenge them to read more advanced materials and comprehend readings, refine their writing skills, draw compelling inferences, analyze, and synthesize texts. Self-efficacy is challenged, even diminished for a time. Through curricular and extra-curricular contacts with faculty in their roles as mentor, advisor, orientation leader, and faculty sponsor in honor societies, clubs, fraternities, sorority leaders, and in new student convocation, students with strong self-efficacy come to see their challenges as motivational, as intrinsic to the teaching, learning, maturation, and goal-setting processes.12

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Caroline Hoxby and Christopher Avery, The Missing “One-Offs”; The Hidden Supply of High-Achieving, Low-Income Students, Brookings Economic Activity (Spring 2013). William G. Bowen, Matthew Chingos, and Michael McPherson, Crossing the Finish Line (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 279. F. Domenech-Betoret, L. Abellan_Rosello, and Gomez-Artiga, “Self-Efficacy, Satisfaction, and Academic Achievement: The Mediator Role of Students’ Expectancy-Value Beliefs,” Frontiers in Psychology, 8 (2017): 1193. Available at frontiersin.org; see also Amal Alhadabi and Aryn C. Karpinski, “Grit, Self-Efficacy, Achievement Orientation Goals, and Academic Performance in University Students,” International Journal of Adolescence and Youth, 25(1) (2020). Available at tanfonline.com, accessed September 18, 2021. E. Pascarella and P. Terenzini, How College Affects Students: Findings and Insights from Twenty Years of Research (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1991); and E. Pascarella, P. Terenzini, and J. Hibel, “Student-Faculty Interactional Settings and Their Relationship to Predicted Academic Performance,” Journal of Higher Education, 49 (1978): 450–463.

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Low-income students who have not attended good secondary schools and who often have parents who are not functionally literate could face complex challenges, ranging from poor reading, comprehension, and writing skills to self-doubt and isolation. For these students and others, the significance ascribed to faculty interactions is top of mind. What perceptions or messages do campus actions convey? If these interactions allow students a sense of belonging to the community – a community in which they are engaged and are expected to achieve and excel – they can, and many do excel. When Jack Harper chose Moorhead Community College as the route to quality higher education, he signaled his relative income insecurity but persisted and excelled in college and beyond, earning above-average wages while in college and, once out of college, advancing to the political and economic classes. Likewise, Governor Phil Bryant’s community college trek (see Chapter 4) was illustrative of his working-class beginnings and the value of community colleges in fostering pathways to economic mobility for those able to gain support and persist. Frequently, though not always, as students’ contact with faculty increases, persistence, and quality completion rates also increased. According to Chetty, colleges are engines of upward mobility, especially mid-tier public colleges. Are most black colleges the mighty engines that could? If not, what would be required to make them strengths-based institutions? HISTORICALLY BLACK COLLEGES IN MISSISSIPPI: FIGHTING FOR WHOLENESS

Ayers v. Waller was filed in Mississippi a half-century ago to address the outcomes of higher education and the payoff from college. These outcomes expressed in the previous chapter had been difficult to achieve while working within a legal racism framework. Isaiah Madison, a sharecropper and the son of a sharecropper who went on to practice law, wanted to erase the framework of higher education legal racism. The story from sharecroppers to college-educated was not as rare as Clementine believed. She was not an exception, though her motivation to complete college had been exceptional. Isaiah returned to Mississippi in 1971 from Howard and observed the pernicious impact of Jim Crow on secondary and higher education. He perceived a wholesale decline in the quality of public elementary and secondary schools, the growth of private all-white secondary

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schools, differently-funded and well-resourced historically white universities, and under-resourced historically black colleges. He vowed at once to help challenge Mississippi’s system of segregated public post-secondary education. In 1972, three years before Ayers was filed, 34 percent of all black students in higher education were enrolled in Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs); today that percentage is eighteen. In 2001, the negotiated settlement resulting from Ayers awarded HBCUs 503 million dollars over a seventeen-year period. As we approach the end of another legal era of de jure segregation, racial vestiges linger in higher education. Despite this fact, Isaiah Madison, the band of lawyers after him, the United States Supreme Court, the District Court and Circuit Court of Appeals, the Justice Department, and citizen petitioners accomplished something of significance in the twenty-seven-year-old campaign. Plaintiffs’ lawyers alleged discrimination in the state’s admissions policies, the colleges’ racial composition, the quality and diversity of faculty and their salaries, differential programs, program duplication, and differential funding. The plaintiffs’ fight and their citizen petitions were conceived in righteous discontent over the status (disparities) of Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs). A small band of African American and Jewish lawyers who understood the promise of equal protection – the capaciousness of the 14th Amendment and Title VI, and the example of the NAACP lawyers in the long fight that culminated in 1954 in Brown v. the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas13 – waged a legal battle against those who had fought to maintain legal racism and its vestiges. I will argue that the litigation struggle was necessary to push the state into a virtuous rather than vicious political negotiation. The 1992 United States

13

The parents of Linda Brown and others, including those in Topeka, Kansas, and Clarendon County, South Carolina, challenged the separate but equal doctrine in public education. As early as 1849, black parents were seeking quality education for their children. Education cases challenging inferior schools attended by blacks arose from Boston, San Francisco, Columbus, Ohio, St. Louis, Missouri, Oklahoma, Columbia, South Carolina, and Austin, Texas – all predated Brown. In Brown, change was promised but it did not arrive for another generation – sixteen years. A generation – my generation – of young people had since 1954 attended segregated and sometimes inferior schools. Even if the justices had been more decisive and timelier in ending “all deliberate speed,” the social norms of lawlessness would in all probability have continued in play after 1954. See Richard Kluger, Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black America’s Struggle for Equality, Alfred Knopf (1976). Brown has two decisions: Brown 1 overruled the “Separate but Equal” doctrine, and Brown 11 created the “all deliberate speed” phrase and phase in the 1955 implementation decision.

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Supreme Court decision in Fordice14 did not provide an adequate legal remedy for erasing the vestiges of legal racism, but the decision was a necessary political predicate to nudge the State of Mississippi toward wholesale removal of those vestiges, a necessary but insufficient answer to Madison’s arguments. I suggest there are lessons learned and trade-offs from that case/negotiation, trade-offs that are part of the political vestiges of legal racism in black public higher education and its intersection, at one critical juncture, with the future of tuition-dependent colleges and universities in the United States. The following crucial elements inform my assessment: I consider whether the Justice Department lawyer and the plaintiffs’ lawyers could connect at the point of their shared strength, and if the plaintiffs’ lawyers could move each piece of the case forward in a winning strategy; whether all the plaintiffs counted equally, and who their opponents were; whether the timing of the settlement would benefit the plaintiffs and/or the state. With these questions in mind, I offer an analysis of how the campaign – political/legal arguments and political/legal remedies to remove the vestiges of de jure segregation in higher education – unfolded in Mississippi, with special emphasis on the initiating lawyer in Ayers v. Waller and Fordice, Isaiah Madison.15

THE BACKGROUND ARGUMENTS

In this case, as in all others, there are foreground, background, and backroom arguments and moves that influence political/legal strategies and outcomes. Those arguments are a mix of the following: legal precedents; the case particulars; the players and their commitments to the political status quo or legal transformation; obeisance to the law; citizens’ unrest and changing norms of citizenship and inclusiveness; and the resources and stamina of the advocates. Sixteen years before Isaiah Madison contemplated suing the State of Mississippi, the Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown16 and its precursors had established the background – that separate but equal was unconstitutional in public secondary education.17 14 15 16

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US v. Fordice 505 US 717 (1992). Civil Action No. GC 75-9-15, April 7, 1975, Ayers v. Waller (pp. 32–40). In Fordice, the Supreme Court did not obligate Mississippi to terminate black and white universities. It did ask, however, whether the presence of eight universities with racially identifiable populations was a vestige of the de jure system. US v. Fordice 505 US 717 (1992). The legal precedent in higher education upheld in Sweatt v. Painter 339 US 629, 635 (1950); and Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada 305 US 337, 351 (1938) was that students, and not colleges/institutions are guaranteed the equal protection of the laws.

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Also influencing the background were the experiences and aspirations of the legal advocates on both sides of the aisle. As for Madison, as a child of and later a lawyer in the Deep South, he was aware that for many decades, the Supreme Court had mandated desegregation of secondary schools as a remedy for separate but unequal. Public secondary schools in Mississippi had begun to desegregate in earnest in June 1969. It had to have occurred to him that the very institutions he sought to advance, HBCUs, might well be considered a vestige of de jure segregation, as might the white-segregated public colleges and universities in Mississippi. Madison was intrepid: he wanted existing resources shared and novel resources allocated sufficient to repair the vestiges of state-coerced segregation. He wanted greater access to higher education opportunities made available to more materially disadvantaged young people. He wanted to help secure HBCUs’ status as higher education institutions of the highest quality. In the words of judicial scholar Stephen Halpern, the plaintiffs wanted remedies that “enabled HBCUs to do better and more what they have done well for so long.”18 At some point in any political struggle, background and foreground merge into a new puzzle with known and less well-known parts and players. Just how a court, any court, will use precedent to inform the current case is not always predictable. As a tool of protest, litigation is fraught with precedent and ambiguity of interpretation; it is protracted, expensive, and tedious. Legal/political tactics would matter as much as messaging. The vision Madison worked to realize had many parts – admissions criteria, funding formula, college designations/mission statements, and strategic scope – but he desired one outcome: greater access to highquality post-secondary institutions for the grandchildren of sharecroppers and the children of middle-class teachers and doctors, alike. In recognition of this cause, he led the petitioners for eight years of the twenty-sevenyear-long litigation to reverse de jure segregation in Mississippi.19 Looming at the heart of the legal argument were the surviving aspects of segregation – the retention of all eight public colleges and universities in Mississippi, the effects of the 1981 mission designations, the singular and combined impact of a sole admission criterion – the ACT score – along with duplication of programs. Madison used to his advantage the courts that oversaw these rules and the laws that had been designed to further a 18

19

Stephen C. Halpern, On the Limits of Law: The Ironic Legacy of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 282. James Anderson, The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860–1935 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988).

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certain group’s interests. In other words, he had to use the white man’s courts, and the white man’s law, and the politically dispossessed people’s discontent to exact more equitable possibilities. Madison and many others who believed in the virtue of historically black colleges and universities and in the talented tenth (and their kin) knew firsthand that most public historically black colleges and universities were unequal in resources and had been set up to be unequal. Like many lawyers before him, Madison believed that legal racism was wrong and its consequences deleterious to the life chances of generations of college-going students and the very capacity of these institutions to deepen, expand, and thrive. Madison believed in the efficacy of the equal protection clause to remedy the vestiges of de jure segregation as manifested in higher education politics and practice.

POLITICS AND THE BAR IN MISSISSIPPI

Young black lawyers in Mississippi had few employment choices in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Once they passed the Bar examination, few among them had the familial resources to begin their own private practice, and even fewer had the networks to build a client base capable of paying lawyers’ fees, except on contingency. Most lacked social networks and material resources because both political and social institutions had restrained their parents’ access to equal protection and equal economic and political opportunity.20 When blacks had legal claims, they often found white lawyers to make their

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There had been at least thirty-two African American lawyers in Mississippi prior to the 1920s. In fact, from 1873 to 1900, seventeen black lawyers had worked in Mississippi, including Willis Mollison who was admitted to the Bar in 1881, and A. W. Shadd, who had been admitted to the Bar as early as 1871. During the second generation of black lawyers, there had been at least fourteen, including Sidney Redmond, Benjamin Green, and Newton Handy. The first black lawyers were carpetbaggers, but in the second generation, all but two of the fourteen were native Mississippians. See Irvin C. Mollison, “Negro Lawyers in Mississippi,” The Journal of Negro History, 15(1) (January 1930). Most of these lawyers practiced in the Delta, or what is formally known as the Mississippi Black Belt, where upwards of 90 percent of the black population resided between 1875 and 1890. Irvin Mollison makes the point that Governors Ames and Alcorn appointed judges who were friendly to blacks seeking candidacy as lawyers. These judges evaluated the Bar candidates according to their technical training, educational assets, and moral character. For a time between 1840 and 1880, once admitted to the Bar in one locale, barristers were allowed to practice in all. It is wise to remember that, as late as 1875, the United States had few more than twenty law schools. The American Bar Association was formed in 1878. In 2021, twice the number of lawyers existed in Alabama, as in Mississippi. Admittedly, 1.8 million fewer people lived in Mississippi than in Alabama. See the 2021 ABA National Lawyer Population Survey, Lawyer Population by State at Americanbar.org.

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cases; many continued to reason that the courts and the law belonged to white men of privilege – the rule of law belonged to the rulers. In the Mississippi of Madison’s boyhood –the late 1940s and early 1950s – there were at least four black lawyers: Carsie Hall, R. Jess Brown, Jack Young, Sr., and Sidney Thorpe. Carsie Hall served as legal counsel for the Mississippi NAACP as well as the president of its Jackson Chapter. In the late 1960s, there was one racially integrated law firm in Jackson: Anderson, Banks, Nichols, and Leventhal. The Magnolia Bar Association was formed in 1955, and by 1970, six blacks had graduated from the University of Mississippi School of Law.21 When Isaiah returned to Mississippi from law and graduate school, he found a dozen or more black and Jewish lawyers and activists, such as Jess Brown, Fred Banks, Marion Wright Edelman, Henry Kirksey, Frank Parker, and Fannie Lou Hamer, working with others to negate legal racism. When Massachusetts resident Robert Pressman, a co-counsel in Ayers/ Fordice,22 joined the Civil Rights Division in 1965 on his first visit to Mississippi, he observed that “opportunities for blacks in Mississippi were not far removed from slavery.”23 About two decades later, he would join in the plaintiffs’ argument and fight to help remove the vestiges of legal racism in higher education. Carsie Hall, a lawyer in the arena fighting against legal racism in Mississippi two decades before Isaiah returned to Mississippi, told one of the freedom riders, “You had to be crazy to practice law in Mississippi, not asylum-crazy but crazy enough not to think about what could happen to you.”24 While white naked violence and lawlessness were not as great in 1971 as they had been in 1951 and 1961, white judges hostile to black lawyers’ causes were not a rarity. Lawyers’ and judges’ predispositions aside, lurking in the shadows of Ayers was the perennial question on which many spent enormous energy: can separate be made equal in a society where separate as a matter of law meant racial subjugation.

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The law school was founded in 1854, 100 years before Brown v. Board of Education was decided; it earned accreditation in 1930. Michael de L. Landon, The University of Mississippi School of Law: A Sesquicentennial History (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2006). US v. Fordice 505 US 717 (1992), with Ayers et al v. Fordice, 90-6588, Governor of Mississippi et al. Telephone interview with Robert Pressman, Cambridge/Lexington, Massachusetts, September 28, 2013. Bell Gale, “The Southern Front: Two Weeks in Mississippi,” The Village Voice, July 16, 1964.

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Isaiah and Alvin Chambliss found employment at North Mississippi Rural Legal Services in 1972. From that base, they mounted a campaign and conducted a political/legal movement to attack unequal post-secondary educational opportunities in Mississippi.25 Cause lawyers such as Madison and Alvin Chambliss went knocking on prospective petitioners’ doors, discussing plausible legal claims and outcomes. Of the young citizens who knew that they had been denied an equal opportunity to earn a college degree, some were reluctant, others were more willing to serve as petitioners. A few years had passed since the summer of 1964 and the founding of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and the Atlantic City challenge, but the thirst to gain full citizenship was unmistakable. Throughout the late 1960s and early to mid1970s, other cause lawyers in Mississippi, such as Frank Parker and Fred L. Banks, Jr., were filing redistricting and public-school desegregation claims.26 Citizens were petitioning to have the rule of law – open, inclusive, highquality institutions – replace laws that favored extractive, old-guard institutions. The Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965 were churning throughout the nation. Robert Clark, the first black legislator since Reconstruction, had been elected in Mississippi in 1967.27 After a decade of litigation over redistricting, by 1979, seventeen black legislators had been elected.28 Robert G. Clark would become chair of the powerful 25

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Mary Coleman and Isaac Byrd, Jr., “Disentangling the Milieu of the Black Bar,” Mississippi Lawyer (Spring 1987); Austin Sarat and Stuart Scheingold, Cause Lawyers and Social Movement (California: Stanford University Press, 2006). Attorney Madison clearly expressed to me over many years that he felt that his work with Ayers was deeply moral and just. Even his later work teaching law and society courses to undergraduate students animated him with a sense of deep moral and religious justification. Fred L. Banks graduated second in his law school class from Howard University in 1968. He returned to Mississippi and worked in the law office founded by Marion Wright Edelman, a Yale graduate. He and other lawyers led the effort that culminated in Alexander v. Holmes 396 US 19 (1969), which ended all deliberate speed. Alexander impacted the pace of change in desegregation throughout the South. He worked for the Legal Defense Fund for seventeen years, served in the Mississippi legislature from 1976 to 1985, and served on the Mississippi Supreme Court from 1991 to 2001. His wife, Dr. Pamela Gibson Banks, was one of the original plaintiffs in the Ayers case. Banks is a senior partner in the general litigation group in the Jackson office of Phelps Dunbar. Will Campbell, Robert G. Clark A Journey to the House: A Black Politician’s Story (Oxford: The University of Mississippi Press, 2003). Frank Parker, Black Votes Count: Political Empowerment in Mississippi after 1965 (Raleigh: University of North Carolina Press, 1990); and Mary Coleman, Legislators, Law and Public Policy: Explaining Political Change in Mississippi and the South (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994). Frank Parker worked for the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law and was a fierce and tireless advocate for black voting rights in Mississippi. The Conner litigation, which he forged, went all the way to the Supreme Court and resulted in single-member districts and the election of a critical mass of black elected officials.

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The Road from Ayers to Fordice: Beyond Race-Neutral Practices to Segregated Effects and Vestiges January 28, 1975 – Original Complaint Filed by Madison, McTeer, Chambliss, and Walls April 7, 1975 – Plaintiffs’ file Amended Complaint April 14, 1975 – Justice Department files Complaint in Intervention September 18, 1975 – Court issues Procedural Order, Judge William Keady identified the Class May 30, 1979 – Plaintiffs file Second Amended Complaint 1982 – Madison files preliminary injunction 1985 – Appeals Court rules on Junior College Complaint filed by Madison, Leonard McClellan, and Alvin Chambliss; Madison leaves North Mississippi Rural Legal Services Case lays fallow until 1987; Chambliss calls Robert Pressman 1987–2000 – Pressman works on ACT challenge Judge William Keady, a Johnson appointee, who serves on District Court and U.S. Court of Appeals (1968–1982) retires. Biggers is appointed by Reagan to the District Court in 1984; Plaintiffs engage in discovery and preliminary negotiations with Defendants Trial 1987 (lasts ten weeks) 1988 – Judge Biggers issues an opinion and dismisses the case Plaintiffs’ Appeal to Fifth Circuit 1988 – 2-1 Fifth Circuit Decision for plaintiffs (en banc) 1989 – State moves for hearing by entire Fifth Circuit panel 1990 – Fifth Circuit rules for dismissal 1991 – Plaintiffs Petition the Supreme Court for a writ of certiorari (discretionary writ) 1992 – Supreme Court issues Fordice standards, remands to district court; Armand Derfner joins Chambliss and Pressman for the plaintiffs; Armand Derfner works on Funding Formula 1993 – Depositions, Discovery 1994 – Trial (lasts twelve weeks) 1995 – Biggers files an opinion, rules for plaintiffs in part, issues partial Remedial Decree; North Mississippi Rural Legal Services discontinues its representation of private plaintiffs 1996 – Plaintiffs appeal to Fifth Circuit; Fifth Circuit rules in part for plaintiffs 1997 – State moves to settle the dispute 1998 – Biggers designates Congressman Thompson as lead counsel and Thompson names Isaac Byrd as lead counsel; State names Reuben Anderson as Mediator 1999 – Byrd hires four experts to build an empirical case for faculty salary compensation, wealth-based programs in law, medicine, engineering, international relations, and public health, including capital improvements, at the three HBCUs 1999 – Informal settlement talks begin; formal talks begin 2001 – Negotiated settlement achieved recommends 503 million, which includes funds awarded in the partial decree; seventeen-year implementation; 2002 Biggers approves settlement; 2003 Fifth Circuit affirms 2002–2003 – Chambliss files with the district court on behalf of ninety-eighty members of the plaintiffs’ class to opt out of class; Fifth Circuit Panel denies relief 2003 – Chambliss appeals to Supreme Court; the Supreme Court denies review

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House Education Committee and befriend the old-guard House Speaker, C. B. “Buddie” Newman; and in 1980, William Winter, a pro-education reform governor, would be elected. Finally, The Clarion-Ledger, the state newspaper, followed and reported on legislative debates and education reform initiatives in cities and towns as well as rural outposts. New leadership, new relationships, and new expectations for childhood literacy were needed to pervade the state’s political consciousness. The convergence of black legislators, Robert Clark’s role on the education committee, Governor Winter’s advocacy and commitment, the media’s role, and sentiments uncongenial to Mississippi’s standing as the worst in education and the prior decades of local protest/litigation, all led to opportunities for substantive change. The twenty-seven-year-old battle from Ayers to Fordice was strenuous. THE ROAD TO AYERS/FORDICE: DEFINING THE PLAINTIFFS’ CLASS

As can be seen from the above grid, the road to Fordice and beyond was laborious. A fundamental question had to be addressed: who had been burdened with and by the vestiges of de jure segregation in higher education in Mississippi? The HBCU institutions, the diverse faculty and staff comprising those institutions, and/or generations of students? In the Jackson State University auditorium, Madison and his colleagues, political scientist Dr. Leslie Burl McLemore and historian Dr. E. C. Foster, and others, articulated a plan and outlined its significance and impact. They invited a class of student plaintiffs to join. Mississippi natives and veterans who had returned from Vietnam to complete their studies and one or two graduate students, including Congressman Bennie Thompson, a Tougaloo College alumnus and civil rights activist, indicated a willingness to serve as members of the plaintiffs’ class. Madison’s passion was resonant; the meeting felt like a crusade – a campaign – a grassroots civic campaign. Uprooting racism in higher education was the new civic religion. Over the next twenty-seven years, the Madison campaign to erase the vestiges of de jure segregation converged with a legal narrative to erase racial segregation in higher education. Students and parents, alike, joined as petitioners. Many first – and second-generation HBCU alumni – the talented tenth – those who had completed professional degrees outside the state but had returned to Mississippi to live middle-class lives, would need to care deeply about their alma maters, invest in and secure them as

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places worthy of the education of future generations – their sons and daughters and new economic and social classes of students. The early alumni would have to believe that the HBCUs, which had been good enough for them, could be made better for the next generation. This level of support would signal the capacity of the black middleclass to live locally but not act parochially. The very future of much of the Deep South hinges on multi-racial cosmopolitan coalitions very much aware of their obligations to their working-class kin and many others in great need of both economic security and social and human capital.

THE LEGAL CLAIMS

On January 28, 1975, the State of Mississippi was sued for maintaining an unconstitutional dual system of higher education.29 At the hearing, Jake Ayers, Jr., his son, Jake Ayers III, Bennie Thompson, Louis Armstrong, Pamela Gibson-Banks and other plaintiffs argued that “Mississippi denied equal opportunities to black students and faculty members by favoring the State’s historically white colleges and universities at the expense of its historically black colleges and universities, and by failing to remove the vestiges of racial segregation in the former de jure dual system.”30 On April 21, 1975, the Justice Department intervened and joined the plaintiffs in seeking injunctive relief that would bring Mississippi’s higher education system into conformity with constitutional and statutory provisions.31 As a backdrop to the filing, the 1954 Brewton Report, a Mississippi Board of Trustees authorized study, examined the state’s higher education system and found “significant disparities between the educational opportunities provided within state for Negro citizens and those provided whites.” A three-part recommendation was forthcoming: (1) the 29

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Legal aid societies and legal services to the poor in the United States have had a sordid history, with some presidents and congresses limiting the authority of the Legal Service Corporation, reducing and expanding funding, and prohibiting class action suits. The Court ruled in 1967, in Gault, that children have a right to counsel at government expense. The first privately funded legal aid society was created in 1876 to assist German immigrants who could not afford a lawyer in New York City. The Freedman Bureau offered legal aid in 1865. For a brief history of civil legal assistance in the United States, see Alan Houseman and Linda Pearle, “Securing Legal Justice for All” (The Center for Law and Social Policy, Washington, DC, 2007). Ayers v. Waller, Civil Action No. GC 75-9-15. Department of Justice – John Moore participated in the negotiated settlement for the US government.

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maintenance of schools operated exclusively for blacks; (2) increased financial resources to meet anticipated enrollment increases; and (3) increased funding level of scholarships permitting African American students to attend out-of-state graduate and professional schools.32 Madison argued what the Brewton Report had found two decades earlier: Mississippi had created a racially discriminatory higher education law and it thus had an affirmative duty to reform those policies and practices. He and several other lawyers filed an amended complaint on April 7, 1975, in which they invoked both Title IV and the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment to redress their claims.33 They hypothesized that the legal/political institutions that had created unequal public higher education institutions could be petitioned to redress their biases and discrimination.34 The Brewton report’s recommendation was clear: maintain and invest modestly in the segregated system. Shortly after that recommendation, $500,000 was donated towards a two-million-dollar building fund.35 Isaiah knew that an intemperate state had and would again attempt to stay miles away from justice. It would bob and weave until it was forced to either stand in the highest court to defend a dual system and/or reach a semi-virtuous compromise. Madison was a member of the legal/political community who fought to eliminate the most toxic vestiges of higher education inequality – the underfunding of historically black colleges and universities. But there was a concern about unintended consequences: what if the court were to rule that both Jackson State University and Ole Miss were relics and vestiges of de jure discrimination? Would the court see relics of segregation in historically black colleges and universities, or would they see these institutions as bulwarks that once sustained the hopes and aspirations of three-quarters of all college-going 32

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Robert N. Davis, “The Quest for Equal Education in Mississippi: The Implications of the United States v. Fordice,” Mississippi Law Journal, 62 (1993): 411–412. In the Amended Complaint filed in April 1975, the lawyers for the plaintiffs’ class were Isaiah Madison, Charles Victor McTeer, Alvin O. Chambliss, Jesse Pennington, Constance Slaughter, and Andrew Gambrell. As with the original complaint, social scientists such as Leslie McLemore and E. C. Foster were also integral to the Mississippi Council on Higher Education and very much engaged in part one of a twopart legal phase. The programs permitted under Title IV are the dominant sources of federal student aid, federal assistance to the states, and postsecondary education. Public Law No. 89-329 is the Higher Education Act of 1965. Alison Bernstein, Philanthropy’s Influence on American Higher Education (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2014).

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students – the rural and urban poor, and the not-so-poor African American? Over the quarter-century of litigation, an equitable remedy became unhinged from Madison’s early précis. As will be shown, Justice White’s majority opinion and Justice O’Connor’s concurring opinion made that shift astonishingly clear. As the legal proceedings wore on and the massive legal resistance team re-reared their well-financed by state taxpayers’ heads, the plaintiffs’ lawyers pushed their way through the legal briar patch: they requested the merger of branch centers of historically white institutions with nearby historically black institutions; the elimination of certain duplicate programs, so that they would only be offered at the historically black institutions; and the enhancement of programs at the historically black schools to create equal educational opportunities at those institutions.36 The Court of Appeals denied the first two remedies. The courts, which had been one of the last bastions of theoretical equality for blacks, could not always be counted on to advance equality.37 Madison had initiated a test to clarify the possible.38 He knew that black institutions had been disadvantaged by deliberate racial discriminatory practices.39 Notwithstanding their religious faith and practice, both Lawyer Madison and Reverend Madison knew that divine intervention alone would not alter the status quo. The plaintiffs’ team would review the law, interrogate briefs, and write claims that would eventually stick. Alvin Chambliss would bang his shoes on the table of justice, and a decade after the original complaint, when Isaiah had stepped away from the Ayers case, Bob Pressman and (much later) Armand Derfner would labor with lawyer Alvin Chambliss, logging thousands of hours in the campaign to destroy unequal opportunity in higher education in Mississippi. In the relay race that lasted a quarter-

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In 1986, Congress amended Title III and thereby acknowledged HBCUs as a defined class of institutions: The Higher Education Act Amendments of 1986, Public Law No. 99-498, 100 Statute 1294. Terence Finnegan, “Lynching and Political Power in Mississippi and South Carolina,” in William Fitzhugh Brundage, Under the Sentence of Death: Lynching in the South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 201. The NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund had initiated many such tests since its 1940 origins. Attorney Madison, however, initiated this test as a staff lawyer with North Mississippi Rural Legal Services. Public schools in Mississippi did not seriously desegregate until 1969 when the Supreme Court decided Alexander v. Holmes and ended all deliberate speed. See 369 US 19 (1969). Scott County native, and leader of the Sovereignty Commission, Erle Johnston, chronicled white resistance to desegregation in Mississippi’s Defiant Years (Forest, MS: Lake Harbour Publishers, 1990).

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century, Madison passed the full burden and opportunity of the case to Alvin Chambliss by March 1985, when Chambliss and Leonard McClellan co-wrote a Memorandum in Support of Motion for Temporary Restraining Order and/or Preliminary Injunction. As the lean years and frustration of co-counsels Alvin Chambliss, Robert Pressman, and Armand Derfner wore on, each endured the legal thicket of obfuscation, delay, sophisticated and simple-minded defendants’ remedies, onerous trials, an unsympathetic Fifth Circuit, and a very resistant District Judge Neal Biggers.40 Isaiah never rejoined the case, and he rarely discussed his role in its evolution. Still, he and the lawyers who worked after him believed that the nation could be petitioned to live up to the letter and spirit of the rule of law, especially the 14th Amendment.

THE FORDICE STANDARD AND NON-DECISIONS

The United States Supreme Court took the case to review the lower courts’ decisions. Upon review, the Supreme Court argued that both the District Court and the Court of Appeals had erred in that, “the courts below did not apply the correct legal standard in ruling that Mississippi has brought itself into compliance with the Equal Protection Clause.” It expounded, “If the State perpetuates policies and practices traceable to its prior de jure dual system that continue to have segregative effects – whether by influencing student enrollment decisions or by fostering segregation in other facets of the university system – and such policies are without sound educational justification and can be practicably eliminated, the policies violate the Clause, even though the State has abolished the legal requirement that the races be educated separately and has established racially neutral policies not animated by a discriminatory purpose. Bazemore v. Friday was distinguished.”41 40

41

Jack Peltason, Fifty-Eight Lonely Men: Southern Federal Judges and School Desegregation (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971). This illuminating work tells the story of how federal district court judges navigated both local massive resistance efforts and the rule of law. As shown in the timeline above, President Richard Nixon appointed Judge Neal Biggers in 1984. Judge William Keady, a Lyndon Johnson appointee, retired from the bench in 1982. Bazemore v. Friday, 1986 478 US 396, 303 US 467 (1992). In Bazemore, the Court wrestled with salary discrimination allegations linked to a merger of extension programs in the North Carolina University system. If the past salary discrimination claims – those obtained prior to the merger – continued for incumbent employees – those transferring into the new system – then the university violated Title VII. But no claims of salary discrimination from the past could be found to violate the rights of the newly hired

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The proper inquiry asks whether existing racial identifiability is attributable to the State (see, e.g., Freeman v. Pitts) and examines a wide range of factors to determine whether the state has perpetuated its former segregation in any facet of its system (see, e.g., Board of Education of Oklahoma City v. Dowell).42 “Because the District Court’s standard did not ask the appropriate questions, the Court of Appeals erred in affirming the lower court’s judgment.”43 The Supreme Court’s ruling pointed to how both the District Court and the Court of Appeals “failed to consider the State’s duties in their proper light.”44 Both resisted the idea that unnecessary duplication of programs of the study was, in and of itself, sufficient to conclude that duplication was linked to the racial identification of the institutions. At the District Court and Appeals Court levels, the plaintiffs’ lawyers were not negotiating with Judge Frank Johnson; even in the formal negotiations, the shadow of Judge Neal Biggers, a reactionary and intemperate man, was evident.45

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without evidence that the disparities were created or began post-merger. The Supreme Court also recommended the certification of the plaintiffs’ class. In a subsequent decision, Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire Company, the Supreme Court distinguished Bazemore and argued that a plaintiff had only a 180-day period for filing a pay discrimination suit (after termination or demotion). For fairness and to build upward economic mobility trajectories, employees, without regard to gender, race, or ethnicity, should be able to challenge pay decisions at any time during their employment. In 2009, President Barack Obama signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act. The Act requires employers to create and use non-discriminatory pay practices to keep records needed to advance fairness in pay decisions. Board of Education of Oklahoma City v. Dowell 498 US 237, 250 (1991) held: “Respondents may contest the District Court’s order dissolving the 1972 injunction.” 498 US 239–246. The Court of Appeals’ test for dissolving a desegregation decree is more stringent than is required either by this Court’s decisions dealing with injunctions or by the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. 498 US 240–251. The Court of Appeals’ test would improperly condemn a school district to judicial tutelage for the indefinite future. 498 US 240–249. 890 F.2d 1483. 44 505 US 717, 743 (1992). Fordice, 743. An Eisenhower appointee to the District Court, Johnson was educated in Alabama and served from 1955 to 1979. He was subsequently nominated to the Court of Appeals by President Jimmy Carter and served from 1979 to 1981. He was a foe of segregationists and an avid advocate for the mentally ill, and he ruled repeatedly that separate but equal was unconstitutional. See Jack Bass, Taming the Storm: The Life and Times of Judge Frank Johnson, Jr. and the South’s Fight over Civil Rights (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2002); and David Garrow, “Visionaries of the Law: John Minor Wisdom and Frank M. Johnson, Jr.,” Yale Law Journal, 109 (April 2000): 1219–1236. Neal Biggers was appointed to the US District Court for the Northern District by President Ronald Reagan in 1984 and served through 2000. He served as Chief Judge for two years, 1998–2000. Biggers presided over Ayers for two decades, initially dismissing it before

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The District and Appeals courts were with the state in their opposition to the claim that current disparities and programs were linked to de jure segregation. Madison clearly wanted to position historically black colleges and universities to succeed in a highly competitive higher education landscape. He wanted the court to reverse the crippling impacts of legal racism in higher education. The State’s refusal to consider both ACT and GPAs together in admissions standards was a clear and continuing access barrier to talented students from materially disadvantaged backgrounds.46 The Supreme Court found the District’s and Court of Appeals’ resistance to looking at both factors objectionable, finding that the “ACT was originally adopted for discriminatory purposes.”47 More lawful work was needed aside from dismantling segregative admissions policies. According to the Court’s decision, remnants traceable to the prior system could no longer exist without sound educational justifications. In addition to segregative admissions policies, the constitutionally suspect policies enumerated by the Court were the following: program duplication, institutional mission, and continued operation of all eight universities. Educational missions and programs of study rightly inform budgetary allocations.48 Certainly, sorting out mission statements or designations and making them operational would have meant a clearer decision, with explicit directives and more. As it had in Pitts, the Court asked whether these remnants were traceable to the state. The Court distinguished Pitts, a ruling which held that race-neutral policies that did not achieve integration were not on their face unconstitutional. Fordice was both clear and opaque: it argued that Mississippi’s historically black colleges and universities had been held down by de jure policies and practices and that it would take meaningful resources to change that trajectory. The Court, however, did not direct the state to invest in the life chances of students, staff, or faculty; rather, it

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the US Supreme Court reinstated it in 1992. To review Judge Biggers’ valedictory on Ayers, please see Diverse Issues in Higher Education, November 17, 2004. Anthony Carnevale and Stephen Rose, Socioeconomic Status: Race Ethnicity, and Selective College Admissions (Center on Education and the Workforce, 2013). Fordice, 737. Peter Bachrach and Morton Baratz, Power and Poverty (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970). The majority decision in Fordice limited the scope of judicial authority and judicial power to decide the full grievances that Madison advanced.

