mick silver
10th January 2015, 08:53 AM
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 (http://sunflowerplantation.com/?page_id=57). 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 (http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/12/in-southern-towns-segregation-academies-are-still-going-strong/266207/) 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 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CLDiS=WgFrs).
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 (https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-most-southern-place-on-earth-9780195089134?cc=us&lang=en&134?cc).
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.’”
http://img.s-msn.com/tenant/amp/entityid/BBhA8Z7.img?h=671&w=1123&m=6&q=60&o=f&l=f (http://pinterest.com/pin/create/button/?url=http%3a%2f%2fwww.msn.com%2f01%2fen-us%2fBBhAboO&media=http%3a%2f%2fimg.s-msn.com%2ftenant%2famp%2fentityid%2fBBhA8Z7.img&description=A+tenant+family+at+Marcella+Plantation +near+Tchula%2c+Mississippi%2c+in+1939.+(Marion+Po st+Wolcott%2fLibra...+-+AP+Photo) © AP Photo A tenant family at Marcella Plantation near Tchula, Mississippi, in 1939. (Marion Post Wolcott/Library of Congress)
“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.
http://img.s-msn.com/tenant/amp/entityid/BBhzZoL.img?h=565&w=486&m=6&q=60&o=f&l=f (http://pinterest.com/pin/create/button/?url=http%3a%2f%2fwww.msn.com%2f01%2fen-us%2fBBhAboO&media=http%3a%2f%2fimg.s-msn.com%2ftenant%2famp%2fentityid%2fBBhzZoL.img&description=Hazel+Brannon+Smith+accepts+a+Woman+of +Conscience+award+at+the+Overseas+Press+Club+in+Ne w+York+in+19...+-+AP+Photo) © AP Photo Hazel Brannon Smith accepts a Woman of Conscience award at the Overseas Press Club in New York in 1964, the same year she won the Pulitzer Prize. (AP)
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 (http://aliciapatterson.org/stories/bombed-burned-and-boycotted) 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 (http://books.google.com/books?id=iJSegIsw8cwC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false) 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.
http://img.s-msn.com/tenant/amp/entityid/BBhzXFZ.img?h=367&w=486&m=6&q=60&o=f&l=f&x=114&y=62 (http://pinterest.com/pin/create/button/?url=http%3a%2f%2fwww.msn.com%2f01%2fen-us%2fBBhAboO&media=http%3a%2f%2fimg.s-msn.com%2ftenant%2famp%2fentityid%2fBBhzXFZ.img&description=A+recent+photo+of+Anthony+Mansoor+in+h is+office+(Alan+Huffman)+-+AP+Photo) © AP Photo A recent photo of Anthony Mansoor in his office (Alan Huffman)
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: 20 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 (http://www.fold3.com/image/47569358/) 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
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 (http://sunflowerplantation.com/?page_id=57). 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 (http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/12/in-southern-towns-segregation-academies-are-still-going-strong/266207/) 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 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CLDiS=WgFrs).
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 (https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-most-southern-place-on-earth-9780195089134?cc=us&lang=en&134?cc).
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.’”
http://img.s-msn.com/tenant/amp/entityid/BBhA8Z7.img?h=671&w=1123&m=6&q=60&o=f&l=f (http://pinterest.com/pin/create/button/?url=http%3a%2f%2fwww.msn.com%2f01%2fen-us%2fBBhAboO&media=http%3a%2f%2fimg.s-msn.com%2ftenant%2famp%2fentityid%2fBBhA8Z7.img&description=A+tenant+family+at+Marcella+Plantation +near+Tchula%2c+Mississippi%2c+in+1939.+(Marion+Po st+Wolcott%2fLibra...+-+AP+Photo) © AP Photo A tenant family at Marcella Plantation near Tchula, Mississippi, in 1939. (Marion Post Wolcott/Library of Congress)
“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.
http://img.s-msn.com/tenant/amp/entityid/BBhzZoL.img?h=565&w=486&m=6&q=60&o=f&l=f (http://pinterest.com/pin/create/button/?url=http%3a%2f%2fwww.msn.com%2f01%2fen-us%2fBBhAboO&media=http%3a%2f%2fimg.s-msn.com%2ftenant%2famp%2fentityid%2fBBhzZoL.img&description=Hazel+Brannon+Smith+accepts+a+Woman+of +Conscience+award+at+the+Overseas+Press+Club+in+Ne w+York+in+19...+-+AP+Photo) © AP Photo Hazel Brannon Smith accepts a Woman of Conscience award at the Overseas Press Club in New York in 1964, the same year she won the Pulitzer Prize. (AP)
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 (http://aliciapatterson.org/stories/bombed-burned-and-boycotted) 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 (http://books.google.com/books?id=iJSegIsw8cwC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false) 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.
http://img.s-msn.com/tenant/amp/entityid/BBhzXFZ.img?h=367&w=486&m=6&q=60&o=f&l=f&x=114&y=62 (http://pinterest.com/pin/create/button/?url=http%3a%2f%2fwww.msn.com%2f01%2fen-us%2fBBhAboO&media=http%3a%2f%2fimg.s-msn.com%2ftenant%2famp%2fentityid%2fBBhzXFZ.img&description=A+recent+photo+of+Anthony+Mansoor+in+h is+office+(Alan+Huffman)+-+AP+Photo) © AP Photo A recent photo of Anthony Mansoor in his office (Alan Huffman)
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: 20 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 (http://www.fold3.com/image/47569358/) 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