Development Arrested: The Blues and Plantation Power in the Mississippi Delta

Abstract

Development Arrested: The Blues and Plantation Power in the Mississippi Delta. By Clyde Woods. The Haymarket Series. (London and New York: Verso, 1998. Pp. x, 342. $22.00, ISBN 1-85984-811-7.) In this sweeping political, cultural, and economic survey of the Mississippi Delta region from slavery to the present, author Clyde Woods outlines in painstaking detail the story of a brutally repressive and frighteningly resilient plantation regime and tells the symbiotic story of black resistance manifested lyrically in the counter-narrative of the Mississippi blues tradition. Although Woods's study begins during slavery and Reconstruction and ends in the 1990s with the: 1990 Delta Pride catfish workers strike and the 1993 appointment of Mississippi's Mike Espy as U.S. Secretary of Agriculture, it is the middle section of his text that is most insightful. Woods contests the standard interpretation of the so-called enclosure movement--a set of policies ostensibly devised to stabilize and modernize the southern economy in the wake of the devastating Mississippi flood of 1927 and the onset of the Great Depression. The movement was embodied in the Agricultural Adjustment Act and, according to Woods, it was the one pivotal development that transformed the state's plantation economy. In his view: [t]he enclosure movement in the Delta was not ... based on the transition of feudalism into capitalism; rather it marked the movement from capital-scarce, labor-intensive plantation to capital-intensive, labor-surplus neo-plantation production (p. 127). This allowed greater concentration of land ownership and wealth and greater control and domination of labor. Woods notes that Works Progress Administration (WPA) practices perpetuated racial inequality by allowing dual pay scales, with blacks paid less than white workers. These oppressive conditions were bolstered by white vigilante violence and a brutal prison system. Woods shifts his attention to the post-World War II period to offer a rigorous critique of what he terms the Green Revolution, an economic and structural reconfiguration of Mississippi's plantation system involving mechanization, crop diversification, and new agricultural techniques. Various labor-saving devices, coupled with a resurgence of white supremacist violence designed forcibly to evict surplus black tenant farmers from the land, resulted in a new plantation regime. Although southern-based white supremacists like the White Citizens Councils are among the main culprits in forging the neo-plantations of Mississippi, Woods also indicts the U. …