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required the state to interrogate its regime policies and prove that they are educationally sound or to eliminate them. Madison’s legacy is indelibly linked to the legal odyssey of Ayers and the erasure of educational servitude in higher education. From public secondary schools to colleges and universities, the Fordice ruling is consonant with Brown, and it also extends the ruling in Brown. Admittedly, Brown lacks an enumeration of legal standards regarding vestiges, but it is wise to understand the historical contexts within which vestiges were spawned and how to mitigate and prevent them in the future. Fordice offered guidance. The Court wrestled with the de jure segregation in Fordice, and for the very first time, the nation heard the Court ruminating about how a state might erase the vestiges of past discrimination – how to unmake servitude in post-secondary education in a state where tyranny was for many generations before and after slavery a commonplace. The Supreme Court reasoned accordingly: “If we understand private petitioners to press us to order the upgrading of Jackson State, Alcorn State, and Mississippi Valley State solely so that they may be publicly financed, exclusively black enclaves by private choice, we reject that request. The State provides these facilities for all its citizens, and it has not met its burden under Brown to take affirmative steps to dismantle its prior de jure system when it perpetuates a separate, but ‘more equal’ one. Whether such an increase in funding is necessary to achieve a full dismantlement under the standards we have outlined, however, is a different question, and one that must be addressed on remand.”49 Muscular funding, strategic thinking, initiative-taking faculty and students, and innovative goal-setting would in fact be necessary to help make and sustain HBCUs as compelling educational institutions attractive to both talented students and faculty alike. Even if, as Associate Justice Clarence Thomas said in his concurring opinion, the destruction of HBCUs is not educationally justifiable, they would die a slow death without proper investment, robust tuition-generated revenue streams, and endowment. Thomas averred: “It would be ironic, to say the least, if the institutions that sustained Blacks during segregation were themselves destroyed in an effort to combat its vestiges.” Madison believed that HBCUs, needed protection from the prior and continuing de jure system.

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US v. Fordice 505 US 717, speaking for the majority, Associate Justice White.

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A NEW CONSTITUTIONAL OPENING: INCREASED FUNDING

Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s concurring opinion in Fordice offered a nice summary of the historic significance of the case. In part, she wrote, “Mississippi’s burden to prove that it has undone its prior segregation, and that the circumstances in which a State may maintain a policy or practice traceable to de jure segregation that has segregative effects are narrow. Considering the State’s long history of discrimination, and the lost educational and career opportunities and stigmatic harms caused by discriminatory educational systems,50 the courts below must carefully examine Mississippi’s proffered justifications for maintaining a remnant of de jure segregation to ensure that such rationales do not merely mask the perpetuation of discriminatory practices.” Throughout the opinion, the majority wanted to be clear that its goal was not primarily about present discriminatory effects but about the consequences of policies that flow from past discrimination. The good news in Fordice was that the Court was adamant that more steps were needed to ameliorate lingering vestiges. While the Court identified some vestiges, it did not attempt to enumerate an exhaustive listing; had it done so, surely, inequity in funding would have been among them. The full range of practices needed scrutiny, including funding of the three historically black colleges and universities.51 Significantly, the Court indicated that plaintiffs do not bear the burden of proving discriminatory intent; the state must show that such a policy is educationally sound or eliminate it. Also, notably, the Court ruled that at what point in the recent past a policy was adopted does not remove it as constitutionally suspect when that policy and its antecedents had both present discriminatory effects and were created to support de jure segregation. The Court paved new ground and opened the gates for further litigation in de jure segregated states.

THE CLEARING GROUND: STATES ARE NOT FORBIDDEN TO MAINTAIN HBCUs

Associate Justice Clarence Thomas was insightful in his concurring opinion. Thomas observed: “No one, I imagine, would argue that such institutional diversity is without ‘sound educational justification,’ or that it is even remotely akin to program duplication, which is designed to separate 50

Sandra Day O’Connor, in concurrence with the majority.

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the races for the sake of separating the races. The Court at least hinted at the importance of this value when it distinguished Green in part on the ground that colleges and universities ‘are not fungible’.” He continued: “Although I agree that a State is not constitutionally required to maintain its historically black institutions as such, I do not understand our opinion to hold that a State is forbidden to do so.”52 Antonin Scalia also had many concerns, and he raised them effectively in dissent. He ended his opinion with the following forecast: “What I do predict is a number of years of litigation-driven confusion and destabilization in the university systems of all the formerly de jure States, that will benefit neither blacks nor whites, neither predominantly black institutions nor predominantly white ones. Nothing good will come of this judicially ordained turmoil, except the public recognition that any court that would knowingly impose it must hate segregation. We must find some other way of making that point.” Scalia’s prediction notwithstanding, Fordice has informed cases such as the one in Maryland, where plaintiffs argued, as did Madison some forty years ago, that the state’s de jure segregation and duplication of program policies discriminated against black colleges and universities.53 Fordice is an unfinished project. De jure segregation hobbled black colleges and universities, dwarfing programs of study, facilities, and salaries of faculty and staff. There has been no “whole” reckoning. The Court’s language in Fordice did much to define its understanding of the concept of de jure discrimination in higher education by saying that separate but more equal was not constitutionally permissible. In other words, making Historically Black Colleges and Universities better for black students was not part of the court’s agenda, or so one of its members inferred in the above passage. The Court’s agenda was to identify continuing legacies of de jure segregation – practices and policies that looked like they were part of the century and a half or more of legal racism: mission statements, admissions standards, and racially identifiable schools in terms of student

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Clarence Thomas, in concurrence with the majority, Fordice, 749. The Coalition for Equity and Excellence in Maryland Higher Education v. Maryland Higher Education Commission, et. al., Civil No. CCB-06-2773, Document 382, Filed October 7, 2013. On April 28, 2021, a $577 million settlement, to be allocated over a ten-year period, ended the fifteen-year federal lawsuit filed on behalf of Maryland’s HBCUs. The Coalition for Equity and Excellence in Maryland Higher Education was joined by attorneys at Kirkland and Ellis and the Lawyers Committee on Civil Rights Under Law. These funds are being used to supplement, not supplant, state expenditures for HBCUs.

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choice. The critical question in Fordice was the following: how would the Court interpret or distinguish its rulings in and since Brown and extrapolate them to higher education? In this narrow sense, Associate Justice Scalia was correct when he averred that, “the majority’s opinion might preclude a state from adopting a policy where HBCUs and HWIs receive equal funding.”54 The United States Supreme Court majority opinion concluded by leaving the district court the option to consider whether enhanced funding of historically black institutions might be necessary to eradicate the effects of prior segregation.55 But that ambiguity notwithstanding, I do not read Fordice as Alex Johnson has, and perhaps does. According to Johnson, as with Brown, Fordice forces assimilation. It does no such thing – at least not in the sense that black students and HBCUs are being asked to relinquish what it means to be African American. Following Scalia, Johnson seems to argue that the state is not obliged to correct the racial segregation resulting from its prior practices.56 The Supreme Court decision itself did not privilege equal funding, but neither has it prohibited it as a remedy for the continuing vestiges of legal racism. To be fair, it also did not require a merger or integration. In its discussions of whether the State of Mississippi can afford eight publicly funded universities and unnecessary duplication, it was implied that both the number of universities and duplicated programs were vestiges of de jure segregation. Alex Johnson contends as well that, “Both Brown and Fordice are premised on the notion that we are but one community, geographically separated in major urban areas but culturally prepared to merge. Given that a separate and distinct African American cultural community does in fact exist, however, integration, to the extent that it embodies this type of coercive assimilation, is doomed to fail. Instead, the existence of a unique African American community requires that a different approach be taken to merge the two disparate cultures. . . . [I]t is possible to articulate an expanded version of liberalism in which integrationism and nationalism can co-exist.”57

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Fordice, 112 Sc.D., at 2747 (1992). See also Lorne Fienberg, “US v. Fordice and the Segregation of Public Higher Education: Groping for Root and Branch,” Boston College Law Review, 34(4) (July 1, 1993): Article 4. Scalia’s Opinion, 757. Alex Johnson, “Bid Whist, Tonk, and United States v. Fordice: Why Integrationism Fails African-Americans Again,” California Law Review, 81 (1993): 1401, 1432.

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Even if Jackson State University (JSU) someday becomes an integrated university, such integration will not be coerced in the ways that Johnson implies. Johnson’s analysis also imputes a certain perspective, suggesting that certain customs, traditions, and Nomos are salient and distinct features of only African American higher education institutions. This analysis is contestable. I do agree, nonetheless, with Johnson that while separate but equal was a farce perpetrated by the State, it offered some benefits, benefits which I would argue go well beyond the two outlined by Johnson – “transmitters and preservers of culture and a cultural buffer.”58 Historically black colleges and universities have never been free of the influences of the majoritarian culture. Both African American and otherrace faculty are products of their own lived experiences, of learning acquired/negotiated in American secondary and post-secondary education institutions, and the majoritarian/immigrant cultures – cultures that are not as monolithic as Johnson implies. As with non-HBCUs, the valuable assets that a diverse faculty provides as teachers, scholars, and role models are incalculable: they set exacting standards and expectations and guide students in how to achieve and exceed them. They serve as role models and mentors over the course of a lifetime. If Johnson’s argument is that Fordice mandates integration, I find no legal basis for that conclusion that can be drawn from the majority

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Fordice, 1401 Fordice does not require mandatory integration. The mediated settlement does contain a private endowment that would be triggered when each of the three colleges maintained a 10 percent non-black enrollment for three years. Alcorn and Jackson State met that trigger. The Court ruled that the equal protection of the law and Title VI required that the effects of any practice or policy traceable to prior state-enforced discrimination be eliminated. It did not rule that equal resource allocation or equitable resource allocation was required. Always in the background was just how the universities would adapt post-settlement – seventeen years later – and whether budgetary allocations, in addition to the Ayers-funded settlement, would be equitably made. In other words, would the state legislature be allowed to persist in inequitable annual allocations to black universities? Would an independent Special Master be appointed to monitor the distribution of taxpayer funds? Which of the newly created programs would attract talented faculty and students of all hues? Which pre-Ayers programs would be strengthened by or with the Ayers funds? Much of the edifice was built on prior state discrimination. A bow was placed atop the edifice, even though the foundation was broken in some ways. The Ayers funds did not go to the broken places, but to new programs and buildings, and neither were the broken places removed nor sutured. Senator John Horhn and other legislators proposed an 8.5-million-dollar additional appropriation for HBCUs during the 2018 legislative session. See Ashley F. G. Norwood, Mississippi Today, September 12, 2017.

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opinion. If Johnson’s view is that excellent historically black colleges and universities ought to exist as an integral part of the mix of institutions available in society, I concur. They will only do so, however, if students – black and white – choose to attend them in sizeable numbers. A legal right to exist with equal funding is no guarantee in this competitive educational landscape that all historically black colleges and universities or other colleges will persist. All things being equal, equal funding does offer historically black colleges and universities a fighting chance to enroll, retain, and graduate talented students; recruit and retain engaged faculty; build, and continuously assess stellar curricula. Financial stability is essential, but so, too, are strong and innovative resource programs, business plans, and practices. Beyond meeting well accreditation standards, historically black colleges and universities that do persist will do so because they offer educational excellence and their graduates’ outcomes bear that out.59 I do not think the Court was trying to achieve the idealized or coerced assimilation that Johnson contends; instead, as Scalia noted, it was turning its back on the non-optimal discriminatory state.60 The lawyers who originated the case brief for the plaintiffs’ class were confident that the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment was broad enough to absorb the claim of de jure discrimination, and their confidence was borne out by the Supreme Court’s ruling and, to a lesser extent, by the negotiated remedy. The arguments on the plaintiffs’ side were complex. Initially, the United States suggested that it wanted the vestiges removed. That position might have been an invitation to dismantle HBCUs, but even so, it could not have been just HBCUs alone. In any case, when the George W. Bush administration’s Justice Department fully joined the plaintiffs’ argument, the disavowal of its original position made national news. In part, the US wrote, “. . . it is time to eliminate those disparities and thereby unfetter the choices of persons who can hereafter choose freely among the state’s institutions.”61

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Jamie Wershbale, “Collaborative Accreditation: Securing the Future of Historically Black Colleges,” Berkeley Journal of African American Law and Policy, 12(1) (2010): 67. Justice Scalia concurred and dissented in part. He argued that Bazemore was the appropriate standard: the “discontinuation of discriminatory practices and adoption of a neutral admissions policy” (p. 57). As cited in Stephen Halpern, On the Limits of the Law: The Ironic Legacy of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 249.

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On February 15, 2002, the court entered a final judgment approving a $503 million settlement.62 Endorsed by the Mississippi legislature, the settlement funds a comprehensive plan over a seventeen-year period aimed at improving academic programs, making capital improvements, expanding summer programs at the state’s historically black colleges and universities, and increasing “other race” enrollment. The settlement offers HBCUs access to publicly funded endowments (totaling 35 million dollars) as an incentive for HBCUs to increase “other race” enrollment by 10 percent and sustain that level of effort.63 The negotiated settlement and the remedial decree preceding it put funding and the creation of innovative programs at its core. In the settlement, the state recognized Jackson State University (JSU) as a comprehensive university. This designation was highly symbolic. It was an admission that had it been properly funded and boldly governed over the last century, it would have been a formidable higher education citadel. All these years later, this recognition notwithstanding, how do institutions long denied opportunity catch up to the demands and expectations of a new and daunting higher education era? THE AFTERMATH

On the part of the state, the settlement was a strategic accommodation, enabling Mississippi to refocus its priorities and come out from under heavy federal scrutiny and national disapprobation. Chambliss saw the negotiated settlement as a token concession to the arguments and fights waged by the band of grassroots-humanitarian lawyers – including himself. Chambliss was not ready to concede the fight or the arguments. Alvin Chambliss and disgruntled members of the plaintiffs’ class did not endorse the negotiated settlement. Chambliss objected to the settlement on the grounds that the remedy was inadequate; that the lead plaintiff, Congressman Bennie Thompson, and the defendant’s counsel were in collusion; that the counsel for the plaintiffs’ class, led by a Sunflower native, Isaac Byrd, Jr., and also Robert Pressman and Armand Derfner, were incompetent; and those plaintiffs had the legal authority to opt out of the case. Alvin Chambliss did not win 62

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The eventual lead plaintiff, Congressman Bennie Thompson, appointed Isaac Byrd, Jr., as the lead counselor in 1999. In the second decade of the litigation, Alvin Chambliss, Bob Pressman, and Armand Derfner served ably as co-counselors. Yoruba Mutakabbir, “A Case Study Examining the Recruitment of ‘Other Race’ Students to a Public Historically Black University” (2011 Clemson University Dissertation Abstracts).

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the argument any more than Isaiah did. Isaiah Madison and Alvin Chambliss, Robert Pressman, Armand Derfner, and Isaac Byrd, Jr., did in fact win some parts of the argument and some of the fight. The State never conceded its guilt in perpetuating decades of legal racism in the sphere of higher education. Even in approving the negotiated settlement, the State was clear about its primary motivation: “The compelling impetus for this Agreement, and for the willingness of the Lieutenant Governor and the Speaker of the House to seek implementation of this Agreement, is achievement of finality for the Ayers litigation. Judicial approval is to relieve the Board, and all other defendants, of any further obligations under the remedial decree. When this Agreement becomes final, the Board will be free to fulfill its constitutional and statutory duties and responsibilities under Mississippi law wholly unfettered by the Ayers litigation except as specified by this Agreement.”64 Ayers was seen as an albatross, a symbol to the world that the State had not changed its colors, that it was still awash in de jure segregation. The filing and mining of the lawsuit was highly symbolic and highly substantive: As a child from the plantation South, Ayers grew up to challenge the tyrannical state using the master’s tools. He did not bring down the house but over time he helped to reshape it in an image befitting inclusive higher education. Ayers was symbolic of the grinding nature of racial equality in America and highly substantive in the context of law and politics at the local and national levels. For two decades, Judge Neal Biggers presented himself as hostile to the plaintiffs’ claims. Still, as shown in the timeline, the negotiated political settlement, which Biggers approved, was more than the Court would have decreed as a remedy. There are unanswered questions. In addition to the resources in the negotiated settlement, did the HBCU’s regular annual allocations increase, decline, or hold steady? All agreed that Mississippi Valley State University, the HBCU located in the Mississippi Delta, the one attended by Clementine Williams and Gwendolyn Byrd, in one of the poorest regions in the nation, was not given its due; given the small enrollment and limited program offerings, what more should and can be done at the Valley? What would make quality faculty and students totally engage at the Valley, given its remote location and lack of branded educational luster?

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Settlement Agreement, Civil Action No. 4:75CV9-B-D, Jake Ayers and United States of America v. Ronnie Musgrove, Governor, State of Mississippi, et al., p. 304.

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Student learning outcomes, social esteem, and graduation rates are important to students, their families, the state, and the nation. A forwardlooking, well-informed, and civically engaged black working and middleclass has yet to take and sustain its place in civil society in the Mississippi Delta. Civil society building – the work that Isaiah began with the Mississippi Council, the work that looks to and beyond election time to the governance process – is unfinished. Mississippi lacks an integrated civil society that takes on its obligations as stewards of a free and open society where opportunity and autonomy reside in equal measure for the poor and not-so-poor alike. Even if lawsuits have run their course, is it important to ask good policy questions: are publicly funded designated scholarships to white students (even poor white students) constitutional? Are state-supported endowments constitutionally permissible? Did the black state colleges and universities get the equal protection due, and what did that encompass? They were due sustained opportunities to catch up. They were due the presumption of worthiness. They were due internships, mentorships, and apprenticeships to harness the students’ talents and efforts. These institutions were due the resources needed to sustain excellence and rigorous opportunities to responsibly govern these institutions with care and foresight. ALTERNATIVE FUTURES AND THE LEGACY OF LAWYER MADISON

If black higher education in Mississippi is to be stronger, citizens must assess the implementation of Ayers and the accountability of higher education institutions, including black, white, public, and private. As Clay’s Facing the Future makes clear, state intransigence and political accommodations to racial law were not and are not the only barriers to making historically black colleges whole; the very legal precedents that made the lawsuit plausible also promised to make the battle long, difficult, and frustrating. The jurisprudence of post-secondary education law had never tackled head-on what counts as evidence of the vestiges of de jure segregation. The progeny of Fordice will stretch into the third decade of the twenty-first century just as Brown’s progeny, of which Fordice is a part, has straddled both centuries. Even when there is “excellence in the judicial act and in the substance of judicial actions,” the odds are great that many HBCUs will not persist unless they are helped by the court and their communities and markets to understand what an educationally sound

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education is and how to achieve it in resource-rich and resourcechallenged environments alike. The wise course of action is to reach thoughtfully for the North Star and align investments in students and faculty with a core ethos of accountability, strategic planning, and persistence. Historically Black Colleges and Universities would be wise to choose this course. Commitments to educating well the next generation of scientists, teachers, artists, and humanists, begin with a well-informed and enthusiastic citizenry and a critical mass of core faculty and students. Dysfunctional narratives and frames of references about HBCUs must be abandoned, and new ways of thinking about internal messaging/communication and external brands are critical.65 High expectations of faculty and diverse students and an engaging curriculum must continue and, as with white higher education institutions, leadership must be held accountable.66 Universities must graduate global citizens who are knowledgeable and appreciative of the best and worst traditions and values of our glorious and inglorious past and local histories. Such students must struggle with how best to use technology to strengthen the future outcomes of dispossessed children and families. Such graduates must be devoted to extending their talents to uplift their lives and, as they are able, the lives of others. As did Isaiah Madison. Why did Madison wage a fight to help rid the nation of de jure segregation? Isaiah was influenced by intergenerational opportunity. His grandfather, Israel Madison, had been an Arkansan sharecropper. Isaiah’s parents, Eddie Mae Neal Brown and Woodrow Madison, were also sharecroppers who lived on the plantation on Lake Cormorant, near Memphis, Tennessee. Woodrow Madison died from pneumonia when Isaiah was not a year old. When he was old enough to go to the cotton fields, he did so; his child labor contributed to his family’s survival and his late start in elementary school. He began elementary school when he was almost eight years old. Isaiah’s teachers and community members purchased clothes and shoes for him to go to school and ensured that he was active in school plays, sports, music, and his studies. Shortly after Woodrow’s death at age thirtyone, his mother remarried, and over time he and his ten siblings eked out a 65

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James Minor, “Decision Making in Historically Black Colleges and Universities: Defining the Governance Context,” The Journal of Negro Education, 73 (2004): 40–52. Phillip L. Clay, “Historically Black Colleges and Universities: Facing the Future.” Available at www.fordfoundation.org/advancing-higher education access and success, accessed September 2012; See also, Christopher Jencks and David Riesman, “The American Negro College,” Harvard Educational Review, 37 (1967): 3–60.

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meager living. Like most black boys and girls of his era who finished twelve grades, Ike attended a racially segregated elementary and secondary school. He finished high school in 1960 when he was twenty years old. Many decades later, he would tell his wife, Carolyn, that he hated fieldwork, but there he found a mentor, Mitchel Hunter, an elder, to whom he remained close throughout his life.67 Another of his life-long friends was a long-legged competitive boy from Walls, Mississippi; his name was Leslie Burl McLemore. Like Leslie, Isaiah was influenced by his grandfather. They both shadowed their grandfathers, and from Isaiah’s grandfather he learned poise, determination, and self-belief – he learned to believe in his capacity to contribute to the makings of a world far different from his childhood – a plantation world of grueling poverty. Leslie earned a PhD in Political Science from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and Isaiah earned a JD from Howard University Law School. Both Leslie and Isaiah earned college degrees from historically black colleges. Their grandfathers provided human capital, as did their teachers, who recognized their potential as high-achieving students. As peers, they influenced and motivated each other. Isaiah began his postsecondary education journey at Owens Jr. College. He enrolled in a fouryear college immediately after earning his associate degree. Then, as of now, the pathways from community to four-year colleges are created with intention, imagination, and structure. From his time at Owens Jr. College in Tennessee to Howard and Atlanta Universities to his work at Legal Services, Isaiah both lived and observed segregation, inequality of opportunity, and the lack of equal protection. He knew from his own life experience that HBCUs in Mississippi had been intentionally held down by state action and inaction. They had been constrained by legal racism and state discrimination. When compared to public white colleges and universities in Mississippi, not one statesupported black college had a law, medical, or engineering school in 1970. When Isaiah finished graduate school in the late 1960s, 65 percent of African American students that enrolled in colleges and universities in the United States were enrolled in HBCUs. When he finished law school at Howard in 1970, his alma mater had educated many members of the black legal professoriate for just over a century. Atlanta was the first African American institution solely for graduate and professional education, and Howard University was the first African American private law school

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Mary Coleman, Telephone interview with Carol Madison, January 7, 2014.

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located at an HBCU. Howard Law School opened its doors to black and white students in 1869. Shaw University was the first state-supported HBCU to offer a legal program; it closed the law school in 1914. North Carolina Central was the first state-supported African American law school to flourish in the twentieth century.68 Isaiah knew this history because he had lived it. He identified with the high aspirations of working-class parents who had not themselves been afforded a quality elementary or secondary education.69 Isaiah knew from his own experience in climbing the educational ladder that preparation, aptitude, and passion were critical components in HBCU post-secondary education success.70 He knew that HBCUs had offered him, and thousands similarly situated, elevated levels of literacy that were much needed to grow human capital. Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) – public and private – fit the bill because they had a citizenship mission and a long remarkable history of contributing, mightily, to black upward mobility.71 He knew, finally, that inside these institutions, or at least many of them, were resources of care, nurture, and intelligence. Administrative leaders, faculty, and staff who, despite great odds, had achieved doctorates and climbed the ladder of success were committed to the educational excellence of a new generation. He wanted to help lift new generations out of poverty and onto the intellectual and professional classes. He wanted to lift these institutions. He had found social capital networks at Howard and Atlanta University. He knew the power of HBCUs. He knew the long odds against their efficacy as bulwarks of hope and success, especially if they remained under resourced. Madison knew that while separate, HBCUs and the students who attended them were victimized by discriminatory state action that “produced racism and served to perpetuate continuing effects of past and present discrimination.”72 The absence of student choice and the lack of equal protection of the HBCU were both vestiges of de jure discrimination.

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Cheney University in Pennsylvania was established in 1837 as the first HBCU; established in 1854, Lincoln University was the first to provide a collegiate education. Bertha Mae Carter and Constance Curry, Silver Rights (Harvest Books, 1996). Silver Rights tells the story of why a sharecropper family sent seven of their thirteen kids to integrate an all-white school in Drew, Mississippi, in the Mississippi Delta. Gregory Price, “Black Public Colleges and Universities as Projects: How Do They Rank Relative to White Public Colleges and Universities,” The Review of Black Political Economy, 24(4) (March 22, 1996). 72 Ibid., 69. Ayers v. Waller, Civil Action No. GC 75-9-15, April 7, 1975 (pp. 32–40).

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Madison believed that if the plaintiffs ever got their day in court, the courtroom arguments and testimony would create a broad historical record and commemorative pedagogy. Even then, the inner teachings of Grandfather Israel and the Howard education of Lawyer Madison were both at work. As the main legal architect of the original complaint, he was offering both survivors of Jim Crow or “de jure vestiges testimony” and establishing the possibility of a future free of both de jure and de facto higher education subjugation. He believed, rightly or wrongly, that for decades to come, HBCUs would remain the dominant purview of African Americans. Except for West Virginia State University, HBCUs have remained the purview of black students. Whatever the student composition of HBCUs, Madison wanted equal resources to prevail at all levels. Implicitly, he must have also believed that, with excellence, unfettered choice could perpetuate or dissipate a majority-black enrollment. His contributions are etched in the Congressional Record73 and in a Senate Resolution in the Mississippi legislature.74 Isaiah Madison was a grass-roots humanitarian – a Christian – very much in the tradition of the late Fannie Lou Hamer.75 Like Hamer, Madison believed that the American Dream should be within the reach of all Americans. The Hamer/Madison view of the Dream’s reach required access to power and protest – social, economic, political, and legal. Like Hamer, Madison was as much a hedgehog as a fox. Though unlettered, Hamer knew many things about injustice because she had lived it, and she knew many things about inequality because she could see the plantation owner’s material advantages in contrast with the wages and living conditions of the peasantry and sharecroppers. She knew that the social, educational, economic, political, and health systems were rigged against the urban and rural black poor, and she had been maltreated across the board. A generation younger than Hamer, Madison knew this lived history as well, but as a lettered and knowledgeable professional and an attorney, he was positioned to wage a direct legal challenge against the status quo. The Greeks knew that the fox knows many things and believes that he or she 73

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Honorable Bennie G. Thompson of Mississippi, “Honoring the Life of Reverend Dr. Isaiah Madison,” Congressional Record, 158(38) (March 8, 2012): 356–357. Senator Hillman Frazier, Mississippi Senate Resolution 600, 2012. Kay Mills, This Little Light of Mine: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1994); Fannie Lou Hamer: Woman of Courage, Civil Rights Documentation Project Vertical File: Moorland-Spingarn Research Center – Howard University and Tulane University/Amistad Research Center: Fannie Lou Hamer, 1917–1977, Microform Papers.

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can outwit her opponents. Unlike the fox, however, the hedgehog “knows one important thing.”76 Madison knew right from wrong and justice from injustice, and he knew the wrangling in the legal/political thicket would require a marathon rather than a sprint. Ayers/Fordice was a social, legal/ political, and economic contest with one big coherent message: the vestiges of de jure segregation in Mississippi higher education were scandalous and unconstitutional.77 Holding equitable black educational advancement in centuries-long abeyance slowed the pace of blacks’ upward economic mobility opportunities. Systematic exposure to high-quality education in the early and post-secondary grades would be important to lift the trajectories of the rural poor and the institutions that served their interests and took seriously their human development. When Isaiah taught at Jackson State University, one of the very universities that he had petitioned the courts to strengthen, he was also living his devotion to the uplift of both student and institutional advancement. In this hyper-competitive higher education landscape, Isaiah’s work is not merely topical, it remains urgent and meaningful. The eradication of policies and practices traceable to its prior de jure dual system should have included reparations for the injuries the institutions, students, and poorly paid faculty and staff sustained – this was a non-decision, where the mobilization of judicial bias was clearly not in favor of rectifying multigenerational injurious institutional and individual invidious discrimination. The equal protection of the law must take into explicit account intent and effect, with special emphasis on effect. The state of Mississippi intended to hobble black public colleges and succeeded in doing so. In addition to the institutions themselves, restitution to the productive administrators, faculty, students, and staff would be appropriate. Those faculty, who labored to educate students from all social classes, and who did so unstintingly, deserve recompense. And students, some of whom had been harmed by poor elementary and secondary schooling, needed additional years of college intensity to catch up as readers, writers, logicians, and scientists – they were owed more time and access to robust mentorship and apprenticeship 76

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C. M. Bowra, “The Fox and the Hedgehog,” Classical Quarterly, 34 (1940): 26–29, 26; and Bowra, On Greek Margins (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970): 59–66. See also Isaiah Berlin, The Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy’s View of History (Dorking: T S Hill Books, 1953). I see minimally in this history that blacks were set on a collision course with capitalism and the administrative state, and this collision has often favored the storytelling of institutional elites. Ayers v. Waller, Civil Action No. GC 75-9-15, April 7, 1975. US v. Fordice 505 US 717 (1992), with Ayers et al. v. Fordice, 90-6588, Governor of Mississippi et al.

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experiences. The poorly paid staff, who in old age have inadequate pensions and Social Security benefits because they were poorly paid, are due compensation. Like the field hands of yore, faculty and administrative output, as measured by students’ outcomes and their perseverance, was undermined by the state; yet core faculty and many administrators persisted in excellence, grantsmanship, and extra-services. Neither politics nor law has succeeded in ending de jure segregation, but both have the capacity to do so, if not the will. The past notwithstanding, a frequently cruel and indifferent legislative and judicial regime will not endure, systematically unchallenged, for much longer. Excellence, teaching, and, where appropriate, research innovation, and strategic community creativity must permeate and emanate from every molecule of HBCUs. The lawyers and the plaintiffs commemorated here were committed and talented individuals. They gave much of their lives and resources to advance black equal opportunity in higher education. The political battles they fought and the arguments they advanced have not been complete victories. There is unfinished work. The lives of the late Jake Ayers, Ike Madison, and Leonard McClellan, and the still-active sojourns of Bennie Thompson, Alvin Chambliss, Bob Pressman, Armand Derfner, and Ike Byrd reflect “a measure of their devotion”78 to erasing legal racism and its effects in America. Madison cared as much about the grand- and great-grandchildren of landless sharecroppers, maids, and factory workers as he did about the children of teachers, doctors, and lawyers; he knew that they all deserved an opportunity to be well-educated.79 All in the nation are called to advance the cause that he and countless others have so nobly charted.80 As with the Holdens of neighboring Mound Bayou, the Sunflower Seven, and the Coleman/Harpers, all wanted to secure formal education for themselves and to “educate their chillum.”81 The Holdens left the Mississippi Delta to find better schooling for young Holden, a future 78

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“A measure of devotion” is how Abraham Lincoln characterized those soldiers who fought and fell in the battle at Gettysburg. President Abraham Lincoln, The Gettysburg Address. Demographic shifts with implications for HBCUs have occurred in the South, with black families moving out of the rural South to central cities and towns, thereby depopulating the rural communities – sites from which many former HBCU graduates hailed. The Southwest has a high percentage of college-aged adults and fierce competition for those students and community college graduates has been underway for a decade. Cobb, The Most Southern Place on Earth; see also Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty (New York: Crown, 2012): 302–334. Matthew Holden, Correspondence to Mary Coleman, June 25, 2019.

