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Different from That Which Is Intended for the Colored Race: Mexicans and Mexico in Jim Crow Mississippi, 1918–1939

Julie M. Weise

in Corazón de Dixie: Mexicanos in the U.S. South since 1910

Chapter Two shows that from the 1910s through the 1930s, tens of thousands of Mexicans and Mexican Americans who initially lived in Texas moved on to the rural black-white South. Of these, the ... More

Chapter Two shows that from the 1910s through the 1930s, tens of thousands of Mexicans and Mexican Americans who initially lived in Texas moved on to the rural black-white South. Of these, the largest group picked the cotton in the Mississippi Delta. From the start, Mexicanos in Mississippi tasted the brutality and exclusion that the region’s white planters had long used to segregate, terrorize, and control African Americans. Mexicanos responded by fighting back in their daily lives, fleeing to new places, and pursuing a political strategy that engaged the cross-border and cross-class nationalism of the Mexican government and its consulate in New Orleans rather than the institutions, lawyers, and liberal discourses of U.S. citizenship. They battled most intensely from 1925 through 1930, the period when many envisioned a future in the Delta. And though most left the area during the Depression, those who remained at long last reaped the fruits of these labors: they forced local officials to admit them to the privileges of whiteness, decisively separating their futures from those of the region’s African Americans and paving the way for their families’ advancement into the white middle class.Less

“Map Maker, Troublemaker, History Maker”: The Boll Weevil Threatens the Delta

in Boll Weevil Blues: Cotton, Myth, and Power in the American South

This chapter addresses the anxiety of the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta about the boll weevil. The boll weevil forced planters to tighten their grip on Delta society. From the moment of its arrival in 1908 ... More

This chapter addresses the anxiety of the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta about the boll weevil. The boll weevil forced planters to tighten their grip on Delta society. From the moment of its arrival in 1908 to the start of the New Deal, the same white landowners exercised their social, political, and economic power over black sharecroppers by using their control of the Delta's physical environment as their main weapon. It is noted that the Delta could be saved from the boll weevil by its geographic location and the presence of its powerful planter class. The farmers were reluctantly encouraged to plant crops other than cotton, but only on “surplus land.” The myth of the boll weevil's wholesale destruction of the plantation system had troubled Delta society even before the pest itself attained the alluvial region. There was no mass exodus of labor from the Delta during the boll weevil's initial foray into northwest Mississippi.Less

Charley Patton: The Conscience of the Delta

David Evans

in Charley Patton: Voice of the Mississippi Delta

This chapter highlights certain aspects of Charley Patton's life and personality to provide a better understanding of the social context of his life and music. It is based largely on the internal ... More

This chapter highlights certain aspects of Charley Patton's life and personality to provide a better understanding of the social context of his life and music. It is based largely on the internal evidence in Patton's songs that contain biographical details and allusions and on interviews with his relatives and associates, particularly his sister Viola Cannon, his niece Bessie Turner, his nephew Tom Cannon, two of his children, and Tom Rushing, a figure in one of his songs. Patton was the first recorded black folk artist to sing about local public events and about white people whom he knew. Indeed, his very existence was a bold challenge to the status quo in the Delta that was designed to keep him oppressed, to keep him from being a “great man.” Charley Patton knew his own greatness and was proud of it.Less

Delta Solutions Big and Small

in Boll Weevil Blues: Cotton, Myth, and Power in the American South

This chapter reports the solutions of the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta to the boll weevil. The Delta and Pine Land Company (DPLC)'s fight against the boll weevil was linked to both its legacy and its ... More

This chapter reports the solutions of the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta to the boll weevil. The Delta and Pine Land Company (DPLC)'s fight against the boll weevil was linked to both its legacy and its success. DPLC's success in taking advantage of the boll weevil embodied a telling irony. Boll weevils destroyed most of the company's cotton in 1914. During the early years, boll weevils influenced just about every decision DPLC made. DPLC had come upon a way to take advantage of farmers' fear that the boll weevil would end cotton farming across the South. Its success of selling seed resulted in other anti-boll weevil strategies. The boll weevil blues that emerged from the early twentieth-century Delta spoke to the power of the boll weevil myth. By the mid-1930s, DPLC sold more quick-maturing weevil-beating cottonseed than any other firm in the world.Less

