Mississippi Delta
[2] Originally covered in hardwood forest across the bottomlands, it was developed as one of the richest cotton-growing areas in the nation before the American Civil War (1861–1865).
The region attracted many speculators who developed land along the riverfronts for cotton plantations; they became wealthy planters dependent on the labor of people they enslaved, who composed 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 slowly constructed, most of the delta's bottomlands remained undeveloped, even after the Civil War.
[citation needed] The majority of residents in several counties in the region are still Black, although more than 400,000 African Americans left the state during the Great Migration in the first half of the 20th century, moving to Northeastern, Midwestern, and Western industrial cities.
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.
French yeomen settlers, supported by extensive families, had begun the back-breaking process of clearing the land to establish farms.
European settlers in the region attempted to enslave local Native Americans for labor, though this proved unsuccessful as they frequently escaped.
In the early years of European colonization, enslaved African laborers brought critical knowledge and techniques for the cultivation and processing of both rice and indigo.
After continued European-American settlement in the area, congressional passage of the Indian Removal Act of 1830 extinguished Native American claims to these lands.
In the opinion of Jefferson Davis, typical of that of Mississippian whites of his day, 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.
[15] In 1861 Democratic mayor Fernando Wood called for secession of New York City because of its close business ties to the South.
[16] Eventually the city joined the state in supporting the war, but immigrants resented having to fight when the wealthy could buy their way out of military service.
[16] 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.
But, the extended low price of cotton had caused many to go deeply into debt, and gradually they had to sell off their lands, as they had a harder time getting credit than did White farmers.
In the late 19th century, the clearing and drainage of wetlands, especially in Arkansas and the Missouri Bootheel, increased lands available for tenant farming and sharecropping.
They quickly moved out of field labor, saving money as communities in order to establish themselves as merchants, often in the small rural towns.
During the 1920s and 1930s, in the aftermath of the increasing mechanization of Delta farms that reduced the need for labor, displaced whites and African Americans began to leave the land and move to towns and cities.
Farming was unable to absorb the available labor force, and entire families moved together, many going north on the railroad to Chicago.
Further, Lemann wrote, "it was undeniable that the economic opportunity [in the North] was vastly greater; that moment in the Black rural South was one of the few in American history when virtually every member of a large class of people was guaranteed an immediate quadrupling of income, at least, by simply relocating to a place that was only a long day’s journey away.
[21] Since the late 20th century, lower Delta agriculture has increasingly been dominated by families and nonresident corporate entities that hold large landholdings.
Such farm entities are capital-intensive, where hundreds and thousands of acres are used to produce market-driven crops such as cotton, sugar, rice, and soybeans.
The Delta is one of the top waterfowl destinations in the world because it is in the middle of the Mississippi Flyway (the largest of all the migratory bird routes in America).
Civic groups such as the Red Shirts in Mississippi were active against Republicans and blacks, sometimes using violence to suppress their voting for state candidates.
But many blacks continued to be elected to local offices, and there was a biracial coalition between Republicans and Populists that briefly gained state power in the late 1880s.
To prevent this from happening again, in 1890 the Mississippi state legislature passed a new constitution which effectively disenfranchised most blacks by use of such devices as poll taxes, literacy tests and grandfather clauses, which withstood court challenges.
The Delta counties were sites of fierce and violent resistance to change, with blacks murdered for trying to register to vote or to use public facilities.
The mostly Black sharecroppers and tenant farmers had lives marked by poverty and hardship but they expressed their struggles in music that became the beat, rhythm and songs of cities and a nation.
It is up for debate as to their origins, but it is strongly suggested they arrived in the Delta with migrant Mexican laborers in the early twentieth century[27] and are attested to around that time period in blues music centering around the dish.
The region's large African American population and historical roots make this cuisine of the Delta's truly endemic food traditions.
This de facto racial segregation is related in part to economics, as few African American parents in the poor region can pay to send their children to private schools.
