Persistent Poverty in the Delta a Problem With No Easy Solution

Almost one-third of people (25 percent of families) live in poverty in Washington County.

The counties in the Mississippi Delta are some of the poorest in the nation. Hoping to draw attention to the area, civil rights icon James Meredith is in the middle of a “200 Mile Walk for the Poor” through the Delta. Later this month, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference will relaunch Martin Luther King, Jr.’s, “Poor People’s Campaign” in Jackson. But as MPB’s Cari Gervin discovered in Washington County, there’s no easy solution to poverty.

Forty-five years after President Lyndon B. Johnson declared a War on Poverty, not a lot has changed in Washington County.

According to census estimates, thirty two percent of the county’s 55,000 people lived in poverty in 2007. That’s almost triple the national average.

Not only is that percentage high for Mississippi, it’s higher than the rest of the Delta. And Washington County has had those high levels of poverty stretching back at least four decades.

Larry Williams has had enough.

“Being from Mississippi and traveling all over America, I hear this all the time – Why, why are the people poor? Why they still poor?”

Williams is the head of the Delta Citizens Alliance. He was one of a number of community leaders that met in Greenville this week for a discussion about Washington County’s persistent poverty – and what can be done to end it. Williams says change is going to have to come from the ground up.

“We’d be remiss if we sit here and suggested that racism doesn’t still exist or if we said that ignorance isn’t part of the equation. But you can sit around and whine all you want to. Grassroots community development, citizen empowerment efforts are going to be the key.”

Poverty in Washington County has increased in the past decade, even as the population has declined. The U.S. Census Bureau defines the poverty threshold as a family of four whose income is under $21,000.

It won’t come as much of a surprise to learn that black families have dramatically higher rates of poverty in Washington County – 37 percent compared to 7 percent of white families. Also unsurprising is the high rate of poverty among single mothers. But the numbers – 54 percent – are still shocking.

“We’re not just talking about poverty here.”

Joachim Singlemann is a professor of sociology at Louisiana State University. He just finished a three-year study that analyzed poverty throughout the Delta in Mississippi, Arkansas and Louisiana.

“We’re really talking about social conditions in a broader sense. If you’re poor, you also tend to have worse health. You tend to participate less in democratic institutions because you may have to have to two or three jobs.”

And so, Singlemann says, it can be hard to get the poor involved in political or social actions that would actually help to break the cycle of poverty.

Emily Broad is a research fellow at Mississippi State. She’s studying what types of economic development programs can actually succeed in the Delta. What she’s found so far is a history of promising initiatives, none of which last very long.

“Sometimes I have ideas, and they say, ‘Oh, someone already implemented that and it didn’t work.’ And so when you actually dig under the surface, you see that someone tried something out for a few months, they didn’t really see an effect right way, and then the funding got pulled. So I think it’s really coming up with a comprehensive plan but then sticking with something for a long enough time to which parts of it work.”

Heather Hudson hopes to change this. Hudson has been the mayor of Greenville since 2004, and she takes her job – and the city’s poverty – seriously.

“We are the leaders. We set the example.”

By “we,” Hudson means the city of Greenville. The city employs single mothers as part of the TANF Work program, commonly known as welfare-to-work. Hudson says the city works with the parents to stop some of the problems that can prevent them from keeping jobs, such as child care and transportation.

But the biggest problem, Hudson says, is the lack of a basic understanding of how the workplace operates, whether it’s showing up on time or dressing appropriately. And a lack of those skills will cost people jobs.

“We have to realize that that still has to be taught, and it has to be taught on a regular basis.”

So the city has hired teenagers. Hudson says the grant-funded program will provide income – and teach workforce development.

“And it’s our that this will be duplicated, not just for this summer, but every summer to come, in that we are providing and creating a workforce to help reduce that poverty rate.”

Hudson hopes that private industries will follow her lead. If enough do, she says, the 2020 census will paint a much brighter picture of poverty in Washington County than next year’s data is bound to reflect.

For MPB News, I’m Cari Gervin.