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President of the American Political Science Association, an author, and a University of Virginia endowed professor. In the days when Josie, Matthews, Agnes, and Williams were children, often the blacks’ pursuit of good schooling had to confront random violence and economic terror, poor housing, and school segregation, as well as intergenerational familial illiteracy. Some considerable and concerted public and private partnerships would be required to dislodge these forces. The next chapter will lay out the campaign joined by field hands and other blacks in Sunflower to fight for a modicum of economic and political power and to make progress in another sphere: early education.

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ANTECEDENTS

If the legacies of violence against blacks, labor, wage extraction, and underinvestment in the education of blacks persisted throughout the nineteenth and much of the twentieth century, these legacies were intermingled with collective freedom struggles and the private tenacity, resignation, and familial aspirations of black Americans. Families, sung and unsung, nuclear and extended, mostly rural at first and then more urban as the twentieth century wore on, fought to outwit and outlast enslavement’s legacies. As shown in the preceding chapter, building an edifice for equity in public education would involve vulnerability and risk – the exertion of time and energy for yet another generation to reap the benefits of legal and political struggle. In the Mississippi Delta, economic and political lawlessness would prove a steadfast enemy. Nonetheless, federal government intervention designed to moderate natural disasters and poverty would alter state and federal relations, even in a closed society like Mississippi’s. When confronted by an organized spirit-filled collective political movement, lawlessness and natural disasters would have enormous resonance. Throughout two centuries, those struggling to build communities and a nation respectful of the rule of law would see the nation’s compliant response when its most favored citizens or regions needed or wanted privilege and note the contrast when its less favored white citizens and communities (the rural poor) and least favored black citizens and communities were in distress. Demography, property ownership, health, labor, family dynamics, and race were intertwined,1 with the largest shares of 1

Frank Furstenberg, Theodore Hershberg, and John Modell, “The Origins of the FemaleHeaded Black Family: The Impact of the Urban Experience,” Journal of Interdisciplinary

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enslaved black descendants in formerly slave states/communities and poor whites in closest proximity, reaping the most hell – feeling deeply the fragility of hollow opportunity. In the twentieth century, the Flood of 1927 was one of those times, as was the Great Depression. The years between 1927 and 1933 showed stark and unmet needs in the United States, not just the Delta. Great masses of people suffered; the role of the federal government changed in response to profound despair. Black families in Mississippi needed equal protection from and of the law; poor black and rural women in Mississippi had little access to this protection. To my knowledge, the nation’s first poor support program was the mothers’ pensions movement of the early twentieth century. Even in the early twentieth century, black family female heads were at least 9 percent of the population in the United States.2 Women in most locales had to be widowed, deserted, divorced, or have incapacitated husbands to access pensions; unmarried mothers or mothers with dependent children were deemed ineligible. Economist Carolyn Moehling found that states where black female headship was highest were the slowest to enact mothers’ pensions and the least generous. “The first assistance programs targeted to single mothers were not responsive, and in fact appear to have been reactionary, to the experiences of black women.”3 During the second and third decades of the last century, mothers in Mississippi and forty-four other states, like Josie, who in 1945 was left widowed after her husband was murdered, were finally eligible for mothers’ pensions.

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History, 6(2) (1975): 211–233; Thor Berger, “Places of Persistence: Slavery and the Geography of Intergenerational Mobility in the United States,” Demography, August 2018. According to the Pew Research Center, 38 percent of black people live in households headed by married couples; 32 percent in female-headed households; 6 percent in maleheaded households; and 24 percent in non-family households. Fact Sheet, March 25, 2021, available at pewresearch.org, accessed December 1, 2021. Samuel Preston, Suet Lim, and S. Phillip Morgan, “African-American Marriage in 1910: Beneath the Surface of Census Data,” Demography, 29(1) (February 1992). Carolyn Moehling has shown that white female headship increased at a higher rate in “more generous states.” Moehling distinguishes between family and household heads. In the latter case, “the female age 20–40, lives in a household without a male relative; in the former case, the female, age 20–40 lives in a household with an adult male relative. She has found that states where black female headship was highest were the slowest to enact mothers’ pensions and the least generous.” See Moehling, “Mothers’ Pensions and Female Headship,” National Bureau of Economic Research/DAE Summer Institute 2001, p. 18.

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The rural poor and black people in places like the Mississippi Delta could only count on themselves, their efforts, abilities, and those of their kin and supporters. It’s a small wonder, then, that parents told their children to get a good education and rely on their own efforts rather than expect government support. The well-being of black folks was not legally protected. There was no social contract of substance, and there was a porous safety net. The Great Depression strained the nineteenth-century doctrine of laissez-faire economics – the idea of minimal regulation of businesses – and this strain resulted in the election of a national leader committed to strengthening the central economy and providing economic guardrails – safety nets. Would the guardrails be inclusive of the descendants of the enslaved? Southerners and European immigrants fleeing the rural south in the first two decades of the century sought jobs as factory workers and as businessmen and women in the cities. During the first three years after the crash, many white women felt the insecurity that an African American woman in Indianola claims to have known all fifty years of her life. Mothers’ pensions reflect the non-protection of those black women who remained in the rural south, as do the very assumptions of the legislation of the New Deal, between 1931 and 1937. Both welfare capitalism and poor support characterized the New Deal. Welfare capitalism maintained private property and profit-making incentives while expanding the role of the federal government. Whether industrialism or urbanization would have inevitably wrought these changes has been debated in the vast literature on the New Deal. What is central to my purpose is an exploration of how New Deal policies spoke to and against the needs of sharecroppers, maids, and an undereducated rural peasantry in the third and fourth decades of the last century. Despite scholars’ varying depictions of sharecropping and sharecroppers, the testimony here from Agnes Brown and Josie Landfair confirms their perennial cross-generation familial status as rural peasants – bound to other people’s land, working without proper compensation, giving rise to Josie’s quip, “that if they gave me what my folks earned, I would not need nothing no more.” The state’s rights and a legally-sanctioned caste system had closed political, economic, and social ranks against the black poor. As had the 1927 Flood, the economic depression of the 1930s would make the “Most Southern Place on Earth” receptive to federal government intervention. Still, New Deal sentiments had been influenced by the English Poor Law and Settlement Law, which made it clear that poor families were responsible for taking care of themselves. When they prove unable to fulfill that responsibility, charitable individuals should help their

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community, and when everything else fails, the government should do its share to assist the truly needy: the aged and the infirmed. Judicial decisions have limited the ways in which benefactors might use their endowments for philanthropic purposes, and as a result, the creation of trusts to channel accumulated individual wealth to charity took longer to implement. Secular organizations, often the outgrowth of churches, continue benevolent activities. Mutual aid societies were established in the colonies to allow neighbors and others to pool resources and build almshouses that provided for the elderly and children. Most of these were local in scope, in cities like Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and later, Chicago, and few were in frontier areas. As early as 1729, orphanages were set up in New Orleans to care for children with smallpox. The first full case for developing specialized health services for the indigent poor was made by Benjamin Franklin in 1750. He argued that good medical care could shorten the period the ill and poor were dependent. Investigations soon followed into the reasons for pauperism and the effectiveness of local indoor relief (relief offered outside the homes of the poor, ill, or elderly). The first officially supported mental hospital was established in Virginia in 1773. By then, children, the mentally challenged, and the disabled elderly were in the category of the truly needy. Such programs would eventually need to grapple with the exploited worker, the unemployed, and the unemployable. Early America seemed insensitive to the unfortunate. A constant refrain was that the able-bodied should work. Seldom did local areas seek work opportunities for the unemployed; instead, they were left to their own devices to find work. The almshouses were often neglected, and efforts to establish facilities for specific populations were hastened. The deaf and blind were among the first to receive classified facilities as early as 1817 and 1829, respectively. These facilities, in places like Boston, Connecticut, and Kentucky, did much to demonstrate the physical and cognitive health and educational needs and the dignity of the infirm. Contemporaneous with this development were movements for free public education and antislavery. All were movements to remove the stigma and develop greater human capability and autonomy. Those movements and their successful appeals to human dignity, lawfulness, and moral authority would result centuries later in institutional expansion and enforcement of public policies that would moderate stigma, dependency, illiteracy, and poverty. To understand the impact of the conflicting legacies, we need first to better understand the framework for

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the New Deal and the Great Society, and how they interfaced with Mississippi: the Closed Society.4

THE GOVERNMENTAL ROLE

The Great Depression was the impetus for the New Deal. However, New Deal programs impacted the poor and the once not-so-poor in uneven and racially discriminatory ways. During World War 1, American farmers benefitted from increased demand for their products. Both farm prices and cash receipts increased. Following the war, when European farmers resumed their productivity, American crops exceeded global demand. At least 10 million farmers produced more goods and services than they sold. Farmers lost purchasing power. Taxes were up, mortgage payments were due, and the cost of living had also increased. Employment in industry was in free fall, lagging productivity. According to the Brookings Institution, “Gains made in increased productivity were not passed along to the industrial worker; however, corporate profits soared between 1920 and 1929.”5 While the nation rushed to protect the interests of large planters, it did not protect the economic rights or wages of domestics, agricultural workers, or small black and white farmers. This absence of protection was state-sanctioned and intentional discrimination. Leaving domestics, cotton, tobacco, and rice laborers out of Social Security was likewise an accommodation to powerful administrative interests and yet another economic insult sanctioned by the nation’s policies – its decisions and nondecisions. The economic trends of the decade preceding the Great Depression showed that income was maldistributed and that the people producing goods and services – the workers – were not receiving enough wages to quicken the pace of overall purchasing power.6 What can the government do to lessen inequality and cure a sluggish or depression-ridden economy? Establish more jobs and ensure that employed people can maintain their jobs. As a first step, Hoover established unemployment relief. 4

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James Silver, Mississippi: The Closed Society (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1964). Martin Baily and Nicholas Montalbano, Brookings Institution, Hutchins Center, Working Paper No. 22, 2016. Simon Kuznets, National Income and Its Composition, 1919–1938 (New York: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1941); Mark Schmitz and Price Fishback, “The Distribution of Income in the Great Depression: Preliminary State Estimates,” The Journal of Economic History, 43 (March 1983): 217–230.

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Here, the plan was to coordinate state and local attempts to help the jobless. He tried unsuccessfully to stabilize wheat and cotton prices and wage rates. Voluntary giving was his plea. The war veterans received a bonus over his presidential veto (the Adjusted Compensation Act). Hoover also vetoed pension bills. He urged a Red Cross movement and recommended funds to feed animals, but deftly fought to deny federal funds to take care of people. “Maximum self-help” is what he wished to see during this crisis. Still, he ended up giving banks and big corporations federal funds and intervening to protect the debt system. No amount of singing or praying, church-going or staying married, filled hungry bellies, clothed naked feet, or filled the poor’s intellectual curiosity. Hoover eventually made three moves to help restore the American economy. With unemployment approaching 25 percent, the Hoover administration was able to get Congress to pass the Federal Home Loan Bank Act, the Revenue Act, and the Emergency Relief and Construction Act. Significantly, the Revenue Act increased corporate and personal income taxes to their highest levels, and the Emergency Relief Construction Act provided government-backed loans to banks and created public works projects. As was discussed in the previous section, trouble loomed in the farming and factory sectors. If the farmer was the “sick man” in the US economy of the late 1920s, rapid technological changes in the late 1920s and early 1930s displaced industries, creating unemployment, and yet productivity increased. Only on unionized railroads did wages increase despite increases in production in the manufacturing, mining, and transportation sectors. Hourly and yearly earnings fell at a time when wages could have been increased or prices cut. While the cost of living did fall in the 1920s, much of that was due to falling food prices. At the end of the decade, profits tripled those at the start of the decade of the 1920s. The maldistribution of income was one impact: farmers were struggling, farm laborers had stagnant wages, and high corporate industrial profits were going to those with a propensity to save rather than purchase or reinvest. Federal and market interventions were needed to minimize the brutal dislocations of the Great Depression. New labor policies were required, and a new monetary approach was adopted. Despite its rickety birth and uncertain maturation into adolescence and adulthood, the New Deal promised federal relief from hunger and federal help for the elderly and widowed; it promised to protect the general welfare, hardly a radical idea. What most blacks had done in enslavement and in emancipation, more Americans, including white Americans, would now do: sell their labor to the few who owned and managed property. Still, at issue was how much

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federal government intervention should be provided to help people who, through no fault of their own, were homeless, unemployed, and hungry. As many as 15 million families had more hope than opportunity to work for livable wages. Jobs could not be found. Still, in the cotton belt, cotton was being picked, and at the end of the year, most, like little Josie and her parents, were told, “You did fine. You did not earn nothing.” The exploitation of the labor of the poor was economic discrimination and a barrier to exiting poverty. With the election of 1934, freedom’s economic promise was tapped. Federal action was swift, if not always expansive, effective, or well-funded enough. As much as $4.88 billion in Emergency Relief Appropriation was approved by Congress in 1935. Relief programs were consolidated and expanded. The American welfare state was launched. The role of government in post-Flood 1927 and the Great Depression restored some citizens’ faith in their country and in their recent military sacrifice. The Works Progress Administration, a new relief effort created by executive order, was formed. However, it was the Resettlement Administration (RA) that offered the greatest help to the black rural poor. During its two-year life span, it offered group health benefits, set up migratory camps, and experimented with long-term leases and cooperatives. It protected tenants from labor exploitation. To the chagrin of large plantation owners and their political constituencies, the RA was effective. Despite or because of its effectiveness, in 1937, it was merged with the Farm Security Administration (FSA), which Congress replaced with the racist Farmers’ Home Administration (FHA). Patricia Sullivan wrote in Days of Hope that “southern landowners and their business associates controlled the administration of the New Deal programs. Indeed, the success of the Agricultural Adjustment Act’s (AAC) voluntary crop reduction program depended on their cooperation. Thus, as many historians have pointed out, the New Deal bolstered the power of the Black-Belt planters, the bulwark of the solid, segregationist South.”7 She concluded, further, that the New Deal “threatened the culture of dependency that had secured an abundant, cheap labor supply.”8 Jane Adams has countered that “black disenfranchisement eliminated blacks as a target of political patronage.”9 Adams wrote convincingly that

7

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Patricia Sullivan, Days of Hope: Race and Democracy in the New Deal Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 3. Ibid., 4. Jane Adams, “Confederate Lane: Class, Race, and Ethnicity in the Mississippi Delta,” American Ethnologist, 33(2) (January 2008): 288–309.

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“benefits from the New Deal relief and settlement programs therefore went disproportionately to poor elites, who were potential voters.” She goes on to note, “FSA strongly favored white sharecroppers in their redistribution of land. In Mississippi 75% of farm tenants were African Americans. But in 1938 they were only 26% of the tenant-purchase borrowers, a proportion that rose to 35% in 1945.”10 The culture of planter dependency on black and cheap labor had been shaken as blacks migrated from the Delta; floods, fevers, and boll weevils destabilized cotton planting and production, and mechanization made it clear that a big obedient labor force would be less needed. While the New Deal did not itself offer the blacks policies to sustain exits from poverty, the period between the Great Depression and 1944 signaled more opportunity than had been evident throughout the early twentieth century. With so much suffering evident in the sharecropping areas, many blacks chose to vote with their feet. In large numbers, those younger than forty-five moved to cities and towns outside the South, hoping to build assets and experience a better land. In the words of Max Weber, they wanted improved life chances.11 They wanted to stop the persistence of disadvantage. So, too, did native black northerners already in place. Together, black native northerners and newly arrived black migrants would struggle. Even as they found work in factories, that struggle would trigger poor health outcomes, especially for those already in place, presumably in a better land.12 A critical question is whether there was anything in the New Deal to support and sustain blacks’ economic opportunity and institutional faith? The Balance Agriculture with Industry program (BAWI) provided community-backed bonds to local elites (planters) to construct industrial plants and offered tax forgiveness, especially in a non-unionized labor force where the right-to-work laws existed. The privileges of the early twentieth century favored the wealthy, and the wages of whiteness favored the poor whites, who got the lion’s share of good government jobs in the 1930s and 1940s.

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Ibid. Leah Platt Boustan, Competition in the Promised Land: Black Migrants in Northern Cities and Labor Markets (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2016). D. Black, S. Sanders, E. Taylor, and L. Taylor, “The Impact of the Great Migration on Mortality of African Americans: Evidence from the Deep South,” American Economic Review, 105(2) (2015): 477–503.

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During the 1930s, for the millions of African Americans toiling in the cotton fields and surviving the vagaries of natural disasters and violence, “days of hope” gave way to nights of hunger, wage inequality, and racist, vitriolic leadership. Those days and nights of massive suffering and Republican neglect of blacks’ functional citizenship shifted their allegiance from the party of Lincoln to the party of FDR. Organizing among sharecroppers, lawsuits making demands to end the white primary and segregated graduate and professional schools, and challenges to the Democratic Party at the grassroots and elite levels, all portended policy change. Two executive orders, one (8802) issued by FDR and the other (9981) by Harry S. Truman in 1948 to desegregate the armed forces, signaled actionable role-taking at the highest levels of governance.13 The possibility of gradual change, if not transformation, was opened. But, then as now, executive orders can have a short shelf life or they can be fortified through legislation and judicial decision-making. Frequently, actions taken at the national level, especially by presidents of the United States, were taken to bolster the economy, the war effort, their election, or re-election interests. Often, in this context, black inclusion was an expedient. Nonetheless, for blacks, the expectation was set for government lawfulness in the acquisition of rights, the due process of the law, the privileges, and immunities, of social, civic, and economic citizenship. Nothing in blacks’ history in the United States supported the view that they wanted something for nothing. When African American men, women, and children looked to the government, as they had for their emancipation and post-emancipation, and as black widows and injured black men had when trying to secure Civil War pensions, they asked the government to live up to its promise – to provide equal protection, due process of the law, and to provide for the general welfare.14 (Military pensions were 34 percent of the federal budget by 1894.)

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Executive Order 8802 enacted by FDR on June 25, 1941, was meant to reduce racial discrimination in the defense realm and lessen discrimination in federal employment practices. A. Phillip Randolph, labor leader of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, had long been active in fighting for employment rights and opportunities. Whether FDR’s order was merely expedient (a move to mobilize the war effort and to win southern democrats to his agenda) and/or a move borne of a will to rid the nation of racial discrimination cannot be known. Brandi Clay Brimmer, Claiming Union Widowhood: Race, Respectability, and Poverty in the Post-Emancipation South (Raleigh: Duke University Press, 2020).

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The War on Poverty,15 in part an initiative of the Lyndon Johnson administration’s Great Society,16 was a federal program administered by locals to mitigate poverty. Presidents Kennedy and Johnson conceived the War on Poverty as one way “to eliminate the causes and effects of poverty in the United States.” Johnson decided to call the effort a war and referred to poverty as evil. Born in 1908, in Central Texas, Johnson had experienced poverty. He had also instructed students of Mexican descent and had worked his way through college (Southwest Texas Teachers College). In his early political life in the Texas House of Representatives, he campaigned for and introduced New Deal measures. The native Texan first sought passage of Kennedy’s unfinished priorities, focusing on a civil rights bill and tax measures. He next implored a grieving nation to build a society that millions of sharecroppers, domestics, and teachers would have appreciated, one where “the meaning of a man’s life matches the marvels of men’s labor.”17 A skillful politician, he captured a window of political opportunity when he announced to the nation in May of 1964, “we have the opportunity to move not only toward the rich society and the powerful society, but upward to the Great Society. The Great Society rests on abundance and liberty for all. It demands an end to poverty and racial injustice, to which we are totally committed in our time. That is just the beginning.”18 Johnson shaped events and events, both international and national, nudged Johnson forward in domestic politics and space exploration, but mired him in the Vietnam War. Nonetheless, on matters regarding a strengthened safety net, the elderly found a measure of support in the 1965 Medicare amendment to the Social Security Act. 15

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There is vast literature on the War on Poverty. See, for example, Robert Haveman (ed.), A Decade of Federal Anti-Poverty Programs: Achievements, Failures, and Lessons (New York: Academic Press, 1977); James T. Patterson, America’s Struggle against Poverty, 1990–1980 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981); Charles Murray, Losing Ground: American Social Policy 1950–1980 (New York: Basic Books, 1984); M. Kaplan and Peggy Cutti (eds.), The Great Society Revisited (Durham: University of North Carolina Press); Frances Piven and Richard Cloward, Poor People’s Movements: How They Fail and Why They Succeed (New York: Pantheon, 1982); Michael B. Katz, The Undeserving Poor: From the War on Poverty to the War on Welfare (New York: Pantheon, 1989), especially chapters 3 and 4; Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Maximum Feasible Misunderstanding: Community Action in the War on Poverty (New York: Free Press, 1969). Lyndon Johnson, First State of the Union Address, January 8, 1964. Frank Freidel and Hugh Sidey, The Presidents of the United States of America (Washington, DC: The White House Historical Association, 2006). President Lyndon Johnson’s Commencement address at the University of Michigan; Johnson’s speech writer was Richard Goodwin.

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This measure established Medicare and Medicaid, a health insurance program for the elderly and the poor, respectively.19 In 1964, President Johnson placed the poverty program, the Economic Opportunity Act, also called the War on Poverty, which created Job Corps, Community Action Programs (CAP), and other work incentive programs, in a separate agency.20 Two reasons have been offered for this move: (1) the amount of money budgeted was so low that it would be perceived as window dressing; and (2) neither Kennedy nor the early Johnson administration had much faith in the existing federal departments. “After President Kennedy’s assassination, the military metaphor appealed to the mood of the nation: redemption through sacrifice.”21 Moral appeals to the national interest stalled would-be naysayers and positioned Johnson as a national leader, not just a Texas conservative. Bureaucratic politics in the President’s cabinet and among foundations also shaped antipoverty programs. Johnson’s executive branch created the contentious phrase “maximum feasible participation.”22 The phrase was a compromise among the program’s planners. According to Piven and Cloward, “some wanted to use the word “involvement,” others found “participation” too strong, and yet others wanted to use the term “control” to describe what most hoped would be a locally administered program.”23 19

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The Barack Obama Affordable Care Act strengthened health care in America. The uninsured rate is now 10 percent, and people with pre-existing conditions are no longer denied health insurance. The Economic Opportunity Act was passed in August 1964. Its stated purpose was “to mobilize the human and financial resources of the nation to combat poverty in the United States.” In a significant part, the legislation reads: Poverty continues to be the lot of a substantial number of people. The United States can achieve its full economic and social potential as a nation only if every individual can contribute to the full extent of his capabilities and participate in the workings of our society. It is, therefore, the policy of the United States to eliminate the paradox of poverty amid plenty in this nation by opening to everyone the opportunity for education and training, the opportunity to work, and the opportunity to live in decency and dignity. See the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, US Congress House Committee on Education and Labor, Subcommittee on the War on Poverty. US Government Printing Office, 1964. The Economic Opportunity Act (1964) provided the basis for the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO), the Job Corps, Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA), Upward Bound, Head Start, Legal Services, the Neighborhood Youth Corps, the CAP, the college Work-Study program, Neighborhood Development Centers, small business loan programs, rural programs, migrant worker programs, remedial programs, and local health care centers. Michael Katz, The Undeserving Poor: America’s Enduring Confrontation with Poverty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 89. Moynihan, Maximum Feasible Misunderstanding. Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward, Regulating the Poor: The Functions of Public Welfare (New York: Vintage, 1971).

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The intellectual treatise used by the planners of the war effort argued that economic growth by itself would not eliminate poverty in America. Rarely had economic growth been even. The Johnson-era approach anchored poverty in income distribution, employment, discrimination, and inadequate transfer payments by the government. The report issued by the Council of Economic Advisors also defined the poor. According to Robert Lampman, an economist and the primary author of the report, “by the poor we mean those who are not now maintaining a decent standard of living – those whose basic needs exceed their means to satisfy them.”24 This definition would hold for a half-century and come to define selfsufficiency, rather than aspirational intergenerational upward economic mobility. For its part, the council’s report rejected explanations of poverty based on heredity or deficiencies in character or intelligence. Poverty as a deficiency would nonetheless hold prominence in the American mind. No matter, the war was waged based on economic growth, civil rights, and new social and educational services designed to equalize opportunity. The strategy adopted by Johnson avoided identifying the behavior and characteristics of the poor as the enemy. Rather, the conditions of the poor were central to the definition of poverty adopted by the Johnson White House. Despite some limitations, the definition of the impoverished as those whose basic needs exceed their means is a definition that goes beyond behavior. The Orshansky definition, adopted by the Johnson administration,25 with all its inherent and admitted limitations, was not a definition about the behavior of the poor. Work Study, Head Start, and Job Corps were not mere normative responses to the behavior of the poor. All were needed policy responses to mitigate intergenerational exclusion from early exposure to quality education, upskilling for youth, and resources to pay for college without a lifetime of debt. Catherine’s daughter, Mary, and her husband, Joe, had both benefitted from college Work Study. The students Mary taught and mentored over the last two decades of the twentieth century would have had Head Start opportunities, and they and their college peers were the better 24

25

Economic Report of the President transmitted to the Congress in January 1964, together with the Annual Council of Economic Advisors’ Report (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1965): 14–17. Mollie Orshansky, “Commentary: The Poverty Measure,” Social Security Bulletin, 51(10) (1988); and Gordon M. Fisher, “The Development and History of the US Poverty Thresholds – A Brief Overview,” GSS/SSS Newsletter (Winter 1997): 6–7. Social Security benefits can only be passed on at death to spouses or disabled children, leaving the benefits earned by single adults without children, who worked their whole lives, to the state.

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for it. Both programs (Head Start and Job Corps) honored the life chances of poor toddlers and youth from ages 16 to 24.26 How rationales for public policy were and are translated and thus implemented and reimagined in different regions and eras are important matters deserving more attention than has been provided in the poverty and policy literature. What is clear is that the locus of control for the Johnson War on Poverty was the community. Community action as defined by the Johnson administration emphasized the active participation of community residents in the formulation and administration of programs such as Operation Head Start for preschool children and Job Corps for adolescents. Community action required the establishment of local agencies to receive and spend federal funds. As a strategy, it was intended to deliberately bypass existing local organizations and develop entirely new ones to mount challenges to existing institutions. Racial justice and local control in Mississippi meant a struggle in what James Silver has termed “the closed society,” not because of its attitude toward African Americans, but rather because of its refusal to allow the freedom of inquiry or tolerate “an error of opinion.”27 That trait meant that the old-guard expected to have the first and final say in how Great Society funds would be spent in counties run by large white land and business owners, some of whom were also elected officials.

THE GOVERNMENTAL ROLE IN SUNFLOWER

In Sunflower County, home to the White Citizens’ Council (WCC), the battle would be waged by citizen freedom fighters, including Ms. Fannie Lou Hamer, one of the rural poor. She inquired about those funds and their use, and she was willing to fight for a share of those funds and their proper distribution. Sunflower County’s War on Poverty became in 1965 a battleground between white holders of power and black insurgents, each

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In 2020, the Department of Labor created a Job Corps Scholars demonstration program and lodged it in select colleges and universities. Certifications, intensive career training, and counseling are elements of the demonstration project. Were the colleges selected based upon which colleges would likely add the most value to students? Which evidencebased mentoring frameworks or tools were used to set students up with skills in highgrowth sectors and with growth mindsets and future orientations? What relationship, if any, did the colleges selected bear to Chetty’s economic mobility college report card findings? See Raj Chetty, John N. Friedman, Emmanuel Saez, Nicholas Turner, and Danny Yagan, “Mobility Report Cards: The Role of Colleges in Intergenerational Mobility,” July 2017. Available at equality-of-opportunity.org, accessed July 21, 2022. Silver, Mississippi.

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group wanting to control how and on whom the revenue from the Great Society programs would be invested. In the War on Poverty, some of its members reached across racial lines to legitimize the community action board. Participants in the poverty programs in Sunflower were principally African American. The Head Start Program and the Nelson ditch draining project were major programs in the anti-poverty effort. Farmers benefitted from the Nelson project, and through Head Start, poor children gained earlier exposure to literacy and better nutrition. The Staff Director, Colbert Crowe, and Board President, R. J. Allen, were both white. As stated above, the key person in county politics for forty years – 1960–2000 – was the late Jack Harper, the Chancery Clerk. According to one observer, “by virtue of his position as Chancery Clerk in Sunflower, Harper had his finger in nearly every political pie in the county, including the purse strings of the supervisors.”28 After Congress passed the Economic Opportunity Act in 1964, Harper worked with the Sunflower Board of Supervisors, the late Polly Greenberg, and the Mississippi State Technical Assistance Director, Martin Fraley, to establish Sunflower Progress. Mr. Harper noted that “the state leadership said no to federal funds – but I knew from my legal training and the military that feds would tell us what to do anyway. So, I advocated for federal money to improve the community – the War on Poverty – Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson – I wrote to be on the county distribution list. I learned the process for getting the county designated a Community Action agency and the locals listened.”29 According to Al From, “the African American community objected to Bryce Alexander, the former Indianola police chief, and first director.”30 Alexander served for a couple of months and resigned after a strident black protest. Crowe, Alexander’s successor, battled with the “out” group, the Associated Communities of Sunflower County (ACSC), led by Ms. Fannie Lou Hamer.31

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Al From, “OEO Memorandum of February 10, 1967,” 9. Interview with the author, Mr. Jack Harper, Jr., Sunflower County Chancery Clerk’s office, Indianola, Mississippi, July 29, 1992. Al From, “OEO Memorandum of February 10, 1967,” 9. See Mills, This Little Light of Mine; Chana Kai Lee, For Freedom’s Sake: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1999); Melissa Harris-Lacewell, “Righteous Politics: An Examination of Fannie Lou Hamer’s Religious Political Activism as a Mental Health Strategy,” Paper presented at the Woodrow Wilson Center, 2006; Kate Clifford Larson, Walk with Me (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021); Keisha N. Blain, Until I Am Free (Boston: Beacon Press, 2021).

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The ACSC, an organization composed primarily of poor African Americans operating a volunteer Head Start program in the county, was an offshoot of the Child Development Group of Mississippi (CDGM) in Sunflower. In Sunflower County, Sunflower County Progress, Inc. (SPI), a community action agency funded by the Office of Economic Opportunity, administered the War on Poverty. Its leader, Jack Harper, the clever democrat and public official who wanted to control the pace of political and economic change in Sunflower, gave bus driving and head start jobs to blacks whose views did not align with those of the black local protest movement. The organizational membership of SPI was well integrated with black and white elites – Lonnie and Evelyn Byrd, husband and wife, landowner and teacher, respectively, and nemesis of Ms. Hamer, were among the blacks on the SPI board. Evelyn Byrd was chosen along with four other African American schoolteachers. According to From, the board had an executive committee. R. J. Allen Jr., the President of SPI and a large plantation owner and former member of the Citizens Council, controlled the board meetings and sat as a member of the executive committee. In most issues facing the board, especially its negotiations with the Hamer-led ACSC, the executive committee was empowered to oversee matters concerning the organization. Allen was considered “liberal” by the other board members. Like Harper, he worked to get an integrated board when most whites in the county were not in favor of such a move. Rather than innovation, however, program efficiency and compliance with the guidelines of OEO were the major goals for Allen and the SPI. According to one observer, “their interests in defending their actions seem to supersede their interests in fighting poverty.”32 From noted that, two African Americans, Lonnie Byrd and Louis Walker, and two whites, Henry Paris and local banker Farmer Hamilton Jr., comprised the executive committee. The 1966 twenty-four-member advisory committee included the chancery clerk, superintendents of all three school districts, representatives of the Mississippi State Employment Service, the Sunflower County Departments of Welfare and Health, and the County Agricultural agent. Al From noted that “The presence of the superintendents on the advisory board seems particularly significant since all but one of the African American board members were teachers in the county schools.” In short, wrote From, the OEO evaluator, “the SPI board of directors was power-structure oriented. Most of its African American members were dependent on whites for their jobs and none among them

32

Al From, “OEO Memorandum of February 10, 1967.”

