PETER EDELMAN, Former Aide to Sen. Robert Kennedy: He said to me as we went from one house to the next that he this was worse than anything he'd ever seen in a Third World country. It's about 30 miles north of here. And because there is no jobs, the education standard is not where it needs to be to entice companies to want to come here. On U.S. Highway 278, between Ruleville and Mound Bayou. The deposed mayors supporters used to describe him as a man before his time. I was on food stamps, welfare and all of that too, she said. Several have come during the past year, thanks to the pandemic. Remember, there are more black elected officials in Mississippi than in any state in the United States. Bringing jobs here threatened the plantation owners who wanted people for cheap labour. But that is not the mayors most immediate problem. She was killed instantly. They couldn't get no jobs back then. But even today, infant mortality in Holmes County is double the US average, while rates for black women age 25-29 are four times the average. These days, mothers is younger, grandmothers is younger. They went after the gas chamber for me, said Carthan. In the Mississippi Delta town of Tchula, there's a fading columned mansion that once belonged to Sara Virginia Jones, the daughter of a local plantation dynasty. Rural Mississippi has always had trouble attracting health-care workers, but the pandemic triggered desperation. Marian Wright Edelman went on to create the Children's Defense Fund. As a result, North Sunflower is guaranteed to profit from providing services that other hospitals almost always lose money delivering. She watched other travel nurses cut their contracts short and saw some of the permanent staff join the ranks of the nomads. For all that, the writing was on the wall. This whole community was just a step from slavery. I grew up in Clarksdale, Mississippi. Mississippi Rankings | US News Best States I aint so sure about around here. Mississippi is one of only three states that lost population from 2010 to 2020, and the outward migration was most intense in rural counties, a couple of which suffered losses of more than 20%. Dropping out of school. North Sunflower Medical Center has long been considered an almost solitary beacon of hope across that landscapeThe Little Hospital That Could, as its administrators label it in the slideshows they present at medical conferences across the country. Eddie Carthan outside the old plantation house. But first there was the killing of the woman whose body was found on the edge of town. She held out little hope that things would change anytime soon. The executive director told me, Dont go into the hospital, its just rampant with Covid right now, she said. By Monte Reel She didnt appear to have Covid, but they couldnt tell what was wrong. I just cant., But she did. I say it was a challenge then but put that back behind you and let us move forward. Hayes, who has since died, used two black councillors, apparently fearful of losing their jobs in white-owned businesses, to reduce the mayors powers, even locking him out of his office, and to reinstate the white police chief, Jim Andrews, who held the post before Carthan took over. The Mississippi Delta, also known as the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta, or simply the Delta, is the distinctive northwest section of the U.S. state of Mississippi (and portions of Arkansas and Louisiana) that lies between the Mississippi and Yazoo rivers. Locals might have assumed shed be like the thousands of other rural providers who come into towns like Indianola, practice for a time, and leave. The delta is a place historian James C. Cobb called "the most Southern place on earth." For most people it's a region that brings up pictures of slavery, lynching, and poverty. When that would not stick because Andrews appointment was of questionable legality, they were tried for assaulting a black officer. Jobs in the cotton fields poorly paid, backbreaking work receded with the mechanisation of plantations. Theres abandoned houses, she said. But for all that, theres a hesitation to pin all of Tchulas troubles on the past. Tchulas not a mile long nor a mile wide. It was a disappointment that nobody from here tried to open it but, to be honest with you, we were thankful. Thank you. It has improved more recently to $14,325, which still leaves Tchula at between a quarter and a third of the national average. Entrenched poverty tough to shake in the Mississippi Delta Democrats wanted to regain political . But these days Tchula is one of the small communities dotted across rural America struggling to find a way to survive. Rural Poverty Has Distinct Regional and Racial Patterns Theyre trying to work but if they can find jobs that just keeps the problem growing. Tchulas chief of police was drifting into sleep at the desk of his sparsely furnished office. There is a little bit of romance in this story. She administered medications to elevate their blood pressure and steadily increased their oxygen levels. lives in a world of high poverty and higher expectations. The administrators at North Sunflower say its a disciplined business plan, not favorable legislation, thats at the root of its success story. Theres that trust. She sometimes runs into the families of patients who died at the hospital. Dropped next to Reeds office door was a plump black bin bag with a handwritten label saying rape case on a strip of white paper. He sent them home, planning to check in on them later to make sure all was well. Unemployment is officially about 25%, but in practice only about one in four adults in Tchula has a regular job. (Corrects the gender of Dr. Ragunanthans baby in paragraph 56.). I have to arrest them because thats possession of a controlled substance. In America's Poorest Place, the Mississippi Delta, Health Care Is The Delta's