Development Arrested: Race, Power and the Blues in the Mississippi Delta

THE HAYMARKET SERIES Editors: Mike Davis and Michael Sprinker

1e Haymarket Series offers original studies in politics, history and tlture, with a focus on North America. Representing views across the merican left on a wide range of subjects, the series will be of interest to ,cialists both in the USA and throughout the world. A century after the rst May Day, the American left remains in the shadow of those martyrs 'hom the Haymarket Series. honors and commemorates. These studies ~stify to the living legacy of political activism and commitment for which aey gave their lives.

Development Arrested The _Blues and Plantation Power In the Mississippi Delta

• CLYDE WOODS

VERSO London • New York

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Dedicated to Lena, James, and Malik Woods, Mamie Woods, Robert Gibson, Nathaniel Gibson, Sr., Denise Bates, and to Willie Dixon, Fannie Lou Hamer, and Richard Wright

First published by Verso 1998 © Oyde Woods 1998 All rights reserved The right of Clyde Woods to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 Verso UK: 6 Meard Street, London Wl V 3HR USA: 180 Varick Street, New York NY 10014-4606 Verso is the imprint of New Left Books ISBN 1-85984-811-7 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Ubrary of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Woods. Clyde Adrian. Development arrested : the cotton and blues empire of the Mississippi Delta I Clyde Woods. p. em. -(The Haymarket series) . Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and mdex. ISBN 1-85984-811-7 (cloth) 1. Afro-Americans- Mississippi River Valley- Economic conditions. 2. Afro-Americans-Mississippi River Valley-Politics and . government. 3. Afro-Americans- Mississippi Rive;r ~ a~ley.- ~oc1al conditions. 4. Blues (Music)- Political aspects-MlSSlSSlppl R1ver Valley-History. 5. Plantation life -Mississip~i River. yalleyHistory. 6. Mississippi River Valley-~conom1c c~m.di:w~s .. 7. Mississippi River Valley-Race relations. 8. MlSSJSstppt Rtver Valley-Politics and government. 9. United States. Lower Mississippi Delta Development Commission. I. Title. F358.2.N4W66 1998 98-39689 976.3'300496073-dc21 CIP Typeset by SetSystems Ltd, Saffron Walden, Essex Printed and bound in the United States by R R Donnelley & Sons

Poem by Sterling D. Plumpp

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Acknowledgements

IX

1 What Happens to a Dream Arre('.·flannilton, Susanna Hecht, Allan Heskin, Gerald Horne, John Horton, Mel Yusef Lateef, Anthony Parent, Laura Pulido, Leonie Sandercock, ~~;J:neJres!~a Singleton, Michael Storper, Bonnie Thornton-Dill, Maria Varela, Billy Woodberry; I'm eternally grateful also to the students and staff of Department of Urban and Regional Planning, UCLA. Additionally, numerous friends and colleagues from many disciplines were RlUUUlenttal to my intellectual development: Angel Acala, Erlyene Alvarez, Brock, Anthony Browne, Shirl Buss, Yvette Galindo, Ricardo Gomes, Governor, Reheema Gray, Richard Green, Secundino Guzman, Habermatian, Iyamide Hazeley, Wardell Herron, Bobbi Hodges-Betts, Hum, Maria Jackson, Florence Kabawsa, Chana Lee, Roberto MontePeter Ngau, Sipho Nyao, Akilah Oliver, David Organ, Steve Peck, Natasha Roxie France, Haripriya Ragan, Fatimah Rony, David Rzspenski, 7