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included a militant or anyone with a mild interest in civil rights movement activity.”33 According to a CAP evaluator of the 1967 effort, “the SPI used the shield of the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) guidelines to effectively finesse civil rights advocates and poor people out of any policy making roles in the Sunflower County War on Poverty. Negro board members – seven of eight of whom are public school teachers – are so dependent on the white power structure that they seldom speak out for the poor.”34 The SPI board was originally appointed in August 1965 by the County Board of Supervisors. The eighteen-member board, ten white men and eight African American men and women, were themselves representative of the non-poor. In the Sunflower County of 1967, as in the Sunflower County of the 1930s, there was a distinction made between the responsible “Nigras” and the irresponsible ones.35 In fact, responsible ones and so-called irresponsible ones had distinct levels and quality of economic vulnerability. The poorest among them could be evicted from plantations; the not-so-poor, the teachers, and landowning farmers could be blacklisted and lose access to loans. The ACSC was begun by six women who developed the CDGM volunteer Head Start: Ms. Cora Fleming, Ms. Alice Giles, Ms. Thelma Mack, and Ms. Ora Dee Wilson, all of Indianola; Ms. Annie May King of Sunflower and Ms. Fannie Lou Hamer of Ruleville. Ms. Fannie Lou Hamer and Ms. Cora Fleming were the most active members of the ACSC. Ms. Hamer claimed that the organization had over 2,000 members throughout the county. According to Al From, “about 175 people crowded into a church with a capacity of about half that size when a CAP evaluator was inspecting in early 1966. At that meeting, Ms. Hamer was leading.”36 Hamer, the youngest of twenty children of Lou Ella and James Townsend, was born into a black, impoverished, and rural family. Harper was born into a white poor rural family. Hamer never escaped poverty. She never finished high school. Hamer could not successfully appeal to the powerful in state government to secure a good education pathway or benefit from local political patronage. The barriers she faced were structural – intentionally designed to hold her race, not just her class, back. Unlike Harper, whose family rented mules on a fourth, Ms. Hamer’s mother and father sharecropped all their lives. Hamer had served as a timekeeper on Marlowe’s plantation until she was fired for registering to vote. Hamer and Harper were God-loving and God-fearing people. Hamer

33

Ibid.

34

Ibid.

35

Ibid.

36

Ibid.

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wanted power – the authority to make decisions and allocate resources to the advantage of blacks and the poor to maintain power by controlling the flow and substance of change. Unlike Harper, she did not see substantive change as inevitable. Hamer fought both the white and the black status quo. Lonnie Byrd, for example, did not consider Ms. Hamer his leader. Indeed, not one of the African American members on the SPI board was publicly sympathetic to the cause for which Hamer fought. One African American involved in Head Start stated, “Mrs. Hamer does not lead most Negroes in the county, but at this point, no one else can rival her for support. She is the only one who has worked to organize this county.”37 In neighboring Bolivar County, in 1965, black farmers had formed the North Bolivar County Farm Collective, and Hamer had formed a collective in Sunflower as well. Ms. Hamer was not among those that white power holders and “wanna be” black power holders viewed as responsible. Al From wrote that one prominent member of the SPI advisory committee referred to her group as “irresponsible riffraff.”38 I do not know what Lonnie Byrd and his wife, Evelyn, would have asked of their white counterparts or of themselves had they been independently wealthy and imbued with a sense of outrage at the high rates of poverty encircling their relative advantage. Years later, Lonnie did indicate that blacks who had a little more than other blacks were envied more. Black farmers did not serve as leaders of blacks in Sunflower. Or, at least, he did not. Some black farmers had participated in cooperatives, and others had led or supported civil rights activity in their hometowns. Lonnie must have appreciated that, like Clinton Battle, he might have been squeezed by whites had he participated in civil rights activities and the cooperative movement. The findings of sociologists like Michael Biggs and Kenneth Andrews on protest movements suggest that if Hamer had been in an infrastructure with a supportive political environment and favorable economic conditions, her protest efforts could have been more successful. If she and her members had had a national strategy designed to expand their networks and quickly intervene to shift public opinion, receptivity could have been more widespread.39 As it was, opposition to her and the upward economic 37

38 39

Interview with Walter Gregory Director of Head Start, Indianola, Mississippi, January 1967. Interview by Al From, CAP Inspector. Al From, “Memorandum to Edgar F. May,” February 10, 1967, 9. Michael Biggs and Kenneth T. Andrews, “Protest Campaigns and Movement Success: Desegregating the U.S. South in the Early 1960s,” American Sociological Review, 80(2) (March 2015).

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mobility of blacks was strong. As a group, blacks lacked demonstrable political strength as white legal racism had prolonged their economic dependency and poverty had atrophied their political muscles. A counter-movement designed to steer change and transform the lives of poor children was what the ACSC wanted to foment. Courageous people risked their lives to transform the community. Along with Hamer, the ACSC had two other active members: its chairman and vice chairman, Clover Green of Moorhead and Oscar Giles of Indianola. Giles, the owner of a grocery store that was bombed after he became involved in the civil rights movement, believed firmly that African Americans had to control the anti-poverty programs if they were going to lift themselves out of poverty. According to Al From, “Ms. Hamer and the ACSC drafted a list of demands and handed the list to Indianola and Sunflower County officials and businessmen at a meeting of the Chamber of Commerce (chaired by Jack Harper) and Community Relations Committee.” Jack Harper’s role was to quell the insurgents, not to moderate them, but to expose them as heretics and cast aspersions on their legitimacy as leaders. The ACSC was not invited to the meeting, and although the list of demands included the names of the two less militant organizations, the list was drafted and advanced by the ACSC. The item on the list about which Ms. Hamer spoke was Head Start. She mused, “The ACSC is seeking money for Head Start not civil rights activity. If you’re going to make changes in the political power structure, you need to get power to people outside the power structure.”40 Those two contrasting organizations held similar views about community control. The problem was that each group wanted to oversee the anti-poverty monies and programs, especially Head Start. It is inexplicable that the conceptions of community empowerment espoused by Washington did not anticipate the racial battle that was an integral part of the political struggle of Sunflower.41 The SPI and ACSC were fighting over control of the funded Head Start program in the county, but the struggle was for robust rather than token political participation and power and a reduction of poverty through early and quality education, access to health, and childcare. Al From, a consultant to OEO/Atlanta, wrote, “For as long as anti-poverty funds in Sunflower

40

41

Interview with Ms. Fannie Hamer as cited in Al From, “Memorandum to Edgar F. May,” February 10, 1967. Kenneth Andrews, “Social Movement and Policy Implementation: The Mississippi Civil Rights Movement and the War on Poverty, 1965–1971,” American Sociological Review, 66 (February 2001): 71–95, 85.

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County are administered by Sunflower Progress, the political benefits of controlling the anti-poverty program will remain with the established leadership of the county. In the hands of the civil rights oriented ACSC, the weapon of war-on-poverty funds would threaten that leadership.”42 The sociologist Kenneth Andrews found that the civil rights movement had varying degrees of success in the War on Poverty in Mississippi. Multiple strategies, including disruptive protest and negotiation with OEO officials, all mattered. Nothing mattered as much as the movement infrastructure in the community. He concluded that the movement had an impact on poverty programs independent of other relevant factors. Children benefitted from Head Start. So, too, did bankers from the deposits of federal funds. In between, there were staff members whose salaries far exceeded those of most African Americans in the county43 and, as earlier stated, large plantation owners benefitted from the ditch draining of the Nelson Amendment project. In some instances, whole families found employment; in other instances, African Americans were harassed. Some unemployed members of the ACSC were bought off by the SPI. In any case, the Democratic Party carried the county and all the Mississippi Delta counties in the next presidential election and all presidential elections thereafter. From indicated that in 1966, SPI operated eight Head Start centers and served 600 children. Of the 600 children attending Head Start in 1966, one was white. A waiting list with more than half that number of children was indicated in Al From’s report. The CAP inspector found “that the ACSC centers were long on enthusiasm but short on expertise and competence. The ACSC volunteers were women who picked up the children and drove them to the centers, collaborated with them, led them in songs and games, and brought lunch to them. The meals, when compared to those at the SPI centers, were wanting.” On the ground conducting site visits, Al From reported that at “the SPI center cube steak was being served while on the same day at the ACSC center volunteers were rounding up beans to feed the children. Although protein of a different sort was being fed to the children at the two centers, the medical and nutritional needs of Head Start children were met.”44 Both 42 43

44

Al From, “Memorandum to Edgar F. May,” February 10, 1967. According to Al From’s Memo, “The staff salaries ranged from $10,096 for the white Director of Sunflower Progress; $7,920 to the African American Head Start director; $7,700 a year to a bookkeeper (whose husband was director of the NYC summer program); to $6,000 for the two African American directors of education and parents and volunteers for Head Start, respectively.” Al From, “OEO Memorandum of February 10, 1967.”

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groups, SPI and ACSC, had accomplishments. However, the politics of poverty was itself a battle, if not a war. Warring political factions were unrelenting – all were determined to either hold on to or loosen political and economic control. The ACSC had an opportunity to have some of its members serve on the SPI board but viewed such an action as a compromise. Some will recall that Ms. Hamer, from the Democratic Party National Convention in Atlantic City in 1964, did not cotton too well to disrespectful compromises. The ACSC was an organization of poor people trying to challenge the status quo. It did not matter that people who shared Ms. Hamer’s visibility were also members of SPI. What mattered is that they did not represent the poor, were not themselves poor and had been known to collude with the power structure. Hence, the SPI overtures to the ACSC were seen as attempts to immobilize or fracture a movement by having some ACSC members join the SPI biracial organization. For at least another year and a half, Al From reported, “SPI was unable to find a way to make the ACSC disappear, even though Mr. Crowe, the Director and former college instructor, was reportedly a part-time magician.” Even so, the War on Poverty in Sunflower had become, in the words of the second-year inspector, “a Civil War among poverty warriors . . . rather than an outright attack on the problems of the poor.”45 Over the objections of Senator James Eastland and the influential advisory committee of SPI, the ACSC was funded as a delegate agency to the CAP the following July of 1967. Allen threatened to resign as chairman of the board, and Harper viewed ACSC as the creation of Bobby Kennedy and OEO Atlanta. Harper was adamant: “Its program is operated for a favored group. There’s no question you think of ACSC, CDGM and FDP synonymously.”46 As County Democratic Chairman, Harper reasoned that if President Johnson were to win Mississippi in 1968, the Office of the OEO had to fund SPI and not ACSC. “The Democrats can’t win Mississippi without the Delta, and if LBJ does not stop Bobby, neither I nor anyone else in the Delta will work for him. These orders for a delegate agency came from the outside . . .”47 There was a zero-sum approach to Jack Harper’s community activism. He wanted control on his terms. In Sunflower, the white minority had monopolized political power for a century. The late Carver Randle’s observation, a decade or more later, that there was no will to share resources, would prove accurate. 45

46

Al From, “Memorandum to Bob Edmond on Sunflower County,” OEO Office of Inspection, February 7, 1968. 47 Ibid. Ibid.

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For its part, the OEO urged the warring factions to work together to achieve their goals. According to Al From’s report, five other specific recommendations were made: (1) to supervise elections in targeted areas; (2) ACSC was asked to work within rather than outside of the CAP agency; (3) CAP employment procedures had to be modified and militant Negroes had to be included on the board and staff levels; (4) steps had to be taken to assure Negroes had the right to speak out without fear of reprisals; and (5) the CAP must make vigorous efforts to involve poor whites in its program.48 What would change for the poor? Head Start’s efforts throughout the country have had long-term benefits.49 No doubt, the quality of Head Start staff, access to transportation, nutritional adequacy, child and parental endowments, and a host of other factors differentiate Head Start outcomes in local contexts. But what had the War on Poverty done to change federal policy prescriptions and the administration of poor support? Those in poverty, poverty scholars, policymakers, and implementers of policy, will not agree on whether the War on Poverty was won, lost, or, for that matter, ever seriously waged. All would agree, however, that an effort of some kind was made, with some successes and failures. What was the War on Poverty? Rhetoric, ideas, and goodwill? A product of bureaucratic maneuvering? A response to social and political forces? A way to meet the political needs of the Democratic Party and to shape a legacy for President Johnson? Was it motivated by an effort to assuage the protests within America? The origins of the War on Poverty can be found in some of the above. The late Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven presented a cogent explanation for the view that “politics was the motivation for the poverty effort, a response to the Birmingham civil rights campaign, the March on Washington in August, and the church bombings in September.”50 According to this view, the poverty program represented in part a strategy of political mobilization designed to ensure Democratic electoral success as well as a response to profound social currents in the United States.51

48 49

50 51

Ibid. Eliana Garces, Duncan Thomas, and Janet Currie, “Longer-Term Effects of Head Start,” American Economic Review, 92(4) (September 2002): 999–1012. Using non-experimental data from the Panel of Income Dynamics, the authors prove that the effects of participating in Head Start on schooling attainment, earnings, and non-criminal behavior are more positive and longer-lasting than have been reported. Ibid. Frances Piven and Richard Cloward, Regulating the Poor (New York: Knopf Doubleday Publishing, 2012); Andrews, “Social Movement and Policy Implementation,” 71–95.

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Then as now, the nation needed to both erase the edifice of legal racism and promote program interventions designed to radically improve adult capabilities and children’s educational trajectories. Head Start was a good start. Jobs Corps had vast potential, as did Legal Services. President Lyndon B. Johnson launched the federal government’s War on Poverty during his State of the Union address on January 8, 1964. Seven months later, Congress passed the Economic Opportunity Act. As a program, the War on Poverty comprised but one arm of a multi-pronged assault on economic hardship and its consequences: Johnson’s “Great Society.” It continued even through the early years of the Nixon presidency and drew its last gasp during the Carter Administration. In terms of upward economic mobility for adults, the impact of the 1966–1968 anti-poverty efforts in Sunflower was tremendous. Sunflower Progress employed more than 450 persons, most of whom lived in poverty before the program started. Sales tax revenue increased by 15 percent in the first year of the program. In total dollars, more than $2 million a year was in circulation in Sunflower. The so-called “ragtag band” of ACSC persisted and emerged as a delegate agency in 1968. The two groups merged some of their functions, and the distinctive moral and political character of ACSC eventually fused with the SPI board. The former ACSC representatives were among the least intimidated persons on the SPI board. As a rule, they had completed fewer years of education than their SPI counterparts, but what they lacked in formal education they compensated for in audacity and tenacity. They educated the non-poor of both races. The Hamer group helped with the political resocialization of some of the African Americans who, in later labor and education disputes in the community, rallied to the cause of justice and fairness. The national War on Poverty in Sunflower County merged with a local war for political and economic empowerment. The federal dollars thus constituted only one locus of control, albeit an important one. The political movement had awakened and/or given expression to latent discontent within the African American community. During the 1960s, African Americans had struggled to take control of their own destinies, envisioning a more equitable future in politics and economics. The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, the Delta Ministry, the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, and thousands of young people from the Yankee North forged a movement – a War on the Status Quo. An integrated indigenous movement to challenge the status quo across all locales had yet to emerge, however. This was so not because all or most

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whites in Sunflower were insiders but because caste still operated, and its main impact had been black economic temerity, dependency, and illiteracy. Ms. Hamer and other members of the ACSC emerged and challenged the white and black status quo. Thus, at some point in the lives of Sunflower residents, the ACSC challenge and the movement challenge would serve as more than public political theatre. Some might have even identified with this struggle as more than distanced spectators. Children whose parents were silent would later recall Ms. Hamer’s efforts and their parents’ chagrin. One child in the landed cohort remarked, “My parents did not respect Mrs. Hamer.” Like Martin Luther King, Jr., Hamer was attempting to transform local and national institutional practices in the concrete arena of politics and economics. What had begun as a fight for the right to dine or sit on the bus or railcar where one wished, a push for voting rights, party engagement, and the right to seek public office, became for King, Hamer, and Malcolm X, and a host of local people and others, a movement for full citizenship – political, social, and economic. No matter how sheltered or insulated families considered themselves, they did not, and do not live, or thrive in silos. The larger social, political, and economic arrangements matter for all families, including the poor and landed as well as the poor and landless. Families’ futures have been and are still inextricably bound up in the politics and economics of the community, state, and nation. Sunflower and Scott residents are a part of the history of the cotton economy, large plantation economies, small farmer deprivation, land confiscation, agri-business, cheap labor, and dual and unequal school systems. There could therefore be little common ground found among the local players. The very premise of the status group was to maintain control of the local economy and political system. Accommodation and control would be possible if organized antagonists like Fannie Hamer and supporters of equal access to opportunity could be banished or, at the least, repudiated as leaders. The life chances of the poor, especially children, were at stake during this struggle to obtain, maintain, and distribute the resources of the “Great Society.” Poor black children’s life chances were confounded in this locale. One thing is certain: a significant minority of African Americans in Sunflower were taking defiant steps to move outside of the caste system and lay claim to their citizenship and the resources needed to make citizenship real. ACSC was bringing local African Americans up from their reticence all the while preparing another generation for greater literacy and the greater capacity to compete in the race for success. In this context, collective struggles within and across communities would be as important

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as familial struggles. Finally, national system responses would be watched by all, and many would dare to transform their lives and, one day, plan how to unseat the status quo and chart pathways toward the common good. In white America and in the history of Sunflower, preserving the legacy and fallacy of white cultural superiority would deny quality public schools to the black impoverished for many generations. Private academies in Sunflower symbolized white resistance and the myth of white superiority. Private academies in Mississippi increased by 374 percent between 1950 and 1975. At the same time, segregated public schools there showed the resilience of the black community, the talent of the poor working class and middle-income children, and their quest for knowledge and the tools to move upward and sustain that trajectory.52 The poverty war itself focused on efforts to promote opportunity in four areas: juvenile justice, civil rights, job training, and education. The most popular, and the most successful, was Operation Head Start, which funded preschool education for poor children. The most controversial aspect of the program was community action – the requirement in Title II of the Economic Opportunity Act that the new community agencies created to receive and administer federal anti-poverty funds be “developed, conducted, and administered with the maximum feasible participation of the residents.” Although the Economic Opportunity Act did not specify legal services as part of the War on Poverty, Office of Economic Opportunity director Sargent Shriver decided to include it. By the end of the 1960s, OEO had allocated over $20 million to 130 legal services projects. In 1974, after a contentious legislative struggle, President Richard Nixon signed into law the legislation creating the Legal Services Corporation. Isaiah Madison, the original lawyer in Ayers, worked at North Mississippi Rural Legal Services at the time Ayers was filed. Between the late 1960s and early 1970s, the federal government expanded public social spending on social services, public assistance, public housing, and legal services for the poor.

52

In 1998 in Sunflower County, 27.2 percent of students in 4th grade scoring in the first quartile of norm-referenced tests lived in a county with a child poverty threshold of 37 percent. According to one study, “children in Sunflower County who grow up in poverty are 43% more likely to score in the first quartile once they reach school age than are children who did not grow up in poverty.” Stokes, Ramey, and Grace, The Development of a Plan for Early Childhood Education Services for Sunflower County, Indianola, and Drew, Mississippi (University of Alabama-Birmingham and Mississippi State University 2001), 37.

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Medicaid and Medicare created a system of national health insurance for welfare recipients and the elderly, while the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act for the first time sent copious amounts of federal dollars to public schools that served disadvantaged youth. In 1977, Congress eliminated the charge for food stamps, and President Jimmy Carter signed the bill indexing social security to inflation. The significant but unheralded outcomes of these programs deserve recognition. Medicare and Medicaid expanded the availability of medical care for the elderly and indigent in some states more than others. Poverty among the elderly plummeted while their use of non-emergency medical care soared; between 1964 and 1973, hospital discharges of the elderly rose by 350 percent.53 The elderly poor began visiting doctors at the same rates as everyone else. Operation Head Start helped significant numbers of poor children prepare for school and increased the likelihood that whites would finish high school and black boys would stay clear of the juvenile justice system.54 Upward Bound prepared large numbers of adolescents for college;55 and financial assistance permitted thousands of young people from families with low or modest incomes to take advantage of higher education, while the funds provided by the Elementary and Secondary Education Act channeled unprecedented dollars to local schools, which allowed them to hire staff and develop programs for students from impoverished families. In the Nixon administration, important measures were created that, if they had passed in Congress, would have had salutary effects on furthering the reduction of poverty. Nixon favored the negative income tax as well as placing a floor under the income of every family with children and the establishment of effective work incentives for able-bodied Americans.56 Since the early 1970s, there has been a robust debate in the US about poverty’s causes, how poverty should be fought,57 who among the poor is

53

54

55

56 57

Nancy de Lew, “Medicare: 35 Years of Service,” Health Care Finance Review, 22(1) (2000 Fall): 75–103. Eliana Garces, Duncan Thomas, and Janet Currie, “Longer-Term Effects of Head Start,” December 2001, available at ipl.econ.duke.edu. Marilyn Ingram, “Examining the Effectiveness of Upward Bound on Postsecondary Success: A Phenomenological Study,” Theses and dissertations (2018), 931, available at https://digital commons pepperdine.edu/etd/931. Richard Nixon, State of the Union Address, January 22, 1971. Sheldon H. Danziger and Daniel Weinberg (eds.) Fighting Poverty: What Works and What Doesn’t (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986).

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deserving58 of federal poor support59 and who is not.60 These debates characterize our nation’s struggle with those who fail to achieve upward economic mobility (on their own) compared with those who are deemed exceptional, meritorious, or otherwise deserving. Some are obscure, whereas others lay bare debates about our nation’s heretofore insincere efforts to erase structural racism and poverty. A rigorous structural racism policy agenda would focus on removing the vestiges of enslavement and servitude, its oldest progeny. Minimally, it would focus on life and death and why black babies and moms die in childbirth more than they should, and why on average black life ends sooner than white life. It would assiduously monitor and cultivate incentives for locales to offer early and continuous exposure to a quality public education – K-12 – and help sort out housing and income and wealth insecurity. In the twentieth century, there has been a conversation about poverty in every administration since Woodrow Wilson’s. While Truman favored rent control, Eisenhower suggested that we spend less on the military (unless real threats emerged) and more on adherence to values that permitted security for struggling families. Often poor farmers, domestics, and sharecroppers did not fare well in pre-1960s local, state, or national poverty talk and protections. Neither the Fair Deal nor the New Deal measures included support for working sharecroppers like Josie and Agnes and their parents or domestics like Catherine. Their general welfare was not protected or privileged by those with authority and power. Pushed by international shame and a grass-roots movement for black and poor people’s citizenship, post-1944 presidents and Congresses summoned the greater will to moderate, if not eradicate, poverty. The federal Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), food support, Medicaid, and housing and child assistance are major provisions that helped the poor survive, but not, in many cases, exit poverty. Enacted in 1975, the Earned Income Tax Credit was the nation’s largest cash outlay to the poor. The largest amount for a single person or couple without qualifying children is just over $535.00; with one qualifying child, the largest amount is $3,584; with two qualifying children it is near $6,000; and with three or more, it is $6,660. The EITC affords working families or individuals with annual incomes of below $37,870 to $52,000, depending on the number of 58 59

60

Lawrence Mead, Beyond Entitlement (New York: Basic Books, 1987). David T. Ellwood, Poor Support: Poverty and the American Family (New York: Basic Books, 1988). Katz, War on Poverty to the War on Welfare.

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qualifying children, a refundable tax credit. Assuming working guardians can provide evidence of the age, relationship, and residency of the qualifying child or children, their claims for the annual EITC benefit can be met. In 1993, President William Clinton tripled the EITC. Its impulse was to support the working poor rather than the non-working poor. As many as twenty-seven states, including Louisiana, North Carolina, Virginia, and Maryland, have fortified the EITC along with several local jurisdictions, among them New York, San Francisco, and Montgomery County, Maryland. Knowing this history and the impact of federal policies on poverty reduction, the 1993 tripling of the EITC notwithstanding, the Welfare to Work actions taken during the Clinton administration seemed ill-considered, even cowardly. Yet the Welfare-to-Work policy reflected a sizeable portion of American elected elites’ belief that people were poor because they did not work or were lazy and that poor support should be temporary, as long-term poor support stigmatizes the poor and disincentivizes work. This is reasonable only if an opportunity to strive is not constrained by a rigid racial hierarchy across all spheres of valued human endeavor. Through its Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF), the Clinton administration re-engaged narratives about who was not married, who was working,61 and who was providing childcare for poor children. Political chatter about welfare dependency, out-of-wedlock births, intergenerational poverty, and welfare queens began anew during the Clinton years and mounted to a crescendo during the 1992 midterms when the Republicans regained control of the House of Representatives. Working with Mississippi’s senior senator, Trent Lott, Clinton worked to find a political accommodation with Republicans. He had twice vetoed Republican-sponsored measures to drastically curb poor relief in the United States. This time, with an election looming and his promise to reform welfare as we know it, he ceded ground to conservatives catalyzed by the Contract with America, a legislative agenda advanced by the Republican Party, to define the deserving in ways that dehumanized single moms, most of whom already worked for wages too slim to support their families. The new vocabulary of poor support included in TANF was a highly crafted political reprise. The political response to the impoverished was to 61

Lawrence Mead, The Nonworking Poor in America: The New Politics of Poverty (New York: Basic Books, 1992). See William Wilson’s counterpoint in Wilson, When Work Disappears (New York: Knopf, 1996).

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“work for a living,” and find childcare for their children, purchase food and shelter on a minimum wage. Though she had worked multiple jobs her entire life and had income generated from her spouses, Catherine, from Scott County, agreed with this impulse. Clinton’s welfare reform was Hoover-like in its inspiration. It punished mothers with small children who had to both find childcare and look for work. It obscured the need to upskill the poor and to build jobs in communities where large shares of the black poor lived. A living wage was not proposed. Subsidies for quality childcare were not offered. Early Head Start, from birth to five years old, was not recommended. What was Welfare-to-Work designed to accomplish and how did it manifest itself in Sunflower in the 1990s and 2000s? The premise harkened back to the English Poor Laws. Only the truly needy, the aged, the disabled, and the alcohol-addicted could benefit from the federal safety net for an extended period. Able-bodied men and women could have minimal and temporary familial support. No matter the need, such needs should not become permanent in a place where work is available and wages from work are sustainable and livable. The problems are that many poor families work for low wages, and in cases where families are headed by (not-welleducated) people without a co-provider, work may not pay for health care, licensed child support, reliable transportation, shelter, and nutritious food. Reba and Eve had training programs that led nowhere. There was work that did not pay for basic subsistence. Upskilling was ephemeral. Their disappointment ballooned. President Clinton’s Personal Responsibility and Work Reconciliation Act of 1996 (PRWORA) placed lifetime limits of five years on recipients, gave great latitude to the states, placed stricter limits on food stamp eligibility, and reduced immigrants’ eligibility. States were given block grants to design their own systems. They were given the latitude to adjust if they met basic requirements. On August 22, 1996, President Clinton signed the measure. A black woman, a past welfare recipient from Clinton’s hometown in Arkansas, flanked him as he signed the legislation. Proponents of the measure lauded its pro-marriage stance, the end of entitlements without work, better enforcement of non-custodial child support payments, and restrictions on some undocumented immigrants, especially the withholding of state professional licenses. They established a single success metric: a reduction in caseloads. The redirection of poor support from the federal to state governments meant that states could do as much as they pleased or as little to strengthen exits from poverty. As in states with large shares of the poor, the block grant, and the state’s

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fortification of it, has meant less generous spending per family. In any case, decreases in benefit levels and, in many cases, the number of eligible recipients have not significantly reduced poverty. A reduction in caseload was, in fact, not a success metric. Rather, it was an easily manipulated indicator without consequence. It simply meant that eligibility criteria would mean a reduction in TANF enrollment. This is especially true for the poor in states and jurisdictions with slow economic and job growth. In some cases, there would not be enough work. Low-wage jobs would not reduce the poverty rate. Like Mississippi and West Virginia, these places needed both innovations in job creation, increases in literacy, and supportive childcare and transportation provisions, not to mention healthy ways to help the chronically poor readjust mindsets formed as adaptations to intergenerational rather than episodic poverty. Economic downturns would pose challenges for the working poor, assuming they could find work. Economic booms would more likely ensure their employment, but not at a living wage, at least not without upskilling and improvements in formal education. A booming economy would mean greater difficulty spending the block grant funds, which states were allowed to keep and spend according to their discretion. If rising tides had ever lifted all boats, they no longer did so during the last quarter of the twentieth century. Economic productivity benefitted economic elites. Those whose adaptations to poverty and legal racism have been the hardest are blue-collar inmates in the nation’s mass incarceration project: prisons. Absent from their families as breadwinners, the mostly femaleheaded families have struggled to make emotional, physical, and fiscal ends meet. Ever since convict leasing in America and the 1890 Mississippi Constitution that gave it life, black men have been not only on parole but part of the undervalued labor source for elites and their projects. Not only did the federal government narrow poor support in the PRWORA legislation, but it also banned food stamps for drug felons, issuing a lifetime ban those states could opt out of if they desired to do so. On May 14, 2019, Jimmie Gates wrote in the Clarion-Ledger that in Mississippi, drug felons can now get food stamps. As of this analysis, one of the nation’s poorest states, West Virginia, has a lifetime ban for drug felons, along with South Carolina. The struggle with poor support has a subtext for much that passes as race politics in the early twenty-first century USA. Sunflower County’s woes are a snapshot of the value of that debate to materially impoverished children and single moms who struggled alone in the TANF era. In the TANF and postTANF eras, in rural areas with large shares of blacks, poverty was and is

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high. Jobs were and are scarce and seasonal. Wages were and are low. Licensed quality childcare was and is negligible and unaffordable. Schools were and are segregated. There, too many have been in a recession their whole lives. The War on Poverty and Great Society did not eradicate poverty in America, but during the years when the programs flourished, poverty dropped, then, to its lowest recorded point in US history. Half a century later, in 2020, poverty rates in the US reprised the rates just after the War on Poverty. The child tax credit and the ETIC would lift families out of temporary poverty. During the COVID-19 and racial crises in the United States, unemployment benefits and stimulus checks would give the poor a life raft. The old child tax credit eliminated 27 million lowincome children. The new child tax credit, a feature of the Biden American Rescue Plan, provided for a one-year increase in the amount each child, up to three children, was eligible to receive. Depending upon their age, the increase per child was from $2,000 to $3,000 or from $2,000 to $3,600. This increased monthly household income to 235 dollars per month per child aged 6–17 and 300 dollars per month per child, 6 and under, up to three children. Couples earning $150,000 annually, or $75,000 as single heads of households, were eligible to receive the Child Tax Credit. Some families would need these resources to make ends meet, and others would have an opportunity to save or invest these one-time funds or build an emergency fund for the very first time. In Sunflower, where there is great food and income insecurity, poor access to health care, and too few adequate public schools, parents would have to choose wisely the best use of funds, including investing in tutors to help kids struggling to read at grade level. Federal poor support is best used when local and state governments join this movement to stabilize family income and erase child poverty rates. It is not profitable to rehash old arguments about whether free enterprise has done more to eradicate poverty or pit military spending against domestic values and community, or the unintended effects of welfare-to-work, time limits, the value of marriage, or personal responsibility. It is time to guarantee access to quality and continuous early education through 12th grade. It is time to ask how private academies might partner with public schools to strengthen poor students’ success in reading, writing, and arithmetic. It is time to arrest poor oral and mental and physical health care. It is time to systematically address the basic health needs of the poor and underserved in rural communities from Mississippi to California and Connecticut. In Mississippi, Republican governors, mayors, and legislators of both parties have not consistently led in ways that engender competence and

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confidence and certainly not in generative policies and conversations. What can be done, and who might jettison failed pathways and lay the routes forward? For much too long, prisons, detention centers, poorquality schools, disinvested communities, and legislatures in Mississippi have been the poor houses rather than the starting points for harnessing new prospects for sustaining exits from poverty toward citizenship and intergenerational achievement.

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What the Research Tells Us

Victim blaming is common in American culture; it may lead to less self-reflection, sympathy, empathy, and anemic mobilization for systems change. Victim blaming locates the behavior of the victimized person or group as being proximately responsible for his circumstances – poverty and the cycle of poverty. Thoughtful scholars have recognized that to become conditioned by poverty is not to have caused it. Every crosscentury iteration of victim blaming and the culture of poverty theses has undergone scrutiny. The question remains: Can human beings live in chronic disadvantage or advantage and not become conditioned by it? When the lived experiences of the poor are examined to discern the patterns, routes, and rates of intergenerational exits, the humanities, the social and behavioral sciences, including neuroscience scholarship on chronic adversity, impoverishment, and trauma, can inform policy decisions, multidisciplinary research, and teaching programs and lead to human services practices or public policy interventions that generate new and sustainable routes or exits from the conditions that foster poverty and chronic disadvantage. Extant literature offers at least four frames of reference for understanding poverty contours in the United States. INTELLECTUAL SIGNIFICANCE

Overlapping frames of reference – a conceptual and empirical lens through which to view poverty – inform this section: (1) poverty as history; (2) poverty as structurally conditioned/culture; (3) poverty as policy and ethics; and (4) poverty as the interplay between nature and nurture. These frames or approaches overlap significantly. These multidisciplinary frames filter human experience and influence how we see ourselves and others. It is possible to enrich the vocabulary of poverty by examining the 324

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evolution of poverty knowledge and analysis across disciplines, offering cross-cutting perspectives on human and societal development, protective environmental contexts, and channels or mitigation strategies to significantly reduce inequities in political, economic, and social opportunity. Social and behavioral scientists and humanities scholars, especially historians and economists, have offered a context for understanding what it has meant to be down and out in America across time and place. Economists have analyzed the determinants of economic mobility and which factors create varying rates of sustainable economic progress. For example, Raj Chetty has posited that social capital, segregation, inequality, school quality, and family structure are predictors of economic mobility. Apparent, too, in Chetty’s work, is economic mobility’s bidirectional trajectory, upward and downward. This bidirectionality means that some in the middle-class have been able to rise from the lower class, and some have fallen from the highincome quintiles to the middle-class and below it. Economists such as William Darity Jr. and Darrick Hamilton, economic stratification economists, have shown that income inequality and wealth inequality are not the same, and hence, securing income equality alone will not lessen wealth inequalities. It is thus important to distinguish income mobility from wealth mobility. Sociologists and thoughtful historians and journalists have looked at systemic structural barriers to economic prosperity with a focus on macroeconomic and political forces, not just individual behavior, or subgroup behavior. Political scientists such as Frances Piven and Theda Skocpol have made contributions to this field by studying the responses of elites and state regimes to poverty policies and policy advocates from colonial times to the present. This is critical grounding for an examination of economic stratification. Some of this literature opens doors for understanding the mobility treks of immigrants, Native Americans, and particularly, for our purposes, women, especially mothers, and the welfare state; it offers a heuristic about which early American movements spawned social policies to protect and value working poor and first-generation middle-class black families and others burdened by legal racism. We can examine how early social policy serves as the basis for the evolution of Great Society programs like the AFDC and its Welfare to Work progeny, TANF. And over the centuries since the American founding, poverty scholars have offered insights into how the institution of slavery and America’s four correctives to the legacy of enslavement and their vestiges (the Civil War, Reconstruction, litigation and Civil Rights, and Black Lives Matter movements) inform counter-movements and policy mobilization.

