Yazoo-Mississippi Delta Research Articles

Assessing Differences in Groundwater Hydrology Dynamics Between In Situ Measurements and GRACE-Derived Estimates via Machine Learning: A Test Case of Consequences for Agroecological Relationships Within the Yazoo–Mississippi Delta (USA)

Assessing Differences in Groundwater Hydrology Dynamics Between In Situ Measurements and GRACE-Derived Estimates via Machine Learning: A Test Case of Consequences for Agroecological Relationships Within the Yazoo–Mississippi Delta (USA)

Cultivation and dynamic cropping processes impart land-cover heterogeneity within agroecosystems: a metrics-based case study in the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta (USA)

ContextCultivation and crop rotation, influenced by federal policy, prices, and precipitation, are significant sources of land-cover heterogeneity. Characterization of heterogeneity is required to identify areas and trends of stability or change.ObjectivesWe analyzed a land-cover time series within a prominent agroecosystem in the US, the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta (the Delta), as a case study of which metrics capture dynamics of landscape composition, configuration, connectivity, and context.MethodsAn assessment of land cover- from 2008 to 2021- was conducted and analyzed for potential differences among three Farm Bill eras. Twelve out of 23 metrics (including three new ones presented herein) examined were useful in characterizing land-cover heterogeneity.ResultsAlthough there was no increase in cultivated land, > 72% of the Delta experienced changes in land-cover type, and ~ 3% of the Delta was stable monoculture. Configurational metrics varied across years for soybeans, cotton, and rice, indicating prevalence of field-level changes in composition; connectivity metrics revealed isolation of upland forest and rice. The amount of corn was positively associated with the previous year’s commodity prices and negatively with precipitation whereas soybean acreage was lower in high-precipitation years and more dependent on commodity prices. Farm Bill effects were mixed among categories, whereas CRP generally declined.ConclusionsThe Delta experienced land-cover change with no net loss or gain of cultivated lands. Using 12 metrics that captured temporal shifts in spatial patterns, we characterized this agroecosystem as a shifting mosaic. Our approach may be useful for identifying areas of spatio-temporal heterogeneity or stability, with implications on resource management.

An evaluation of the distribution of imported lithics within the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta during the Poverty Point period

ABSTRACT One cultural hallmark of the Poverty Point culture in the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta is the importation of lithic materials for fashioning everyday tools from sources in Arkansas, the Ohio and Tennessee River valleys, and southeastern Missouri. Previous research characterizing the distribution of imported cherts has documented a high intensity of imported chert usage at a cluster of sites near Poverty Point and at several other sites, suggesting that these sites served as centers from which imported lithics were disseminated to sites throughout the Delta. Since these studies focused on a limited number of sites in subsections of the Delta, it is difficult to gauge the importance of imported lithics basin wide. Assigning source regions to ∼57,000 chert artifacts from 81 collections from 46 Poverty Point sites, this study quantified the distribution of imported cherts throughout the Delta. The objective was to evaluate the areal extent of high-intensity usage of imported cherts, shedding light on both the density of imported cherts throughout the basin and the role of sites posited as dissemination hubs. The presence/absence of imported hematite, magnetite, quartz crystal, black chert, Tallahatta sandstone, and steatite were also noted. The analysis indicated that while the occurrence of imported cherts was widespread, sites featuring high densities of imported cherts were limited. The Poverty Point site and only a few sites located just east of Poverty Point exhibited high densities of northern gray flints. Arkansas novaculite usage was high within Arkansas but declined with distance from the Ouachita Mountain source region along the Ouachita and Arkansas River corridors. Missouri white cherts were less intensively exploited, but evidence suggests a decline with distance from the Mississippi River. While imported lithics were important at Jaketown and certain other sites in northwestern Mississippi, neighboring sites indicated low densities. Although the occurrence of imported cherts at sites throughout the Delta testifies to their widespread availability, densities typically were low except for a limited number of sites that may have served as economically or spiritually important aggregation centers.

