MESSAGE
| DATE | 2015-01-20 |
| FROM | Ruben Safir
|
| SUBJECT | Re: [NYLXS - HANGOUT] The Atlantic - How White Flight Ravaged the
|
I read this while traveling, it is a long article with a lot of
interesting information and amazingly enough, it is even somewhat
balanced for the Atlantic.
On 01/16/2015 01:03 PM, einker wrote:
> For generations, plantation owners strove to keep black laborers on the
> farm and competing businesses out of town. Today, the towns faring best are
> the ones whose white residents stayed to reckon with their own history.
> ------------------------------
>
> *By Alan Huffman *
>
> January 6, 2015
>
> In the Mississippi Delta town of Tchula, there’s a fading columned mansion
> that once belonged to Sara Virginia Jones, the daughter of a local
> plantation dynasty. Its walls were lined with nearly 400 works by artists
> as prominent as Paul Cezanne, Marc Chagall, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Salvador
> Dali, and Andy Warhol.
>
>
> Then, in the 1990s, the house changed hands. Today, it is filled with
> framed photos of the current owner—Tchula’s controversial first black
> mayor, Eddie Carthan, who was in office from 1977 to 1981—posing with U.S.
> presidents Carter, Clinton, and Obama and the Nation of Islam’s Louis
> Farrakhan.
>
>
> The irony of this set change is not lost on Carthan, who, as he puts it,
> went “from being a second-class citizen to staying in a house where the
> slave-owners used to live.” Carthan grew up in a shack outside Tchula, on
> property his family purchased in the 1930s as part of a New Deal project
> . The land was located on a
> former plantation, which the government bought and divided among several
> black tenants. His community became a relatively safe haven for African
> Americans and later formed an important staging ground during the
> civil-rights era.
>
>
> When Carthan was a young boy, he says he’d have risked punishment for
> simply walking past the Jones mansion without a proper reason. “I look at
> the house now, how beautiful it is and well-built it is. I was told slaves
> built it,” Carthan said, sitting at his desk in the central hall,
> surrounded by his political memorabilia. “And I think about how well they
> lived back then, and how we lived back then. This house is huge. There are
> five bedrooms. It has three full bathrooms. We didn’t have bathrooms at
> all.” He pauses to let the contrast sink in. “It’s something to focus on,”
> he says.
>
>
> But as the mansion’s flaking paint makes clear, the transformation was
> about a transfer of local power, not wealth. Families like the Joneses have
> long since left Tchula, taking their business and money with them. The
> remaining community is 97 percent black and achingly poor.
>
>
> In the Delta flatlands and the hillier country to the east, the landscape
> is dotted with towns and cities that figured prominently in the
> civil-rights era. Like Tchula, many of those places are now languishing.
>
> Greenwood, 80 miles north of Tchula, was one of the main organizing bases
> for voter registration during the 1964 Freedom Summer. For a while, the
> town’s fortunes seemed to improve, especially after a large Viking Range
> manufacturing facility opened there in 1990. But Viking was sold in 2012
> and the new owners laid off a large part of the local workforce. Today, the
> town is two-thirds black and, in important ways, still deeply segregated.
> Most of the white students go to private academies
>
> while black students attend public schools, and its residential areas are
> divided between two extremes: the leafy boulevards of the affluent white
> section and the historically poor, black Baptist Town, which is so little
> changed that it stood in for a 1960s Jackson neighborhood in the movie *The
> Help *.
>
>
> Among the key towns of the civil-rights era, those with the largest black
> majorities are frequently in the most economic trouble.
>
>
> Nearby Clarksdale, where Martin Luther King held the first major meeting of
> the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1958, dwindled in
> population beginning in the 1970s. It underwent a brief renaissance in 1995
> after its former resident Morgan Freeman opened an upscale restaurant and
> the Ground Zero Blues Club next to Clarksdale’s storied blues museum. But
> the restaurant has since closed and entire blocks of the downtown area
> currently stand abandoned.
