The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture: Volume 14: Folklife

The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture - Vol. 4

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Melosi 1 M. Thomas Inge 1 Laurie B. Green 1 Larry J. Griffin 1 Judith H. Bonner 1 John T. Edge 1 James W. Ely Jr.

Table of Contents: The new encyclopedia of Southern culture /

Thomas, Ann J. Abadie and Samuel S. Hill editors. New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture. Volume 3, History Charles Reagan Wilson, editor. Hill, editor. Edge, editor.

UNC Press, ,. Thomas Inge, editor. Ely and Bradley G. Bond, editors. Cobb, editors. Malone, editor.

Series: The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture

UNC-Chapel Hill, Jackson, editor. Mohr, editor.

The region attracted many speculators who developed land along the riverfronts for cotton plantations; they became wealthy planters dependent on the labor of black slaves , who comprised the vast majority of the population in these counties well before the Civil War, often twice the number of whites.

As the riverfront areas were developed first and railroads were slow to be constructed, most of the bottomlands in the Delta were undeveloped, even after the Civil War. Both black and white migrants flowed into Mississippi, using their labor to clear land and sell timber in order to buy land. By the end of the 19th century, black farmers made up two-thirds of the independent farmers in the Mississippi Delta. In the next three decades, most blacks lost their lands due to tight credit and political oppression. Their political exclusion was maintained by the whites until after the gains of the Civil Rights Movement in the s.

The majority of residents in several counties in the region are still black, although more than , African Americans left the state during the Great Migration in the first half of the 20th century, moving to northern, midwestern, and western industrial cities. As the agricultural economy does not support many jobs or businesses, the region has had to work hard in order to diversify that economy.

Lumbering is important and new crops such as soybeans have been cultivated in the area by the largest industrial farmers. At times, the region has suffered heavy flooding from the Mississippi River, notably in and Despite the name , this region is not part of the delta of the Mississippi River. Rather, it is part of an alluvial plain , created by regular flooding of the Mississippi and Yazoo rivers over thousands of years.

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The land is flat and contains some of the most fertile soil in the world. It is two hundred miles long and seventy miles across at its widest point, encompassing approximately 4,, acres, or, some 7, square miles of alluvial floodplain. On the east, it is bounded by bluffs extending beyond the Yazoo River. Lexington, Mississippi located in Holmes County , is also part of the Delta. The shifting river delta at the mouth of the Mississippi on the Gulf Coast lies some miles south of this area, and is referred to as the Mississippi River Delta.

The two should not be confused.

Chinese began settling in Bolivar County and other Delta counties as plantation workers in the s, though most Delta Chinese families migrated to the state between the s and s. Most Chinese immigrants worked to leave the fields, becoming merchants in the small rural towns. As these have declined, along with other Delta residents ethnic Chinese have moved to cities or other states. While many Chinese have left the Delta, their population has increased in the state.

In the 21st century, about one-third of Mississippi's African-American population resides in the Delta, which has many black-majority state legislative districts.

For more than two centuries, agriculture has been the mainstay of the Delta economy. Sugar cane and rice were introduced to the region by European settlers from the Caribbean in the 18th century. Sugar and rice production were centered in southern Louisiana , and later in the Arkansas Delta. Early agriculture also included limited tobacco production in the Natchez area and indigo in the lower Mississippi. Yeoman French farmers, supported by extensive families, had begun the back-breaking land clearing.

Colonists tried to enslave the Native Americans, who escaped.

In the 18th century, the French, Spanish and English ended Native American slavery, and imported enslaved Africans instead. In the early years, African laborers brought critical knowledge and techniques for the cultivation and processing of both rice and indigo. Hundreds of thousands of Africans were captured, sold and transported as slaves from West Africa to North America. The invention of the cotton gin in the late 18th century made profitable the cultivation of short-staple cotton.

This type could be grown in the upland areas of the South, leading to the rapid development of King Cotton throughout what became known as the Deep South. The demand for labor drove the domestic slave trade , and more than one million African-American slaves were forced by sales into the South, taken in a forced migration from families in the Upper South. After continued European-American settlement in the area, Congressional passage of the Indian Removal Act of extinguished Native American claims to these lands.

In the areas of greatest cotton cultivation, whites were far outnumbered by their slaves. Many slaves were transported to Delta towns by riverboat from slave markets in New Orleans , which became the fourth largest city in the country by Other slaves were transported downriver from slave markets at Memphis and Louisville. Still others were transported by sea in the coastwise slave trade. By this time, slavery had long been established as a racial caste.

African Americans for generations worked the commodity plantations, which they made extremely profitable. In the opinion of Jefferson Davis and others later living in Mississippi, Africans being held in slavery reflected the will of Providence, as it led to their Christianizing and to the improvement of their condition, compared to what it would have been had they remained in Africa.

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Many southern planters traveled so frequently there for business that they had favorite hotels. From cotton-related exports comprised half of all exports from the port of New York City. Comparing cotton's preeminence then to that of oil today, Historian Sven Beckert called the Delta "a kind of Saudi Arabia of the early nineteenth century. Demand for cotton remained high until well after the American Civil War , even in an era of falling cotton prices. Though cotton planters believed that the alluvial soils of the region would always renew, the agricultural boom from the s to the late s caused extensive soil exhaustion and erosion.

Lacking agricultural knowledge, planters continued to raise cotton the same way after the Civil War. Plantations before the war were generally developed on ridges near the rivers, which were used for transportation of products to market.

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