Effects of low-till parabolic subsoiling frequency and furrow irrigation frequency on maize in the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta

Naturally forming or mechanically induced hardpans limit water infiltration and crop productivity in many agricultural regions including the Mid-South U.S. This research was conducted to determine whether low-till parabolic subsoiling and furrow irrigation interact to influence soil water dynamics and maize production in the Mid-South. The factorial effects of subsoiling frequency (no subsoiling, NS; subsoiling only before cotton, CS; subsoiling only before maize, MS; and subsoiling every year, ES) × irrigation frequency (no irrigation, NI; low-frequency irrigation, LI; and high-frequency irrigation, HI) on infiltration, grain yield, and profit over specified costs were investigated for the maize portion of a maize-cotton rotation experiment in a silty clay loam soil near Tribbett, Mississippi. Subsoiling before maize improved the infiltration of irrigation (p < 0.05) but not the infiltration of in-season rainfall for irrigated treatments. By subsoiling before maize, high-frequency irrigation maximized grain yield in just one—rather than three—out of five years. Subsoiling before maize also increased non-irrigated yield in all five years. Overall, the combination of subsoiling only before maize and low-frequency irrigation achieved the largest average profit and a relatively small risk. These findings support the practice of low-till parabolic subsoiling before maize as a hydrologically effective and economically viable strategy to conserve freshwater resources in the Mid-South.

A Quantitative Review of Irrigation Development in the Yazoo–Mississippi Delta from 1991 to 2020

The Yazoo–Mississippi Delta is one of the regions within the Lower Mississippi River Basin where substantial irrigation development and consequent groundwater depletion have occurred over the past three decades. To describe this irrigation development, a study was conducted to analyze existing geospatial datasets and to synthesize the results with those of past government surveys. The effort produced a quantitative review characterizing three aspects of irrigation development from 1991 to 2020. First, the expansion of irrigated area was tracked in terms of absolute area and in terms of fraction relative to total land or cropland area. Second, trends in irrigated land cover were traced in terms of irrigated crop mix, irrigated fractions of main crops, and comparisons with non-irrigated land. Third, changes in irrigation systems were examined in terms of water sources, energy sources, and application methods. Original findings of this study for the end of 2020 included moderate positive spatial autocorrelation in the density of irrigated areas; a higher irrigated crop preference for soybean and rice over cotton and corn in highly hydric soils; and 91% and 3% of permitted areas studied being respectively under groundwater withdrawal permits exclusively and under surface water diversion permits exclusively. By compiling such information, this paper can serve as a convenient reference on the recent history and status of irrigation development in the Yazoo–Mississippi Delta.

“That we may live”: Pesticides, plantations, and environmental racism in the United States South

This article situates pesticides as technologies marked by both continuities and discontinuities from previous modes of agrarian racism in the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta, a plantation region of the United States South. Attention to the historical-geographical specificity of pesticide intensification, I argue, provides the means to understand pesticide intensification as a mode of what I term agro-environmental racism. Anti-Black racism shaped the politics of pesticides, underpinning policies and material practices that were destructive of both the environment and human welfare in the Delta and beyond. The structures and ideologies of plantation racism helped position the Delta as one of the most pesticide-intensive sectors of U.S. agriculture during the mid-20th century—a particularly consequential period for both the intensification of pesticides and the formation of contemporary environmentalism. Pesticides were defended by agro-industrial interests as technologies supporting agricultural production—and particularly that of cotton, the most pesticide-intensive commodity crop. Simultaneously, they were figured as technologies crucial to a normative way of life. Although pesticides were articulated without explicit mention of race by the 1960s, I argue that the freedom struggle activism of the Mississippi Freedom Labor Union and Fannie Lou Hamer provide context necessary to explain the pesticide politics of the Delta’s plantation bloc. These mobilizations to enact more just, sustainable, and livable geographies were an indictment of a plantation politics which put the health of cotton and profitability of plantations above all else.

Backwater Blues: The Mississippi Flood of 1927 in the African American Imagination by Richard M. Mizelle Jr.