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Varying conceptualizations of caste, class, race, underclass, upward economic mobility, and poverty have evolved, leading toward a new poverty synthesis involving neuroscience, public health, qualitative narratives and case studies, and big income and macro-economic data analyses. The literature provides a compelling multidisciplinary framework, bridging the institutional and individual, to explain economic mobility and inequities, and their amelioration, from the twentieth to the twenty-first century. What follows is an analysis of how some of the literature stands up to the lived experiences of the families in this study. These families and their forebears labored to build profits for others. Their labor was extracted. They benefitted unevenly from a continuum of political movements to counter white supremacy and legal racism. Nonetheless, some sponsored a generation of middle-class children from fragments of chance bound together with religious faith, a strong work ethic, kinship networks, historically black colleges, and benevolence. The architecture for building resilient children to withstand enslavement’s legacy and contribute to its demise was no ordinary work. The interiority of institutions, including the family, the grounds on which resiliency and future orientations take shape, and the conception of the family as a political institution are, I have argued, interrelated phenomena. Often missing from poverty literature is how to situate intergenerational familial and community trajectories in the context of the nation’s institutional failures and promises. In times of economic downturns or demographic shifts, or both, this omission has given rise to not just victim blaming but to counterproductive public policies and to hyper-partisan political resentments, and national fracture. Institutions interact to shape the lives of families and individuals. This literature and the expanse of Land, Promise, and Peril show how institutions interacted with subordinated people and how these interactions have shaped history and impelled some humans to desperate circumstances and measures. FRAME 1: POVERTY IN THE AMERICAN HISTORICAL EXPERIENCE

Two historians, Jacqueline Jones and the late Michael Katz, generated knowledge that depicted the poor as strivers against long institutional odds.1 In 1989, Katz’s The Undeserving Poor offered a multidisciplinary 1

Jacqueline Jones, The Dispossessed: America’s Underclass from the Civil War to the Present (New York: Basic Books, 1992).

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and trenchant analysis. He cautioned against scientific blaming, and in the revised edition of his book, he spent time discussing neuroscience and epigenetics critically, all the while acknowledging that brain science had come a long way from the nature/nurture binary, arriving at conclusions less fatalistic and more nuanced. The Undeserving Poor’s thesis was powerful and simple: for the better part of the last four centuries (400 years), the collective view of poverty has been one of a personal problem, a social history, and a social policy history that both the late social historian Michael Katz2 and the recent chair of the United States Partnership on Mobility from Poverty, economist David Ellwood,3 chronicled well. Published in the same year as Katz’s Undeserving Poor in 1989, Ellwood’s views are still resonant thirty years later. Three insights stand out: families in poverty have different constellations and needs that can be variously met by supplemental support, transitional support, and job support; to gain acceptance, poor support, at least state-based poor support, must uphold the primacy of autonomy, the virtue of work, family, and community; and in doing so, it must avoid disincentivizing work, family planning, and parental separation. This still makes sense – that is, if living wages and safe and affordable homes and adequate public education can be sustained over generations and can benefit all populations, making all lands promised lands and all families promising. In the American context, economic promised lands and promising families cannot exist well apart from political, market, and educational promised lands. What Jack had, long before he reached the middle-class and joined the political class, was access to the rulers and the rule of law. Both granted him access to markets and land speculation, Ole Miss, and to power wielders willing to use their influence to push his income, not just his political aspirations. He did the work, but he had access to economic and political resources. Josie, Agnes, Matthews, Williams, Catherine, Clementine, and Lonnie did not enter a world made for their economic, political, or educational advancement. The world made for them was designed to advance others; a more equitable world had to be made anew. In The Dispossessed, Jones focused on those for whom there had been no promised lands. This was a world of wrenching displacement of millions of

2 3

Katz, America’s Enduring Confrontation with Poverty. Ellwood, Poor Support. For a report on the partnership’s recommendations, please see Ellwood and Nisha Patel, “Restoring the American Dream: What Would It Take to Increase Mobility from Poverty?” (January 2018), available at research.hks.harvard.edu.

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rural Americans, both blacks and whites, beginning after the Civil War and following their great trek into the industrial centers and urban ghettos of the North. Through the stories of ordinary families, The Dispossessed and Labor of Love and Labor of Sorrow systematically dismantle the myth of the “culture of poverty,” challenging the central tenets of the underclass debate. Jones shows how families and black women in particular struggled mightily as domestic housekeepers, on cotton plantations, men in coal mining camps, and black men and women in factory towns, to piece together a livelihood and free themselves from economic dependency. Jones has argued that the common thread running throughout scholarship on both the black and white poor is the absence of place and opportunity – the inability of the poor to preserve status throughout generations. Jones’s and Katz’s findings would be empirically supported in the decades that followed. The Dispossessed traces the lived experiences of people who went in search of literal upward economic mobility movement, from, say, one plantation or farm in rural Mississippi or Georgia to another, seeking a bare living wage or protection from domestic violence, sexual harassment, or unhealthy housing. Jones’s subjects energetically and tirelessly sought opportunity, and often found discrimination. Notwithstanding legal racism and discrimination, like the families chronicled here, their lives and everyday search for freedom had dignity, honor, and purpose. Individual and familial striving interacted with public policies rigged against the black working and rural poor. Theda Skocpol’s Protecting Soldiers and Mothers offered a detailed historical case study of how (mostly white) women and men (soldiers) were able to get an upward economic mobility toehold during the latter part of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.4 Summoned by Theodore Roosevelt, the 1909 White House Conference on the Care of Dependent Children was the starting policy ground for twentieth-century mothers’ pensions. However, soldiers’ pensions dated from at least the period of the Civil War. Brandi Clay Brimmer’s stunning expose on black women’s struggle to receive a Civil War widow’s pension in fluid family contexts sets a preamble for scholarship examining later eras of the welfare state.5 The stigma associated with

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Theda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995). Brandi Clay Brimmer, Claiming Union Widowhood (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2020).

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the early twentieth-century discussion focused on single mothers who were separated from their children by poverty alone. Impoverished mothers were encouraged to place their children in orphanages or foster care.6 One of the areas of greatest variation was in eligibility requirements for pensions by states. New York and New Jersey only permitted grants to widows. Other states extended coverage to deserted, divorced, or mothers with institutionalized and incapacitated husbands. Michigan and Nebraska explicitly allowed payments to unmarried mothers. Legislation in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Washington, Colorado, Pennsylvania, Maine, and Indiana covered “mothers of dependent children” without reference to marital status. Notwithstanding amended laws to extend coverage, by 1931, only twenty states permitted aid to any needy mother, and two states – Connecticut and Utah – still only permitted aid to widows.7 A survey of mothers’ pension programs in 1931 by the Children’s Bureau found that 82 percent of pension recipients were widows. More disturbing, though, was the racial composition of pension recipients: 96 percent were white, 3 percent were black, and 1 percent belonged to “other races.” Most of the black recipients, furthermore, were in two states – Ohio and Pennsylvania.8 In its totality, this literature drives home how deeply stacked the deck was against the black rural poor seeking economic mobility. A state-centered analysis of social policy highlights which mothers were valued and which ones were not. It recognizes the role middle-class women played in fostering a “maternalist”9 movement, but it fails to recognize the roles that localities – states – play not just in promulgating poor support or welfare policy but in distributing or choosing not to distribute federal resources. Josie and Agnes, Catherine and Hattie, and Jack, Matthews, and Williams understood themselves to be citizens of the locale, state, and nation. They wanted protection and opportunity from all sources. They wanted to be valued at home and by the nation. They looked for land, work that paid, a place to call home, and adequate education. They sought dignified citizenship with duties, responsibilities, and equity before the law.

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Mark F. Leff, “Consensus for Reform: The Mothers’ Pension Movement in the Progressive Era,” Social Science Review, 47(3) (1973): 397–417. 8 US Children’s Bureau, 1933, 3. Ibid., 11–13. Theda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995).

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FRAME 2: THE CULTURAL AND INTERGENERATIONAL REPRODUCTION OF POVERTY

Oscar Lewis Alice O’Connor’s Poverty Knowledge laid bare the evolution of poor support and its ever-narrowing contours, showing that the culture of poverty idea is “perennial and perenially contriversial.”10 This idea asserts that an individual’s values play a critical role in perpetuating poverty. Its modern origins can be found in the writings of Oscar Lewis,11 but it gained notoriety in the context of a heated debate about African American families and the black and white underclasses. Lewis argued that urban poor Mexican and Puerto Rican families had adapted to their economic conditions and created a “design for living” that was passed on from one generation to the next.12 Lewis characterized this “design for living” adaptation as an attitude of living for today, otherwise known as instant gratification, and an attitude of fatalism, accompanied by high rates of divorce and families headed by women. Children, he argued, absorbed the basic values and attitudes of the subculture and were therefore not psychologically oriented to take full advantage of changing conditions or increased opportunities. According to Lewis, this environmentally induced adaptation was self-perpetuating in communities in the preliminary stages of industrialization but not in advanced capitalist societies. He did not inquire whether adaptations are perpetuated by systems of disinvestment in communities with large shares or concentrations of dispossessed people. In this regard, he appeared to lean into the culture of poverty thesis – as being carried by the poor themselves, rather than being embedded in multiple systems of profound, injurious indifference and disinvestment.

William Julius Wilson William Julius Wilson expanded upon this thesis, indicating that cultural adaptations to conditions of extreme oppression/deprivation seemed to 10 11

12

Alice O’Connor, Poverty Knowledge (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001). Oscar Lewis, Five Families: Mexican Case Studies in the Culture of Poverty (New York: Basic Books, 1959). Oscar Lewis, “The Culture of Poverty,” in Daniel Patrick Moynihan (ed.), On Understanding Poverty: Perspectives from the Social Sciences (New York: Basic Books, 1969), 199.

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have hardened into self-perpetuating patterns. In 2009, Wilson wrote More Than Just Race. In contrast to his earlier works, The Declining Significance of Race and The Truly Disadvantaged, which were structural analyses of the challenges facing the black urban poor, in More Than Just Race he argued that three generations of the ghetto poor have become conditioned to living in a culture of poverty. Forty-five years after Moynihan’s report on the black family, Wilson argued that socialization had taken hold, with devastating effect on the ghetto poor. The good news from Wilson’s perspective was that regeneration is/was possible. Wilson might have described his observations in terms of “thick poverty” and “thick adaptations,” which have become norms of survival fortified by a few supportive or sustaining alternatives in places of great emotional and material want. Neither thick poverty, intergenerational, nor thick adaptations to thick poverty are magically ameliorated. Sustained co-investments in communities and individuals are required. Is the poverty of Wilson’s black ghetto poor any more intractable than that of J. D. Vance’s, James Agee’s or Walker Evans’s white poor?13

Daniel Patrick Moynihan The notion of a culture of poverty was taken up three to five decades after Dollard and Powdermaker’s scholarship in the Moynihan Report and Nicholas Lemann’s The Promised Land, two works of poverty scholarship written over a quarter-century apart. In these studies, the black family was detached from meaningful context – its national moorings, the foundations of enslavement, labor exploitation, and the over-incarceration of black men. Moynihan’s academic contributions would straddle both the culture of poverty literature and the policy realm, as he argued for a public jobs program and, under Richard Nixon, for a guaranteed annual income. He would attribute the disintegration of the black family to a destructive vein in ghetto culture, traceable to enslavement and Jim Crow. Moynihan’s sociological analysis implied that self-destructive patterns, intergenerationally transmitted, rather than institutional – federal, market, and state – disinvestment was the lifeblood of ghetto culture. 13

James Evans and Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: Three Tenant Families (Houghton Mifflin, 1941; 2nd ed., 1969).

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Assuming, for the sake of argument, that Moynihan was correct – that most ghetto environments adversely affect self-regulation and that black people’s adaptations to slavery and segregation exacerbated poverty’s grip – they were not the root cause of poverty. Poverty was not innate to black mothers or even to black communities but was influenced by perceptions and structured by the persistence of legal and extra-legal racism. “Toxic stress”14 – chronic multigenerational disadvantage – wrought by racism indicts our nation’s core principles and functioning. As I have shown in this work, intergenerational insults and injuries are consequential: low opportunity neighborhoods, poor political representation systems, violence, chronic disease, wage theft, incarceration, premature death, malnutrition, homelessness, and ill-education are specific structural injustices and threats to intergenerational and national thriving. If, as Moynihan concluded, ghettos are insidious environments that spawn intergenerational cultures of crime and poverty, our cities, states, and our nation should remove them while bettering the capacity and capabilities of former dwellers to access safe and reliable transportation, employment, housing, human development opportunities, good schools for children, and affordable housing and nutritious food. If this cannot be done well across the nation, then these residents should have access to the income needed to purchase affordable housing in good communities and remove all discriminatory barriers. Where there are housing shortages, creative thinking about decent and sustainable alternatives is needed.15 Moynihan’s analysis implicated black women in urban low-income dwellings as agents, not as those victimized by it. A stamp of inferiority linked to black mothers’ DNA held in the American imagination and in economic tough times coarsened in the American mind. However, it was 14

15

Jack Shonkoff, “Hearing on Examining the Failures of the Trump Administration’s Inhumane Family Separation Policy,” February 7, 2019. Shonkoff testified that “extreme exposure to toxic stress can change the stress system so that it responds at lower thresholds to events that might not be stressful to others, and therefore the stress response system activates more frequently and for longer periods of time than is necessary. This wear and tear increases the risk of stress-related physical and mental illness later in life.” See Jack P. Shonkoff, W. Thomas Boyce, and Bruce S. McEwen, “Neuroscience, Molecular Biology, and the Childhood Roots of Health Disparities: Building a New Framework for Health Promotion and Disease Prevention,” Journal of American Medical Association, 301(21) (2009): 2252–2259. Gianpaolo Baiocchi, Marnie Brady, and H. Jacob Carlson, “Beyond the Market: Housing Alternatives from the Grassroots,” Dissent Magazine, 65(4) (Fall 2018): 51–58; Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City (New York: Crown, 2016).

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the impoverishment of housing opportunity itself that was a carrier of poverty’s intergenerational hold for Agnes and Josie; they were not themselves carriers of a culture of poverty. Amy Krosch and David Amodio find that “socio-economic context can shape perceptions of minority group members, and this process may contribute to the widening of racial disparities during economic stress,”16 such as recessions and pandemics. Economic scarcity may in fact exacerbate disparities in the allocation of resources.17 Culture and poverty18 and the culture of poverty thesis are not the same analytical constructs. The cultures to which we are exposed and the ones we absorb, consciously and unconsciously, critically and uncritically, influence our worldview. But our adaptations, how we cope with them, and what changes in our primary environments largely determine what takes hold and what gets shredded. Why do some people jump toward an opportunity to better themselves while others do not? Clementine was intelligent and someone noticed and took action. Opportunities to advance her career road were in plain sight. Others affirmed her intelligence and offered her a road to greater skills and income. Clementine saw that the payoff was not farfetched. She could imagine the preferred future. The feeling of economic vulnerability was etched into Jack’s core being. His love of oratory and observations regarding how to get ahead prudently and politically influenced both his imagination and his actions. His relative poverty informed his values of thrift and directed intergenerational pathways to community college and informed the qualities he valued in a spouse. How might scholars meaningfully separate context from culture? How is it that Jack embraced some political traditions but rejected the inevitability of the material condition into which he was born? Whatever the value of a renewed focus on poverty and culture, better defining customs, resistant cultures, and salient upward mobility experiences and environments will likely matter. Finally, parent-child attachments, parenting values and examples of work, and farm and land ownership mattered greatly and differently to the families presented in this work.

16

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Amy Krosch and David Amodio, “Scarcity Disrupts the Neural Encoding of Black Faces: A Socioperceptual Pathway to Discrimination,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology: Attitudes and Social Cognition, 117(5) (2019): 874. Ibid. Mario Small, David Harding, and Michele Lamont, “Reconsidering Culture and Poverty,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 629 (May 21, 2010).

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Nicholas Lemann and Isabel Wilkerson Nicholas Lemann’s The Promised Land and Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns are engagingly written narratives that reconstruct the lives and treks of families who left the South hoping to find healthy communities, communities offering economic opportunity and family stability. In 1991, Lemann traced the journeys of three sharecropper families from Clarksdale, Mississippi to Chicago. The author followed a specific population: those who went north to the Promised Land, as opposed to Dollard’s and Powdermaker’s subjects who stayed home in the sharecropping Deep South. His thesis: they were swallowed up by the poverty warriors who gave money to gangs and built ghettos and projects that left the poor more isolated, segregated, and dependent on welfare, an outcome shared with the sharecroppers exploited by unscrupulous work contracts. Lemann’s claim was that the people themselves brought the pathology of poverty from rural outposts like Dollard’s Southern town to big cities like Chicago, the site of Lemann’s investigation and that of Wilson’s early poverty studies. When Lemann added the consequences of the War on Poverty to that pathology, he called attention to the governmental role while also blaming the victim, labeling his subjects as carriers and supplicants and the government as an enabler. Lemann did not argue that welfare or that the War on Poverty produced a culture of poverty; he argued, instead, that openness to other ideas – like massive job programs or mixed-use housing, or skills-based workforce programs for African American men – might have dislodged established coping strategies, learned under conditions of intergenerational disadvantage, that produced better outcomes. He asked: What is/was constitutive of American pathology and how had slavery, segregation, and random violence conditioned the American experience, including America’s ghetto poor? These works were structural, historical, and political analyses in method, tone, and tenor, a stark contrast to the ahistorical and individuated neuroscience scholarship emerging just one to two decades later. Comprehensive studies purporting to offer insights about the rural poor and their treks from poverty needed to also address how the white poor understood opportunity and fought to get ahead. Instead, many social scientists, historians, journalists, and policymakers have spent an inordinate amount of time studying the characteristics and outcomes of those African Americans who chose to leave the South in search of opportunity. Who did better or worse only matters if this knowledge can inform under what

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conditions moving to opportunity is more feasible and intergenerationally sustainable than bringing opportunity to disinvested communities. Nicholas Lemann accurately identified the public policy hits and misses associated with finding stable and affordable housing and economic mobility in the inner city of Chicago. Lemann was attentive to his three primary subjects – G. Hicks, U. Carter, and Ruby Lee Haynes – and their outcomes. Ruby Haynes’s life was chronicled in Lemann’s study of the interactive effects between community and family – the public and the private – but the two blurred as the narrative arc formed. As the only woman in his historical account, Haynes, who quit sharecropping in 1938, read like a picture of despair, a caricature, a walking pathology. The tangled web of despair had created conditions that engulfed her capacity to move ahead. Her life had been precarious since her birth to an unwed mother and an absent father, whom she met for the first time when she was twenty years old. She had worked on the Hopson Plantation, making pennies a day. She moved north to Chicago, following Highway 61 out of Clarksdale. She met one misfortune after another. There she found public housing, finally landing in the public housing project Robert Taylor Homes – hardly the Promised Land, or the seeds from which to grow the American Dream. She worked at numerous low-skill and low-paying jobs, earning .75 cents an hour in a laundry, then moving from there to a factory, a restaurant, a hotel, and the stockyards. Multiple marriages and divorces later, she was left on her own to make the journey to the Promised Land pay off. She needed to escape not just low-paying jobs, but inadequate formal education, domestic and community violence, segregation, social isolation, and despair. She longed for a stable marriage, and after multiple tries, she found that search as elusive as the American Dream, as hard to get hold of as a living wage, and as illusory as a community ready to embrace her as a human being, no matter her circumstances or missteps. Was Haynes anomalous in terms of how she experienced Chicago or did others from the Mississippi Delta, from Clarksdale, Bolivar, and Sunflower, and beyond, suffer similar misfortune? Not all, not most, African Americans who fled the Delta had been long-term sharecroppers, and not all who had cropped in Mississippi had been born to unwed parents or been deserted by their fathers or mothers. Even so, demographic information alone cannot predict sustainable outcomes or temporary poverty exits. Context matters. More texture and thickness of detail are needed to bring into focus how exits occurred without privilege and historical advantage. Further, the places the poor homesteaded have not traditionally been places of promise,

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where public and private capital investments are high and repetitive chances for intergenerational familial exposure to quality educational and economic opportunity are ordered and intentional. Cabrini Green and the Taylor Homes, which contained 27,000 people and over 4,000 apartments, and where Ruby Haynes sought a new beginning, were not places of promise. Her experience poses the question: Does concentrated public housing of any kind offer more peril than promise? The precariousness of Ruby’s life was never bolstered by tangible fragments of chance or opportunity – fragments Mamma Rose and Catherine, her stepdaughter, stitched together to form a patchwork of intergenerational aspirations and rites of passage. In Catherine’s biography, told earlier, we found a braiding of values: work, affirmation of her worth, principally by Mamma Rose (her stepmom), her Christian faith, her friends and neighbors, notably Mamma Laura, schooling, marriage, homeownership, and high disregard for the abled-bodied unemployed. Catherine was widowed three times. Through it all, rearing and cultivating children and grandchildren to pursue the American Dream, she never blinked. Had Ruby adjusted to chronic adversity and, in her isolation and desperation, become trapped? Did Catherine simply have better luck, including a supportive network of kinship, religious community, and a modest home, or a different emotional constitution? What is not clear about Haynes’s story, as interpreted by Lemann, is whether her community had any of those strengths she could tap into. The intrinsic motivation for progress that all humans possess, including sharecroppers, needed unleashing, co-investment, and mobilizing. Wrought by systems of racism, much undermined her pathways to upward mobility. A wickedly chaotic early family life, along with failed public housing policies and the lack of access to a high quality education and living wage, got in her way, and got “underneath her skin.” Unlike Jack Harper, who marshaled support, Haynes was alone, very much in need of encouragement and thoughtful intervention. Haynes, unlike Catherine, whose father’s betrayal and irresponsibility are central to her childhood memories and to her adult yearnings and yet who was determined to be a resolute parent, proved unable to lock onto enough promise to look after her children successfully. Like The Promised Land, Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns follows three individual migrants from the South. They were one sharecropper’s wife, an agricultural worker, and a physician from Mississippi, Florida, and Louisiana, respectively. Significantly, each of Wilkerson’s subjects left the South in a different decade, the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, and headed to Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles.

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This approach signaled that the time of departure, destination cities, and the shares of blacks already in place mattered in terms of receptivity and economic mobility opportunities. This broad focus opened a new range of vistas for seeing and understanding the migrations and the migrants themselves. Her work chronicled the functional lives of these migrants, the hurdles they faced and surmounted, and the courage it took to leave a violent and tumultuous land, an unflinchingly racist land, in search of more mobility and better race relations. Her subjects are not caricatures. They have faults and make missteps, and they face discrimination, but they are not pathological characters with dysfunctional valances. Not only did they find a fragile freedom, but they also provided a pathway for those they had left behind. Wilkerson’s study begs a question: does this kind of life narrative avoid the pitfalls of confirmation bias any more than traditional social and behavioral science scholarship? In much the way that photojournalists’ portraits of the civil rights and peace movements moved a nation or shamed it into action, storytelling can conceal, obscure, and reveal truths. POVERTY KNOWLEDGE AS A POLICY AND ETHICAL DILEMMA

To understand this frame of reference, one might ask if the adverse conditions experienced by the poorest among us – blacks, whites, women, Native Americans, newly arrived immigrants, Reba Smith, and Eve Adams, whom we met in Indianola – are perpetuated by the market or state action, or both. To look forward, I look back to the seminal works of Gunnar Myrdal and Michael Harrington who wrote, respectively, An American Dilemma and The Other America. Both Myrdal and Harrington wrote about black impoverishment in ways that raised questions about the ethical and moral compass of the nation and the treatment of its poor. Myrdal published An American Dilemma in 1944. He characterized the problem of race relations as a conflict between noble ideals, embodied in what he called the “American Creed,” on the one hand, and inferior performance by the state and state actors on the other. In the generations since the Civil War, the US had been unable to put its human rights ideals into practice for the African American tenth of its population. Myrdal wrote, “At the outbreak of the Second World War, taxation was regressive for the poor; they paid a proportionately higher amount or rate and the higher income brackets, paid less; their taxation was steeply

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progressive.”19 He observed a trend in the United States to make public benefits available to more people, citing public schools, unemployment relief, and subsidized hospitalization. Myrdal then raised a principle with respect to African Americans: “They should partake of the burdens and the benefits of the public economy like other citizens in similar circumstances.”20 This, he wrote, is a corollary of the principle of nondiscrimination. He found that African Americans in the South had more difficulty securing relief aid and that the relief given tended to be lower than that given to whites of similar circumstances. The segregated schools, he said, were not equal, and neither were other institutions such as libraries, parks, and hospitals. He remarked that higher rates of illness and inferior housing created a much greater need for fairer access to services than was provided. He observed the same inequity in the absence of police and judicial protection and its alignment against African Americans. He noted inequities in employment and discrimination in the agricultural sector and the New Deal policies. Despite the South’s stiff arm against federal intervention, federal subsidies benefitted the wealthy and discriminated in favor of elite whites, big farmers, and plantation owners, who in turn discriminated against the poorest workers, those on the bottom of the employment rungs. In addition to local and federal discrimination, African Americans were said not to deserve benefits, only benevolence, because they paid no taxes, which was untrue. The message conveyed by this treatment resounded: African Americans were without much value except as cheap laborers and discounted citizens. This meant that poor whites were deemed less unworthy and more valuable than blacks. The actual discrimination presented above was conducted, said Myrdal, against the American Creed and the laws. But legal racism existed. Law and order had always been a challenge to white rule in Mississippi. And at the federal level, a view of a proportional share of benefits from the public economy was utilitarian but missed the equity mark. There was no doubt, however, that as a share of their labor (their contributions), blacks were discriminated against before and after World War II. But their fortunes improved as they gained a share of public jobs, especially jobs in the government sector, and as the gains in education, housing, employment, and voting rights, gains secured from the pre-1960s litigation and civil rights movements, opened doors that had been padlocked.

19

Myrdal, An American Dilemma, 334.

20

Ibid.

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In reviewing An American Dilemma, Ralph Ellison wrote: The task of reconciling moralities is usually the function of religion and philosophy, of art and psychoanalysis – all of which find myth-making indispensable. And in this, American sociological literature rivals all three, its mythmaking consisting of its “scientific” justification of anti-democratic and unscientific racial attitudes and practices. If Myrdal has done nothing else, he has used his science to discredit all the vicious non-scientific nonsense that has cluttered our sociological literature. He has, in short, shorn it of its mythology.21

Myrdal pushed back against claims that the American dilemma or Negro problem was a class problem. What was the central core of the American pathology as it related to the Negro? It was white Americans’ actions – policies and practices – especially but not only those of the southern elites, who were pathological political and economic actors. What Myrdal made clear was that the traits observed in the poorest Negro groups, much like the ones Dollard identified in Southern Town, were socially conditioned rather than innate. Ellison argued that what Myrdal failed to convey was that these poor and dispossessed people the world over recreated themselves and exercised agency, even as they were and are conditioned by their circumstances, experiences, and socialization. But, then as now, it is not always possible to exercise agency under conditions of chronic adversity. People do not make themselves over all by themselves, and for blacks and poor whites, class is inextricably linked to uninspiring institutional governance and the pace and quality of local and national political engagement, upward economic mobility policies, their enforcement, and evaluation.22 President John Kennedy and his brother, Robert, read Michael Harrington’s The Other America in 1962. It was Harrington’s depiction of the deplorable living conditions of human beings and the ravages of poverty that helped to put political machinery in motion. Harrington’s sober treatise forewarned about the moral and psychological costs of poverty. Harrington wrote the following: In short, being poor is not one aspect of a person’s life in this country; it is his life. Taken as a whole, poverty is a culture. Taken on the family level, it has the same quality. These are people who lack education and skill, who have bad health, poor housing, low levels of aspiration and prominent levels of mental distress. They are,

21

22

Ralph Ellison, “An American Dilemma: A Review,” 1(944), available at teachingamericanhistory.org, accessed December 4, 2021. David Paul Kuhn, The Neglected Voter (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2007); see also Susan J. Pharr and Robert D. Putnam, Disaffected Democracies, What’s Troubling the Trilateral Countries (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).

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in the language of sociology, “multi problem” families. Each disability is more intense because it exists within a web of disabilities. And if one problem is solved, and the others are left constant, there is little gain.23

He was right about the integrated web of poverty’s contours. Just as environments characterized by freedom from want have causes and consequences, poverty environments have causes and consequences. Harrington’s depiction of some of those consequences signaled the onerous tangle poverty can concoct. Poverty creates a subculture in much the same way that affluence creates its own subculture. In the larger society, poverty works against the poor, and affluence works in favor of the wealthy and often against the poor. Too often, culture gets assigned to the people themselves rather than to the environment interacting on people’s intergenerational life chances. In this study, culture is understood in the context of opportunities available for people to strive in community and nation, as well as the patterns of behavior, values, traditions, and orientations that characterize families throughout time and place. As scientists and humanities scholars seek to chronicle human history and explain determinants of human flourishing, both physical and mental, they might do so in ways better enabling the transferability of knowledge and convergence of human experiences across disciplines. What follows is an attempt at such a multidisciplinary analysis.

POVERTY AS NATURE AND NURTURE

Advances in neuroscience might begin to lay bare the toll that Harrington argued poverty takes on the poor. Drawing on the insights of neuroscience, Jack Shonkoff at the Harvard Center on the Developing Child24 and Elisabeth Babcock formerly at Economic Mobility Pathways (EMPath), the oldest women’s economic mobility organization in the nation, have laid important groundwork that avoids some of the pitfalls of the past. Economic Mobility Mentoring (coaching) offers promising outcomes for diverse families, especially in the realms of executive functioning, positive human development, and downstream outcomes for children.25 23 24

25

Michael Harrington, The Other America (New York: Macmillan, 1962). The Center on the Developing Child marshals the science of early education to inform transformative policies and practices. See Shonkoff et al., “Early Childhood Adversity,” 115–134. Charles J. Homer, Ashley Winning, and Kevin Cummings, “A Coaching Model to Promote Economic Mobility and Child Developmental Outcomes,” Pediatrics, December 23, 2021; Elisabeth Babcock, “Harnessing the Power of High Expectations: Using Brain

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Some of the past failures of science/medicine can be directly traced to the nation’s indifference to the poor – to the failure to see the poor as human beings with value, agency, and, to use William Wilson’s term, “norms of citizenship.”26 This Wilberforce- and Washington State University-educated sociologist understood poverty firsthand. He understood the power of his aunt’s belief in him and the value of education. Wilson’s poignant statement given in the Godkin Lecture serves as an urgent reminder: “Whatever accommodations they themselves must make to the negative realities which dominate their own lives, they know consciously or unconsciously that their fate is not the fate of mankind.” Behavioral scientists Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir have examined the science of scarcity – the consequences of living in negative realities which dominate lives intergenerationally. How might society diminish scarcity and mobilize lawful and innovative income and wealth-producing childhood, adult, and community environments? Mullainathan and Shafir argued that scarcity can both upend and focus the mind.27 They posited this in negative terms: a constant state of scarcity produces tunneling behavior, or a tendency to neglect long-term planning and goals to fix immediate challenges. Scarcity can reproduce a culture of poverty as people adapt and, at times, resign themselves to the contours of disadvantage and scrape by. The question is how one might transform disadvantaged environments characterized by economic scarcity into flourishing environments long before gaps in opportunity, reciprocity, self-respect, knowledge, and lives and deaths of despair widen. Early exposure to emotional and material scarcity or abundance influences brain functioning and conditions adaptations. Abundantly resourced environments can certainly compensate for unprepared or distracted parents and discriminatory institutional processes. Resource-poor families and communities, however, face a plethora of constraints, and the luckiest families and children find their way out to build healthier life chances. Historian Alice O’Connor described in 2014 the suite of current neuroscience and behavioral economic findings: These studies incorporate technologies and methods from biogenetics and brain science to argue that the effects of income deprivation are life-altering and direr than was once thought, and to redouble the case for the earliest possible interventions,

26

27

Science to Coach for Breakthrough Outcomes,” 2018, available at www.e,pathways.org/ research-policy/publications/2018-hughexpectations, accessed January 19, 2022. William Wilson, The Godkin Lecture, “The American Underclass: Inner-City Ghettos and the Norms of Citizenship,” April 26, 1988 (Harvard University, Cambridge, MA). Sendhil Mullainathan and E. Shafir, Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means so Much (Times Books, New York, 2013).