Mud, Blood, and the Blues: Hurricane Katrina and the Flood waters of the African Diaspora

Anissa Janine Wardi

in Water and African American Memory: An Ecocritical Perspective

This chapter builds on the relationship between water and trauma beginning with the Middle Passage, and specifically reads floods as an extended metaphor for African American life on the Mississippi ... More

This chapter builds on the relationship between water and trauma beginning with the Middle Passage, and specifically reads floods as an extended metaphor for African American life on the Mississippi Delta. It contextualizes Hurricane Katrina and the floodwaters that drowned New Orleans and the surrounding areas in terms of the Galveston Flood of 1900 and the 1927 Mississippi Flood. Though flood waters may be colorblind, African American communities have disproportionately borne the greatest burden of these disasters. Driving the chapter is an analysis of Richard Wright's “Down by the Riverside” and “The Man Who Saw the Flood,” each of which stories provides a glimpse into the unfolding African Diaspora. The chapter theorizes the literary, symbolic, and material meanings to be found in African American conceptions of waterways—literal and metaphoric, political and geographic. Providing a context for reading Hurricane Katrina—a natural and man-made disaster which gave way to the destruction of lives, homes, and an entire metropolis—it concludes that bodies of water are infused with the body politic of the nation.Less

True Blues Ain’t No New News

Ali Colleen Neff and William Ferris

in Let the World Listen Right: The Mississippi Delta Hip-Hop Story

This chapter focuses on the relationship between blues music and freestyle hip-hop music in the Mississippi Delta. Topnotch the Villain admits to growing up on blues music and that his musical style ... More

This chapter focuses on the relationship between blues music and freestyle hip-hop music in the Mississippi Delta. Topnotch the Villain admits to growing up on blues music and that his musical style was definitely influenced by it. The chapter also discusses how the African American people of the Mississippi Delta create social spaces for the performance of verbal art.Less

Modern Overflow

Susan Scott Parrish

in The Flood Year 1927: A Cultural History

This chapter discusses how the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 exposed the chronic and longstanding social and economic precariousness of the Delta. The flood made visible the combination of history ... More

This chapter discusses how the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 exposed the chronic and longstanding social and economic precariousness of the Delta. The flood made visible the combination of history and natural history that had produced it. Economic and social commentator Stuart Chase was a northerner who looked critically at the flood as a sign of systemic trouble. In the book Rich Land, Poor Land (1936), he contemplated not only the 1927 flood but also the still unfolding Dust Bowl, averring that his was a time of environmental “boomerangs.” Chase perceived the river not as a willful agent but rather one neutral part of various natural and humanly altered cycles, systems, and histories. Thus, to understand 1927 in the Delta, we have to understand that industrial “gallop” which occurred throughout the Mississippi watershed after the Civil War.Less

“This Game Is for Life!”

Ali Colleen Neff and William Ferris

in Let the World Listen Right: The Mississippi Delta Hip-Hop Story

This chapter discusses the hip-hop and blues scene at Red’s Juke Joint in the Mississippi Delta. It suggests that while the juke joint is made from worn materials, it was able to retain a wealth of ... More

This chapter discusses the hip-hop and blues scene at Red’s Juke Joint in the Mississippi Delta. It suggests that while the juke joint is made from worn materials, it was able to retain a wealth of local meaning, history, and style. The chapter also provides a description of the music scene by local artists and patrons of the joint, including blues singer and guitarist Wesley Jefferson, toast-teller Antonio Coburn, and bluesman Kenny Brown.Less

