Development Arrested

The Blues and Plantation Power in the Mississippi Delta

Clyde Woods

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781844675616
• eBook ISBN:
  9781786632524
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: African American History
• Index: Social Sciences

How could the Mississippi Delta, one of the world's most prolific cultural centres, be demolished by a predictable natural disaster? This revised edition of Clyde Woods's classic book examines disaster relief and reconstruction conflicts after Hurricane Katrina. Development Arrested also traces the decline and resurrection of plantation ideology in national public policy discourse from Thomas Jefferson to George W. Bush, documenting the unceasing attacks on the gains of the Civil Rights Movement and how, despite having suffered countless defeats at the hands of the planter regime, African Americans in the Delta region have continued to push forward their agenda for social, economic and cultural justice. Woods examines the role of the blues in sustaining their efforts, surveying a musical tradition including jazz, rock and roll, soul and hiphop that has embraced a radical vision of social change.

1

What Happens to a Dream Arrested?

The Lower Mississippi Delta region became arrested during these changes … and is presently chained by the bonds of illiteracy, poverty and prejudice.

Dr Jocelyn Elders, director of the Arkansas Department of Health, 1988¹

Dear Mr President:

The Lower Mississippi Delta Development Commission was established … in October 1988 as a result of legislation introduced by a bipartisan group of senators and congressmen representing the Lower Mississippi Delta region … 214 of the poorest and most depressed counties in Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Illinois, Tennessee and Kentucky.

… Our goal is ambitious but simple—to make the Delta and its people a full partner in America’s future. That means giving every person in the Delta 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 measurement, the 8.3 million people in the Delta region are the least prepared to participate in and to contribute 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

The establishment of the Lower Mississippi Delta Development Commission (LMDDC) marked the beginning of a new era for the poorest and most heavily African American region in the United States. The official goal of the commission was to design a ten-year development plan to eliminate the most profound features of economic exhaustion and human desperation. Yet the social origins, organizational practices, and public polices of the LMDDC ensured that the people of the seven-state Delta region would remain mired in a seemingly bottomless state of crisis. Led by the then Governor of Arkansas and future President, Bill Clinton, the LMDDC concerned itself with stabilizing the region’s dominant plantation leadership while simultaneously silencing the century-old African American vision of human development. Consequently, a development agenda based on social justice and economic sustainability fell before one based upon the relentless expansion of social inequality.

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.

Figure 1 The Mississippi Delta and the boundaries of the Lower Mississippi Delta Development Commission

In order to understand the traditions of development thought that shaped the LMDDC, in this book I 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 Mississippi 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, environmental sustainability, and the full 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 and popular memory. Yet even in defeat these movements transformed the policies of the plantation 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 deny the deepening ethnic and economic crisis in the South even after African American churches in the region began to be systematically burned in 1996. Removing this veil is necessary before we can understand the evolution of social relations in the Mississippi Delta and the emergence of both Clinton 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 leadership while continually advocating the expansion of their monopoly over agriculture, manufacturing, banking, land, and water. They also sought to preserve their monopoly over local, county, and state finances. Their commitment to the elimination 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 turn 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 diversification 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 combined with a crisis in small- and medium-sized farming to drive many rural New South communities into a state of perpetual turmoil. Unable to recruit new industries that prefer more “competitive” international locations, many of these communities now stare into the unblinking eyes of fiscal collapse. Even though they have benefited from a half-century of industrial promotion that traditionally and consciously excluded their African American neighbors, they are still seeking to blame this disaster upon them. President Clinton, Vice President Gore, the Democratic Leadership Council, and other leading members of the New South bloc increasingly look toward a receding federal government as a mechanism for their empowerment. Southern executive branch and Congressional leaders are truly reinventing government. They have moved quickly to grant the New South bloc the regulatory authority to redesign Southern state social structures so that federal funds can be used to prop up local regimes more directly. In the case of the Lower Mississippi Valley and other parts of the South, this has resulted in a plantation bloc-led restoration of White supremacist attitudes, alliances, institutions, social policies, and economic programs.

In attempting to marginalize the third tradition, the LMDDC engaged in a silencing strategy that has its roots in the mid-seventeenth century. As defined here, the third tradition of Southern political-economic explanation is centered 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 river” – became synonymous with a sentence of death. One observer of US capitalism during the 1850s, Karl Marx, noticed that the Deep South plantation regime was an agrarian form of capitalism that had successfully grafted the barbarism 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 the viewpoint that the plantation South was a noncapitalist semifeudal 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 industrial capitalism emerged in the plantation South before it did in the mercantile-oriented North, we can begin to understand how the region’s so-called “backwardness” and poverty may actually be the result of too much profit-oriented development. We must also revise labor history so that enslaved African Americans assume their rightful place as one of the world’s first working classes, and one of its most important.

The second period of plantation criticism emerged during the Civil War and Reconstruction. The central theme of the war was land and labor reform. Both Northern Republican Free Soilers and some small farmers in the South wanted to limit competition from the plantation regimes. Based on the Southern experience, many White small farmers and laborers throughout the country believed that opportunities for them to accumulate wealth would rapidly evaporate in the face of the driving force behind plantation settlement; the monopolization of land, natural resources, infrastructure, institutions, capital, and labor. African Americans wanted to abolish and dismantle the plantation regime, to establish self-governing communities, and to become landowners, both individually and ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Poem by Sterling D. Plumpp
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction by Ruth Wilson Gilmore
• 1. What Happens to a Dream Arrested?
• 2. The Blues Tradition of Explanation
• 3. The Social-Spatial Construction of the Mississippi Delta
• 4. The Shotgun Policy and the Birth of the Blues
• 5. Segregation, Peonage, and the Blues Ascension
• 6. The Enclosure Movement
• 7. The Green Revolution
• 8. Poor People and the Freedom Blues
• 9. The Crises of Tchula, Tunica, and Delta Pride
• 10. Writing the Regional Future
• 11. The Blues Reconstruction
• Postscript
• Notes
• Index