Left Behind: Economic Upswing Eludes the Rural South

What has happened in this Mississippi Delta town tells much about rural poverty, which continues unabated nearly a quarter century after President Lyndon B. Johnson declared war on it.

The fresh air and fertile land of such bucolic regions mask a flood of economic challenges as relentless as the flow of the Mississippi River 50 miles west of here:

- Rural people who have the skills to make a living elsewhere are moving to cities by the thousands.

- Farmers are often struggling to survive.

- Machines are taking away jobs, not only in the fields but in small-town factories.

- More and more of those factories have been fleeing to lower-paying places abroad.

- Those out of work increasingly live on government assistance.

The chairman of the Senate Agriculture Committee, Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.), says that rural America has suffered “an economic body blow from which it may never recover.”

While Congress and the states seek to pass laws to protect scarce rural jobs, bail out farmers, underwrite economic development and improve schools, many see the problems of America’s 13.5 million rural poor as almost beyond help.

Aside from the rise of economic powerhouses like Atlanta, poverty, according to Census Bureau figures, is disproportionately a Southern problem. Roughly 16% of all Southerners’ incomes are below the government-defined poverty level, compared to 10% of Northeasterners and 13% of those in the West and Midwest. Not coincidentally, the South has a larger proportion of its people in rural areas--37%--than any other region.

“The sunshine on the Sun Belt has proved to be a narrow beam of light brightening futures along the Atlantic Seaboard and in large cities, but skipping over many small towns and rural areas,” a report for the Southern Growth Policies Board concluded in 1986.

Tchula, once a prosperous shipping center for the region’s cotton planters, is at the center of the ninth-poorest county in the United States. In 1986, per capita income was $5,780 here in Holmes County and the population was 23,600, slightly more than it was in 1970.

Some residents joined the post-World War II migration that saw millions move from the rural South and Appalachia to cities where they hoped to find opportunity.

Then, like other rural places in the South with plenty of land, low tax rates and cheap labor, Tchula attracted industry. Now it is shopping for a new factory to replace the sewing plant that has since been shut down, like so many others elsewhere.

People here talk about the need for better training, so that companies that need skilled workers can replace the vanishing employers of minimum-wage labor. They talk about home-grown businesses that won’t be moved away by absentee owners. They talk about keeping the next generation on the farm or at least nearby, with the old-fashioned values that they say derive from living on the land.

“I’m about ready to call it quits,” said Pat Bell, who, with her husband, William, runs the gas station and convenience shop in Tchula where the Greyhound buses stop on the way north to Memphis or south to Jackson.

Nowadays in Tchula, she said, “There’s just no money.” Sometimes she gives away groceries to customers who “cry that their kids don’t have anything to eat.”

“If you didn’t have credit,” her husband said, “you wouldn’t have any business at all.”

D. E. Cotton, the mayor of this town of about 1,900 people, doesn’t try to gloss over Tchula’s plight. The unemployment rate here is 85%, compared to 9.7% in all of Mississippi. He said: “We cannot pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, but with a helping hand, we will get ahead.”

He and others have set up a food program for poor children and started a town cleanup campaign. Tchula won a $695,000 federal Community Development Block Grant to improve its most blighted section, and he mentioned negotiations with an unidentified manufacturer that is considering a location here.

“The upheaval of racial problems (and a) lack of cooperation” has hurt the town, where nine out of 10 people are black, like the mayor.

Still, Cotton said: “We’re not blaming anyone. We’re saying: Let’s look ahead.”

His voice rose as he described his vision of a future financed by further grants and the investments of new businesses and homeowners.

“There would be clothing stores, shoe stores; there would be a shopping center. There would be restaurants. There would be a hotel, possibly two,” he said. “A municipal golf course. . . .”

At the Chevron station, Johnny Patterson unwound the twisted coat hanger holding the gas cap on a rusting car and pumped the requested $2.50 worth. He rolled his eyes at mention of the mayor’s dreams and complained that the federal minimum wage is still $3.35 an hour.

“How can we progress,” he said, “if they won’t let you get up?”

Down the road that splits the brown cotton fields surrounding Tchula, 25-year-old James White lives with his mother in a shingled shack that has holes in the walls and sheets for interior doors. In the summer he hopes to get some farm work again. His mother gets some financial help from her brother.

How do they get by? “Barely,” White said.

On a cold morning, a small gas heater crackled in the drafty house. Would White leave if he could afford to? “I think about it all the time,” he said.