Reviewed by: Backwater Blues: The Mississippi Flood of 1927 in the African American Imaginationby Richard M. Mizelle Jr. Ezelle Sanford III (bio) Backwater Blues: The Mississippi Flood of 1927 in the African American Imagination. by Richard M. Mizelle Jr. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014. Pp. 224. $25. Taking its name from famed blues singer Bessie Smith's 1927 single, Richard Mizelle's innovative synchronic history Backwater Bluesrecovers the voices and experiences of African Americans during one of the most destructive environmental disasters in American history. The 1927 Mississippi River flood devastated communities in seven states as excessive rain created a slow-moving disaster. Patchworks of levees, not yet standardized and coordinated by the Army Corps of Engineers, failed from natural forces and human intervention. The river flooded areas along its main corridor, as well as its backwaters—those places and people long forgotten and marginal. Contrary to existing scholarship which analyzes the flood in the context of policy, environmental disasters, and the shaping of the Yazoo Mississippi Delta, Mizelle combines alternative sources, namely blues music and historical fiction, with traditional primary sources to fully explore key questions related to the African American experience. In this way, Mizelle makes similar moves as in Robin D. G. Kelley's Race Rebels(1994) and Keith Wailoo's Dying in the City of the Blues(2001), finding new ways to excavate experiences often not chronicled in traditional archives. Central to this study is how environmental disaster exposes the troubled relationships between race and place, protection and vulnerability, wealth and power, and citizenship and non-citizenship. Mizelle begins by making a case for blues as a valid source of counter-hegemonic expression. African Americans simultaneously expressed vulnerability and close relationships to the environment in the medium which created a shared memory around the disaster. He then moves to a close analysis of two essays penned by author Richard Wright. These essays depict the "limited options of Black people" (p. 69), where decisions made to survive were not easy and could themselves result in death. Chapter 3 is, perhaps, the most fascinating. Mizelle asks who is charity for and what does it do? Analyzing the militarization of charity and flood relief, the author documents how the American Red Cross, the main disaster relief organization preceding the growth of federal power, was used as a means to control black movement and black labor. The Red Cross camps were often undesirable places to take refuge. Men were forced to labor on failing levees, a dangerous job in itself, while trapped in a system of debt peonage. Conditions in the camps were unsanitary and the refuge from the violence of nature exposed southern blacks to the violence of men. Given the extraordinary circumstances, Mizelle maintains that these camps were "microcosms of daily survival" (p. 127). [End Page 590] African Americans not affected by the disaster learned of these horrific conditions through the black press. Efforts led by the NAACP channeled financial resources to organizations which could directly benefit their southern counterparts. Roy Wilkins and George Schuyler traveled south undercover to investigate relief camps and levee labor conditions. Efforts like the NAACP's mobilized black support and began a program of federal policy reform that would continue into the New Deal. More than this, the NAACP elucidated the political violence experienced by African American flood survivors. Finally, Mizelle demonstrates how the disaster influenced black mobility. Using the development of Frenchtown, an ethnic enclave of relocated Louisiana Creoles in Houston, Texas, Mizelle makes a case for a "racial flood diaspora" (p. 12). The specter of Hurricane Katrina looms large over this text. Though Mizelle does not make many direct comparisons, the questions explored here lend themselves to understanding the cultural and political implications of the disaster. In particular, he examines the multiple (violent) uses and purposes of artificial levees as experienced by black people. Though Mizelle is creative in excavating non-traditional sources, sometimes his work errs on the side of source analysis, which detracts from his larger analytical and narrative work. This is understandable for those who are unfamiliar with myriad blues forms; Mizelle contextualizes them very well. Overall, this small book excellently executes large ambitions as...