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starting in the womb. Recent studies in social psychology and behavioral economics follow suit with experimental and observational studies that show scarcity leaves poor people too cognitively impaired to make sound decisions about things like spending and borrowing and planning for the future and avoid making bad ones.28

She acknowledged the contributions and limitations of the neuroscience work: “In these and other ways, the latest poverty science seeks to dig deeper and to bring a new perspective to the presumably elusive ‘cycle’ that keeps poor people in poverty, or keeps sucking them back into it: Poor people make bad decisions, these studies tell us, not because they lack character but because material deprivation robs them of cognitive capacity.”29 She continued, “What these studies don’t do is acknowledge or engage the political-economic dimensions of the issues, except possibly as afterthoughts.”30 O’Connor is on to something important. A small cadre of scholar-practitioners, such as Shonkoff, Babcock, and their colleagues, have shown how important adult capabilities are to mitigating intergenerational poverty. It is to that discussion that I now turn. First, the nature and nurture binary is discussed. Genes are units of heredity, containing information that directs and influences development. Some studies have argued that the environments and experience can remodel our molecular makeup. Shonkoff and Phillips’s From Neurons to Neighborhoods, published in 2000,31 offered a review of scholarship on early childhood development that underscored and validated Michael Harrington’s perspective on the farreaching toll that poverty exerts on the poor. Public health scholars, David R. Williams, Jourdyn Lawrence, and Brigette Davis among them, have identified chronic poverty and racism as public health challenges for the nation and world and have set out some useful interventions and reforms, some transformative.32 Their transformative potential is heavily reliant on what scaling can occur to mitigate structural racism, especially residential segregation. In From Neurons to Neighborhoods, Jack Shonkoff and his colleagues drew upon adverse and recurring childhood experiences in world contexts. The authors’ findings disrupted the nature and nurture binary and asked that we grapple with the converging or interactive effects of both institutional racism

28 29 31

32

Alice O’Connor, “Poverty and Paradox,” The Hedgehog Review, 16(3) (Fall 2014). 30 Ibid., 4. Ibid. Jack P. Shonkoff and Deborah Phillips, From Neurons to Neighborhoods: The Science of Early Childhood Development (Washington, DC: National Academy of Sciences, 2000). David R. Williams, J. A. Lawrence, and B. A. Davis, “Racism and Health: Evidence and Needed Research,” Annual Review of Public Health, 40 (2019): 105–125.

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and adaptations to poverty or chronic adversity on executive functioning, self-regulation, and public health outcomes. Neuroscience previous to this work had produced few rigorous critiques of institutions and their roles in reshaping or harnessing strengths-based environments. Shonkoff’s scholarship implicitly connected nation, nurture, and nature, and I have attempted to do so explicitly. Gene Robinson’s 2004 article in Science, “Genomics: Beyond Nature and Nurture,” established that DNA is both inherited and environmentally responsive.33 Thus, for example, early nurturing regulates the expression of a gene which is crucial to modulating the stress response. As Darlene Francis and Daniela Kaaufer asserted in the October 2011 issue of The Scientist, “Environmental effects (nurture) are modulated by genetic polymorphism and epigenetic programming of gene expression (nature) to shape development. So, as the molecular underpinnings are elucidated, the need to study the interaction between environment and our genome is highlighted, and the divide seems less relevant.”34As I have argued, the political, historical, and economic dimensions of poverty and upward economic mobility are integral to the nurture/environment and nature interplay. It is hard to disagree with the idea that “systems” or environments influence the life chances of the poor; historians, philosophers, and social scientists have written cogently on their psychosocial, economic, and intergenerational effects. It is only when neuroscience is brought into conversation with the humanities and the social and behavioral sciences (as has been done at Harvard, Columbia, Wisconsin-Madison, and Duke, for example) that a more nuanced and full-bodied narrative about poverty’s contours and amelioration will enter the public mind and become accepted. The late Michael Katz, Alice O’Connor, and Jacqueline Jones – all historians – have produced scholarship related to the historical dynamics of structural racism and classism. This body of work has implications for the research and practical interface between public health, neuroscience, and history – the lived experiences of the poor – without regard to their race or ethnicity. Taken as a whole, then, this scholarship reminds us that economic and social conditions, experiences, and opportunities can set individuals, families, and communities on a course to succeed and/or fail, but such 33

34

Gene Robinson, “Genomics: Beyond Nature and Nurture,” Science, 304(5669) (2004): 397–399. D. Francis and D. Kaaufer, “Beyond Nature and Nurture,” Scientist, 25(10) (October 2011): 94.

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conditions and experiences need not determine individuals’ or families’ or regions’ destinies. Trajectories are, nonetheless, set in motion.35 In our new understanding of what racism (not merely income deprivation or episodic scarcity) does to the developing brain, how might our nation reverse course? The neuroscience literature posits some answers and some limitations. It is through the lens of early exposure to strengths-based environments that epigenetics is being reimagined. The reimagination bears heavily on new science, but science by itself carries too little weight. It requires an interrogation of extant systems and norms of social insurance and safety nets, including a guaranteed family income to supplement inadequate wages and the systematic repair of injuries perpetrated by the state and markets, intergenerationally. Dignified social services interventions and systems change might, in combination with a guaranteed income or state and/or federal-sponsored living wage job programs, reverse those cascading intergenerational effects (on children, parents, and families). Practitioners eager to provide one-on-one interventions alone ignore the interactive effects of racism on mindsets and fair opportunities. If the human and social services sectors are to play roles more consistent with O’Connor’s and Katz’s critiques, they must transform themselves, including, as they are able, revamping upward employee wage scales, retirement benefits, and health and childcare facilities. They must not reproduce poverty among employees while trying to ameliorate it in the populations they serve. They must engage in sectorial change, asking what the nation and locale might value and how robust investments in human and fiscal capital sharing and mentorship would add value to families and communities, and to public policies and national cohesion. NAVIGATING INTEMPERATE PATHWAYS ACROSS TIME AND PLACE

As previously shown, some of the scholarship on the Great Migration contends that those who left the South and those who stayed had different human capital assets from the very start.36 Those studies that treated those 35

36

Raj Chetty, Nathaniel Hendren, Patrick Kline, Emmanuel Saez, and Nicholas Turner, “Is the United States Still a Land of Opportunity: Recent Trends in Intergenerational Mobility,” The American Economic Review, 104(5) (2014): 141–147. Chinhui Juhn, Murphy K. Murphy, and Brooks Pierce, “Wage Inequality and the Rise in Returns to Skill,” Journal of Political Economy, 100 (June 1993): 410–442; Chang-Tai Hsieh, Erik Hurst, Charles Jones, and Peter Klenow, “The Allocation of Talent and US Economic Growth,” Journal of Econometric Society, 87(5) (September 2019): 1439–1474.

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who stayed and those who did not as binaries – works such as Norman, Boyle, Rees (2005) and Black, Sanders, and Taylor obscure more than they illuminate.37 The interactions between those who left for many decades, compared with those who left for a decade or less, and those who never left, are much more linked and nuanced than is supposed. The treks of Rudolph Payton (long-Midwestern-stayer and widowed), Hattie Isaac (short-Midwestern stayer and separated), and Halester Myers (long-Midwestern stayer and widowed) point to ways in which migrants’ access to jobs with pensions up north was inversely linked to the length of stay on the agricultural ladder down south and less linked to their educational status beyond high school. One part of the intergenerational poverty exit story is one of early exposure to strengths-based familial environments – north or south. As already indicated, frequently those who left Mississippi – Halester, Mamma Rose, Jimmy, John, Hattie, and Isaac – left contemporary and older land-owning family members behind. Some, like Halester (a bluecollar worker) and John Farmer (a physician), would return to places in or near their place or state of birth with pensions and more Social Security assets than those who had stayed in the rural South. Among non-high school finishers, no matter how hard those who stayed had worked, their wages and benefits were smaller. If they stayed married and finished high school, north or south, however, the educational and occupational outcomes of their children were more favorable. About one-seventh of the Sunflower Seven and their children/kin made it to the professional class of physicians and lawyers. Two sevenths of those who married once graduated college and professional schools and were honorably discharged from the military – made it to the middle-class and sustained their new class status, as did most of their children. The rest, functionally illiterate sharecroppers who stayed on the lower rung of the agricultural ladder, elementary or high-school stop-outs, female household heads, and Rebecca and Evelyn, then unemployed, stitched together a bare existence, with mixed results for their children. Evelyn and Rebecca, contemporaries of the children of the Sunflower Seven, had downward

37

Paul Norman, Paul Boyle, and Philip Rees, “Selective Migration, Health and Deprivation: A Longitudinal Analysis,” Social Science and Medicine, 60(12) (June 2005): 2769; Dan Black, Seth Sanders, Evan Taylor, and Lowell Taylor, “The Impact of the Great Migration on Mortality of African Americans: Evidence from the Deep South,” American Economic Review, 105(2) (February 2015): 477.

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economic mobility trajectories. They also spent more time in Chicago (outside of the South) than others in their work. Sociologists Eichenlaub, Tolnay, and Alexander’s 2010 study, “Moving Up but Not Out,” and the 2017 “Second-Generation Outcomes of the Great Migration,” in Demography, offer promise in the comparative realm of migration studies. In both works, the authors drew upon census data to help explicate the outcomes of those who stayed and those who remained in the South. These studies found that those who left did not do appreciably better than those who stayed or moved to towns and cities inside the South.38 First-generation outcomes were not better for those who migrated. Their 2017 examination examined how the poverty status of children of African Americans who migrated to the north compared to that of the children of African Americans who remained in the South. Modest but statistically significant advantages in education, income, and poverty status were found for migrant children when compared to southern children who stayed in the south. In her seminal and recent work, Katherine Curtis found that “migration experiences are diverse and have complexity and consequences for understanding racial inequality.”39 She, too, called for a nuanced theoretical approach to migration that gives weight to economic and non-economic racial dimensions, such as education and human capital development. Sociologist J. Trent Alexander and his colleagues did find evidence to support the theory that leaving the South resulted in residential advantages for children of the Great Migration participants.40 The characteristics (high school and college completion, marital status) and receptivity of places to large shares of blacks and labor needs of the migration participants no doubt matter in terms of their capacity to find opportunity and sponsor their children’s upper economic mobility. A few scholars placed in context the ways in which the changing economy and shared family fiscal assets were inflection points in the nation’s exclusionary opportunity structure.

38

39

40

Suzanne C. Eichenlaub, Stewart E. Tolnay, and J. Trent Alexander, “Moving Out but Not Up: Economic Outcomes in the Great Migration,” American Sociological Review, 75 (2010): 101–125; Christine Leibbrand, Catherine Massey, J. Trent Alexander, and Stewart Tolnay, “Second-Generation Outcomes of the Great Migration,” Demography, 54(6) (2017): 2249–2271. Katherine Curtis, “US Return Migration and the Decline of Southern Disadvantage, 1970–2000,” Social Science Quarterly, 99(3) (2018): 1214–1232. J. Trent Alexander, Christine Liebbrand, Stewart Tolnay, and Catherine Massey, “Neighborhood Attainment Outcomes for Children of the Great Migration,” American Journal of Sociology, 125(1) (2019): 141–183.

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PLACED-BASED STUDIES

W. E. B. DuBois In the late 1890s, W. E. B. DuBois undertook a scholarly examination of one of the African American migration destination cities, Philadelphia. Eight decades later, William Julius Wilson examined poverty’s mechanisms as structural economic epochs, each with different influences on economic mobility, centered on his historical examination of American economic shifts since World War II. In some ways, DuBois and Wilson’s works are bookends; they help readers understand the progression of challenges faced by communities and citizens in places with large shares of blacks over the last century. DuBois and Wilson and the scholarly debates their works engendered can be used to frame and animate convergent and divergent academic disciplines, stories, narratives, and actions of the Sunflower Seven, the Scott County family, and their progeny, and illuminate poverty research. W. E. B. DuBois’s The Philadelphia Negro is one of the first efforts by an African American sociologist to live in the community while studying it. DuBois and his first wife, Nina Gomer, moved into the seventh ward of Philadelphia in 1896. Living in impoverished quarters, he and his associate, Isabel Eaton, employed archival, descriptive, and survey research, mapping households by family structure and other characteristics and interviewing over 5,000 Philadelphians.41 He certainly observed crime, drug addiction, and poverty; he also saw a concentration of black professionals and white affluence. He wrote that the Negro problem was not just one thing but a complex of challenges made worse by whites’ enforcement of racial discrimination and unequal access to opportunity. He found zealous discrimination in housing and access to industrial jobs, good jobs with a living wage and health benefits. DuBois believed that both African Americans and whites had to change, but meaningful change, he argued, was needed in how whites perceived African Americans. The perception of African Americans as inferior was a barrier to social and economic mobility. The Fisk- and Harvard-educated sociologist believed in equal opportunity and wrote the first empirical analysis of the so-called Negro problem of the late nineteenth century. The Yale Review lauded it as a credit to American scholarship, and in the 41

W. E. B. DuBois, The Philadelphia Negro (Philadelphia: The University of Pennsylvania Press, 1899).

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introduction of the 1995 revised edition, the University of Pennsylvania sociologist Elijah Anderson celebrated it as the first and finest engaged sociological scholarship – the kind that contemplated social reality and helped to change it. What conclusions did DuBois draw?  Poverty is a complex system, characterized by both racial discrimination in the job sector, with African Americans having bad jobs, and unequal access to education and housing  Poverty is lodged in areas of high black concentration, in part because of whites’ perceptions of African Americans  Elevated levels of crime are emblematic of a lack of opportunity – scarcity  Income differentiation and class differentiation coexisted within the same neighborhoods  Moral and behavioral deficiencies in African American poor communities hold the poor back DuBois more than hinted at a culture of poverty in his “moral and behavioral deficiencies” statement. The five conclusions DuBois draws are quite powerful; they have resonance today for both the urban and rural poor, especially as a description of the causes of poverty and poverty’s weight on human development and human flourishing, both black and white. Neuroscience and epigenetics suggest strongly that these so-called deficiencies are not innate; poor people are not born with moral and behavioral deficiencies. Maladaptive behavior is learned and normalized and can be unlearned through lawful opportunities to prosper, selfawareness, and a capacity to sustain upward familial mobility trajectories. At the time of DuBois’s writing, Philadelphia had not emerged as a city of intra-racial binaries. To be sure, “haves” and “have-nots” were present, but the isolation of the poor was not yet severe, as DuBois indicated that both income and class differentiation were obtained in the same neighborhoods. It remained to be seen how long and why the professional class would coexist alongside the poor, provide role models, and build networks of advancement across the generations. And would the black upper, middle, and lower class co-exist for any longer or shorter periods than the multigenerational ethnic immigrant groups in Boston, Miami, Chicago, or Los Angeles? DuBois had warned of the depopulation of cities by the middle and upper classes – a phenomenon which Wilson, writing eighty-two years later, would term “spatial isolation,” which was portrayed as a loss of human and social capital for those left behind in the inner ring of cities.

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A similar depopulation of some of the older and more successful residents has occurred in rural America, leaving ghost towns like the Promised Land in Sunflower and schools inhabited by those who were subjected to the gravest public violence and economic historical disadvantages. POWDERMAKER AND DOLLARD REVISITED

Like DuBois and Wilson, scholars writing about the poor have paid attention to the history, geopolitics, and political economy of the place, focusing on the interactive effects of institutions and socio-historical arrangements on people’s access to or denial of full-bodied opportunity. Wilson’s work implied that there was an over-class, not just an upper class. The underclass phraseology presupposed that some individuals were profiting off the underclass and that, whatever their personal deficits or cultural adaptations to poverty, their economic situation was at best co-produced by the over-class. Yale-educated sociologist and psychoanalyst John Dollard believed that to understand people’s choices, it was necessary to understand the culture into which a person is born. He believed, further, that social class influenced a person’s learning experiences. He therefore wanted to observe people’s actual living conditions. Great Depression studies like John Dollard’s 1937 Southern Town and Hortense Powdermaker’s 1935 Cottonville left unanswered questions relevant to this analysis. Was Powdermaker too optimistic about the plasticity of caste and the role of religion and education in mitigating caste and lower-class permanence in Sunflower? She did not examine the economic and social constraints facing black men and boys, even in the 1930s. She did foresee black women’s capabilities in mitigating poverty’s permanence. Moynihan,42 in the decades that followed, underscored deficits, mostly as a matter of black family structure and too little job opportunity. But does coping with racism make people sick in a gendered way? The southern town Dollard examined was Indianola, the capital seat of Sunflower, the same Cottonville that Hortense Powdermaker, a cultural anthropologist, chronicled in After Freedom. Like Dollard, Powdermaker believed that the poor made psychological adaptations to their socio-economic and historical environments. As shown in an earlier chapter, in support of the findings of After Freedom, Sean Hier and 42

Daniel Patrick Moynihan, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action (Washington, DC: Office of Planning, Policy, and Research, US Department of Labor, 1965).

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Candace Kemp in The Women’s History Review mused about the importance of contextual historical analysis to our understanding of poverty and family dynamics.43 What did the caste school obscure that historical analysis explained? What did Powdermaker’s social analysis obscure that Dollard’s caste analysis explained better? Dollard argued that both the sharecropper arrangement and the political caste systems undermined upward economic mobility. Caste compelled economic and social systems of race relations far too rigid to permit a breakaway and far too strong to permit transcendence. Did Dollard misjudge the capacity of the African American rural poor to exorcise caste? We have examined the trajectories of more than a handful of lower-caste adults who, like Agnes and Josie, were able to build value-added interior lives in family and community. In the public square, caste was diminished by protracted frontal attacks on legal racism and appeals to the nation’s creed. In the private space of the black family, caste was treated variously as a permanent barrier to internalizing how freedom might look and feel and/or an artifice built to rationalize white supremacy. Some black families, north and south, survived segregation with a sense of their worth and a keen sense of their possibilities. Landownership and a home of one’s own did not remove legal racism, but north or south, land and homeownership and the protective safety and affirmation of human flourishing allowed families (renters and homeowners) to close psychological ranks against legal racism. Thus, for Powdermaker and Dollard, a better explication of the caste role in diminishing black masculinity and lessening the paternal role in parental role-taking would have been illuminating. Likewise, an examination of the health and social penalties black women would pay as exemplars of the race would have been helpful, especially in interrogating the urban black welfare queen narratives in the decades that followed and the vulnerability of women and their reproductive health throughout. From the perspective of upward economic mobility, would not married and unmarried households engaged in low-wage work – and high school incompletion – black, brown, and white – require more opportunity to thrive and better protection against capitalism and its excesses? Dollard and Powdermaker both offered a key hypothesis later postulated by neuroscientists and groundbreaking practitioners such as Elisabeth Babcock and Shonkoff: environmental settings influence performance. 43

Sean Hier and Candace Kemp, “Anthropological Stranger: The Intellectual Trajectory of Hortense Powdermaker,”The Women’s History Review, 11(2) (2002): 270.

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Not mere performance, but faith, opportunity, and expectations. Powdermaker would add that these belief systems lodged in Christianity, rather than in lower-class caste norms, would over time compel upward black economic familial mobility. The bonds, cognitive and emotional, developed between families, settings and opportunities – contemporary settings of elite and mid-tier schools and universities, skills trade in health care and IT, community college, work, church, community, and role reinforcements – would or could defy the permanence of caste. Science has since borne out her claim that bonds develop between people and settings during human development.44 Familial as well as individual performance/achievement and behavior are indeed shaped in part by settings, both internal practices and imaginations, and external observations and opportunities. The external settings or environments expose families, especially children, to expectant gradients of substantial or meager opportunity and reciprocity. Adaptations to poverty are learned behaviors that might be unlearned under community and familial strengths-based conditions such as those advanced by Jack Shonkoff and the baby bonds originators, William Darity, Jr., and Darrick Hamilton. Darrick Hamilton and William Darity address the issue of economic scarcity and strengths-based material and emotional environments.45 They have suggested that putting an end to economic scarcity requires early exposure to opportunity and advanced opportunity investment in infants – baby bonds. The logic is compelling: if poor children born today started the world with bonds or a publicly funded trust, they and their parents’ expectations for their future would be more hopeful, and their goal-setting more future-oriented and intentional. Baby bonds would open the prospect to a future of greater possibility, if not a guaranteed promise. Scholarly findings suggest that children with aspirations for college, and teachers and principals with aspirations for students to attend college, behave in ways that children, teachers, and principals lacking this

44

45

Arnold Samaroff and Michael Mackenzie, “Research Strategies for Capturing Transactional Models of Development: The Limits of the Possible,” Development and Psychopathology 15(3) (2003): 613–640; Oliyenne Skinner, Xiaoran Sun, and Susan McHale, “Links between Marital and Parent-Child Relationship in African American Families: A Dyadic Approach,” Journal of Family Psychology, available at psynet.apa.org, accessed September 26, 2021. William Darity and Darrick Hamilton, “Can Baby Bonds Eliminate the Racial Wealth Gap in Putative Post-Racial America?” The Review of Black Political Economy, January 2010.

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aspiration/vision do not.46 Thus, both psychological and material good could come into play earlier in a child’s life, positively affecting child rearing and parental efforts to deepen and expand exposure to knowledge, opportunity, and role models in school and earnings.47 High parental expectations matter here as well as elsewhere because, as has been shown, working-class parents who set and reinforce high expectations for children in early life enable them to set goals and strive against great odds toward the achievement of those expectations. The families in this work demonstrate that impoverished material environments are hard places from which to set and achieve consequential goals. As Hamilton and Darity indicate, a baby bond trust fund would be related, inversely, to the level of family wealth. An early and continuous strength-based investment in children from materially fragmented homes could lessen inequality, heighten economic growth, and focus children’s and parents’ goals and imaginations on their human agency and material development.48 Baby bonds could serve to lessen the performance of inferiority, as the need to perform is premised on the perception that African American inferiority is the norm.49 At eighteen, children could potentially begin a business, purchase a home, or pay for their education. What really matters is that children would begin the world with a cushion and not have to face uncertainty with empty pockets or be weighed down by low national or familial expectations. Instead of thinking that my family and I have been unfairly disadvantaged our whole lives, one now thinks, as did Agnes, Josie, Matthew, Jack, Williams, Isaac, and Clementine, “I have a chance and I can make it count – all things being equal; I can make progress. Demanding work will

46

47

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49

Charles Beady, Jr. and Stephen Hansell, “Teacher Race and Expectations for Student Achievement,” American Educational Research Journal, 18(2) (Summer 1981); Matthew Anderson, “Transformational Leadership in Education: A Review of Existing Literature,” International Social Science Review, 93(2) (2017), Article 4, 99. Raj Chetty, John Friedman, Nathan Hilger, Emmanuel Saez, Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach, and Danny Yagan, “How Does Your Kindergarten Classroom Affect Your Earnings? Evidence from Project Star,” The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 126 (4) (2011): 1593–1660. Barbara Entwisle, “Putting People into Place,” Demography, 44(4) (November 2007): 687–703. John Ogbu, “Minority Coping Responses and School Experience,” Journal of Psychiatry, 18(4) (1991): 433–456; see also Kevin Michael Foster, “Coming to Terms: A Discussion of John Ogbu’s Cultural-Ecological Theory of Minority Academic Achievement,” Intercultural Education, 15(4) (December 2004).

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pay off.” It did not equitably pay off for Josie and Agnes; work, good mental and physical health, and luck counted, but they were insufficient. Risk factors in the lived experience might lessen in the family and neighborhood if siblings were oriented toward a future where, through talent and applied effort, their chances for wealth and upward income as a family could often be realized rather than sabotaged by the nation’s policies. As more multidisciplinary approaches are probed, as answers are communicated and discussed in places of power, and as social services interventions mesh with guaranteed jobs and a living wage, we can hope that our nation’s citizens will be better poised to reassess their values; that their orientation will be guided by the will to elect accountable politicians and mobilize informed neighborhoods charged with leading the restoration of healthy trust in basic institutions – the family, schools, medicine, courts, and the statehouse and beyond; that they will be better situated to see themselves in the faces of others; that they will experience intergenerational possibility and probability in lands of promise as culturally plural as Sunflower and Scott and well beyond; that they will discover that they are now the progenitors of equitable futures and the curators of lands of promise without regard to race, religion, class, gender orientation/identity, or zip code. As intimated earlier, over the last three to four decades following these studies, newly accreted knowledge framed human development more holistically. Human development is influenced by nature and nurture, pointing to the role of early exposure to strengths-based environments and protective environments (absence of lawlessness, chronic trauma, financial or marital strain, hunger, and/or income insecurity) as a critical ally to early childhood development and adult capabilities. This literature has also shown how a genetic expression is altered by exposure to toxic as well as strengths-based environments, settings, and relationships. Finally, the research has demonstrated that human beings, children, and adults, are active participants in their own development – actors with intrinsic desires, capabilities, and imaginations. The above findings hold for populations in my family that stayed in Mississippi as well as those that did not. Those who left believed that the settings and experiences in a new region would be better than those they left behind. Those who stayed behind believed at minimum that they could create the internal familial experiences/settings from which or on which to build new opportunities. In either case, I have argued that most were interested in increasing their odds of securing and sustaining intergenerational upward economic mobility and nominal citizenship. There are

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inherent limitations and advantages in using biography to illuminate economic peril and promise. Those limitations lessen if we have access to a cross-section of observations and if researchers can studiously align policy progressions and contractions to political, economic, and social histories, with a triple focus on elites and local people, their thriving, and settings.

BIOGRAPHY AND SECTIONALISM

J. D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy, a memoir about growing up poor in Appalachia, was in some ways a call to understand the white rural poor’s stalled pathways out of twenty-first-century poverty – their sense of themselves as misfits, alone, and frustrated. He outlined the debilitating consequences of chronic (intergenerational) familial poverty on a community. We have known for a century what happens when people are trapped in poverty, but little scholarship offers fresh ideas about how to unlock those intergenerational rural poverty traps. If nothing more, Hillbilly Elegy warned that the white rural poor are no longer invisible in politics, as they were portrayed fifty years ago in Michael Harrington’s study or the way Nixon’s Silent Majority was characterized a few decades later. If nothing more, we learned of the politics of rural white resentment and its corrosive power. We hear in Vance’s musings resentment born of relative familial deprivation, biases about who gets over and ahead, and why. We learn that upward individual economic mobility is possible, but not for large numbers of individuals. Is his mobility pathway itself symbolic of the American Dream – of the Horatio Alger narrative of the American Gilded Age? Like Jack Harper, Vance rose to middle-class respectability, as did some black children from 1940–1964, born to parents with barely functional literacy. Stephen Greenberg’s incisive analysis of Hillbilly Elegy raises challenging issues.50 Greenberg wrote, “Conservatives are most certainly wrong to believe that this powerful personal narrative confirms their belief that poverty is invariably the result of bad personal choices and immune to any governmental solutions.” Plantation politics in Mississippi and coal mining in West Virginia were not the same things. The share of blacks in the plantation South is itself important in understanding poverty exits for the white poor. White working-class life in West Virginia, as in Mississippi, requires a class lens and robust historical underpinnings. Who seized the 50

The American Prospect, November 27, 2020.

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timber and mineral rights to land in West Virginia? Who fought the coal mining unions and the sharecropping unions and created an economy, if not a culture of poverty? The Depression rendered the coal economy anemic in West Virginia, whereas, in the Deep plantation South, large plantation owners stabilized their wealth with the support of government subsidies. Technology, mechanization, soil erosion, and black flight, along with the protracted civil rights movement, brought the plantation South down, though not to its economic and political knees. Unlike blacks who migrated north, east, and west at different epochs, West Virginians hewed toward home and particularistic values and attachments. Few whites from the plantation South ventured to West Virginia; they made new lives in the Midwest, west, and east. Poverty in the plantation South has been as entrenched as in West Virginia. Even so, though poor, the Jack Harpers of Sunflower were not Mississippi hillbillies, in sensibility or in fact. With grit, determination, system reciprocity, and white audacity, Jack made it out, as did his children. Jack’s exit exposed his children to a pathway both prudent and possible. There was no need for his kids to knife off from the parent generation’s thriving. Improving oneself was not an act of familial betrayal. It was for Jack’s kids what it was for Hattie’s, Clementine’s, and Catherine’s kids, an ode to parents’ sacrifice, teachers’ expectations, children’s motivation, and their discipline and perseverance. They saw chances, and they took them. That said, the social isolation of the rural South is a challenge to exits from poverty. In West Virginia as in Sunflower, for new generations of J. D. Vances and Jack Harpers, social policies, adult job prospects and a living wage, better public schools and schooling, and early mental health care are needed to stabilize exits from poverty and moderate social isolation and resentment. A living wage job matters to the mental, social, and economic health of families and their relationship to the community, state, and nation. We learn implicitly from Hillbilly Elegy that whites who have fallen back, or perceived that they have done so, are perhaps as resentful as those whose intergenerational pathways out of poverty have stalled. Chapter 12 in this book is biographical in much the same way that Hillbilly Elegy is biographical. There I sought to understand how my maternal family’s land had been lost in the late 1880s; how marriage, especially serial marriages, was/were helpful; how Mom’s unrelenting work ethic was transmitted to subsequent generations; how her disdain of welfare and able-bodied welfare recipients lessened the value she accorded

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some families and some community clusters in the neighborhood. What parents transmit to children is important. What children internalize is more complex. Of course, parents matter and muscular institutional early and continuous investments in the poor and first generation middle-class also matter. Throughout this work, I have shown that familial valences, ideas, and admonishments are data available to children. Siblings interpret this data and internalize them in diverse ways. They are sometimes unaware of what they have internalized in the short term. The work needed to understand how parenting orientations and early life exposures help shape children’s worldviews and actions, especially in times of stress, is daunting. RURAL AND URBAN POVERTY AT THE CROSSROADS

Sunflower’s population today is one-third of what it was in 1930. While some American cities have also experienced depopulation, cities contain the nation’s financial and political classes, as well as their white-collar workers. Reinvestment in those financial and political capitals has gentrified these places, causing market rate housing stock to rise, capital to flourish, and legislation to reflect the desires of the capitalist or corporate classes, often at the expense of laborers and the poor, especially the nonworking-class poor, who have languished, in some instances, in poorly resourced learning, health, and housing environments. By the 1970s, the nation’s failure to build high-opportunity neighborhoods across the land – rural and urban – would be chronicled in the scholarship of social and behavioral scientists, with an emphasis on urban America. Wilson’s poignant analysis enhanced and at times confounded scholars’ and policymakers’ critiques of poverty and poverty exits in the inner city. As a sociologist, he captured better than most the nature of the changing economic sector and the roles of globalization and deindustrialization in the life chances and the interior lives of the intergenerational poor, some of whom had found their way to Chicago during the early to mid-twentieth century. In The Declining Significance of Race (1978), Wilson outlined economic epochs and aligned them with the skills and opportunities available to African Americans from the period of the antebellum South through the modern-day Civil Rights era. While Wilson’s early work focused on the automobile industry and the strength of labor unions, his theoretical framework in The Declining Significance of Race covered an expanse of political and economic history: the pre-industrial, industrial, and post-industrial periods. The Declining

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Significance of Race addressed the temporal, spatial/geographical, and interactive effects of growing African American income differentiation and corresponding underclass stagnation. It is crucial to capture the concurrent interplay among class, increases in education, income earnings over time, and the governmental and private sector roles in fostering intergenerational as well as intra-generational upward and downward economic mobility. In this section, I begin with his characterization of the period just after World War II – what Wilson termed the Modern Industrial Period. This was the period during which the second cohort in my study was born. Wilson argued that the significance of race in explaining the life chances of African Americans, though significant, was in decline, and that other factors were in play. What had changed? Reflecting on the arguments originally advanced in The Declining Significance of Race51 thirty-seven years later (in 2011), Wilson concluded that, “it is difficult to determine which factor has been more important in shaping race relations since World War II. Economic expansion facilitated black movement from the rural areas of the South to the industrial centers and created job opportunities leading to greater occupational differentiation in the African American community, as an increasing percentage of African Americans moved into semiskilled and skilled blue-collar positions and white-collar positions.”52 It is indeed true that Momma Rose, who ventured from East Central Mississippi to Milwaukee, and Hattie Byrd, Lonnie’s first cousin by marriage, found greater opportunity for work in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and LaPorte, Indiana, respectively. It is also true that they both earned more than the average black worker in the rural outposts. What is not true is that Hattie and Mamma Rose had more education than the kin they left behind, though both could certainly read and write. Instead, they found more and higher quality opportunities to advance their wages and their retirement income than those they left behind. As previously indicated, Momma Rose was hired as a head seamstress at Jack Winter, a designer factory, where she worked for thirty years. Hattie worked at a detonation factory in Laporte, Indiana, earning hourly wages well above her Mississippi relatives. Other than university educator Uncle 51

52

William J. Wilson, The Declining Significance of Race (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1978 and 1980). William J. Wilson, “The Declining Significance of Race Revisited and Revised,” Daedalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 140(2) (2011): 55.