cultural traditions are as rich and diverse as its natural resources. The average person in Mississippi spends more than twice as much on insurance, relative to total income, as someone in Massachusetts, the state that also has the most doctors per capita. In Greenwood, an old cotton port town in the Mississippi Delta, 10 people gathered last July around a table in the center of a gray conference room. The accused killer, Edward Young, is Sandra Youngs cousin. The impact on the people working in its hospitals was very clear to Oglesby. Please check your inbox to confirm. The Mississippi Deltas population is majority Black, and theres no poorer place in America. I sleep all day, and Im not the only nurse who sleeps all day, I promise you that., When the delta surge started to subside last fall, the preliminary data showed that 11 states had experienced higher rates of Covid infection than Mississippi. In constructing this mansion its builders spared no expense. I was a threat to them. But right now, a lot of people have got jobs. They got tired of not finding work. The two women had similar reactions to the shooting: sadness at lives destroyed but also an air of resignation as if this too was a consequence of Tchula. History and Culture of the Mississippi Delta Region A newborn gets a checkup in 1968 at the Delta Health Center in Mound Bayou. But follow the line of portraits and Lyon is also Carthans immediate successor. It doesnt help us, he said. So she quit her job and spent 12 years concentrating on getting them through school. . Young women walk past the site where a young man was shot dead the previous night. How White Flight Ravaged the Mississippi Delta - The Atlantic I set about trying to find these people somewhere to go, and I was completely unsuccessful, he said, leaning in over his sandwich. With no conclusion in sight to the pandemic, the idea of a happy ending seems dangerous for a rural hospital to even consider, as if predicting ultimate success would be tempting fate. Not once did a single one of those 16 ICU beds sit empty. They warned her shortly after she arrived: Brace yourself. His gasps were violent, frightening. Reed slumped, his voice wound down and his eyes closed for a few seconds before he re-emerged and apologised. Teenage mothers. Not just in Tchula across the delta. What did he ask you about? He's a public defender in Cleveland. Catherine Wilson is more optimistic. Little moments like this had cemented her decision to become a rural doctor. Less and less homes have both parents, just single mothers. Geography Mississippi is bordered on the north by Tennessee, on the east by Alabama, on the south by Louisiana and a narrow coast on the Gulf of Mexico, and on the west, across the Mississippi River, by Louisiana and Arkansas . I ain't given up Freedom Village. The combination of low wages and expensive health care has saddled Mississippi with yet another dubious distinction: Almost 40% of adults under 65 carry medical debt, according to the Urban Institute, and that figure, too, is the highest in the U.S. You cant talk about the crisis in rural hospitals, he said, without talking about that banner. For others, emergency aidlike the $7.5 billion earmarked for rural providers in the American Rescue Plan last Novemberhelped them forestall closure, but it didnt lift them out of crisis mode. 'They're easiest to step on': The real reason why families in the Delta The voting rights act finally gave the towns African American majority a say over who governed them in 1965 but it was not until 12 years later that they used it to elect Tchulas first black mayor, Eddie Carthan. Its no more poor or less poor than its ever been but its changed. The experience in the Delta stuck with them. Nothing seemed to work. Since then, shes experienced plenty of days that even someone with the sunniest disposition would struggle to describe in positive terms. Two decades later, voters installed the USs first elected black female Republican mayor, Yvonne Brown, in the hope it would encourage President George W Bush to send money. Everyones in the same boat. You going to stay at home and were going to play games and read books and everything.. Compared to other parts of the US, Id say this place is 20-50 years behind in everything. That looks pretty OK to me. Im putting down roots, my familys here, and Im here to serve. Closing hospitals and increasing the number of smaller, basic-service health clinics would be far more cost-efficientand more effective for the vast majority of health problems residents experience. Theres this place, Tunica, said Reed, the police chief. Despite how fertile the ground is here, one in five households live below the poverty line, and, in fact, Mississippi is ranked 50th out of 50 states by poverty rate; 68-year-old Catherine Wilson has lived here her whole life. Learn more about Friends of the NewsHour. He returned because he did not think the town had much of a future if the best educated moved away. It became known as the war on poverty. I don't know. Drugs. 