Boll Weevil Blues: Cotton, Myth, and Power in the American South by James C. Giesen (review)

Reviewed by: Boll Weevil Blues: Cotton, Myth, and Power in the American South by James C. Giesen Tiffany M. Fink Boll Weevil Blues: Cotton, Myth, and Power in the American South. By James C. Giesen. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. 240 pp. $40.00 (cloth); $7.00–$32.00 (e-book). Boll Weevil Blues: Cotton, Myth, and Power in the American South by James C. Giesen is about a destructive little insect and its impact on one of the key agricultural regions of the United States: the American South. The boll weevil, a small beetle from Mexico, brought about much devastation throughout the U.S. agrarian South in the first half of the 1900s. And, though the actual impact of the boll weevil was real, the insect quickly emerged as the scapegoat for all problems faced by Southerners in the United States. Deteriorating quality of soil, a poor economic outlook, and failure of government leadership—all could be blamed in some form on the boll weevil. Yet, many hoped that the infestation might propel the farmers of a land often referenced by the name Cotton Kingdom to diversify and modernize. Such monumental change would come for the region, but not as a result of an agricultural pest. Giesen readily asserts that the boll weevil is more than an agricultural pest. The boll weevil and its destructive tendencies are nothing short of an environmental disaster in the agricultural history of the United States. Yet, the author contends, studies and scholarship chronicling the sheer damaging nature of the insect fail to capture the full picture of the crushing blow that the boll weevil made to the culture and mentality of the American South. Giesen makes the striking assertion that the boll weevil is “a crucial component of the larger personal, cultural, and economic history that southerners tell of their region” (p. 175). In short, in order to understand the human experience in the American South, one must understand the powerful effect of an insect that thrives on a diet of cotton plants. Giesen traces the movement of the fear of the boll weevil across the Rio Grande to East Texas, through the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta, [End Page 724] to southeastern Alabama and into central Georgia from the 1890s through the late 1920s. The advance of the phenomenon mirrors the progression of the insect itself. As it infested more and more states in the American South, farmers called for action on the part of legislators at the local, state, and national level. Scholars offered wisdom, including recommendations to starve the boll weevil by limiting or abandoning cotton production for a season or two. U.S. Department of Agriculture entomologist Tyler Townsend pioneered a plan of attack on the boll weevil habitat. The plan, called the cultural method, proved popular with tenant farmers. The method included vigilant watchfulness for infestations, diligent weeding out of affected plants, and a simple albeit labor-intensive post-harvest process of burning and discarding old stalks, flooding irrigated fields, encouraging livestock to consume remains, and embracing crop rotation practices. In Texas and Louisiana, African American tenant farmers employed the cultural method with notable successes. Giesen argues that tenant farmers in general were faced with only three possible solutions in regards to the threat of boll weevil infestation: “quit farming, move to another farm, or continue to live and farm alongside the insect” (p. 33). Townsend’s cultural method, therefore, presented a workable approach to living and farming alongside the insect. Regardless of the wisdom and practical experience shared by some who had success fighting boll weevil infestations, farmers resisted practical methods. Agricultural extension offices opened up throughout the American South with the purpose of educating farmers on methods of boll weevil resistance. Institutions of higher education boomed through the region as land grant colleges emerged in southern cities with various academic departments working on research methods to fight boll weevils. And groups of scholars visited communities to encourage diversification and modernization as ways to grapple not only with boll weevil problems, but also with concerns about deteriorating soil quality throughout the Cotton Kingdom. The real change that the Southern states needed could have come about as a result...

Bioregional Approach to Southern History: The Yazoo-Mississippi Delta

Bioregional Approach to Southern History: The Yazoo-Mississippi Delta

Concessions and Conservation: A Study of Environmentalism and Anti-environmentalism among Commodity Farmers

Concessions and Conservation: A Study of Environmentalism and Anti-environmentalism among Commodity Farmers