New Blues in the Mississippi Delta

Ali Colleen Neff and William Ferris

in Let the World Listen Right: The Mississippi Delta Hip-Hop Story

This chapter focuses on the musical style of TopNotch the Villain, a hip-hop artist from the Mississippi Delta. It explains that TopNotch’s freestyle technique reveals the rhythms of blues music, the ... More

This chapter focuses on the musical style of TopNotch the Villain, a hip-hop artist from the Mississippi Delta. It explains that TopNotch’s freestyle technique reveals the rhythms of blues music, the complexity of poetry, and the song-like phrasing of the West-Coast G-Funk hip-hop collective. The chapter also mentions that the art and aesthetics that shape TopNotch’s verbal style are the result of many years of talking lessons in the church house, at home, in the schoolyard, and over the radio waves.Less

Poetry from the Delta

Williams Martin

in Jazz Changes

The sixteen tracks on “Robert Johnson: King of the Delta Blues Singers”—some of them previously unreleased and some of them alternate takes—were conducted at several sessions between 1936–7, the only ... More

The sixteen tracks on “Robert Johnson: King of the Delta Blues Singers”—some of them previously unreleased and some of them alternate takes—were conducted at several sessions between 1936–7, the only recording dates of self-accompanying Robert Johnson, Mississippi Delta blues singer. Johnson's performance apparently was the direct product of the Mississippi Delta blues tradition, and it was also a surprise to those who believed that the original “country” blues is restrained in tempo and emotion to the slow moodiness of, for example, Bill Broonzy's later days. His kind of emotional sincerity takes courage bravery. And if jazz did not have such courage and bravery in its background, it would definitely not have survived.Less

. The Stage of Southern History

Benjamin E. Wise

in William Alexander Percy: The Curious Life of a Mississippi Planter and Sexual Freethinker

William Alexander Percy's Mississippi Delta in 1910 was a world of sprawling cotton plantations, a disproportionately large black population, and a political system run by white people and by ... More

William Alexander Percy's Mississippi Delta in 1910 was a world of sprawling cotton plantations, a disproportionately large black population, and a political system run by white people and by Democrats. Percy later wrote stories of Reconstruction, the main act on the stage of southern history. The central theme in these stories was that of southern men defending their honor and their homes.Less

Introduction: Emergence at the Crossroads

Ali Colleen Neff and William Ferris

in Let the World Listen Right: The Mississippi Delta Hip-Hop Story

This introductory chapter discusses the theme of this book, which is about the history of hip-hop music in the Mississippi Delta. The book explores the musical life of the Mississippi Delta and ... More

This introductory chapter discusses the theme of this book, which is about the history of hip-hop music in the Mississippi Delta. The book explores the musical life of the Mississippi Delta and features some of the more prominent local artists. It highlights the relationship between hip-hop and blues, and suggests that the Delta rappers are not merely avatars of the blues tradition but master oral/musical practitioners, skilled and schooled in the power of the word.Less

Musical Mobilities

Ali Colleen Neff and William Ferris

in Let the World Listen Right: The Mississippi Delta Hip-Hop Story

This chapter focuses on the issue of musical mobility in the Mississippi Delta. It explains that the unique cultural convergence that defines the Mississippi Delta can be traced through the town’s ... More

This chapter focuses on the issue of musical mobility in the Mississippi Delta. It explains that the unique cultural convergence that defines the Mississippi Delta can be traced through the town’s history as a center for agricultural trade. The chapter discusses how the race recording industry served as a sort of national telephone line as Delta musicians added to new styles, themes, and songs a distinctly local flavor. It also considers the debate on what the constitution of the rap and hip-hop forms must be.Less

Sunflower County, 1904

Chris Myers Asch

in The Senator and the Sharecropper: The Freedom Struggles of James O. Eastland and Fannie Lou Hamer

This chapter focuses on Doddsville, which, by the standards of Sunflower County and the Mississippi Delta at the turn of the century, was a bustling hamlet. Several dozen inhabitants supported a ... More

