‘Plantation Mentality’ Under Fire : Delta: Workers sent to school to upgrade skills, but history is hard to overcome.

Bob Topper supposedly got a 10th-grade education, although he was more likely to be found in the barn milking cows than inside a classroom cracking books.

“I was busy working Daddy’s farm. I didn’t spend much time on school,” said Topper, now 48. “But they kept passing me on up.”

Jesse Sims, 38, didn’t get in much studying either during a youth spent chopping cotton for $7 a day. Nearly everyone he knew did that kind of work.

“I thought that’s what I’d be doing,” Sims said.

But low-skill agricultural work has steadily shrunk in Mississippi’s Delta region as mechanization, technology and the decline of small farms have accelerated. A few decades ago, 75% or more of the work force labored on farms. Now, farm jobs account for 15% or less.

“It’s an area that’s been in transition--for a long, long time,” said Ron Hudson, executive director of the Coahoma County Chamber of Commerce.

The problem is, transition to what?

Enter a Massachusetts Yankee into King Cotton’s court.

George Walker came to this land of blues music, soft drawls and intense poverty 12 years ago, bringing Northeastern industrial experience, a clipped Worcester accent and a vision for a different Delta--a vision that may be sparking a trend.

“I could sense that the world was changing,” Walker recalled. “To compete, you would have to offer world-class quality.”

Walker started by trying to create a world-class work force in this rural town of 20,000 for his Delta Wire Corp.

Mississippi State University and the county community college worked with Walker to develop training courses ranging from basic reading and math to learning how to use statistics methodology for quality control.

Workers such as Topper, who shunned classrooms in his youth, were paid to study. And Delta Wire paid its employees more than double the local average--some 10 times more than Sims once got for chopping cotton.

“I like factory work a lot better,” said Sims. “It’s a better job, more pay, more benefits, and they sent us to school.”

The company has grown from 10 workers making high-carbon steel wire to 120, and its office walls boast such honors as a Goodyear “best-of-class” supplier award and the 1993 Governor’s Cup award from the Southern Growth Policies Board. Among its customers have been NASA and AT&T.;

“In this area, Delta Wire is known as one of the best places to work,” said plant manager Freddy Williams, who represents another innovation. The 44-year-old native of nearby Benoit is black, heading an integrated work force in a region where old racial attitudes still surface.

“Not too long ago, this would have been virtually unheard of,” Williams said. “This company sets an example.”

Just to the south, in Shelby, attorney G. Rives Neblett considered Delta Wire’s training efforts three years ago as he mulled closing his Shelby Diecasting Plant and shifting its money-losing production to its profitable sister plant in Fayette, Ala.

Reluctant to close the plant and put 135 people out of work in his hometown, Neblett took a hard look at its employees and its management style.

He decided to spend $52,000 for a computer-filled training center outside the factory. The community college set up courses for his workers, whom he paid by the hour to attend class.

The workers were organized into teams for decision-making.

“It’s a significant change from the plantation mentality, where the boss man tells the workers what to do,” Neblett said. “It’s difficult. They still want to be directed. The fear of change and failure is still significant.”

Innovations like Neblett’s and Walker’s are a start, of course, but the region obviously needs more than a few scattered training efforts.

Statewide, 25% of Mississippians live below the federal poverty line--compared to 13% nationwide--with figures ranging much higher in Delta communities.

“It’s going to take time. Church is still out, so to speak,” Neblett said. “If the education standards are not improved drastically in the coming years, if we can’t create the work ethic that is so badly needed in this competitive environment, I don’t see that the Mississippi Delta is ever going to lift itself up.”

Walker, meanwhile, has become a Delta ambassador working closely with the Chamber of Commerce.

“We’ve had some successes,” Walker said. “It’s starting to happen here.”

Clarksdale has a new industrial park and the chamber offers low-cost “incubators” for new small businesses, in which they entrepreneurs lease space and use chamber utilities, maintenance, secretaries and office equipment to defray the start-up costs that often kill new businesses in their first year.

Depicted on advertisements, caps and T-shirts by a contented-looking green frog, the chamber’s goal, with Walker often leading the way, is to lure a “big frog for our small pond”--a large company to ease double-digit unemployment.

“He could sit over there and run that business very successfully and very quietly,” said Hudson. “He’s the true epitome of a volunteer. I think when all is said and done, he wants to know that he’s made a difference for this area.”