Immersed in the Delta

Immersed in the Delta CL Bledsoe (bio) If the Delta Was the Sea, Dick Lourie. Hanging Loose Press: http://www.hangingloosepress.com. 165 pages; paper, $18.00, cloth $28.00. Dick Lourie is a blues saxophonist, in addition to being a poet. In 1997, he traveled to Clarksdale, Mississippi, to play with renowned blues musician Big Jack Johnson. Since then, he has returned to this vital center of Delta blues every year, drawn by the culture and history of the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta area as much as its music. If the Delta Was the Sea, his new poetry collection, grew from Lourie's exploration of the culture and the area. The book is divided into six sections, five of which end with an installment from a lengthy serialized poem, "The Camel Chronicles," which summarizes and comments on a story, taken from a website, involving a race between a camel and a horse. The story pits Southerners against foreigners and is intended to be a humorous throwaway story of the office humor variety, littered with inside jokes, yet Lourie uses it to elucidate the purportedly xenophobic Southern town of Clarksdale. Prominent townsfolk are recast in exotic roles, everyday locations familiar to any Clarksdale native are suddenly envisioned as the settings for international intrigue. Lourie states in the introduction to the collection that he had certain preconceptions about the Delta region when he arrived, and the extended analysis of this seemingly trivial story serves as a key opportunity for Lourie to dispel some of these preconceptions. It also allows him to illuminate the closed society of small-town life ("closed" if for no other reason than that these people have lived in the same place and interacted on a regular basis for so long they've developed their own codes, customs, and shared experiences). There are fourteen episodes in the story, which Lourie exhaustively analyzes at a whopping thirty-three pages. The title poem begins the collection on page fifteen and introduces the reader to Clarksdale and to blues music. "'If the river was whiskey,'" he begins, quoting Big T, a blues singer, "'and I was a / diving duck.'" The line is from an old blues song, and Lourie explores the metaphor, delighted with the conditional mixed with the transformative nature of figurative language. It's an idea he also applies to his surroundings: "if the river was / Clarksdale the Delta would be the sea," he says, implying that the culture of Clarksdale has flowed into and influenced the rest of the Delta region. This is a theme Lourie explores throughout the book. He concludes the poem by committing himself to "diving in" to the exploration of this "sea" by stating that "tonight it would all be intense blue…I might never come up." The conclusion is not only a pleasing image, but it serves to imply that Lourie hopes to not only understand and learn about Clarksdale; he also wants to simply enjoy being immersed in its culture. Lourie's poems are clean and precise. Many extend to two or more pages. He paints vivid scenes, but these are only catalysts for his explorations of the culture and society of Clarksdale and the Delta region, and of blues music in general. He chronicles veteran performers throughout the book, but he also spends time on younger, up-and-coming musicians in an attempt to show that this musical form, and this region, in general, is still vital. Lourie doesn't gloss over the negative aspects of his subject—the history of oppression, not only of African Americans, but of Native Americans, and the abject poverty made more troubling by the "sharply contrasting affluence" he discusses in his introduction, and he also explores less-often-considered groups in the South, including Italian and Jewish immigrants and their experiences. The poem "Thinking About Clarksdale" brings some of these issues to life. Lourie ponders a cotton field which leads him to an unmarked slave burial ground. He begins to realize that the descendants of some of these slaves and the descendants of their owners may still live in the area. They might even be neighbors. More troubling to him, somewhere along the line, their bloodlines...

“The Truth about the Boll Weevil”: The Nature of Planter Power in the Mississippi Delta

AbstractThe cotton boll weevil's threat to the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta at the start of the twentieth century reveals how the region's elite landowners used racism and social power to maintain contr...

Exploiting the North-South Differential: Corporate Power, Southern Politics, and the Decline of Organized Labor after World War II

In October 1945 the Alexander Smith and Sons Carpet Company, one of the leading car pet manufacturers the United States and the largest employer Yonkers, New York, marked its hundredth year. At a gala celebration sponsored by the Yonkers Chamber of Commerce, the company's first vice president, William F. C. Bill Ewing, shared his vision for the postwar future. Ewing called for greater federal support for business since, as he put it, in the last 10 or 12 years, Government has been deliberately unfriendly business. He also expressed concern about labor's demands; without federal tariff protection, he cautioned, high wages would prevent successful competition. Ewing re minded the audience that his great-grandfather, Alexander Smith, had relocated Yon kers eighty years earlier to escape deliberate sabotage and find a friendly atmosphere. He found it and prospered. Ewing alluded Smith's move Yonkers 1864 after his first factory, established 1845, burned down; the fire may have been set by employ ees incensed by Smith's introduction of the power loom. Ewing's remarks undoubtedly struck a chord with the city's business leaders, who understood that if postwar conditions proved undesirable, the company could move again.1 Five years later Ewing, now company president, followed his ancestor's lead. In August 1950 he and several Smith colleagues traveled Greenville, Mississippi, a small com munity nestled the heart of the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta, where they met with civic leaders eager attract northern firms. The two groups quickly solidified arrangements construct a new carpet mill. By early 1953 Greenville Mills was up and running; by June 1954, it had 450 employees and company officials were ready abandon the northern operation. On June 24, during a strike by Yonkers members of the Textile Workers Union of America (twua), Smith managers announced that it had become economically im possible continue running the Yonkers plant. In the coming months, they closed the