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Victoria Santiago, Sasha, Anthony Scott, Cheryl Sharpe, Joseph Simms, Gerald Thomas, Lisa Washington, Maliya Washington, Ron Wilkins, and Itabari Zulu. Many insights on current conditions in the Delta were gained from valuable discussions with Ronald Bailey, Owen Brooks, Ralph Cristy, Arthur Cosby, Andrew Ewing, Wilbur Hawkins, Melvin Horton, Stan Hyland, Mary Jackson, Pamela Moore, Charles Tisdale, and from the staffs of the Blues City Cultural Center in Memphis, the Federation of Southern Cooperatives, the Martin Luther King Jr Center for Social Change, the Tougaloo College Archives and the Rural Organizing and Cultural Center in Holmes County, Mississippi. Numerous individuals at Alcorn State University, Delta State University, Jackson State University, Memphis State University, Mississippi State University, Mississippi Valley State University and the University of Mississippi provided invaluable assistance. The Woodrow Wilson Rural Policy Fellowship Program deserves a note of thanks for enabling me to complete my fieldwork. I'm also extremely grateful to the many individuals and organizations in the Delta who took the time to educate me. Many thanks are due to the Verso editors, readers, and staff, particularly Mike Davis, Michael Sprinker, Colin Robinson, Jane Hindle, Gopal Balakrishnan, Pat Harper, and Adam Green. I was truly honored by Dr John Biggers's decision to allow me to use The Upper Room for the cover. I'd like to thank him and his representative Eugene Phony of Artcetera in Houston. Similarly, I'm deeply grateful to Memphis photographer Robert Jones for his contribution to this work. I'd like also to dedicate this work to Paul, and to all the other young people in the Delta, Baltimore, Los Angeles, and all communities who have been tragically taken from us way before their time. And I'd like to thank Carol Ahmed and the faculty, staff, and students of the Department of African and African American Studies at Pennsylvania State University. Finally, the author is solely responsible for the conclusions reached in this work. Clyde Woods June 1998

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What Happens to a Dream Arrested?

The _Lower Mississi~pi Delta region became arrested during these changes ... and IS presently chamed by the bonds of illiteracy, poverty and prejudice. Dr Jocelyn Elders, director of the Arkansas Department of Health, 1988t Mr President: !he Lower Mississippi Delta Development Commission was established ... m October 1988 as a result of legislation introduced by a bipartisan group of senators and congressmen representing the Lower Mississippi Delta region · ·: 2_14. of. the. poor~st ~nd. most depressed counties in Arkansas, Louisiana, MissiSsippi, Mrss.oun, Il.h~Ois, Tennessee and Kentucky. · · · Our ~oal IS ambitious but simple-to make the Delta and its peopl full partne · 's fu ture. That means giving every person in the Delta ea · r m A merzca the chance to be a part of the American Dream. America as a whole faces difficult challenges as it attempts to compete in the global marketplace. By any objective economic, educational and social :easur~z_nent, ~he 8.3 million p~ople in the Delta region are the least prepared partiCipate m and to contnbute to the nation's effort to succeed in the world economy. Governor Bill Clinton of Arkansas, chairman of the Lower Mississippi Delta Development Commission, to President George Bush, 15 October, 19892

~s;;blishment of the Lower Mississippi Delta Development Commission African C) m~rked th~ be~inning of a new era for the poorest and most heavily "',• Amencan regwn m the United States. The official goal of the commis ~10 n was to design a t _ d . . featur 8 f en year eve1opment plan to ehmmate the most profound org~ ~ ec~nomi~ exhaustion and human desperation. Yet the social origins a f ona practices, and public polices of the LMDDC ensured that th~ bottomio the seven-~t~te Delta region would remain mired in a seemingly ess state of cns•s Led by th th G President Bill cr · e en overnor of Arkansas and future mton, t~e LMDDC concerned itself with stabilizing the region's century-ol~~:;;n ~anta~IOn ~~~dership while simultaneously silencing the development a enda mencan VISI~n o~ h~man development. Consequently, a one b gd bahsed on social JUstice and economic sustainability fell ase upon t e relentless expansion of social inequality.