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Brasco Coleman no member of the Sunflower Seven or the Scott family migrant cohort who left the rural disadvantaged South from 1930–1950 landed in the white-collar class, however. Several relatives (not just children of the Sunflower Seven but their cousins, nieces, and nephews) in the Boomer cohort joined the ranks of the middle- and upper-class in the decades that followed.53 While economic expansion was occurring in the industrial centers, Wilson argued, “government intervention (in response to the pressures of increased black political resources and the civil rights protest movements) removed many artificial discrimination barriers through municipal, state, and federal civil rights legislation. Moreover, state intervention contributed to the more liberal racial policies of the nation’s labor unions through protective union legislation. These combined economic and political changes created a pattern of black occupational upgrading that resulted, for example, in a substantial decline of African Americans in low-paying service jobs, unskilled labor, and farm jobs.”54 In Mississippi’s post-World War II era, economic expansion occurred much more slowly, with the mechanization of cotton and crop diversification still some fifteen years away. Little significant occupational differentiation was occurring in the African American community in Mississippi through the early 1960s. Only faint traces of the pressures from the Civil Rights Movement were evident; barriers to economic mobility that stood in the way at the turn of the nineteenth century still held. They held as state elites pledged, one after another, to defend segregation in schools, marital relations, and employment. As was true of the nation’s segregated inner cities, the barriers most in need of falling away were political and economic exclusion, as well as poor schooling and poor health care; what was needed were opportunities to be well and to become well-educated in the humanities and social sciences and in wealth-based and value-added professions, such as education, business, technology, medicine, and law. As we have seen, it was 1886 before Mississippi required licensed teachers. Schools serving black children were chronically underfunded, 53

54

Marc Levine has shown that “Milwaukee’s black population is severely impoverished; its median household declined by 30% since the 1970s; and black home ownership in Milwaukee is 27%, the second lowest in the nation among large metropolitan areas.” See Levine, “The State of Black Milwaukee in National Perspective” Center for Economic Development, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (2020), available at https:dc.uwm.edu/ ced_pubs/56. Wilson, “The Declining Significance of Race Revisited,” 56.

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and child labor often kept poor kids out of school for all but one month of a four-month school term.55 In 1918, Mississippi was the last state in the Union to require children to attain some schooling. It was rare that black children attended public school for at least four-and-a-half months, while some whites, like Jack, attended for eight months. That interlinked edifice of privilege and wealth was undisrupted. In 1935, Sunflower boasted twenty-nine white doctors and eight nurses, all but three were white. In that same year, in Scott County, all the physicians and attorneys were white. In areas of public education and quality health care for the rural poor, the backwardness of white leadership in the rural Deep South would fall away only slowly. As Wilson intimated, in the 1950s, the emerging industrial centers in the US were in the manufacturing sector and, by revenue, the sector included petroleum, steel, automobiles, aerospace, telecommunications, chemicals, electronics, food processing, consumer goods, lumber, and mining. What kind of job opportunities did semiskilled and unskilled workers from the South secure in these sectors? Due to wartime needs, Hattie Byrd, Lonnie’s in-law, found work in the chemical sector, owing to wartime needs, and Momma Rose landed in the consumer goods sector, where, again, she earned promotions and advanced to head seamstress. Even if the “Up North” incomes of Mamma Rose and Hattie differentiated them from their rural stay-home kin, by what metrics might we assess the declining significance of race in the economic trajectories of African Americans across regions over a span of a century? I have argued here that the declining significance of race was nullified or neutralized in the rural Deep South by highly vituperative white officeholders, racism, poor schooling, and low-wage jobs. Governing elites controlled political and economic power and blocked access to even well-to-do blacks like Minnie Cox, Clinton Battle, and Lonnie Byrd. In 1978, the same year that The Declining Significance of Race was published, the United States Supreme Court decided Bakke, an affirmative action case arising from the University of California at Davis. Writing for the majority, Richard Nixon’s appointed Associate Justice Lewis Powell, Jr., upheld affirmative action but decided that strict racial quotas were unconstitutional even if race could be used as one of several admissions criteria for institutions of higher learning to achieve diversity.56 In Bakke, 55

56

Neil McMillen, Black Mississippi in the Age of Jim Crow (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989). Regents of the University of California v. Bakke 438 US 265 (1978).

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the highest court in the land signaled how it had wrestled with the question of race and its salience in the American economic and educational mobility story. As it had been for a century and more, the Supreme Court was still a gatekeeper and a barrier to political, social, and economic opportunity. Still, in 1978, Isaac, Jr., Alsee, Mary, and John Mickey had been beneficiaries of a graduate and professional school education and affirmative action; unlike some of their contemporaries, they had finished college, had mentors, and they had shown the requisite intelligence and capacity to learn and persist. Wilson had made an astute observation: a growing black middle-class was emerging, though its assets were far below those of the white middleclass. The rural non-high school finisher was languishing. Starting in the 1970s, some African Americans were earning salaries and positions that separated them from their poorer kin – north and south. Both phenomena, stagnation among the nation’s poorest and economic opportunity among the first-generation black working and middle-class, converged prior to the advent of the knowledge economy. All things being equal, black children, born into intact families, with aspirational, working class, literate, and landowning parents and kin, could find a way through, while their contemporaries without these assets or early exposure to educational quality and self-affirmation would stall. However much the decline in race as a factor might affect black life chances, it could not compete with “white legacies of (compounded) advantage.”57 Race never had receded in significance for the poorest, least welleducated blacks.58 Nor had it declined in significance in terms of the competition for wealth and the opportunity to advance in wealth-making professions or occupations, for rural blacks. Expanding and contracting economies and expanding and contracting inequalities, audacity, luck, and perceptions of life chances interplay. Literature has shown that racial discrimination and immigrant discrimination increase in tight labor markets when people at the bottom and those squeezed in the middle sense economic vulnerability and a keen sense of undeserved absolute and relative deprivation. 57

58

Alexandra Killewald, Fabian T. Pfeffer, and Jared N. Schachner, “Wealth Inequality and Accumulation,” Annual Review of Sociology, 43 (2017): 379–404. William Darity Jr. and Patrick Mason, “Evidence of Discrimination in Employment, Codes of Color, Codes of Gender,” The Journal of Economic Perspectives, 12 (1998): 63–90; Devah Pager, Bruce Western, and Bart Bonikowski, “Discrimination in a LowWage Labor Market: A Field Experiment,” American Sociological Review, 74 (October 2009): 777–799.

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If the economic sector and its distinctive epochal characteristics influenced African American economic life chances, what kind of emerging economy and macro-economic forces could sustain their poverty exits to the middle-class and asset accumulation in one generation and then another? And what would become of those left behind, not just in the inner city but also in rural outposts? In The Truly Disadvantaged, Wilson addressed this question, in part, by acknowledging that the urban underclass needed a better definition. In his 2012 reflections on his 1989 work, Wilson characterized the disadvantaged: “The underclass are the poor who inhabited inner cities, outside the mainstream of the U.S. occupational system – including those who lack training and skills and either experience long-term unemployment or are not members of the labor force. This includes those engaged in street crime and other aberrant behavior, families that experience long-term spells of poverty and/or welfare dependency or share the same social milieu.”59 This characterization was apt for the rural poor as well. The rural poor in Sunflower was truly isolated, unskilled, undereducated, and angry. Reba, the perennially unemployed Sunflower resident introduced earlier in this work, who exclaimed that she has known recessions her whole life, had gone to Chicago to live and returned to Sunflower. Her lament was the story of the non-working and intermittently employed black poor who had gone up north but immediately returned home to make another fresh start and found that start almost impossible in Sunflower. Like Eddie Landfair and Andrew Brown, she blamed herself – never the system. Eddie Landfair’s mother, Josie, believed, on the other hand, that she had been cheated out of wages earned and that if the white man had given her what her parents had earned, she “would not need nothing no more.” The rural poor saw themselves as bearing the chief but not sole responsibility for their economic lot in life. Wilson, like DuBois eighty-two years earlier, explained that a complex web of factors accounted for the persistence of the urban underclass and that a binary explanation of a culture of poverty or racism is insufficient as an explanatory factor. Such a binary analysis obscures the fact that “social, structural, cultural, and social-psychological variables are integrated into the underclass theoretical framework.” In Wilson’s conception, neighborhood contexts aggravated weak attachments to labor force participation.

59

William J. Wilson, The Truly Disadvantaged (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987; 2nd ed., 2012), 257.

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Wilson wrote that “both exogenous and endogenous factors explain dislocations in the low-income areas of the inner city.”60 Together, these factors create an interplay of some complexity. The exogenous factors (those produced outside the ghetto) are racial discrimination, restructured occupations, relocated industries, political processes, and increases in class conflict. The endogenous factors (those generated inside the neighborhoods) are social isolation, depleted neighborhood resources, weakened informal information networks, weak workforce attachment, and concentrated poverty.

INTERGENERATIONAL ECONOMIC MOBILITY SCHOLARSHIP

Diverse economic mobility scholarship of the last two decades has produced a wellspring of multidisciplinary insight. Lee Alston and Joseph Ferrie found that over three decades in Jefferson County, Arkansas, the ladder from laborer, cropper, to renter and owner was more possible during some periods than others, and, if the inheritance was acquired, it was more possible to ascend to the top rung. Alston and Ferrie explained: “For many, a career in agriculture was akin to climbing with the aid of an escalator, while for others, it was like Sisyphus pushing his rock up the mountain. The difference between ascension and entrapment was individual initiative or good luck.”61 Whether in agriculture or other endeavors, far too often, for black Americans, the bottom economic rungs are sticky and the top rungs are slippery, whereas, for the truly wealthy, it is the top rung that is sticky. Advantaged whites tend to stay there and accumulate more wealth; white privilege compounded the capacity to invest and affected their luck.62 Some Sunflower families achieved wealth (Harper, Lonnie, and Isaac Byrd, Jr.); the same blacks who had gained the most ground also lost ground (Lonnie and Isaac Byrd, Jr.) and yet Jack climbed the rungs and achieved wealth security. Life-cycle savings, or what one can save from earned income alone, is sometimes insufficient to build African American intergenerational upward income mobility, let alone intergenerational and intragenerational wealth. Those who have kinship in new wealth or new middle-income families bear the burdens/responsibility of stretching their

60 62

61 Wilson, p. 256. Alston and Ferrie, “Time on the Ladder,” 26. Tatjana Meschede and Joanne Taylor, “Inherited Prospects: The Importance of Financial Transfers for White and Black College-Educated Households’ Wealth Trajectories,” American Journal of Economics and Sociology, 77 (2018): 3–4.

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savings to care for older relatives who grew up under systems of wage theft and bare bone, if that, literacy. As with Jimmy Alexander’s and Uncle Rudy’s modest bequests to Catherine, wealth transfers between generations of African Americans are likely to be small. Even small wealth transfers, however, properly invested, can have significant stabilizing one-generation effects. In the fall of 1994, in the Journal of Economic Perspectives, William Gale and John Karl Scholz found that at least 20 percent of wealth derives from intended transfers. Using detailed data from the 1983–1986 Survey of Consumer Finances, they found that “gifts from parents to adult children living in separate household” are the source of at least 20 percent of aggregate wealth. Actual wealth due to intended transfers is likely to be higher, and much higher. Further, we estimate that bequests, setting aside the question of whether they are intended, account for an additional 31 percent of net worth. Finally, we find that inter vivo transfers are about half as large as transfers that occur upon the death of the donor.63 They continued, “When bequests are added, the figure rises to at least 51 percent of net worth accumulation. If college expenses are added, it climbs still higher. It is somewhat controversial to count these as departures from the life-cycle model.”64 The $70,000 that Catherine received over the period between 2007, when Jimmy Alexander died, and 2013, when Rudy died, gave her the freedom for the first time ever to pass money on to her children during her lifetime, and the comfort of knowing that as she aged in place, she had some financial wherewithal to take care of herself. Catherine’s puny work wages of four decades did not permit significant savings to accumulate, whereas Jack’s did. Similarly, Lonnie and Jack’s estates and wills attest not only to what they accumulated (Jack) and lost (Lonnie), but what they distributed to their survivors. According to Raj Chetty and his colleagues, the variation in intergenerational mobility is significant across regions and commuter zones (CZs) and within cities and towns, with the greatest variability occurring in highly segregated communities with a preponderance of single parents. In part, the finding highlights the power of segregation to erode mobility 63

64

William Gale and John Karl Scholz, “Intergenerational Transfers and the Accumulation of Wealth,” available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/ (1994), 147; Franco Modigliani, “Measuring the Contribution of Intergenerational Wealth Transfers to Total Wealth: Conceptual Issues and Empirical Findings,” in Denis Kessler and Andre Masson (eds.), Modelling the Accumulation and Distribution of Wealth (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 16. Ibid., 156.

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opportunities and the insufficiency of one breadwinner to lift families out of intergenerational poverty. This erosion underscores wealth and income inequities and the housing stock inhabited by large shares of blacks across the nation. Housing value is correlated with low wealth and low mobility across places. Chetty and his colleagues investigated both relative and absolute mobility across CZs and found that, “Relative mobility is lowest for children who grew up in the Southeast and highest in the Mountain West and the rural Midwest. Some CZs in the U.S. have relative mobility comparable to the highest mobility countries in the world, such as Canada and Denmark.”65 Research conducted by Palomino and his colleagues offers an examination of intergenerational outcomes beyond regression to the mean models so that an improved interrogation of what is happening at the upper and lower tails of the income distribution is possible. Looking over a period of three decades, they found that, “Above the median, both the mid-to-high and the high-income quantiles maintained a steady value. The three decades of data analysed showed only a very mild decreasing pattern in the 1990s that turned into an increase in the 2000s.”66 They continued, “The new century was a turning point in the trends for all income groups but especially for the poor, with an increase in elasticity (i.e., a decrease in mobility) since 2002.”67 When education is included in their analysis, they found that “Between one fifth and half of intergenerational income transmission can be explained by the level of education that parents can provide to their children.”68 With respect to race, they concluded, “Across quantiles, the importance of race is around 10% in the bottom half of the distribution and 5% from the 60th percentile upwards.”69 In their estimate, this is roughly the share of intergenerational income transmission that is mediated by race and education. For both Chetty and Palomino and their co-authors, the policy prescriptions point to the role of quality public education – valueadded teachers – in spurring upward intergenerational economic mobility. How, if at all, these findings implicate research on family (siblings’) origins and income earnings variation and inequality is also of interest.70 65 66

67 70

Chetty et al., “Is the United States Still a Land of Opportunity?,” 2. Juan C. Palomino, Gustavo Marrero, and Juan G. Rodríguez, “One Size Doesn’t Fit All: A Quantile Analysis of Intergenerational Income Mobility in the U.S. (1980–2010),” Journal of Economic Inequality, 16(3) (2018): 360. 68 69 Ibid., 348. Ibid., 360. Ibid., 364. Anders Bjorklund, Markus Jantti, and Gary Solon, “Influences of Nature and Nurture on Earnings Variation,” in Samuel Boles, Herbert Gintis, and Melissa Osborne Groves (eds.),

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Differential earnings by siblings can shed light on both place-based opportunities, career pathways, mentors, and various familial headwinds. This important work obscures certain issues: When race is included, education does not have much explanatory power for wealth differentials. For example, African Americans with a college degree have two-thirds of the net worth of whites with a high school degree at the median.71 Might the power of quality education be more determinative of future success when acquired during the early school years than later, say, in college? If, for example, boy siblings entered St. Albans or any of the top independent public or private primary and secondary schools in 4th grade, rather than middling local elementary or secondary schools, and were exposed to the best teaching and learning environments for many years, all things being equal, would their net-worth or value-added as employees or employers be comparable to or greater than whites at the median? The sources of the racial wealth gap and the income mobility gap are rooted in centuries-long racism, labor exploitation, discriminatory policies, and the failure of the public and private sectors to account for this protracted disinvestment in black and brown lives, and hence in communities concentrated by black and brown lives. When 1 percent of the individuals in the nation owns 20 percent of the nation’s GDP, and when African American familial intergenerational upward economic mobility has been unprotected by the rule of law for four centuries, the legacies and vestiges of enslavement, especially legal racism and lawlessness, are still prominent. Platitudes about individual upward mobility, or bootstraps, or even college completion, alone will not sustain an upward intergenerational economic mobility trajectory. While high-quality pre-schools and primary, middle, and secondary schools, with value-added teachers, are of course essential, my argument is that they are not sufficient to leapfrog poor and first-generation middle-class children (and poor families of children) in zip codes of intractable scarcity to higher levels of formal achievement and greater wealth potential. Children and their families would benefit from early exposure to value-added communities, where families with a variety of religious, linguistic, racial, educational, and occupational backgrounds coexist productively.

71

Unequal Chances: Family Background and Economic Success (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 145–164. Darrick Hamilton and William Darity, Jr., “The Political Economy of Education, Financial Literacy, and the Racial Wealth Gap,” Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis Review, First Quarter, 99(1) (2017): 59–76.

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Early exposure and positive adult relationships can have good outcomes and certainly influence a future orientation and mindset.72 When classrooms are themselves sites of continuous scarcity, children from already vulnerable environments are doubly victimized. As with the Sunflower Seven and the Scott family, scholars and practitioners must persist together in progress and healthy skepticism. They must better recognize the value of practitioners as both generators of new knowledge and translators of knowledge. It is the full human experience that thoughtful multidisciplinary inquiry can explicate. The legacies of enslavement and Jim Crow have stained the nation’s promise, but it is the lives of those born during the second and third decades of the last century – Josie, Agnes, Matthews, David, Lonnie, Hattie, Catherine, Clementine, and Jack – and the stark differences in the economic treks of their children and their children’s contemporaries that should give the nation and its leaders an institutional pause. The scholarship and practices of thoughtful non-profits have done much to inform the nation’s citizens and the nation’s conscience. Collaborative, respectful, and equitable space is urgently needed to reflect on our past and present and galvanize the preferred future.

72

Stefano Passini, Luisa Molinari, and Giuseppina Speltini, “A Validation of the Questionnaire on Teacher Interaction in Italian Secondary School Students: The Effect of Positive Relations on Motivation and Academic Achievement,” Social Psychology of Education, 18(3) (2015).

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During much of the first half of the last century, Catherine’s siblings, Rudy and Lilly Ree, her future husband, Halester, and her stepmom, Mamma Rose, those leaving rural Mississippi without a high school diploma, found jobs in factories, in the transportation sector, in county government, and garnered small pensions, life insurance, Social Security benefits, and home ownership in Milwaukee. Lilly’s four children finished high school but did not go to college. Four of Halester’s five kids did not finish high school. Although married, Rudy was childless. Of Mamma Rose’s thirteen grandchildren, not counting Catherine and Lilly’s kids, nine finished high school, and among them, three finished college. Of her forty great-grandchildren, all finished or are on course to complete high school. Ten of the grandkids are employed. One just retired from the postal service. For Mamma Rose’s grandchildren, as for Halester, the government was and is still the most sustaining employer. Clothing manufacturers such as Jack Winter’s in Milwaukee, where Mamma Rose advanced to head seamstress, and detonation factories, where Hattie worked a few years in Indiana, both now shuttered, absorbed women, including African Americans who left Mississippi in the 1940s. The years between World War 1 and the Korean War (1944–1953) saw women enter the workforce in record numbers. African American women, north and south, rural and urban, were already workers in the home and outside it. Differences in the industrial urban economies and cities’ political receptivity to African American shares conditioned the quality of familial economic and employment transitions. When Mamma Rose first moved to Keefe Avenue in Milwaukee, formerly a bustling Irish community, there were few blacks on her block. Each summer from 1964–1972, during our month-long visits, I noticed a change in the neighborhoods. The mom-andpop stores disappeared along with the whites who had once dominated the 367

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area. District 7, one of the largest wards in Milwaukee, boasts one of the highest crime rates, with Milwaukee having a crime rate that is 84 percent higher than the national average. Violent crime rates are 312 percent higher than the national average. Drugs and drug dealers were said to run the neighborhood, as they are said to do in Scott County, Mississippi – a place that holds less promise for children today than sixty years ago. In Milwaukee, only Jeremiah Missionary Baptist Church remained unchanged; it was packed to the brim. Mamma Rose and Aunt Earline, her youngest daughter, sat with the other women of the church dressed in white, from head to toe, listening to Reverend Fred Boyd from Morton, in Scott County, Mississippi. The Palms, Paytons, Garys, Boyds, and Myerses of Scott County, Mississippi had moved to the Midwest, leaving Mom as the only sibling in Mississippi. Among the young and black in Milwaukee, Indianola, and Forest, many are idle. Unemployment and low-skill levels are challenges for the poor in rural and urban America. The closure of a key industry, Modern Line Products, in Indianola, also spurred unemployment and citizens’ interest in looking elsewhere for employment. Work opportunities there had paved the way for David Williams to buy a barbershop. Alderman David Williams, Sr.’s barbershop had proved to be a mainstay and a place of refuge and personal pride in old age. Throughout the century, the economy surrounding them diversified, but the wages remained bare, even at Walmart and local businesses. Many unemployed youth and adults are ill-educated. Year after year, many of the schools attended by poor children performed at the bottom in the state. Most black children (born between 1944 and 1960) of the primary families (born between 1909 and 1932) who left the Delta for college, and after college, left the state to secure post-collegiate education, had the fastest exits from poverty. Of the white children, two of the Harper children attended college and professional schools in Mississippi; one attended medical school out of state. The Harpers produced, as did the Byrds, a doctor, lawyer, and teacher. The Colemans produced five kids, including two grandchildren, who earned graduate degrees, found employment, and joined the professional class as teachers and writers. Often, the African American working poor in the 1950s and 1960s worked several jobs, as did David Williams and Catherine. Many adults and students do today, to keep their children clean, educated, and nourished, to provide them with shelter, transportation, and future educational opportunities. The wages earned in domestic work, including laundry workers, prior to the 1950s did not carry any Federal Insurance Contributions (FICA) benefits.

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FICA benefits include required payroll deductions for Social Security and Medicare. Like agricultural work, low-wage domestic work made the poor economically vulnerable in young and old age. Rose Harper and Hattie Byrd notwithstanding, in the nineteenth and much of the twentieth century, most African American women in Sunflower and Scott were in the labor force, and they stayed there until old age. In Sunflower, military men left the land and country of their birth for two, three, or four years and returned to complete their education or to begin life in earnest with their spouses. They all took brides with either more formal education than they had or with a higher familial social position than theirs. The Sunflower Seven military veterans featured here searched for and found space for public engagement. They also established habits of saving that would enhance their chances of achieving and sustaining social status, if not wealth. The military offered a form of upward mobility since it supplied steady work, skills training, health care, education, and an opportunity to buy a home. The number of men, including Catherine’s Jimmy, returning with mental injury from Vietnam, seemed extremely high among African Americans. This greater likelihood of injury reduced earning ability and was disruptive in family life as well as destabilizing intergenerationally for families made up of veterans. Whether or not mental health care and drug treatment centers in military hospitals offer high-quality care and posthospital monitoring on an equitable racial and class basis is an understudied question. What is important is that poor families lacked the resources, including the knowledge, needed to advocate for their mentally injured kin. Trauma was left to metastasize and rip families and some communities apart. In some cases, shame and pride kept mental health treatment at bay. Catherine’s Jimmy entered a recovery center to mitigate his cocaine addiction, but it was inadequate and too late. In rural communities where physicians and psychiatrists and psychologists are scarce, regular health care visits were and often are not normalized. Instead, health crises spur ER visits. Crisis health care only or primarily may mean that disease progression has already occurred, and recovery will take longer and encumber more expense. Healthcare is expensive in America. In the United States, for most Americans, health insurance is tethered to employment. High-employment communities have greater access to health care providers than low-employment communities. The rural elderly poor, children in poverty, populations with chronic diseases, and adults and children with mental challenges (especially nonambulatory veterans suffering from psychosis, who live alone or with

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elderly kin) suffer egregious health care inequities. Good rural health is crucial to employment and income mobility and intergenerational wellbeing. Rural hospital closures totaled 126 since 2010.1 The absence of good rural healthcare, mental and physical, in chronically poor communities is a multigenerational American dilemma. It is made more perverse by the debt first-generation physicians rack up; the greater the medical school debt, the more likely they are to enter private practice. Those who respond to the high demand for primary care earn much less than specialists and wrestle with Medicaid payments. Pursuing a profession is a costly enterprise, and making it pay-off is not a given.

FAMILIES, LANDOWNERSHIP, AND HUMAN FLOURISHING

As we learn from Lonnie’s farming history, farming was risk, labor, and fiscal and human capital intensive. Whereas a high school and college diploma, a law degree, land purchases, and high resale values positioned veteran Jack Harper to save and to have the freedom to be a public man, very much engaged in the life of the community, veteran Lonnie Byrd’s land inheritance became a noose around his neck that tightened over the latter half of the twentieth century. Lonnie looked to make his inheritance a farming dynasty; sometimes he rented land to others, but he wanted to secure enough capital to build wealth as a successful farmer. Only two goals in life interested him: a successful marriage and becoming a successful farmer. He failed in his second goal and died an embittered businessperson. Just before his death, he sold acres to pay his farm debts. Small farmers in Sunflower had failed as much as they had succeeded; black landowners and day farmers were and are especially vulnerable. Lonnie’s substantial land-owning status and a family grocery store gained the attention of white town elites. This attention gave Lonnie opportunities to sit on biracial boards in the early 1960s in his county. He sat at the table of decision-making, but he was not able to gain enough capital, or was not talented enough, to manage a farming dynasty. At the end of his life, he sold some of his birthright to secure his debts. As he lay dying, he instructed his wife to join the class of black farmers suing lending agencies. It was too late for Lonnie Byrd to achieve the capital needed to accrue wealth. 1

Kent Jason Cheng, Yue Sun, and Shannon Monnat, “COVID-19 Death Rates Are Higher in Rural Counties with Larger Shares of Blacks and Hispanics,” Journal of Rural Health, 36 (4) (September 7, 2020): 602–608.

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He lost the ground his father and grandfather gained when they secured deeds from the railroad for 700 acres in late nineteenth-century Sunflower County. His father trusted Lonnie to take care of the land. Lonnie trusted no one. When, finally, he confided in Evelyn, his choices had narrowed. He wanted to leave Evelyn enough security to weather old age, and he wanted to keep the land. Pigford 1 and 11 went ahead without him.2 Lonnie Byrd was never hungry, never without a home, and was never insulted in quite the way that Agnes and Josie had been insulted. Their labor had been exploited. They had moved from plantation to plantation, looking for an honest owner and hoping not to get evicted. Still, economic vulnerability and insult shared large tracts in all three of their families. Josie and Agnes, those with grossly inadequate education and low-rung wages, had the longest period of impoverishment (eighty years) in the last century. Their status as exploited sharecroppers and long-term renters (rather than reapers of their labor) meant only survival, not exits. Yet, somehow, they managed to secure a stable family life and, like Catherine in Scott, demonstrated a willingness to work menial jobs beyond the cotton field/domesticity and poultry plant. At least the custodial jobs that Josie and Agnes landed through their church networks provided Social Security and greater social attachments and respect. Jobs cleaning the church or serving as domestics secured enough income to pay small monthly mortgages and have access to some white “influentials.” Eventually, for Josie, Agnes, and Williams, work, in and beyond the cotton field, led to a formal employment record and relationships more sustaining of hope and promise than hopelessness and despair. Hattie Byrd, Agnes Brown, and Josephine Landfair were separated by a decade, but Hattie grew up with both parents in a family that managed early in her life to secure land when the father borrowed from a mother who had benefitted from a life insurance policy. The family was stable and autonomous. Hattie and her three siblings did not move four or five times before they reached adulthood, and her children, by the time of her second marriage, spent all their childhood in the same place, farming the same 2

Alleging racial discrimination, in Pigford 1 and 11, just over 83,000 black farmers filed a class-action lawsuit against the Department of Agriculture. In Pigford v. Glickman, filed in 1999, a settlement resulted for 13,000 farmers. In December of 2010, Congress distributed 1.2 billion dollars to 70,000 African American farmers. Eligible recipients covered by the Consent Decree included three categories of plaintiffs: African Americans who had farmed or tried to farm between 1981 and 1996; African Americans who had applied to the USDA for farm credit or program benefits; and African Americans who had made a complaint against the USDA on or before July 1, 1997.

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land, in a kinship community. Except for the two years of work at a detonation plant in Laporte, Indiana and, two years as a Head Start worker in the mid-1960s in Indianola, she had gained no Social Security, and her husband, Isaac, had added no income from the farm and, in effect, no Social Security. Their son, Isaac, invested in the family farm to keep it solvent. If Hattie’s dream of teaching elementary education had been realized, she would have contributed income to the family’s subsistence. Her income might have modestly reduced the need for her husband to borrow money to meet basic needs. However, she did not complete high school or college early enough to have a career in teaching. Her contribution to her family as a stay-at-home mom on the farm was incalculable, not just because the children’s outcomes were favorable, but because children needed caring attention and direction in the initial stages of their lives. Neither Hattie nor her able children had access to kindergarten. They had ambition and the freedom to imagine themselves in the future of the nation, giving back and learning. A big family of eight to nine kids needed someone to organize family life and socialize the children to achievement and discipline. Hattie and Isaac reared a family of successful children who helped to support her in old age. Pigford 1, the legal case mentioned above, included Hattie’s husband, Isaac. When it was settled in 1999, the petitioners received compensation for their losses. Hattie died just shy of her 100th birthday. Her children’s familial stability, talents, and unconditional love had redounded to her benefit. Hattie had shown remarkable tenacity and verve. Clementine, the youngest child in the primary study, was born during the Great Depression. Unlike Hattie’s parents, Clementine’s parents were landless sharecroppers; they were croppers for most of their children’s young adult lives. Clementine helped them in the field as early as age five, and she assumed domestic chores to help her mother as well. Like Hattie, she wanted desperately to become a teacher. Folks in the community, beyond Britt’s Plantation, encouraged her; although her pathway was not straight, she persevered. She attended a black public college in the Mississippi Delta, woefully under-funded, earned her first degree, and became a secretary. Her income was extremely low. She later married a veteran of the Korean War. They bought a home with his GI bill. She returned to college, earned a second degree, and was promoted from secretary to teacher. She was the fourth woman (after Rose Harper, Evelyn Byrd, and Lillian Matthews) in the primary group to complete high school and college. Others – Agnes and Josie – did not complete high school.

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Among the boys, all eventually earned a high school education. Matthews and Jack completed college. Matthews attended Morehouse. Jack attended Mississippi Delta Community College, where his name is etched on the science building, and where Jack served as a trustee. He later enrolled and graduated from the University of Mississippi. The Sunflower men became farmers, business owners, a minister, and a politician/lawyer. Landowning occupations, especially farming, did obscure poverty’s presence, especially in the case of Hattie and her family. Land and income were never present in the same measure. There was always more land than income and greater unmet cash needs than met ones.

THEIR CHILDREN AFTER THEM

The children of the primary families discussed above were born between 1948 and 1955, just as cotton production exceeded demand, prices stagnated, the US cotton monopoly again lessened as it had in the 1920s, and technologies associated with cotton machinery made labor-intensive field work obsolete. These families never wanted their children to spend their lives sharecropping and working low-wage jobs, so even if technology had not mechanized the industry, these children’s aims were beyond the farm and their strivings commensurate with their aims. Most were taught to reach beyond their communities in search of greater education and economic opportunity. Thus, these same children internalized exits from poverty toward achievement as their familial duty and they did so quite early. One, a boy, was told, “Stay in your place because you ain’t got nothing to fight with.” Another, also a boy, was told to “know your place.” Yet, in another generation, that boy, now a father, told his girls, “Go as far as your talents will take you, and on the way, demand respect.” Remarkably different valences were clear. Intergenerationally, the rural black family internalized a variety of predominant biases: accommodation to caste status, optimism, achievement, an unreasonable work ethic, resentment, or resignation. The presentation of self in an intemperate society and the perceived receptivity of others to that presentation is integral to the adaptations (behavior and choice) made across time and place, as well as to events and expectations.3

3

Marie Helweg-Larsen, Pedram Sadeghian, and Mary Webb, “The Stigma of Being Pessimistically Biased,” Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, 21(1) (2002): 92–107; Claude M. Steele, Whistling Vivaldi, How Stereotypes Affect Us and What We Can Do (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010).

