Tour highlights race-based poverty and inequity across Mississippi Delta region
Interstate highways have dramatically compressed parts of the United States. But when you get off the big federal roadways, the ground unfurls for miles in every direction.
Nowhere is that truer than driving into the Mississippi Delta. The green mile markers and clip-clop of expansion joints give way to huge expanses of farmland, the occasional remains of a barn or rusting farm equipment and, very rarely, the blinking yellow light marking another roadway cutting across the expanse.
It was the heart of the nation’s cotton production before the U.S. Civil War. But the change in Mississippi’s constitution in 1890 to allow Black farmers’ fields to be taken away and the mechanization of agriculture combined to drive Black migration northward. What had been one of the few areas in the South where it was not unusual to see Black legislators and local political office holders slid fully under the shadow of Jim Crow.
Overcoming more than a century of abuse and neglect was part of the purpose behind the inaugural Truth, Poverty and Democracy Tour. The effort, a collaboration between the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Mississippi state office, the Foundation for the Mid South, Mississippi Legislative Black Caucus, NAACP Legal Defense Fund, ACLU-MS, Mississippi Poor People’s Campaign and others, combined a multicity bus tour through the region with a series of community conversations, talks and roundtables at which Mississippians were able to directly share their struggles with advocacy and civic groups and state leaders.
In the video: The SPLC’s Mississippi state office in October embarked on the inaugural Truth, Poverty and Democracy Tour, a multicity bus tour through the region with a series of community conversations, talks and roundtables at which Mississippians were able to directly share their struggles with advocacy and civic groups and state leaders.
Discussions centered on the lived experiences of people in the poorest regions, offering the chance to discuss strategies and policies that can provide pathways out of poverty against the backdrop of the Delta’s ongoing struggle for survival.
“We’re here in the Mississippi Delta, so this really illuminates what lies at the intersection of race, poverty and democracy here in the state of Mississippi,” said Waikinya Clanton, director of the SPLC’s Mississippi state office. “I know generally when people think about democracy, they don’t generally think about the connections between that and poverty eradication and what it really looks like.”
Making the leap from truth to democracy and poverty, Clanton said, was at the heart of the planning and partner selection for the three-day program in October.
“The reason this is so important for us to do is because, in the state of Mississippi, nearly 20% of our state is in poverty,” Clanton said. “It’s an impoverished state. And a third of those impoverished people are children.”
A temporal backwater
Most people have only a vague idea of where the Mississippi Delta region lies. Rather than being at the mouth of the Mississippi River, it is primarily a 200-mile-long alluvial island between the Mississippi and Yazoo rivers, forming a skinny football of verdant agricultural land stretching from the Tennessee border south to Vicksburg, Mississippi. It is the birthplace of Delta blues, with the poverty and hardship of Black farmers struggling under the oppression of Jim Crow laws in the early 20th century providing fertile ground from which early rock and roll music grew.
Now it is a region struggling to survive. According to data from Mississippi State University, the Delta saw a 2.6% drop in overall population between 2010 and 2020. Within those numbers, the Delta region’s white population dropped 9.7% and the Black population 1.4%, although the adult Black population still grew 4.5% — indicating an aging population unable or unwilling to relocate.
The economic outlook for those in the Mississippi Delta declined as well. A 2023 report from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics showed a 0.6% decline in employment opportunity in the Delta from 2002 to 2022. During the same period, employment in the surrounding region grew 9% and employment nationwide grew 17.8%. Tunica County, the northern tip of the Delta, had the largest percentage decrease in employment nationally at 66.5%, according to the report.
One of the focal points of the tour was the state of housing. Clanton said the housing crisis is emerging in Mississippi and one of its biggest contributors is housing insecurity. Mary Dramé, who is an inaugural graduate of the Mississippi state office’s Advocacy Institute, is a Tunica native. She put together portions of the presentation focused on the challenges homeowners in the region face trying to maintain their family homes.
“Some people, they don’t have insurance,” Dramé said. “Their parents or a relative left them a home, so they had insurance on the home then but it lapsed. So when damage was done by storms and things, they didn’t have the insurance to come fix the damage.”
The bus stopped at the house of Betty Reed, who had been unable to cook Thanksgiving dinner at the family property for three years because of repairs that were started but came to a halt when she ran out of funds for materials, leaving her without a floor anywhere in the home. Dramé reached out to SPLC and other partners to get funding to secure materials and have the work completed.