>
>
> As for Tchula, it’s currently listed as the fifth-poorest town in the
> nation with a population of more than 1,000. Its last two industries—a
> sawmill and an apparel factory—closed long ago, and more than 15 percent of
> its residents are unemployed. Carthan said he has sought help from
> foundations and state and federal agencies, but his proposals for economic
> development projects have all been rejected.
>
> “Businesses don’t want to come to a town like Tchula,” observed Anthony
> Mansoor, who owns a hardware store downtown. “That bothers me. The people
> in this town worked so hard to get to where we are today, and in a lot of
> ways, things are better. But the town is broke. That’s the bottom line.”
>
>
> The situation is impossible to ignore: Among the key towns of the
> civil-rights era, those with the largest black majorities are frequently in
> the most economic trouble.
>
> “The richest land this side of the valley Nile!” The plantation owner Big
> Daddy Pollitt used those words to describe the Mississippi Delta in
> Tennessee Williams’ play *Cat on a Hot Tin Roof*. The fertile soils
> stretching from near Memphis to Vicksburg along the Mississippi River once
> supported a lucrative cotton economy; before the Civil War, the city of
> Natchez, farther south along the river, had more millionaires per capita
> than any other city in the U.S.
>
> After emancipation, plantation owners relied upon sharecroppers to grow and
> harvest their crops. To keep the system in place, white leaders studiously
> kept out industries that might lure their laborers away from agriculture,
> as historian James Cobb reported in his seminal book about the Delta, *The
> Most Southern Place on Earth
> *
> .
>
>
> Carthan saw that resistance firsthand. In Tchula, he said, “We couldn’t get
> factories—the power structure would block it. They didn’t want folks
> leaving the plantations.”
>
> State Senator David Jordan, who grew up in Greenwood, observes that
> employment opportunities in the Delta have always been tightly interwoven
> with politics and race. His family lived and worked as field laborers on
> one of several plantations owned by the family of U.S. Representative Will
> Whittington, and the school year ran from December to April to enable
> children to help with the crops. As a teenager, Jordan worked at a
> white-owned store, where his tasks included learning the types and brands
> of various illegal liquors. (Mississippi remained a dry state for more than
> 30 years after Prohibition was repealed.) Once, Jordan said, a customer
> asked the store owner, “‘What you educatin’ that nigger for? I need him for
> a tractor driver.’”
>
>
> “We just accepted it,” said Jordan, who graduated from high school with
> Morgan Freeman in the 1950s and went on to attend Mississippi Valley State
> University. “Wasn’t anything we could do about it.”
>
> In those days, the Delta’s plantations were plowed by mules, cultivated by
> workers with hoes, and harvested by hand. After farming became increasingly
> mechanized in the 1960s, local workers had little to do, and no new jobs
> were available to fill the void. Jordan said the loss of even the most
> basic plantation labor helped the civil-rights movement gain traction in
> the Delta.
>
> “Field hands were being replaced,” he said. “They were being paid $9 a day,
> and they paid $20 a month in rent, but when the cotton picker came, there
> was less work. People had no other trade. They got laid off, and the
> landowners pushed the shanties down, and those people had nowhere to go.
> There was a lot of dissatisfaction.”
>
>
> Dissatisfaction was nothing new in the Mississippi Delta; this was, after
> all, the birthplace of the Blues. But when the plantation jobs disappeared
> and no new industries rose to take their place, the dissatisfaction turned
> into desperation. Many blacks migrated to Northern cities like Chicago, but
> Jordan refused to budge. “I said, ‘I’ll never leave Mississippi. I’m gonna
> do something—I’m gonna get even some kind of way.’” Jordan eventually sued
> the city of Greenwood, forcing it to adopt a more representative system of
> government. After that, he was elected to the city council and then to the
> state legislature.
>
>
> Throughout Freedom Summer, these activists ran into fierce resistance from
> white business leaders. Mansoor, who was born in Honduras of Lebanese
> descent and arrived in Mississippi as an exchange student in the 1950s,
> recalled that blacks who took part in the voter registration drives were
> often fired from their jobs or denied credit at stores and banks.