1996 - 2023 NewsHour Productions LLC. This has created yet another challenge for the states rural hospitals and local economies: How can you find people to work in communities where the standard of living, by nearly every measurable standard, lags so far behind? If you dont want to work 12-hour days for a large period of your life, it may not be the best choice, said Ivy Sandquist, a 27-year-old medical student from Tulane University in New Orleans. In the Mississippi Deltathe poorest region in the poorest statethe doctors, nurses, and administrators have sacrificed and improvised, month after month, exhausting themselves to keep their. Shes a traveling nurse from Nashville who early last year threw a couple of tote bags in the back of her Honda Civic and drove to the Delta for the first time, taking a temporary assignment at a 16-bed intensive care unit in Greenville. A monument to the women of the Confederacy stands in front of the Mississippi State Capitol. Poverty-stricken past and present in the Mississippi Delta Mississippi Plan - Wikipedia A better chance, she said. The Mississippi Delta's History of Black Land Theft - The Atlantic Jobs training, adult education and loans were all part of the plan. A lot of the other peoples kids was out partying, drinking, smoking this funny kind of cigarette, she said. I still believe. But afterwards, Mississippi prosecutors charged Carthan and five others with assaulting a police officer, Andrews. I have not seen any permanent improvement, said Myers, who is also a pianist and in 1994 released a CD, Blues for Tchula. We ask, Father God, that you bless the administration of this hospitalour CEO, our VP, he said. This whole block here was stores, said Annie Horton, 63, standing on the edge of the large dirt patch next to the railway line that passes for a town square in Tchula. You can see the results all around you. A music major in college, he fell into police work while helping his wife study for a degree in criminal justice and moved to Tchula at the behest of an old colleague, Anthony Jones, then the towns police chief. Other articles where the Delta is discussed: Mississippi: Relief and soils: the great fertile crescent called the Delta is the old floodplain of the Yazoo and Mississippi rivers, comprising some 6,250 square miles (16,200 square km) of black alluvial soil several feet deep. Windsor Plantation Ruins of Windsor Plantation | Claiborne County MS | c. 1861. Its right outside of Memphis. One had bullet holes in the wing and a windscreen with a starburst crack. These people werent just names on charts; many were faces Patterson recognized. In the Mississippi Deltathe poorest region in the poorest statethe doctors, nurses, and administrators have sacrificed and improvised, month after month, exhausting themselves to keep their hospitals afloat. And I want to go back to the haves, We saw it coming, Oglesby recalled of the weeks in late summer, before things got really bad. Have you heard of it? Some of them stayed here too long. The body of a young woman had been found on the edge of Tchula by deer hunters, he said. Id say to my kids, no, yall cant do that. Police make an arrest after the Saturday night shooting. We thought chicken legs were delicious. Because of the limited number of doctors in the Delta, he regularly fills in at the hospital, which is labeled at high risk for closure. Wherever she ended up next, it would be someplace where the water was clear. Wilson was raised by his grandmother with seven other children. When the delta variant emerged in mid-2021, it zeroed in on the poorest pockets of the rural South. After that many blacks were discouraged for years from even running for office in Tchula.. The trade-off is that for specialty care and emergencies the clinics couldnt handle, trips to the nearest urban center might be necessary. The stats had been grim for years in Greenwood, and at rural hospitals all over the country. I would probably be in a world I don't need to be in. Long live fewer hospitals, he wrote. Its a pretty cool town. Oh no baby, thats not me. Some even swear it tastes better than the clear stuff. Oh, yes. The Mississippi Plan of 1875 was developed by white Southern Democrats as part of the white insurgency during the Reconstruction Era in the Southern United States.It was devised by the Democratic Party in that state to overthrow the Republican Party in Mississippi by means of organized threats of violence and suppression or purchase of the black vote. Greenwood Leflore boasted the only neurosurgery unit in the Delta. It is sixty miles at its widest point from the Yazoo to the Mississippi, in what poet William Alexander Percy called "a badly drawn half oval." Its looking better and better!. They got sucked up.. Thats a product for infant mortality disaster. Until his late 20s, when he turned to medicine, hed been a session bassist at studios throughout the SouthMuscle Shoals in Alabama, MasterSound in Atlanta, a few others in Nashville. Its really tough. Of those 11 patients that weekend, 9 died. Any Republican casting around for a welfare mother to demonise need look no further than Young. Theres haves, and theres have-nots, she said. Theres not a lot of jobs. Then he mentioned that when he first arrived in Tchula he told people his name was Jos because he was worried that his origins and religion might be held against him. That means it gets reimbursed at 101% of the cost for treating Medicaid patients. The Mississippi Delta is known for music and for juke joints like this one, and for rich agricultural land. Its the water itself; ancient, decomposing cypress trees have been marinating in the aquifer for centuries. We had a Chevrolet dealership, a Greyhound bus station, a TV shop, a couple of furniture stores, dry cleaners, fabric store. But none had a higher death rate. America's poorest white town: abandoned by coal, swallowed by drugs, Original reporting and incisive analysis, direct from the Guardian every morning, 2023 Guardian News & Media Limited or its affiliated companies. Photographs by Ariel Cobbert. The subsequent national outcry over what looked very much like a conspiracy against Carthan forced Mississippis governor to release him early, but by then Lester Lyon was back in the mayors office, to be succeeded later by another white politician. Why Is Mississippi So Poor? - The Freeman Online Police guard a burning bus in Anniston, Alabama, in May 1961, after a mob of white supremacists attacked it. The victim was Bettina Crigler, 30. It has. For whatever reason, the family hadnt gotten the spacer device when they got the albuterol inhaler.
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