The Limits of Political Power

Abstract

In the mid-1990s, a number of Bolivar County activists voiced a mixture of grief, rage, and disappointment about their own experiences and the conditions of African Americans in their communities. The women and men who led an array of community struggles described with pride their successes in earning a living, becoming politically active, educating their children, and serving their communities and churches. But many also voiced a resonant despair about what they saw as the lack of significant advances in the quality of education, life, and health in the Delta. They pointed to the continuing power and economic inequalities within the Delta—a charge borne out by census numbers that revealed great disparities in educational achievement, employment, and life chances between the county’s whites and blacks. In 1990, when about 64 percent of Mississippi adults had completed high school, 72 percent of Bolivar’s whites were high school graduates, but only 42 percent of African Americans were graduates. Between 1990 and 1994, when Mississippi had an infant mortality rate of 12, with a nonwhite infant mortality rate of 15, in the Delta’s core counties (which included Bolivar), whites had an infant mortality rate of 7, and blacks, a rate of 17. Bolivar County had an unemployment rate of 9.5 percent in 1994, with the white rate at less than 3 percent, and the African American rate higher than 16 percent. The Delta as a whole had a white unemployment rate of less than 4 percent, but a black rate of more than 16 percent. Clearly, African American communities in the Mississippi Delta continued to be blighted by a lack of educational opportunities and incentives, by poor health care and life chances for infants and children, and by Depression-level unemployment rates for adult African Americans.