>
>
> Whites who opposed segregation were likewise targeted. Hazel Brannon Smith,
> then the fiery publisher of *The Lexington Advertiser*, editorialized
> against the segregationist white Citizens’ Council in 1964. In the process,
> she said, her offices were “bombed, burned and boycotted,” and she was
> later bankrupted by a rival Citizens Council-backed newspaper.
>
>
> “My life had always been comfortable in Lexington,” Smith wrote in an
> editorial
> published in 1984, on the 20th anniversary of Freedom Summer. “My two
> papers in Holmes County were paid for. I wore good clothes, and drove a
> Cadillac convertible. I went to Europe on vacation for four months and had
> more money in my bank account when I returned than I did when I left. But
> the boycott and the hate campaign wore my business down. The Council-backed
> newspaper depleted my advertising revenues, and I fell into deep debt.”
>
>
> Mansoor’s business suffered after 1967, when one of his Tchula stores was
> the setting for a showdown between the Ku Klux Klan and a black activist
> named Edgar Love. According to Love’s account
>
> in the book *Thunder of Freedom: Black Leadership and the Transformation of
> 1960s Mississippi*, Klan members cornered him on a dark street and pursued
> him into the store. Love hid behind a counter and drew his pistol, and when
> the first Klansman entered, Love trained his gun on him. Other Klansmen
> followed and began turning over counters and racks, “just demolishing the
> store,” says Mansoor, who remembers telling his pregnant wife to run home.
> “I called the sheriff—his name was Andrew Smith—and he said, ‘There’s
> nothing I can do about it.’” The standoff ended when Love turned himself
> over to a trusted white police officer who took him to jail in Lexington,
> the county seat, “for protection,” Mansoor said.
>
> Love was later released, and Mansoor took some of the Klansmen to court for
> demolishing his store. He lost the case and his defense of the activist led
> to a boycott of his business. The bad feelings persisted for decades:
> Twenty years later, when his store caught fire, arson was suspected though
> never proven. “My wife wanted to move to California,” he recalled. “But I
> said, ‘No way I’m going to let them drive me away.’”
>
>
> In the early years of the civil-rights era, most of Tchula’s white
> residents remained, including Sarah Virginia Jones, who was described in a
> Memphis *Commercial Appeal *article as a member of “the leading family of
> Tchula.” She operated Refuge plantation with her brother and lived out her
> life in the mansion, even after her neighborhood became racially mixed.
> Jones was known for her garden-club work, her civic and beautification
> projects, the parties she hosted for high school seniors, and the artwork,
> which covered every eye-level wall space in her home. (She acquired most of
> it from a New Orleans art dealer, a Tchula native who regularly visited her
> home to offer pieces for her review.)
>
>
> Throughout the 1970s, the *Holmes County Herald* gave ample space to white
> society news, down to minute details like the time Jones went shopping
> in Memphis with a friend. There was
> little mention of life on the black side of town.
>
> But if they lacked social clout, black residents were gaining political
> power. After the passage of the Civil Rights Act, and the accompanying
> voter-registration drives, blacks comprised the majority of the electorate
> in many Mississippi towns and counties. In 1967, Robert Clark became the
> state’s first black state representative since the Reconstruction era, and
> over the decade that followed, black politicians were elected into more and
> more local leadership positions.
>
>
> When Carthan became mayor in 1977, one of his primary goals, he says, was
> to “bring the other side up.” “Tchula was like most southern towns, with
> the whites on one side and blacks on the other,” he recalls. “On the white
> side, where I am now, there were sidewalks, manicured lawns and beautiful
> homes like this one. But on the other side was dirt roads, shacks, and 75
> percent of the houses had no plumbing.”
>
>
> Carthan and the board of aldermen set about getting federal grants to make
> much-needed improvements: “Put in a sewer system, one of the first day-care
> centers in the state, paved streets, built houses and a free clinic,
> started a transportation system and a feeding program for the elderly.”