Traveling Riverside Blues: Landscapes of Robert Johnson in the Yazoo‐Mississippi Delta

Focus on GeographyVolume 49, Issue 3 p. 22-28 Traveling Riverside Blues: Landscapes of Robert Johnson in the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta Robert N. Brown, Robert N. BrownSearch for more papers by this author Robert N. Brown, Robert N. BrownSearch for more papers by this author First published: 21 April 2010 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1949-8535.2006.tb00170.xCitations: 1AboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Citing Literature Volume49, Issue3Winter 2006Pages 22-28 RelatedInformation

Black Homeplace Migration to the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta: Ambiguous Journeys, Uncertain Outcomes

Between 1910 and 1970, African Americans moved out of the southeastern U.S. in one of the largest movements in human history. Some estimates hold that more than 9 million black Southerners left the South for new lives in the North and West. The migration reached its peak in the 1950s, and began to slow in the 1960s. In the early 1970s, these black migrants and their descendants began coming home to the South, a trend that continues today. This study looks at one region to which many African Americans have returned, the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta. Regions like the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta have been largely ignored in black return migration studies. Much of the work that has been done to document the return migration of blacks to the South has focused on the South's urban areas. What has been neglected is the fact that there is also a significant return of African Americans to the rural South, a region of chronic economic stagnation. While the U.S. Census Bureau collects information on its long forms that can lead the researcher to a better understanding of African American migration processes and place attachments, the data are imperfect and can only provide the backbone of understanding. In an attempt to dig beneath the available data, we employ ethnographic methodology in this study. We focus on the geographic life history of Mrs. Dorothy Mae Scott.

This delta, this land: an environmental history of the Yazoo-Mississippi floodplain

This Delta, This Land is a comprehensive environmental history of the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta - the first one to place the Delta's economic and cultural history in an environmental context. The Delta, the floodplain between two great rivers in the northwestern corner of Mississippi, has changed enormously since the Civil War. Agriculture, lumbering, and flood-management schemes have transformed it beyond recognition - and beyond any prospects for a full recovery. However, says Mikko Saikku, the 150 years following the Civil War brought greater environmental change than we generally realize. Also, the long-term environmental history of the Delta is much more complex than our current view of it, which privileges recent periods rather than presenting the entire continuum. Looking across thousands of years, Saikku examines successive human societies in the Delta, drawing connections between environmental and social problems and noting differences between Native Americans and Euro-Americans in their economies, modes of production, and land-use patterns. Saikku's range of sources is astonishing: travel literature, naturalists' writings, government records, company archives, archaeological data, private correspondence, and more. As he documents how such factors as climate and water levels shaped the Delta, he also reveals the human aspects of the region's natural history, including land reclamation, slave and sharecropper economies, ethnic and racial perceptions of land ownership and stewardship, and even blues music.

Gendered freedoms: race, rights, and the politics of household in the Delta, 1861-1875