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DEVELOPMENT ARRESTED

In a larger sense, the LMDDC was part of a new international movement led by numerous regional alliances to respond to the devastating consequences of global economic restructuring. The goal of the dominant alliances or blocs is to restore and reproduce their profitability and power. Conversely, the ethnic and working-class communities still trapped in the previous structures of regional inequality are mobilizing in unprecedented numbers to create new and fundamentally transformed societies. The intellectual traditions and the social conditions that led to the creation of the LMDDC can best be understood by examining the development history of the Mississippi Delta. In 1990, some 60 percent of the nearly half-million people living in these eighteen northwestern Mississippi counties were African Americans (see Figure 1). Although small in size this region is known nationally and internationally as a center of tragedy and schism; of extreme levels of poverty and wealth; and of historic movements of repression and freedom; and as the center of both plantation culture and the African American working-class culture known as the blues. In order to understand the traditions of development thought that shaped the LMDDC, in this book l examine the Commission as part of the twelfth transformation of the Mississippi Delta's plantation regime. As analyzed in successive chapters, each transformation involved an economic and social crisis; a mobilization by the dominant plantation bloc; a shift in the form of social explanation; the establishment of a new stable regime of accumulation; and a new transformative crisis generated by the countermobilizations of the region's African American, Native American, and poor White communities. Successive Delta mobilizations and countermobilizations have defined and redefined the nation's identity. The :tviississippi Delta is one of the world's most prolific cultural centers. Generation after generation, the dominant regional bloc has carried the plantation banner of ethnic, class, and regional supremacy into every arena of American life, from academic scholarship to popular culture to domestic and foreign policy. Simultaneously, African Americans in the region have carried the message of Black working-class consciousness, pride, and resiliency into national and international arenas. In addition to informing their daily lives and the life of the United States as a nation, their vision of social, economic, and cultural affirmation and justice is the mother of several global languages and philosophical systems commonly known as the blues, jazz, rock and roll, and soul. Feeling powerless before the central ethnic and class conflicts present in the Lower Mississippi Valley (that is, the Delta areas of Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Tennessee), Clinton and the other governors, congressmen, and political leaders who worked closely with the LMDDC chose to accept them, intensify them, rub them raw, and preserve them in all their horrid splendor. In order to construct societies based on social and economic justice, a new form of consciousness must emerge. Regional planning has always held the promise of creating new social relations based on economic redistribution,

WHAT HAPPENS TO A DREAM ARRESTED?

The Mississippi Delta and the boundaries of the Lower M. . . . D Commission ISSISSippl elta

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environmental sustainability, and the fuU realization of basic human and cultural rights. Yet, without a thoroughgoing critique of regional power and culture based on indigenous conceptions of development, these efforts often create more repressive social relations. The origins of a new form of regional development in the Delta are to be found within the region itself among the scattered, misplaced and often forgotten movements, projects, and agendas of its African American communities and of other marginalized groups. Generation after generation, ethnic and class alliances arose in the region with the aim of expanding social and economic democracy, only to be ignored, dismissed, and defeated. These defeats were followed by arrogant attempts to purge such heroic movements from both historical texts ~~d popular mem~ry. yet even in defeat these movements transformed the pohc1es of the plantatwn bloc and informed daily life, community-building activities, and subsequent movements. Within the unreconstructed oral and written records of these arrested movements resides the knowledge upon which to construct new relationships and new regional structures of equality.

The Resilience of Plantation Relations The plantation has always occupied a central place in US iconography. In recent decades it has been described as a dead, yet still romanticized, aberration killed off by the inevitable march of human progress. Although the plantation tradition has been relegated to the dustbin of history by some social theorists, it continues to survive among those who celebrate its brutal legacy. It is also painfully alive among those still dominated by the economic and political dynasties of the South which preserved and reproduced themselves through diversification and through numerous new mobilizations. By the late 1960s, social scientists had abandoned the critical investigation of rural relations in the predominantly African American plantation counties of the South. When they are examined, there is a tendency to superimpose categories created for the study of Northern manufacturing-based cities onto the social and institutional histories of these rural regions. What is lost in the process is not only an appreciation of the continuity of plantation-based economic systems and power relations, but also the critique of these relations. This lovingly cultivated theoretical blindness enabled many observers to ~eny the deepening ethnic and economic crisis in the South even after Afncan American churches in the region began to be systematically burned in 1996. Removing this veil is necessary before we can understand the evoluti~n of social relations in the Mississippi Delta and the emergence of both Chnton and the LMDDC. Three development traditions emerged clearly during LMDDC debates in the late 1980s and early 1990s over the region's future. Plantation bloc leaders asserted the superiority of the plantation system and of their leadersh~p while continually advocating the expansion of their monopoly over agnculture,