> These changes were a boon to Tchula’s poorer residents, but they produced
> few jobs. For the most part, black residents were left to grapple with an
> economic system that had been designed specifically to keep them in
> low-wage agricultural jobs.
>
>
> White residents continued to control most of the town’s wealth and business
> connections, and Carthan says they “didn’t take kindly” to his efforts:
> “Tchula’s a plantation town, and they just rejected me.”
>
> Carthan’s detractors often say that the town’s troubles are directly linked
> to his tenure as mayor, but he claims that white residents launched an
> elaborate campaign against him. “I stayed in court the entire time I was in
> office. They were accustomed to blacks who’d bow, say ‘yes-sir, boss,’ that
> sort of thing.”
>
>
> Throughout his tenure, the *Herald* frequently ran front-page stories about
> his political and legal troubles, which were legion. He feuded with the
> former mayor, who was white, and with the then-biracial board of aldermen.
> In 1980, the aldermen tried to replace the black police chief Carthan had
> appointed with a white one. There was an altercation at City Hall, and
> Carthan was charged with assault. In April 1981, he was forced to leave
> office.
>
> Two months after his resignation, Carthan was charged with allegedly hiring
> two hit men to murder one of his political rivals, Alderman Roosevelt
> Granderson. Though Granderson was black, Carthan—who defended
> himself—argued that the charges were racially motivated, that he was being
> framed by whites. Black farmers raised $115,000 for his bail and the actor
> and playwright Ossie Davis traveled to 66 cities to proclaim his innocence.
>
> Carthan was acquitted of murder in 1982 but returned to jail on charges
> stemming from the 1980 fight at City Hall. A 1986 NBC segment
> about Carthan’s trials noted that he was seen
> by his opponents as “a conniving troublemaker” and by his supporters as “a
> folk hero.” The local district attorney, Frank Carlton, acknowledged on
> camera that he had struck a deal with Granderson’s alleged murderers: After
> serving two years in prison, the two men claimed that Carthan had hired
> them to do the job. Carlton offered to drop the charges against them if
> they would testify against Carthan in court.
>
>
> “Whites felt threatened. People don’t want to come where there’s division
> and conflict and animosity.”
>
>
> By the time Carthan’s legal battles were over, Tchula’s white population
> had dwindled away to almost nothing. “Whites felt threatened,” he says. And
> new businesses didn’t want to fill the void: “People don’t want to come
> where there’s division and conflict and animosity.” The growing sense of
> desperation brought an increase in drug use and a corresponding uptick in
> crime, which led even Mansoor and his wife to move to a Jackson suburb,
> though he continues to commute an hour each way to operate his hardware
> store.
>
>
> Today, Carthan’s vision for Tchula has partially come to pass. The town of
> about 2,000 residents is governed entirely by black elected officials, and
> every house has running water. No one in Tchula gets fired from their jobs
> or is denied credit for upsetting the status quo, as happened frequently
> during the civil-rights era. The problem is, few people have jobs. Where
> local workers once harvested cotton or drove tractors on white-owned
> plantations, or toiled in the local sawmill or coat factory, there is today
> no visible means of economic support. Dwindling government grants and long
> commutes to jobs elsewhere are all that’s left.
>
> Carthan makes no secret of his disdain for whites who decamped for other
> locales, as well as those who continue to avoid moving their businesses to
> black-majority towns. But he also blames the current, majority-black
> population. “Three or four generations of people raised on
> welfare—everybody knows the problem,” he said. “Single-family homes,
> drug-infested neighborhoods, the youth always on social media, exposed to
> everything. Ear rings, nose rings, lip rings, baggy pants. I’d expect
> they’d show some appreciation, but a lot of them don’t know their history.
> That’s a challenge. It’s very difficult for the teachers to even teach
> school. They’re rebellious. They have the freedom, the resources. They
> don’t have the restraints we had in the ’60s.” He shakes his head. “What
> goes around comes around. We’ve come a long ways, but we’ve got a long ways
> to go.”