“When we started examining what the root causes are to some of the challenges, it is things like inheriting homes that are in other people’s names,” Clanton said. “The deeds are not clear, so it’s hard to get insurance. It’s hard to get support for things because of government regulation in a lot of these instances. We’re trying to figure out how to work through those systems, change those systems or figure out what to supplement.”
A desert of death
At another stop, in Belzoni, a town hall meeting took place to address the closure of county-run hospitals. Rural counties across the South are facing an epidemic of growing medical service deserts, a situation that’s particularly harsh in the 17-county Delta region.
According to a 2021 GoodRx Research Team report, 58% of Mississippi’s counties do not have enough primary care providers to cover the local residents. Even after a state effort to boost primary care provider recruitment to the state, 30% of residents still live in a primary care desert. Nationally, Mississippi ranks 49th out of 50 states in terms of access to clinical care.
The town’s only hospital, Patients’ Choice Medical Center, closed in 2013. The building still stands, its yellowed walls and unkempt lawn a sign of a decade of neglect. Once the local urgent care shuts down at 5 p.m., the nearest medical services for residents are at least 30 minutes away.
Shenelle Ball-Burks’ daughter, Harmony Stribling, died when she became unresponsive due to complications during her late-term pregnancy. She went into cardiac arrest while her husband, Byron, was driving her to the nearest hospital in Greenwood.
“What hurt me the most is, after I got there — because God gonna be God — as I walked through there, a nurse said that if she would have had oxygen, the baby could have lived,” Ball-Burks said. “The baby was four days from being born. It was planned already that Friday they were going to induce her labor.”
Byron Stribling said even the most rudimentary of emergency services would have allowed his child to survive. He and Ball-Burks have fought for the Patients’ Choice facility to be reopened, but to no avail.
“Basically, if we had hospitals here, it’s a possibility that my story will be totally different,” Stribling said. “So I’m doing this, I’m fighting this fight for those people.”
The members of the audience at the town hall were riveted during the tearful testimony. But James Coleman, the CEO of G.A. Carmichael Family Health Center, which operates a half-dozen family health care facilities including the urgent care in Belzoni, said that there would be some additional services coming, although not a full-blown hospital.
“The stories that I hear tug at my heart and gives me the passion to do what we do in health care,” Coleman said. “I am pleased to say that we have just been awarded at G.A. Carmichael a $1.8 million grant from the federal government. It’s called the Delta Region Maternal Care Coordination Program grant. There are only two health centers in the state of Mississippi — and only two out of seven in the nation — that receive the funding.”
In the short term, the Belzoni urgent care facility was given additional operating hours during the week, so it remained open beyond 5 p.m. Monday through Friday, allowing for some additional service availability.
A long road to travel
If nothing else, the first Truth, Poverty and Democracy Tour showed that the issues facing rural populations, especially Black citizens, across Mississippi are numerous.
“We talked about oxygen, we talked about access to just basic medical resources,” Clanton said. “It is something that is causing us to be in this moment. So, as we go forward and we’re talking about the collapse — because that’s really what we’re talking about. We’re talking about how, in the last several years, almost a dozen rural hospitals have closed. We see what that has meant for the brain drain here in the Mississippi Delta. We’ve seen what that meant for the economic devastation.”
State Rep. Timaka James-Jones, who is a life-long resident of the city of Belzoni and represents Mississippi’s 51st House District that includes Belzoni, said the tour gave everyone a laser-focused vision of the connection between those various aspects of the community.
“We took a drive through on the tour bus just to kind of look around at Belzoni,” James-Jones said. “You can see that downtown is empty. You will see homes that are empty. And that’s because we have to realize that when you have a community that does not have urgent care emergency care, then it causes us to have the people leave for better opportunities, for a better way of life.
“And then we see there are people who are leaving our county and the numbers are constantly dwindling,” she continued. “We know that we must have adequate schools. Our education system has to be fully funded. That way we can continue to have vibrant students who will hopefully be so successful that they will want to stay here in this community, but we’ve got to make sure that we provide those opportunities in every single facet. In every single facet. Whether it’s health care, whether it’s education, whether it’s housing disparities. Whether it’s state level. Whether it’s county level. Whether it’s municipal level.
“We are all responsible for making sure that our communities are whole.”
Picture at top: From left: Melanie Townsend-Blackmon, mayor of Drew, Mississippi; Mississippi state Reps. Timaka James-Jones and Tracey Rosebud; and Waikinya Clanton, director of the SPLC's Mississippi state office, during a stop on the inaugural Truth, Poverty and Democracy Tour. (Credit: Dan Anderson)