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manufacturing, banking, land, and water. They also sought to preserve their monopoly over local, county, and state finances. Their commitment to the ellm.ination of federal programs designed to lessen ethnic and class exploitation was, moreover, unwavering. Their control of the region forms the foundation of powerful national and international alliances which in tum guarantees that the plantation bloc's worldview will remain highly influential in the twenty-first century. This system of social domination has also guaranteed the spread of mass impoverishment, the erosion of human rights protections, and the increased deadliness of daily life; Delta rates of infant, teen, and adult mortality are among the highest in the USA. Another tradition in the region, the New South development tradition, emerged from the predominantly White areas that after the Civil War were increasingly integrated into the sphere of Northern capital. New rail centers grew in these regions at the expense of the ports and other older urban centers that had been developed to support an economy based upon African American slavery. By the 1920s, agricultural decline and diver~ification led the state of Mississippi to create a program to preserve White rural areas by providing subsidies for Northern manufacturers moving into the state. Later copied by all fifty states, this program cemented the alliance between Northern capital and the expanding Southern manufacturing, commercial, financial, and utility · interests. To encourage additional investment, the New South bloc launched . numerous legal and illegal actions to preserve the region's "competitive . advantage": a labor force disorganized through terror, and natural resources 'Opened to uncontrolled exploitation. The seemingly endless rounds of plant closures since the early 1980s ,?,J:Otnblined with a crisis in small- and medium-sized farming to drive many rural South communities into a state of perpetual turmoil. Unable to recruit industries that prefer more "competitive" international locations, many these communities now stare into the unblinking eyes of fiscal collapse. though they have benefited from a half-century of industrial promotion traditionally and consciously excluded their African American neighbors, are still seeking to blame this disaster upon them. President Clinton, Vice Gore, the Democratic Leadership Council, and other leading memof the New South bloc increasingly look toward a receding federal as a mechanism for their empowerment. Southern executive and Co.ngressional leaders are truly reinventing government. They qmckly to grant the New South bloc the regulatory authority to Southern state social structures so that federal funds can be used to up local regimes more directly. In the case of the Lower Mississippi and other parts of the South, this has resulted in a plantation bloc-led of W?ite supremacist attitudes, alliances, institutions, social polieconomic programs. to marginalize the third tradition, the LMDDC engaged in a s~ategy that has its roots in the mid-seventeenth century. As defined third tradition of Southern political-economic explanation is centered

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upon resistance to plantation monopoly. It emerged from the Native American communities which experienced both genocide and exile as the plantation complex moved south and west It emerged from the new African American communities trapped inside the boundaries of the plantation complex. It also emerged in a less consistent manner from the impoverished White farmers and workers who tried to confront plantation power. These encounters have shaped traditions of solidarity, affirmation, and resistance which view the plantation system as an evil abomination whose strength is dependent upon the repeated destruction of community after community, family after family. These groups learned a painful lesson that many scholars have yet to learn; slavery and the plantation are not an anathema to capitalism but are pillars of it. The first school of plantation criticism was developed by those whose lives were viciously consumed by plantation slavery during its apocalyptic march across the continent. Edgar Thompson referred to the plantation as both a military form of agriculture and as a capitalist settlement institution having extensive land requirements, intensive capital and labor requirements, and internal forms of governance. In such a situation, if a worker "steals, fights, assembles unlawfully, plots, marries secretly, indulges in fornication, has illegitimate children, spends his time gambling, cock fighting or courting, the planter suffers some loss or threat of loss". 3 Slavery, sharecropping, mechanization, and prison, wage and migratory labor are just a few of the permutations possible within a plantation complex. None of these forms changes the basic features of resource monopoly and extreme ethnic and class polarization. The Mississippi Delta's plantation production complex has gone through all of these various changes and still remains the dominant feature of regional life. After 1830, the enslaved African American community confronted a new plantation system. Exploitation increased exponentially when the Southern cotton plantation empire became the pillar of the textile-driven British industrial revolution. In the Mississippi Delta, the alluvial soils produced cotton yields double those of the rest of the South. Consequently, successful planters were able easily to buy African Americans to replace the thousands who died of exhaustion as they toiled in the receding malarial swamps. These plantations have been described as both factories in the fields and death camps. Consequently, for Blacks to be sold into the Deep South- "sold down the ri.ve~" became synonymous with a sentence of death. One observer of US capttahsm during the 1850s, Karl Marx, noticed that the Deep South plantation reg~me was an agrarian form of capitalism that had successfully grafted the barbansm • of overwork onto the horrors of slavery. Although the United States has never experienced feudalism, many schools of economic thought hold that unfree labor systems, particularly slavery, are feudal and semifeudal throwbacks that are incompatible with capitalism. This assumption is undermined by the work of historians and political economists such as Edgar Thompson, George Beckford, and John Hebron Moore. In their studies of the United States, the Caribbean, Latin America, Asia, and Africa, they found capitalist dynamism, adaptability and innovation in plantation