>
>
> Neshoba County Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price watches protesters pass through
> Philadelphia, Mississippi, on June 21, 1965, during a memorial for the
> three civil-rights workers who had been murdered one year earlier. Price
> was later charged with conspiracy to violate the workers’ civil rights and
> served four years in prison. (AP)
>
>
> Eighty miles to the southeast, the town of Philadelphia, Mississippi,
> stands in stark contrast with Tchula. Philadelphia was the site of Freedom
> Summer’s most brutal event: On June 21, 1964, three young civil rights
> workers were killed by Klansmen after being apprehended by local
> law-enforcement officials. James Earl Chaney, a black man from nearby
> Meridian, was beaten and shot three times; two Jewish New Yorkers, Andrew
> Goodman and Michael “Mickey” Schwerner, were shot through the heart. All
> three bodies were discovered two months later, buried in an earthen dam.
>
>
> But after decades of public notoriety and internal strife, Philadelphia has
> become one of the most successful towns in the region. The economy is
> diverse, drawing on a mix of farming, manufacturing, forestry, and service
> industries, with the added boon of a nearby Choctaw Indian casino. The
> county has also set up an enterprise incubator to provide office,
> manufacturing, and warehouse space to startup businesses.
>
> James Young, the town’s black mayor, says this economic expansion was
> possible only because white residents faced the shame of their past.
> “People didn’t turn away,” Young said. “They didn’t move away.”
>
> The self-examination didn’t start immediately. “During that season when the
> civil rights workers were missing, there was heavy tension in the air, a
> lot of frustration and disbelief,” recalled Young, who was a child at the
> time. “It sent shockwaves through the community that no one was safe. I
> remember lying on the floor of our living room with my father and a gun.”
>
>
> Philadelphia’s prominent white families were chagrined by the way their
> city and county were being portrayed by the media. In particular, one
> December 1964 article
> ,
> written by *New York Times* reporter (and later executive editor) Joseph
> Lelyveld, reported negatively on the city’s “business class” and its
> reaction to the murders.
>
>
> Former Mississippi Secretary of State Dick Molpus was 14 at the time, and
> he remembers that his father invited the *Times*’s editor, a Philadelphia
> native named Turner Catledge, to meet with the local businesses community.
> Influential locals turned out from the hospital, the newspaper, the lumber
> industry, and the glove factory. “The Klan and the Citizens Council were
> essentially running the county,” Molpus recalled. “The question was, where
> was the white leadership?”
>
> As in Tchula, whites who supported integration were being openly targeted.
> “They threatened to burn my father’s lumber mill down if he didn’t fire a
> list of employees they gave him who had gone to NAACP meetings,” said
> Molpus. “But he hired three guys with deer rifles who were as bad as they
> were to stand watch, and they didn’t burn him out.”
>
>
> Catledge had met with President Lyndon Johnson the night before the meeting
> in Philadelphia. Molpus remembers sitting on the floor next to the visiting
> editor: “He was drinking scotch, and now and then he’d hold his glass down
> and tinkle it around and I’d take it to my mother to make him another.”
>
>
> Throughout the evening, the group’s grievances centered more on the town’s
> negative portrayal than on the murders themselves. “The business guys were
> furious,” Molpus said. “They wanted him to get rid of Lelyveld. We’d had
> churches burned, homes burned, a guy got his skull broke, there were three
> kidnapped, and the discussion in the business class was just about how the
> press is making us look like hicks.” After listening to their complaints,
> Catledge turned the discussion back to the larger issues. He told the local
> leaders, “‘There’s a moment in your life to step up and demand this stop,’
> which offended everyone in there. Somebody said, ‘You’re from here, Turner,
> but you’re not one of us anymore.’”
>
>
> “We’d had churches burned, homes burned, a guy got his skull broke, and the
> discussion in the business class was just about how the press is making us
> look like hicks.”