Slump in the Country

“What’s happening in Mississippi is not that much different than what’s happening in all of the rural states,” said Phil Pepper, manager of the Economic Analysis Division of the state Research and Development Center.

He noted that a large proportion of jobs in Mississippi are for unskilled workers, and across the rural South, it’s much the same. According to a report for the congressional Sun Belt Caucus, 27% of the non-agricultural work is in manufacturing, which is in a long-term decline.

The apparel industry is Mississippi’s leader in employment. There is furniture manufacturing in the Tupelo area and catfish processing in the Delta.

Since the 1960s, manufacturing has employed more people than farming in a state where 70% of the people live outside urban areas. But in some recent years, the leading source of income in Mississippi was neither. It was government “transfer payments” from Aid to Families with Dependent Children, Social Security and food stamps.

“As the economy becomes more automated, more geared toward people with skills,” Pepper said, “you’re going to see more people left out.”

‘Education’ as Key

As for a solution, he quoted Mississippi Gov. Ray Mabus: “Education, education, education.”

Without it, technology companies will continue to stay away, said Jane Jackson, a lawyer with the Mississippi House of Representatives. “You’ve got to get (students) enough math and English so that the Vo-Tech can teach them to work for a Sony.”

Nationwide, 18% of all rural people are living below the poverty line--annual income of about $11,200 for a family of four, according to 1986 Census Bureau figures. The proportion is the same in the inner cities.

“I don’t think the people who are masterminding this economy are paying attention to this,” said John Zippert of the Federation of Southern Cooperatives, a group based in Alabama that helps family farmers hold onto their land.

“It’s a little like the underclass question of the urban ghetto--that there’s going to be a permanent class that’s going to be left behind.”

And “left behind” is an apt description.

Migration to Cities

“In one year, rural areas across the country lost 632,000 people to metro areas, due to migration,” Sen. Leahy has said. “That’s like saying that all of North Dakota migrated in one year.” Those who leave tend to be the best educated, and officials talk of a rural “brain drain.”

It’s not that nothing is being done to address the rural-urban economic restructuring that Jesse White of the Southern Growth Policies Board has termed “just as profound as what was happening in the Rust Belt,” but many observers of the rural poor say the efforts of government are piecemeal and inadequate.

Federal support of a variety of rural development programs added up to about $1.6 billion last year, according to a report just completed by the Center for Community Change, a research and advocacy group in Washington, D.C. That included money from programs of the Department of Housing and Urban Development--from which Tchula received its grant--and the Agriculture, Commerce and other departments.

“The funding levels have shrunk radically from what they were at the end of the Carter Administration,” said Norm DeWeaver, who led the study.

Decentralized Aid

The Reagan Administration’s policy has been to decentralize efforts to aid rural development, the economic research organization MDC Inc. of Chapel Hill, N.C., noted in a report last month.

“The federal government now dictates fewer rules and provides fewer dollars. As a result,” said MDC, “. . . there is a surge of economic and social initiatives in state governments throughout the country.”

Besides a new emphasis on improving education in virtually all Southern states, MDC cited other initiatives: A bank in Arkansas that focuses its lending on rural economic development, innovative literacy projects in Kentucky and a biracial group in struggling Noxubee County, Miss., that promotes home-grown businesses.

Nonetheless, the report cited “many more dark rural places still lacking the resources, the information, and the encouragement” to make significant economic progress. It called for more care in placement of federal and private-sector help so that these isolated places have access to capital and management assistance, education and training.

Just outside of Tchula, the members of the Mileston Co-op know what a little outside help can mean.

Farmers Got Donation

In the spare country store that the co-op of black farmers has owned for 40 years, Willie Lacy, the acting president, talked about the donation they received from FarmAid, the charity supported by country musicians.

Some of the members, whose cotton farms average about 50 acres, used the money to pay delinquent taxes, overdue rent on land or old fertilizer bills.

“I can remember one fella,” Lacy said. “He had everything, but he couldn’t get diesel--so that helped him.”

In the store, the afternoon gathering place now a month before planting time, the co-op members said they could use a different kind of outside help.

They’d like to restart their cotton gin, which was closed a few years ago because of drought and lack of money. And they would like to diversify, maybe open a plant to process, package and freeze vegetables grown in their fields.

A food plant would employ some of the workers displaced by the planting and picking machines. First, they would need expert help to ensure profitability, and second, the start-up capital.

The idea is not to get rich, the men said, but to employ people and give the next generation a chance to stay here.

“I realize it wouldn’t cure the problem,” Lacy said, “but that would help some.”