This chapter focuses on Doddsville, which, by the standards of Sunflower County and the Mississippi Delta at the turn of the century, was a bustling hamlet. Several dozen inhabitants supported a cluster of small businesses nestled just east of a bend in the Sunflower River. More than a decade earlier, two brothers, Jim and Sid Dodd, had slashed their way south from Kentucky to the banks of the Sunflower, establishing a sawmill and commissary in the hopes of making a fortune in timber. They joined another enterprising pioneer, Oliver Eastland, who had purchased hundreds of acres west of the river. Using the profits of a prosperous drugstore in the piney woods of central Mississippi, Eastland quickly expanded his holdings, ultimately bequeathing nearly 2,400 acres to his family when he died in 1899.Less

John Lee Hooker’s Blues

Richard M. Mizelle

in Backwater Blues: The Mississippi Flood of 1927 in the African American Imagination

The Introduction discusses the many floods in the Delta counties, standardization of levees, and introduces the 1927 flood.

Members

Mary G. Rolinson

in Grassroots Garveyism: The Universal Negro Improvement Association in the Rural South, 1920-1927

This chapter provides an overview of the characteristics and circumstances of supporters of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) in three sections of the rural South: Southwest Georgia, ... More

This chapter provides an overview of the characteristics and circumstances of supporters of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) in three sections of the rural South: Southwest Georgia, the Arkansas Delta, and the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta. Drawing on the 1920 and 1930 censuses, it looks at members' households, employment, financial status, and color (black or mulatto), as well as their ages, state or national nativity, and literacy. By focusing on similarities in their situations, the chapter highlights UNIA supporters' priorities and motivations for supporting the organization. A comparison of UNIA households in 1920 and in 1930 revealed stability, upward economic mobility or stagnation, urban or northward migration, and in many cases, presumably the death of Marcus Garvey's former supporters.Less

Transition

Mary G. Rolinson

in Grassroots Garveyism: The Universal Negro Improvement Association in the Rural South, 1920-1927

This chapter examines the Universal Negro Improvement Association's (UNIA) legacy in the context of black activism. In particular, it considers the striking contrast between UNIA and NAACP success in ... More

This chapter examines the Universal Negro Improvement Association's (UNIA) legacy in the context of black activism. In particular, it considers the striking contrast between UNIA and NAACP success in the rural South, especially in the Georgia and Delta regions. It highlights the almost exclusively rural character of Garveyism in Georgia and its connection to the NAACP's popularity in urban areas of the state, as well as UNIA's presence in the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta. The chapter also discusses the strategies of the NAACP and another historically significant group, the Southern Tenant Farmers Union, to win the support and leadership of blacks in the South, including rural farmers. Finally, it analyzes the role of Garveyism in promoting black nationalism as a deeply rooted ideology.Less

The Foreign Faulkner: The Mississippi Chinese in Faulkner’s South

Heidi Kim

in Invisible Subjects: Asian America in Postwar Literature

William Faulkner’s imagined small county in Mississippi has grown to represent the US South and the racial turmoil of generations imbricated in the long legacy of slavery. But in the last few ... More

William Faulkner’s imagined small county in Mississippi has grown to represent the US South and the racial turmoil of generations imbricated in the long legacy of slavery. But in the last few decades, not only have Faulkner and Southern studies looked more at diverse and global interpretations of Faulkner, but the Mississippi Delta Chinese population has become an important part of the study of racialization in the South. This chapter particularly examines the historical and literary role that the Chinese play as parties neither black nor white. The interstitial positioning of the Chinese American population parallels the skillful use of foreignness and outsiderness in Faulkner’s works, most particularly in Light in August, in which the ambiguously raced protagonist exists as a foreigner until he irretrievably falls within the racial binary. Faulkner makes use of the Chinese at pivotal moments to discuss the intrusion and socioeconomic containment of a foreign presence, which his characters see will lead to a mixed-race future.Less