>
>
> Another moment of reckoning came in August 1965, when a local white woman
> named Florence Mars was pulled over on her way home from a party. As Molpus
> put it, Mars was “a very outspoken, courageous woman from a well-thought-of
> family—a very gutsy woman” who supported Martin Luther King and the
> protesters who marched with him through town. When she and her sister were
> stopped on the road, Mars had reportedly had too much to drink.
>
> “The way things were done then, when someone like her was pulled over,
> they’d let her go,” Molpus said. “But they threw her and her sister into
> the drunk tank. And the community got together on a Sunday night and said,
> ‘This has got to stop,’ and it did stop. It took something happening to one
> of their own, from a prominent family.”
>
>
> Even then, there was a lingering sense of denial about the civil rights
> murders. “Preachers were saying of the civil rights workers, ‘They came
> looking for trouble, and they found it.’ I heard that from the pulpit of
> the First Baptist Church,” Molpus said. “The murderers were in control.
> They were still in law enforcement. These were killers.” Even state
> officials refused to prosecute. In 1967, seven men were convicted in
> federal court and sent to prison, but the longest any served was six years.
>
>
> Over time, Molpus said, the white community became more circumspect about
> the crime and what it meant for the future of the city. When federal
> court-ordered school integration came during the 1969–70 school year,
> Philadelphia chose not to establish all-white private academies as other
> nearby towns and cities had done. “I think the people had examined their
> souls, really, and the decision was made to keep the schools integrated,”
> Molpus said. Louisville, 30 miles down the road, was culturally and
> economically similar to Philadelphia, but its white residents decided to
> send their children to private academies, Molpus said. Today, Louisville is
> economically depressed.
>
>
> Molpus partly credits the crusading editor of the *Neshoba Democrat*,
> Stanley Dearman, for helping change Philadelphia’s outlook. In the late
> 1980s, he ran a series of articles that humanized Chaney, Goodman, and
> Schwerner, the three men killed by Klansmen in 1964, for local residents.
> “He went to New York City and sat down with Dr. Goodman. She told him about
> her son sending her a postcard saying people were friendly in Philadelphia,
> the day before he was killed.”
>
>
> Then, in 1989, Molpus and Dearman decided to commemorate the 25th
> anniversary of the murders by holding a memorial at Mt. Zion Church, which
> had been used as a voter registration site during Freedom Summer. The
> building had been torched by the Klan, and the three civil rights workers
> had been returning from it at the time of their murder. The families of the
> three murdered men attended the gathering in 1989, along with a crowd of
> several hundred—including Molpus, who apologized for what happened on
> behalf of the state.
>
>
> In 2000, Philadelphia held a multi-racial leadership conference, where
> Molpus was keynote speaker. “I said until we remove this shadow or at least
> attempt redemption, nothing is going to happen. They wanted an industrial
> park, to plant roses at the visitors center. I said we’re known for one
> thing: as the place where these three kids were killed for doing a
> patriotic duty.”
>
>
> In 2004, Dearman invited Carolyn Goodman to speak to the Philadelphia
> Coalition, an interracial group cofounded by the *Democrat*’s new editor,
> Jim Prince, and the head of the Neshoba County NAACP, Leroy Clemons.
> Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood attended and listened to Goodman’s
> moving personal account. The following year, he reopened the case and Edgar
> Ray Killen, the 80-year-old Baptist preacher who had orchestrated the
> murders, was convicted of three counts of manslaughter and sentenced to 60
> years in prison.
>
>
> In 2009, when the majority-white electorate voted in Young as
> Philadelphia’s first black mayor, national news outlets reported
>
> that the town had finally risen above its history. Young was invited to the
> White House for Christmas that year, and then to a meeting with Vice
> President Joe Biden. And in 2010, he received a civil rights award from
> CORE, the Congress On Racial Equality, which was one of the organizers of
> Freedom Summer. Because he was only a child during Freedom Summer, Young
> asked the group why he was given the award. “They said to think of Goodman,
> Chaney and Schwerner: ‘You’re the manifestation of their effort.’”
