A war waged by deed of title has dispossessed 98 percent of black agricultural landowners in America. If you’re one of the millions of people who have a retirement account with the Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association, for instance, you might even own a little bit yourself. Investors in boardrooms throughout the country have bought hundreds of thousands of acres of premium Delta land. Fewer and fewer farms are still owned by actual farmers.
The farms and plantations are much larger-industrial operations with bioengineered plants, laser-guided tractors, and crop-dusting drones. Now much of the land is green with soybeans. Back in the day, snow-white bolls of King Cotton reigned. The hands that dig into black Delta dirt belong to people like Willena Scott-White, African Americans who bear faces and names passed down from men and women who were owned here, who were kept here, and who chose to stay here, tending the same fields their forebears tended.īut some things have changed. Imposing plantations and ramshackle shotgun houses still populate the countryside from Memphis to Vicksburg. Each one was also a reminder of an inheritance that had once been stolen.ĭrive Route 61 through the Mississippi Delta and you’ll find much of the scenery exactly as it was 50 or 75 years ago. Each landmark was a reminder of the Scott legacy that she had fought to keep-or to regain-and she noted this with pride. A patch of scruffy wilderness in the distance. But as we toured 1,000 acres of land in Leflore and Bolivar Counties, straddling Route 61, Scott-White pointed out the demarcations between plots. The fields alongside us as we drove were monotonous. “Then you ain’t never worked,” she replied. I had labored long hours over other crops, but had to admit to Scott-White, a 60-something grandmother who’d grown up chopping, that I’d never done it. The work is backbreaking, and the people who do it maintain that no other job on Earth is quite as demanding. To hear more feature stories, see our full list or get the Audm iPhone app.Ĭotton sowed with planters must be chopped-thinned and weeded manually with hoes-to produce orderly rows of fluffy bolls.
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