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Hattie’s dream of having a career in teaching did not come to fruition, but her daughter, Gwendolyn, was an outstanding teacher at Gentry High School decades later. Gwen, now retired and celebrating more than fifty years of marriage to her husband, Hamp, mentored students and looked after her mom, Hattie, as she aged. Like Isaac and Michelle, she was empowered by her Mom and Dad and by her family’s landowning legacy. Gwen’s brother, Isaac Byrd Jr.’s activities over the last three decades suggested, however, that in Mississippi, there are still incomplete educational triumphs arising from a legacy of discrimination, where the “haves” still come out ahead.4 In the late 1970s and throughout the 1990s, lawyers born in-state, like Isaac Byrd, Hattie’s youngest son, advocated for the poor and the injured against wealthy insurance companies and other corporations when their actions were injurious to human life. Often, Byrd’s legal advocacy bumped up against intransigent governors, defense attorneys, state, and federal judges. The great-grandchildren of the Sunflower Seven who stayed in the Delta are in segregated public schools in Indianola, Drew, Inverness, and Ruleville, or are working and facing unemployment, especially if they are not ready for college. Gentry High, the school from which Isaac and Michelle Love-Byrd and Alsee McDaniel all graduated in the early 1970s, has about 400 students, all but six of whom are black. Eight percent of the students at Gentry in 2018 were evaluated at a proficiency level in mathematics, and 10 percent were evaluated as proficient in reading.5 These test outcomes raise questions about the tests themselves, but also about the learning, the curriculum, the purveyors of knowledge, the literacy of parents, and the preparation of students in the lower grades. Chicago, Gary, Evanston, and Milwaukee had been places where some of these families from the rural South had trekked for many summers. Attending graduate and professional schools in these places or places nearby had meant not only knowledge of the existence of great institutions but access to kinfolk who had ventured north decades earlier. Some had professors who had attended these universities; high school and college counselors and church members had encouraged others to attend. The struggles of 400 years, culminating in the Civil Rights Movement, had 4

5

Marc Galanter, “Why the Haves Come Out Ahead: Speculations on the Limits of Legal Change,” Law and Society Review, 9, Litigation and Dispute Processing: Part One (Autumn 1974): 95–160. National Center for Education Statistics, Mississippi Department of Education, 2018.

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made it possible for demonstrably talented black students to be educated in the best colleges and universities in the nation. Some did not need affirmative action. Using any metric, they were first-in-class. I had some of those students as classmates; their mothers had been domestics, and their fathers day laborers. Others had potential and had demonstrated it; for those students, affirmative action held more promise than peril. The legislation and its implementation had made it possible for some to gain admission to great colleges and universities and for many talented mentors to join their networks of support and burnish their newly-earned credentials and potential. If colleges and universities can muster enough courageous and rigorous leadership and correct mistakes and injustices, then both the military and colleges and universities hold promise as institutions worthy of healthy trust and capable of cultivating citizenship, diversity, public service, new knowledge, and responsible civil service and corporate elan. In this work, just one successful college attendee in a family would spur another family member and then another. Over the last 125 years or more, black colleges graduated more than 80 percent of all black college graduates. As previously mentioned, in 2020, HBCUs graduated 10 percent of black college students. Early in this century, HBCUs would be strenuously challenged to recruit and retain working- and middle-class students – both children of HBCU alumni and first-generation black, brown, and white students. What kind of systematic efforts are colleges making to enrich students’ experiences while lowering the cost of college and professional school?6 In the children’s cohort, the doctors’ and lawyers’ earnings were the highest. Despite their larger incomes, the initial repayment of law school and medical school loans took a toll on first-generation middle-class children and their families.7 The sensible price point of community colleges led Jack and one of his sons to enter community college and to exit college with less debt. Studies frequently suggest that black college and professional school graduates do not benefit from strong mentorship in elite colleges and universities, but those who are lucky enough to have thoughtful and

6

7

Raj Chetty, John Friedman, Emmanuel Saez, Nicholas Turner, and Danny Yagan, “Mobility Report Cards: The Role of Colleges in Intergenerational Mobility,” NBER Working Paper No. 23618, revised version, December 2017. Christopher Toresky, Sunita Mutha, and Janet Coffman, “Reducing Educational Debt among Physicians and Dentists,” Healthforce Center at the University of California, San Francisco, August 2019; Melanie Hanson, “Average Law School Debt,” available at Educational Data.org/average-law-school-debt, accessed December 5, 2021.

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well-networked mentors do benefit. They often experience career advancement at rates comparable to whites.8 The achievements of poor children were forged in the family but made actionable by the alliance with intelligent and empathetic citizens and institutions with a will to fight injustice and transform the nation. If the constancy of intergenerational achievement is to continue, better policies to correct past inequities are needed. More efforts to advance human capital and reduce wealth disparities are needed, not fewer. Seen from this perspective, the War on Poverty and the war to eradicate underinvestment in black education were both incomplete but significant triumphs. College and professional school debt is compromising the pathways African Americans can take toward the middle-class and beyond. The next war to reduce income insecurity must close the income and wealth gap and include better access to great schools at lower price points, from kindergarten through graduate and professional school. The War on Poverty reached into Sunflower to give local people opportunities to improve the life chances of its poorest members. The intervention unsettled the status quo and signaled power-sharing in federal programs and quality African American education as non-negotiable issues in local politics, if not local economics. The War on Poverty in Sunflower County succeeded in wresting control of federal revenue from white resisters. It created jobs (provided patronage) for blacks and whites who had not had above-poverty wages before; it introduced Head Start as a gateway to education and better health care for poor children and their families; it also gave rise to some abuses of Great Society revenue on the part of plantation owners and their friends, such as the Nelson Ditch Amendment project, which federally funded drainage systems for cotton owners/farmers. The war funds created much-needed legal services in previously underserved communities. Legal services organizations have been stripped of some of their authority, but at their inception, they had transformational potential. When African American men born in the second and third decades of the twentieth century stabilized their exits from poverty (got and stayed ahead of their household expenditures), they did so in part because they had a college education and veterans’ benefits and had entered into stable marriages with smart, loving, and virtuous partners. If inequalities in educational opportunity and work opportunities were not erased, those 8

William Bowen and Derek Bok, Shape of the River: The Long-Term Consequences of Considering Race in College (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996).

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women most in need of a dual-income family would remain poor, unmarried, and not well educated, and give birth to children whose exits from poverty could be slower than sharecroppers whose families had cropped for fifty years or more.

THE POLITICS OF ECONOMIC MOBILITY

The Sunflower Seven were born during the last decades of the tyrannical reign of terror – 1870–1944. In addition to violence – state-sponsored and mob violence – they and their parents experienced the flu epidemic, the bow weevil, the economic crash, the Great Depression, the Flood of 1927, and three wars. These families also lived and worked long enough to witness and some had to take part in the counter to the Counter Emancipation – the Civil Rights Movement – which has been termed the Second Reconstruction.9 The battle to remove the vestiges of slavery and Jim Crow and secure the permanent gains of that battle for governance and equity in labor are two different stories, which the Second Reconstruction language obscures in significant part. It is important to recall that the Civil Rights movement had been preceded by a litigation movement powered by the NAACP from 1909–1954 and beyond. This collective movement for civil and voting rights for the removal of discrimination by race, color, religion, gender identity, and national origin mattered, not just because it was triumphant in securing the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965, but because the movement burst the myth of the happy rural black tethered to his good white people. Some few rural people in places like Sunflower responded to the call for action to assure representation and foster equity, an action discomforting to the white and black accommodationists. When the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the NAACP, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, and the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO) were at their peak in Mississippi, it was rural people from outposts known and unknown who joined the fray and sheltered and fed mostly young

9

Neil McMillian, The Citizens’ Council: Organized Resistance to the Second Reconstruction, 1954–1964 (Urbana: The University of Illinois Press, 1971). “The end of slavery was thrust upon much of the South and never got its sanction. The White Citizens’ Council, in this sense, made plain that the advantages of freedom should be withheld from the Negro.” See Myrdal, An American Dilemma, 223.

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activists from the north.10 Locals joined the movement at enormous risk to their lives.11 They challenged the system of dispossession. They also challenged themselves and their neighbors.12 Although, as John Dittmer found, several local leaders were veterans who had left their state for military service, their ardent supporters were Mississippians who had never left Mississippi. Like their contemporaries who had moved to cities inside the South and those who migrated outside the region, they wanted improvement, some envisioning more radical changes than others. They believed in egalitarianism even as they lived in a traditional and closed society. They believed in progress and in ridding the state and nation of the linked economic and political tyranny of white supremacy. Agnes and Josie were then nearing their sixties, growing old and weary from labor that had not paid and therefore would not assure more than a pittance in old age. Their lives had not been reconstructed. They had reared a grateful, politically observant, competitive, and, in some cases, a humble generation, which had gone to segregated schools, done without dental care, public libraries, and economic security. Agnes and Josie themselves were at last able to access Medicaid, and their grandchildren could attend Head Start. The Civil Rights Movement resulted in much good. Blacks veered closer to equal access to the right to vote and substantive chances to run and win some offices. The litigation movement of the NAACP and the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, along with other parties and individuals, had helped to usher in equity in teacher salaries and singlemember districts to harness the efficacy of the black vote in instances where black voting shares were significant.13 Arguably, the movement’s victories did not alter institutional rules of power and privilege in legislatures across the country; the movement did not loosen the economic power 10

11

12

13

Adam Fairclough, To Redeem the Soul of America: The Southern Christian Leadership Conference and Martin Luther King, Jr. (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1987); Claiborne Carson, In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981); Leslie Burl McLemore, “The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party: A Case Study of Grassroots Politics,” Doctoral dissertation (University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 1971). John Dittmer, Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 203. Bob Moses and Charles Cobb, Jr., Radical Equations: Civil Rights from Mississippi to the Algebra Project (New York: Beacon Press, 2002). Parker, Black Votes Count, 78–101; Michael Putnam and Jill Cabrera, “Mississippi: One State’s Search for Equity in School Finance,” SAGE, Open Access (April–June 2015).

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held by white families, intergenerationally, any more than it propelled the intergenerational wealth of the most disadvantaged rural poor. The Second Reconstruction in Mississippi lasted beyond 1965 – well into the next decade – the decade when challenges to redistricting systems were at their zenith and when blacks began to run and win elected office in greater numbers. Whatever its length – its beginning or end – it was a significant but incomplete victory. The first Reconstruction had been halted by a federal government that had withdrawn federal troops prematurely. Federal troop withdrawal opened the way to local violence and the attendant failure of the United States Supreme Court and Southern legislatures and local sheriffs to uphold the rule of law through the last half of the nineteenth century.14 The legacy of both efforts was, despite their failures, a more inclusive and participatory society. Had this book been written in the 1990s, little would appear to have changed in the orientation and values espoused by the economic and political power elite in Sunflower. Now, however, some three decades later, blacks govern the politics of Sunflower, from the supervisors’ to the sheriff’s offices. Blacks have also been elected to one of the last bastions of white power: the circuit and chancery clerks’ offices. The electoral capture of the Indianola mayor’s office has now been achieved as well. Economic systems are still lodged with catfish and land-grabbing barons and the planter-merchant class. The long hand of Jack Harper, the son of a three-fourths mule renter, is no longer omnipresent in Sunflower, and his absence creates space for new and more egalitarian leadership across racial and economic lines – in formerly white spaces such as the Chamber of Commerce and the economic councils of the county, in judgeships and the mayor’s office. His legacy offers insights into the lessening of individual rather than institutional white resistance. Now it would appear in Sunflower that policies and programs to alleviate poverty at the local level would be engineered by black and white political elites, with support from the former Jewish mayor of Indianola, Stephen Rosenthal. The quality of mayors running small towns and cities with large shares of blacks is in question at a time when leadership and relationship building across racial and class lines is essential. The work for intergenerational familial upward mobility will require an equally intentional series of thoughtful efforts, routinely evaluated for their intended and unintended effects; the same nation that empowered and then tempered Senator Eastland’s legacy and the casualties it entailed will 14

Nicholas Lemann, Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2006).

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now be called upon to end them. Upward intergenerational mobility in both wealth and income will require early and continuous exposure to quality education, housing, and health care, strengthened adult human capabilities, and greater protection from social bias and job and pay discrimination. In effect, our nation must be willing to mitigate the preferences that perennially advantage whiteness while at the same time fostering policies to lessen intergenerational poverty transmission – a transmission not originating in the black poor or by the Sunflower Seven or Scott families. THE SUNFLOWER SEVEN AND THE SCOTT COUNTY FAMILIES: A VALEDICTORY

How have the itineraries of these individuals and families shown the failings of the nation but also pointed to a course of action for its future? Josie and Agnes – perennial croppers – were housing, employment, health, education, and income insecure. What might be done to fix all these issues for low-income families? Regarding income extraction, only reparations can fix that. A living wage is needed across all sectors, including low-rung agricultural workers. In addition, living wage government jobs in rural places would guarantee lower unemployment rates and sustainable employment if pre-apprenticeship and apprenticeships offered the new knowledge that workers need to gain proficiency and promotions. Williams, Clementine, and Matthews were living and working on white people’s land, ill-paid, ill-educated, and ill-housed. They jumped off the lower rungs to find public education, high school completion, and non-agricultural professions. Two spouses among the quasi-cropper families joined the military. Matthews’s mother’s job as a midwife and her father’s ability to fix cars helped the family leave the agricultural ladder. Matthews and his wife, Lilly, lived a transparent religious life, saved their earnings, adopted a daughter, and helped to rear her son. Reverend Matthews distinguished himself in his profession, and like Clementine, David, Agnes, and Josie, he weathered childhood storms not of his own making. Clementine was smart and her teachers and principal noticed; the principal found a benefactor who offered her a scholarship to college. Her persistence paid off, and she moved from secretary to teacher and benefitted from greater income security from both her teaching and her deceased husband’s military benefits. She was also sustained by a strong and loyal kinship family. Her four girls saw the example of an earlier generation of parents and propelled themselves through college completion, parenting and a stable career to a middle-class existence.

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Jack the tenant farmer worked and attended school full sessions, entered community college, looked for and joined political networks, persisted in law school, entered the white-collar class, and petitioned the powers-that-be for access, which they granted. He jumped into the fray, moved into the local political arena, and accessed points of finance and politics for forty years. Lonnie had more but was black and shut out of farm subsidies and could not acquire new farming technology. He suffered losses and did not confide in the kinship clan. He fell back. His next-door neighbors, his cousins, Isaac and Hattie, raised eight children, all of whom landed in the middle-class. Isaac Jr., the son, became a millionaire, but fell back, due to tort reform, money management, and illness. John, the doctor, achieved upward mobility and status as a physician and kept his status, as did the other children as teacher, politician, paralegal, crane operator, and truck driver. Isaac, Jr. used his wealth to lift others, individuals, and institutions such as his alma mater, Tougaloo College, fledging newspapers, and first-generation municipal politicians, who lacked wealth. The National Bar Association was formed in 1909, the year Agnes was born and the year of the founding of the NAACP. Like Agnes’s, Isaac’s life and legacy, and the legacy of these institutions, are intertwined with promise and peril. In Scott, Catherine worked long hours and multiple jobs. She stayed serially married, inherited small sums of money, and received her husband’s Social Security and her children and grandchildren’s benevolence. Her low-wage work did not pay a living wage. Though she was undereducated, she had enough education to read and write and manage her finances. For many decades, she, her children, and all her husbands had been health care insecure. The fact that she was not homeless and had grown up with grandparents who had a modicum of ownership and family sovereignty meant that children had stability and were not wanderers in their own country and community. At home, children were offered a sense of possibility, promise, wholeness, and safety. In their everyday lives, they were not conscious of being psychologically imperiled by the racist regime but were attentive to family maladies – a marriage that had cracked. The church and kinship communities of Forest, Hillsboro, Chicago, Gary, Milwaukee, and Indianapolis sustained Catherine and John and their children, just as it had sustained the Byrd kinship family of Springhill. Historically black colleges and early exposure to caring and intelligent teachers and mentors sustained some of the Sunflower Seven and Catherine’s girls, as did their religious faith, teachers’ affirmation, and

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personal sense of efficacy. Catherine’s children saw the differences in black and white housing stock, and witnessed their parents need to work multiple jobs, the 54-hour work week, and still be barely able to make financial ends meet. They saw oral health needs go unmet and noticed the white man with the little suitcase who made monthly visits to collect $13.00. The Life of Georgia insurance secured for the family was processed by an agent who collected monthly premiums on insurance that would pay out $1,300 when their dad died in a boating accident twenty years later. Modest home ownership, marriage, and strong kinship and community ties anchored the family in the Hill community in Scott County. Here, fragments of chance were stitched together and most of the threads held. Jimmy unraveled and left inconsolable pain in places that the family had to acknowledge and then mend. Catherine’s kids, including Jimmy, and grandchildren, found their way to the middle-class, but when compared to their white counterparts, early in their middle-class trek, they lacked a safety net or buffer in times of financial stress. The white kids, Kim and Lori Red, who called Catherine “Reno,” had parents already ensconced in the middle-class (the father was a pharmacist) and a literate grandmother (who was an administrator with the Forest Separate School District). Long and terror filled seasons of dispossession could not be recovered by Catherine’s or Isaac Jr.’s efforts, their generosity, or their achievements alone. Like Josie and Agnes, Catherine and John and Lonnie Byrd and their descendants were injured – they were intentionally subjugated by the state’s actions. Catherine’s husband, John, illiterate and with a shortened childhood, due to the lack of a widow’s pension to support his Mom and her eight children, was penalized. Absent a safety raft of any kind, weighed down by unmet mental and physical health care needs and economic and housing security, fatherless and chronically poor, children like young John, Eve, and Reba became conditioned by early adversity. John smoked, drank, and gambled excessively. Yet he was more than his circumstances. Politicians, both local and national, played pivotal roles in the dispossession of these families. While a few native whites stepped outside the orthodoxy of white supremacy and white tyranny, most did not. The scandalous presentation of white supremacy was met by a centuries-long protracted march for economic and political citizenship, which gained the attention of the nation and the international world, and then fostered a new black voting bloc and a series of federal laws. With the help of the media, the nation which was grieving acted as it had done a century before,

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with the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments. But over the last third of the nineteenth century and the first four decades into the twentieth century, the courts “made haste slowly”15 to turn their back on white supremacy and states’ rights. White resentment grew as immigration lessened the share of whites in the nation and as the knowledge economy and income inequality left more whites behind, feeling relative if not absolute deprivation. Judicial edicts today signal that in 2022 the nation’s collective shame is at an end. They proclaim that the barriers that once were erected to hold blacks back have fallen away. The preclearance provision of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 has therefore largely outlived its purpose. The Supreme Court majority reasoned that data from forty years ago could not be used to justify which jurisdictions, if any, would be covered today. Its decision has released from parole places formerly and presently riddled by a rigid racial hierarchy and one-party rule.16 The Court argued that Congress had exceeded its power to enforce the 14th and 15th Amendments and had disparaged the rights and sovereignty of states. This was decided even though every black person of voting age in America is still vulnerable to rigged redistricting schemes and so is blocked from consequential interracial deliberation and candidate choice from the ground up, and is therefore excluded from actionable political engagement. Absent strong appeals and an independent and attentive judiciary, the party in power in state legislatures rules the redistricting process and commands media attention. In the nation broadly, and in black and brown communities across much of the nation, unprovoked violence, illegal police stops, poor access to healthy and affordable housing and health care, unemployment, and restricted opportunities abound. None of this portends well. This is our challenge. Intransigent party elites (executive, judicial, and legislative) have decided that the nation is not worth sustaining unless it mirrors their vision of the preferred future. In the north and south, and in rural and urban places of unyielding promise, the descendants of the enslaved are now engaged in battle with the states and systems that attempted to re-enslave them, both economically and educationally, and that incarcerated many of their descendants and contemporaries. Just as

15

16

Julian Bond, “With All Deliberate Speed: Brown vs. Board of Education,” Indiana Law Journal, 90 (2015): 167. Shelby County v. Holder 570 US 529 (2013).

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Josie and Agnes searched every inch of Sunflower for a more promising land, so should each American examine every mile of our country, its systems of politics, economics, and education to better understand how to make the rule of law just rather than unjust, and to make systems work for enslaved descendants and the new poor and the economically vulnerable throughout our nation.

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Epilogue

As rural places like Sunflower and Scott counties go, so goes the nation. My desire to write this book emanated from seeing firsthand the struggles of poor people in places as distinct as Scott and Sunflower counties in Mississippi, Andhra Pradesh, India, Baku, Azerbaijan, Bucharest, Romania, Havana, and Santiago de Cuba, Palestine, Zambia, Zimbabwe, and Angola. Poverty and civil conflict, centuries-old conflict, appear linked. The eldest and youngest members of the society, especially visible in places outside the US, wore their dispossession in ways that I found deeply haunting. In Romania, the Roma Senti children wore their pain as vividly as did their parents. The stateless Palestinians stacked in UN camps in Ramallah looked every bit as worn as the poor in southern India. During the civil war in Angola, when children drank dirty water and walked the pristine beaches long ago deserted by the well-heeled, I wondered as an adult, as I had as a child, why and how some children, families, neighborhoods, and nations, provinces, or regions succeed, and others fail. Not just zip codes, but whole nations all over the world offered promise or peril to children and adults alike, to some families and not others. I knew that poor and working-class people themselves were not perpetrators of their own victimization, or at least not the originators of their deprivation and dispossession. The poor and dispossessed seemed caught in a complex web woven by the state and markets and those who want to be highly prized by the state and markets rather than be praised for forwarding progress for the marginalized and struggling. Egalitarian regimes appeared in short supply the world over, and that meant to me that egalitarian sensibilities had not often prevailed in the concrete arenas of education, politics, and economics. I also knew from my own experience in a working-class family that work (one job or several jobs) did not pay enough to make ends meet. I knew, 385

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then, that work was first and last, from well before sunup to well after sundown. I knew that the homes my mother worked in as a maid and a laundress were better constructed, had grander driveways, and were bigger and prettier than ours. I also knew that the dress shops, insurance businesses, journalists, doctors, lawyers, bankers, and pharmacists in town were white, mostly men. I knew that I had grown up with Native American Choctaws in the town, but they, too, went to segregated schools, and whatever my status as a member of the nation, theirs was less than mine. I knew that schools were segregated by race for teachers and students. I knew that my fourth-grade classmate, Isaiah Horde, never had a chance to learn anything in school, but I did not know why. I knew that teachers did not see him even though he was there, visibly overweight and unengaged. It was Isaiah’s visible invisibility that haunted me as a child and an adult. I saw Isaiah in the adult and child faces I have encountered across eastern Europe, Central Asia, southern Africa, Palestine, and Cuba. One could be in the room or at the table, but not in the game, in the arena, contributing and learning. Some people’s presence, views, interests, and values counted more than others, and some counted not at all. While not all rural places and communities are impoverished, too many are and have been persistently disadvantaged, right alongside some inner cities, where large numbers of working-class blacks and other poor have resided for generations. We can hide the poor, gentrify their neighborhoods, and send their boys and men to prison. We can send children to schools of mediocre quality and not pay well the teachers who struggle to help make them whole. We can argue about the role of government and content ourselves with a view of the War on Poverty as a government failure, despite evidence to the contrary. We can argue that the world needs more children with Jack Harper’s spunk, and Clementine’s self-belief, and even Catherine’s aspirations to stay serially married. We can say that the poor, like Reba and Eve, will always be with us. We can view small farmers as anachronistic and their dreams as fantastical. We can justify not compensating the families whose wages were stolen and whose families were broken by arguing that the past is dead. We can ignore joblessness in rural places and safety and environmental insults from food processing plants in places like Scott. We can close our eyes to our nation’s fragile identity as one nation under God, rather than several sub-nations held together tenuously, especially at national election time, during stubborn recessionary periods, and during health pandemics and natural disasters.

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We cannot pretend though that enough of our elected leaders in rural counties and states with black populations have their collective heads and hearts in the game and can help steer our nation toward egalitarian and healthy functioning. We can never become one well-integrated nation, secular or sacred, until those who serve do so with intelligence, accountability, and dignity. Our nation is fallible. We are inching closer toward national, community, and familial disintegration. Our fourth estate, the media, bears responsibility, as do our markets. Erosions in those arenas are destructive to the body politic, to our civic culture, and to a shared and more equitable destiny. To paraphrase the late senator Robert Dole, no first-class nation or organization – profit or non-profit – can exploit the poor and their communities, pay second-class wages, and still expect the support of a fair-minded and justice-seeking citizenry. Great adversity can lead but it does not inexorably lead to great opportunities.

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Index

The 1890 Mississippi Constitution, 135 Abraham Lincoln, 106, 113–114, 116, 126, 143, 230, 291 ACSC, 306, 308, 310–315 adverse childhood experiences, 81, 216 African American population, 130, 134 Agnes Brown, 4, 26, 31, 113, 153, 166, 173, 220, 295, 371 Alcorn State University, 87, 212, 229, 241, 277 Alexander v. Holmes, 133, 268, 273 Ayers v. Waller, 262, 264, 271 Black Codes, 116, 126–127, 135, 138, 222 Christianity, 15–16, 153, 157, 159–160, 175, 179, 351 Civil Rights Act, 8, 19, 21, 127, 133, 138, 155, 265, 282 Civil Rights Movement, 87, 93, 101, 178, 308, 310–311, 355, 358 Clementine Richardson, 4, 26, 68, 170, 176, 179–181, 183, 185, 254 Clinton Battle, 93–94, 99–100, 102, 182, 255, 309, 359 Congressman Bennie Thompson, 36, 102, 270, 283 corruption, 74, 79, 89 David Matthews, 11, 26, 145, 169, 175, 177, 179 David Williams, 12, 15, 26, 52, 68, 153, 163, 166, 170–171, 173–174, 180, 254, 256, 368 de jure segregation, 263–266, 270, 276–280, 284–286, 290–291

Democratic Party, 25–26, 74, 102, 113, 120, 126, 129, 143–144, 163, 208, 268, 301, 311–314, 377 Dred Scott, 19, 21, 118–121, 126–127 Drew, Mississippi, 169, 173, 216, 288, 316 education in Mississippi, 29, 270, 273, 285 Eisenhower, 8, 122, 275, 318 Emmett Till, 33, 202 enslavement, 3, 8, 19–20, 30, 33–34, 59, 67, 69, 77, 107, 109, 115–116, 118, 120–121, 123–124, 130, 136, 147, 166, 177, 182, 222, 293, 298, 318, 325, 331, 365 Evelyn Adams, 213, 217, 337 Fannie Lou Hamer, 17, 25–26, 36–37, 64, 90–91, 170, 192–193, 224, 227, 267, 289, 306, 308 federal government intervention, 295, 299 The Fifth Circuit, 123 Forest, Mississippi, 122–123, 228 Forest, 25, 223–227, 229–236, 239–240, 242, 245–248, 273, 381–382 Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 116, 144, 170 Frederick Douglass, 114–116, 166 Glenn Family Foundation, 34, 216 Gunnar Myrdal, 18, 21, 31, 101, 181, 337–339, 377 Haley Barbour, 82 Hattie Byrd, 214, 357, 359, 369, 371 Hattie Isaac, 36, 100, 145, 198, 200–202, 207, 345 HBCUs, 88, 258–259, 263, 265, 269, 271, 273, 277–278, 280–282, 285–289, 291, 375

397

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398

Index

Herbert Hoover, 97–98, 297–298, 320 Hispanics, 39–40, 160, 223, 370 homelessness, 16, 18, 47, 63, 68, 81, 84, 99, 135, 156, 163, 219, 332 Hortense Powdermaker’, 3, 349 intergenerational mobility, 9, 363, 380 Isaac Byrd, 4, 10, 14, 36, 145, 203–205, 207–208, 211, 220, 256–257, 268–269, 283, 362, 374 Isaiah Madison, 262–264, 272, 284, 286, 289, 316 Jack Harper, 4, 7, 10–11, 14, 17, 26, 47, 63, 65–66, 78, 92, 94, 105, 114, 145, 176, 178, 186–187, 190–191, 193, 208, 214, 256, 262, 306–307, 310, 312, 314, 336, 354, 370, 379, 386 Jackson State University, xv–xvi, 87, 102, 172, 174, 183, 192, 225, 229, 243, 256, 258, 270, 272, 283, 290 James Eastland, 7, 25, 27, 195, 199, 226–228, 312 John Dollard, 3, 54, 213, 349 Josephine Landfair, 153, 157, 160, 371 Judge Neal Biggers, 284 Julian Bond, 121, 132, 253, 383 landowning, 26, 30, 208, 308, 360, 370, 374 lawlessness, 8, 27, 29–30, 36, 46, 48, 71, 95–96, 99–101, 114, 129, 136, 140, 144, 263, 267, 293, 353, 365 legal racism, xiii, 9, 24, 29–30, 44–46, 51, 55, 61, 64, 67, 87, 91, 121, 135, 140, 155, 157, 167, 182, 184, 194, 207, 262–263, 266–267, 276, 279, 284, 287, 291, 310, 314, 321, 326, 338, 365 Lonnie Byrd, 4, 7, 11, 17, 22–23, 26, 29–30, 48, 63, 65, 94, 145, 176, 194, 196–197, 204, 207, 256, 307, 309, 359, 370–371, 382 lynching, 19, 94, 96, 100, 144, 153, 156, 168, 199, 226 marriage, 6, 14, 18, 53, 62–64, 67–68, 114, 156, 160, 172, 175–176, 184–185, 189, 196, 208, 210, 215, 217, 223, 236–237, 241–242, 245–247, 320, 322, 335–336, 355, 357, 370–371, 374, 381 Matthew Holden, 146 Medgar Evers, 90, 100, 201

migrations, 47, 109, 337 military veteran, 100 Mississippi governors, 72, 76–77, 80, 82–83, 89, 230, 322 Mississippi Valley State, xv, 14, 87–88, 102, 156, 161, 170, 177, 181, 183, 229, 256, 259, 277, 284 mobility from poverty, 3 mule renter, 11, 48, 379 NAACP, 36, 93, 100–101, 105, 130, 143–144, 153, 156, 163, 166, 178, 180, 182, 201, 263, 267, 273, 377–378, 381 native Americans, 82, 108, 232, 325, 337 Ole Miss, 66, 103, 188, 225–226, 228, 230, 245, 248, 272, 327 Parchman, 31, 33–35, 39, 96 per capita income, 27, 136, 223 perennial croppers, 4, 14, 68, 92, 152, 156, 162, 169, 380 poverty, xiii, xvi, 3, 6, 9–11, 16–19, 21, 23, 26, 30, 35, 39–43, 46–47, 49, 61, 63, 66, 68, 77, 81–82, 84–85, 87–88, 90, 95–96, 99, 102, 106, 114–116, 131, 134, 136, 146, 152, 157, 165–166, 170–174, 176, 187, 189, 191, 199, 203, 213, 215–216, 220, 223, 230, 242, 247–249, 255–259, 287–288, 293, 296, 299–300, 302, 304, 306–310, 312–314, 316–322, 324–335, 339–350, 354–356, 361, 364, 368–369, 373, 376, 379–380 public schools, 40, 49, 73, 103, 105, 122, 130–134, 138, 167, 173, 234, 244, 253, 257–258, 260, 316–317, 322, 338, 355, 374 Rebecca Smith, 211, 213–214, 337 reconstruction, 19, 46, 57, 75, 105, 113, 123, 126, 128–130, 135–137, 140, 142, 144, 167, 179–180, 188, 222, 231, 233, 259, 268, 325, 377, 379 religion, 16, 53, 70, 137, 144, 159, 162, 175–176, 270, 339, 349, 353, 377 reparations, 123, 139, 290, 380 Richard Nixon, 133, 274, 316–317, 331, 359 Robert G. Clark, 75, 90, 103, 268 Ruleville, 25, 31, 37, 41, 257, 308, 374 rural poor, xv, 6, 54, 62–63, 82, 95, 114, 135, 248, 253, 290, 293, 299, 305, 329, 334, 348, 350, 354, 361, 379

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Index scarcity, 192, 333, 341–342, 344, 348, 351 Scott County, xiii, xvi, 6–7, 9, 14, 25, 80, 123, 140, 209, 223–228, 230–235, 239, 245, 247–249, 273, 320, 347, 359, 368, 380 sharecropping, 135, 145, 169–170 Sunflower County, xiii, 4, 6–7, 10, 14, 24–25, 27–31, 33–34, 37, 39–41, 44, 47, 77, 80, 85–86, 91, 93, 100, 102–104, 157, 162, 169, 177, 189, 192, 194, 199, 213, 216, 220, 226, 234, 254, 257, 305–307, 310–312, 314, 316, 321, 371, 376 Sunflower Progress, 306, 311, 314 The Sunflower Seven, 4, 10, 14, 17, 21, 26, 43–44, 47, 96, 116, 145, 152, 175, 253, 347, 358, 369, 377, 380 Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), 319, 321, 325 tenant farmer, 5 Tougaloo, xv, 87, 102, 172, 174, 197, 204–208, 229, 255, 257, 259, 270, 381 towns in Scott, 223

399

United States Supreme Court, 23, 36, 76, 84, 121–123, 128, 142, 263–264, 274, 280, 359, 379 upward economic mobility, xiv, 3, 9–11, 22, 24, 26, 33, 56, 58–60, 72, 79, 88, 119, 134, 136, 156, 169, 174, 194, 210, 224, 241, 255, 262, 275, 290, 304, 310, 314, 318, 326, 328, 339, 343, 350, 353, 365 US Civil War, 337 Voting Rights Act, 8, 76, 383 The War on Poverty, 293, 302, 313, 322, 376 W. E. B. DuBois, 347 Wage theft, 60, 63, 156 William Clinton, 84, 122, 319 William Wilson, xvi, 319, 341 William Winter, 71, 75, 189, 206, 270 Woodrow Wilson, xv, 98, 142, 144, 165, 172, 306, 318

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