>
> Today, unemployment in Philadelphia is lower than in most Mississippi
> cities (5.8 percent as of December 2013, compared to 7.3 percent statewide)
> and its per capita income is higher. Its schools are strong, despite the
> fact that Philadelphia is as geographically isolated as Tchula, located
> about 50 miles from the nearest interstate highway. Along with its other
> industries, the town is benefitting from a new influx of tourism. “The
> chamber of commerce now does civil rights tours,” Young said. “They’ve got
> a little brochure. We’ve had people come from London, South America,
> Australia.”
>
>
> Still, Philadelphia is exceptional among Mississippi’s former civil-rights
> battlegrounds. The state as a whole has more black elected officials than
> any other, but the ongoing segregation and economic decline in so many
> places is evidence of persistent, deep-seated problems.
>
>
> “Businesses are not going to go to a place where there are not strong
> public schools,” Molpus said. “That says the community is ill. If the poor
> are in public schools and the affluent go to private, that community is
> ill. The public schools in virtually every town in the Delta were abandoned
> by the whites. That will take decades to fix—it’s a historical legacy. The
> poverty cycle hasn’t been broken.”
>
> When Eddie Carthan bought the Jones mansion in the late 1990s, the house
> had been sitting vacant for years and its legendary artwork had been moved
> to the Mississippi Museum of Art. He also bought the formerly white church
> across the street, whose congregation, he says, refused to speak to him
> when he showed up, unbidden, one Sunday after his election as mayor. Now
> he’s the pastor of that church, which is all black.
>
> On a recent afternoon, as Carthan ruminated about the future of Tchula at
> his desk, his wife, Shirley, tutored a group of young girls at the
> mansion’s long dining room table. The girls were members of the church
> Carthan pastors; only two of the congregation’s adult members have jobs.
> “They’re the poorest of the poor,” Carthan said.
>
>
> Carthan also owns a century-old, formerly white-owned hardware store that
> anchors the downtown. Business is typically slow there, and most of his
> wares are covered in dust. There is more activity in Mansoor’s store,
> though much of it centers on the free doughnuts he provides each day to the
> city’s seniors. Though he now lives an hour away, Mansoor said he refuses
> to give up on Tchula. “For the most part, it’s better in Mississippi than a
> lot of places,” he said. “People know each other. They try to get along.
> People change.”
>
>
> As evidence of the latter, Mansoor recalled an episode involving one of the
> Klansmen who demolished his store. After he died, Mansoor said, “his mother
> reached out to me and I took care of her for years. I’d go by and see about
> her, pick up her groceries. She’d cook me the best biscuits and sausage,
> and when she died she left me an old Ford car and a .38-calibre pistol. It
> was amazing. She wanted to be friends to make up for what they did.”
>
> But such changes of heart have done little to improve Tchula’s economic
> fortunes. The majority of white residents fled town without making amends
> or doing anything to reverse the decades of economic oppression. For that
> reason, Tchula, unlike Philadelphia, must rely heavily on outside
> assistance.
>
>
> Near Mansoor’s store on a recent morning, unemployed men lingered under
> shade trees behind the modest town hall, where Zula Patterson, the current
> mayor, was preparing to attend the ribbon cutting for two federally
> subsidized low-income houses. According to Patterson, such grants are few
> and far between. Asked what the town needs most, she replied, “What do we
> need? We need everything. But now we need police cars foremost. Our streets
> need to be redone. We need to try to find somebody to open some businesses.
> Nobody is really coming in until we get our infrastructure improved.”
>
>
> Meanwhile, the subsidized houses represent the first new construction in a
> long time. They might not seem like much, but as Patterson said, “We’re
> trying to make things better. We’re doing what we can.”
>
> *Alan Huffman is a freelance writer and the author of five books, most
> recently Here I Am: The Story of Tim Hetherington, War Photographer
> .
> *
>
>
> Regards,
>
> Evan M. Inker
>
|
|