In May 1862, hundreds of African-Americans freed themselves in the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta and in the process destroyed the South's fundamental structure of power - the plantation household. Yet at the moment of freedom, southerners did not discard what they knew. Instead, blacks and whites, men and women constructed competing visions of freedom based on their particular understanding of household authority. General Freedoms explores this first generation of freedom and presents an intimate history of the political consciousness of the franchised and disenfranchised during the Civil War and Reconstruction in the Mississippi Delta. Gendered Freedoms is the first book to analyze black and white southerners' subjective understandings of the household, challenging us to reexamine the relationship between identity and political consciousness. Where others emphasize the household principally as a structure based on an ideology of power, Nancy Bercaw demonstrates how deeply household hierarchies permeated into southerners' most personal sense of themselves, shaping their perceptions of their autonomy, rights, duties, and obligations to one another. The author highlights the importance of African-American and white women and integrates them into her analysis to reveal political consciousness in both its public and its private dimensions. The first to uncover these largely unheard of voices of the region, the author investigates the conservative and radical traditions embodied in southern dissent. In order to capture the personal perspectives of individual southerners, the author mines a variety of archival collections which record the public and private responses of southern white men and women to war and emancipation - providing rare insight into how black men and women defined and contested the meaning of freedom within their households and communities. The end product is an intimate window into the lives of individuals in the Delta from 1861 to 1875, as they contested the nature of political rights from the perspective of whiteness and blackness, manhood and womanhood, freedom and dependency.

Forgotten Time: The Yazoo-Mississippi Delta after the Civil War

Although it came to epitomize the Cotton South in the twentieth century, the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta emerged as a distinct entity in the decades following the Civil War. As other southerners confronted the need to rebuild, the Delta remained mostly wilderness in 1865. Elsewhere, planters struggled to maintain the perquisites of slaveholding and poor families tried desperately to escape the sharecropper's lot, yet Delta landlords offered generous terms to freed people willing to clear and cultivate backcountry acres subject to yellow fever and yearly flooding. By the turn of the century, two-thirds of the region's farmers were African Americans, whose holdings represented great political and economic strength.Most historical studies of the Delta have either lauded the achievements of its white planters or found its record number of lynchings representative of the worst aspects of the New South. By looking beyond white planters to the region as a whole, John C. Willis uncovers surprising evidence of African-American enterprise, the advantages of tenancy in an unstable cotton market, and the dominance of foreign-born merchants in the area, including many Chinese. Examining the lives of individuals--freedmen, planters, and merchants--Willis explores the reciprocal interests of former slaves and former slaveholders. He shows how, in a cruel irony replicated in other areas of the South, the backbreaking work that African Americans did to clear, settle, and farm the land away from the river made the land ultimately too valuable for them to retain. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the Delta began to devolve back into a stereotypical southern region with African Americans cast back into an impoverished, debt-ridden labor system.The Yazoo-Mississippi Delta has long been seen as a focal point for the study of Reconstruction, and Forgotten Time enters this historiographical tradition at the same time that it reverses many of its central assumptions.

Forgotten Time: The Yazoo-Mississippi Delta after the Civil War

Forgotten Time: The Yazoo-Mississippi Delta after the Civil War

Forgotten Time: The Yazoo-Mississippi Delta after the Civil War

This work explores the level of economic opportunity that African Americans in the Ya zooMississippi Delta experienced from the end of the Civil War through the early twentieth century. John C. Willis begins by noting how undeveloped this area was in 1860 when it contained fewer than fifty thousand settlers (87 percent African American) and but one tenth of its acreage had been cleared. It would be the combination of vast untapped resources and the need to attract a black labor force that would make this an area of unusual economic opportunity for blacks during the late nineteenth century. This book is held together by a combination of fascinating individual portraits of black farmers as well as an impressive database constructed by Willis from information on about twentyfive thousand farm owners and laborers from three counties using the 1870, 1880, and 1900 federal manuscript censuses. These portraits reveal interesting characters and families and raise important questions about the factors that shaped economic opportunity. For example, Willis describes the circumstances that influenced Bohlen Lucas, a black farmer who accumulated hundreds of acres of land through hard work and equally impressive manipulation of white patrons. Lucas enhanced his position within the white community by supporting the Democratic party—a position that ultimately led to his election as county treasurer and to the retribution of freedmen. Willis points out that it was not surprising that as county treasurer Lucas deputized two white Democrats as his assistants, since this otherwise very successful landowner was illiterate. This observation then leads Willis to note that Lucas was not unusual, as threefifths of black farm owners in his Delta database also were illiterate, and that this shortcoming did not pose an “insurmountable handicap” to farm ownership.