regimes and not the rigid and unchanging aristocracy of mythology. The drive to innovate is in many ways a product of the construction of an inherently explosive social order where supervision is never-ending and where management decisions are a matter of life and death. 4 The value of such a perspective for understanding the Mississippi Delta is that it reorders common assumptions about the role of the Black working class. First, it reveals the daily terror and violence insultingly romanticized as "paternalism". It requires that we consider the central role of plantation agriculture in the development of capitalism in the United States. In terms of regional distinctiveness, this perspective reveals that there are several development trajectories in the South, each of which must be understood individually and relationally in order to comprehend existing alliances and to enter upon new development paths. Furthermore, many of those who proceed from viewpoint that the plantation South was a noncapitalist scmifeudal backwater from 1630 to 1965 would argue that the region needs more unregulated resource and labor exploitation to become fully capitalist. Yet, if we assume capitalism emerged in the plantation South before it did in the mercantile-oriented North, we can begin to understand how the region's socalled "backwardness" and poverty may actually be the result of too much development. We must also revise labor history so that .eruna,rect African Americans assume their rightful place as one of the world's working classes, and one of its most important. The second period of plantation criticism emerged during the Civil War and ecnlield ~ "'I 'd · h , · · . . · ·-o.T »I 111g I, ••1iSRJ<Stpp!, (c;ourt~sy of Rot>en T. Jones, Jr)

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:king cotton for $1 a day in a field near Clevclancl, MIAsisslppi, 1949. After World Wnr II, and before Africall Ameri"ans regained their voting ri,hts. planters began tu use StHivation and the mechanical cotton picker to drive them out of the Delta. (Courtesy uf GeMgc Walkerftbe Lihr..y of Congres
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"I'm a Man" /''1 Can't Be Satisfied." Muddy Waters and Governor William Winter at the Muddy Waters Homecoming Day. State Capitol, Jackson, Mississippi, 1980. (Courtesy of Robert T. Jones, Jr)

"The Hunter" I "Born Under a Bad Sign"/ "I Get Evil." Albert King (1924-92) at the Delta Blues Festival, Greenville, Mississippi, 1982. (Courtesy of Robert T. Jones, Jr)

Folk artist and Bluesman James "Son" Thomas ( 1926-93) and band performing in a Leland, Mississippi, jook joint, 1989. (Courtesy of Robert T. Jones, Jr)

}nna pitch a wang dang doodle all night long, all night long." Jook joint in Greenville, Mississippi, 1985. (Courtesy of Robert T. Jones, Jr)

Turner Fife and Drum Band is just one of two bands in the USA to maintain an African American musical that is more than a century old. 1\Jmer (aged 89) and his band released their first album in 1980. Fife and music combines hymns and Black folk songs with polyrhythmic drumming. Pictured are Otha Turner, lt.lU.eS,IVOJman Jessie Mae Hemphill, and Charles Woods at the Delta Blues Festival, Greenville, Mississippi, 1986.

Linking sacred nntute wilh sacrtd communities. Baptizing members of Mount Nuel Church, Red Bank, Mississippi, 1989. (Courtesy of Robert T. Jones. Jr)

(next page) ''The Su.ll is Shinin'." The blazing Delta sun illuminates a church doorway in Clarksdale. Mis.